Squarespace review

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Squarespace Review What’s with the Hype? The Pros and Cons

of Squarespace Exposed!

All opinions and commentaries are based on the author’s own hands-on experiences with the website builders.

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Squarespace Overview

A brief introduction to Squarespace and who should be using them





Squarespace was launched in 2004 out of New York

It is a drag and drop website builder specifically focused on providing rich-imagery, highly polished / finished experiences for website builders.

The visual experiences are undeniably rich, causing us to believe that Squarespace is targeting a unique segment of users such as designers, boutique businesses, photographers, portfolio driven websites, and such.



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Squarespace currently powers more than 1.8 million websites, which in appearance is much lower than other website builders such as Weebly or Wix.

But one significant distinction is that all websites created by Squarespace are paid, whereas an unknown number (we suspect a fairly high number) of websites created with Weebly or Wix are free.




Squarespace Pros and Cons

The 3 Top Pros and Cons of Squarespace




Squarespace Pro - #1

Squarespace provides you with beautiful, rich imagery, designer templates that undeniably command your attention right off the bat.

Our first thought of their templates is that they are clean, minimalistic and gives off a sophisticated vibe.

They definitely project a highly finished quality, as if a designer has invested months in polishing them.

We particularly appreciated their clean lines which is a nice contrast to other website builders’ templates which could be a bit noisy.



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All Squarespace templates are responsive You can resize your browser and the content (including

the images, slideshows) will also automatically resize to help give you and your visitors optimized viewing experiences.

This is especially helpful if your visitors tend to use mobile devices (certainly an upward trend for most users).





Squarespace gives you extensive styling options that the majority of other website builders do not have.

Squarespace makes it very easy for you to customize your website’s design without editing codes.

For example, you can adjust the fonts, colors, image opacity, sidebar width, background images, sizes, spacing / padding, etc of just about anything on a Squarespace website.



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Squarespace Con - #1

Squarespace separates the editing screen and the live preview screen, making it difficult for you to format your website layout the way you want.

What you see when you are in editing mode, is not necessarily what you will see when you preview or publish your website.

Although the templates are responsive and so your visitor will see a “similar” version of what you want your layout format to be, it is a bit of a nuisance in terms of user experience when what you see as your website layout while in editing mode, is different from live mode.





Adding, and Dragging and dropping Blocks in Squarespace were slightly buggy in our tests, and not as smooth as other website builders

We had to try multiple times to add or re-arrange Blocks, which slightly annoying.

For example, we were moving a Image Block from the top of the screen down to the bottom, we expected to be able to click on the Block, drag it to the bottom of our screen and the page will automatically scroll down to the bottom so we can drop off the Block. This didn’t happen, so at the time of our test, we had troubles re-arranging content.





Although Squarespace’s gives you the ability to customize or style almost everything in the website, this could be a bit overwhelming

It’s awesome if you have the patience, a designer-eye or high, specific design standards for your website.

However we feel that for the average person, this could potentially be a bit too much.

That does not mean you can’t create a beautiful website with Squarespace, because you definitely still can.




Squarespace Themes

Impressive and Responsive Themes – making your website look good!




Squarespace Themes

The first words that came out of our mouths when we saw Squarespace’s templates include “I love them”, “looks clean, high-end and expensive” and “very designer-like”.

We think those words pretty much summarizes how we feel about their templates.

Even though Squarespace does not have hundreds of templates for you to choose from (like other website builders), to us, it’s pretty clear that a ton of thought, care and time have been invested in each and every template.





Squarespace Themes

Squarespace currently has 11 portfolio templates, 9 blog templates and 8 business focused templates. It’s a classic case of high quality over quantity.

They don’t give you a bag of mediocre or “cheap” templates, which a lot of other website builders do, but rather, a carefully selected, smaller group of polished templates.

To those who know a bit of code, Squarespace does allow you to make edits to CSS to further style your website.




Support / Tutorials / Community Resources

Squarespace has one of the most committed and best supporting team




Committed Customer Support

They have a 24/7 support team which can help you, either with

1) live chat or

2) email support.

It is their policy to reply to every message in less than 1 hour, no matter what time you send in support requests.

This level of commitment to customer support is one of the best amongst website builders



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Tutorial Resources – Very Helpful

Squarespace gives you a series of “Workshop” videos, showing you how to use their website building tools.

We found these immensely helpful in learning the basics of how to use Squarespace, instead of trying to figure everything out ourselves.

They also have a Knowledgebase in which you can search through to find answers to your questions.



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Community Forum Support

Squarespace does have a forum where you can ask questions in public and have their support staff or other Squarespace users answer your questions.

This is an excellent way for users to share experiences and troubleshooting tips.



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Squarespace Commerce

Comprehensive e-Commerce Tools to Help You Build an Online Store




Comprehensive Set of e-Commerce Tools Squarespace’s e-Commerce functions are fully

integrated into their platform, and seamlessly built into all their templates

Full Control Over Product Variants - so your customers can pick and choose different variations of your products.

Unlimited Products - They do not place limits on how many products you want to upload into your website.



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Comprehensive Set of e-Commerce Tools Inventory Management - easily manage your

inventory across your entire store by stock level, price, or title.

Sell Both Physical and Digital Products - In addition to selling physical products, Squarespace also allows you to sell digital products.

Squarespace allows you to create coupons to manage promotions for your online store.



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Comprehensive Set of e-Commerce Tools Shipping Options - You can create different

shipping options for your customers to choose from

Configure Sales Taxes - Squarespace allows you to set up taxes in Canada and also other countries’

Automatic Sales Confirmation Email Notification System – notify your customers automatically



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Comprehensive Set of e-Commerce Tools Full Integration with Stripe (Payment Services

Provider)

Automatic Newsletter Signup with MailChimp – helping you stay in touch with your customers through newsletters

Simple and Straightforward Pricing Structure - Squarespace does not charge you a transaction fee, so you can sell as many items as you can and they won’t take a cut from your profits.



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Squarespace Hosting / Export Options

You can export Squarespace websites into WordPress – Nice!




Squarespace Hosting

Squarespace hosts all the websites for you, so you don’t have to pay for hosting separately.

They manage the entire hosting process for you so you can focus on building your website and other more important things

Squarespace takes care of all the security upgrades for their servers and do all the technical details to ensure your website is always up and running, and doesn’t get hacked.




Squarespace Exporting Option

One important benefit that makes Squarespace stands out is that they allow you to export your pages and blog from Squarespace into WordPress.

It’s nice when a website builder doesn’t hold you hostage – most website builders do not have this option!




Squarespace Pricing Packages

Is Squarespace Worth Your Investment?




Squarespace – Risk-Free Trial

Squarespace is different from other website builders in that it does not offer users a free plan.

There is, however, a 14-day risk-free trial for you to thoroughly test out their website builder.

This removes a lot of the risks from you without you having to commit to Squarespace without trying it out.





Squarespace – 3 Pricing Packages

Squarespace offers 3 packages:

1. Standard – $8 per month for an annual plan (or $10 if you are paying month-to-month)

2. Unlimited – $16 per month for an annual plan (or $20 if you are paying month-to-month)

3. Business – $24 per month for an annual plan (or $30 if you are paying month-to-month)





Squarespace – 3 Pricing Packages

The pricing for the plans are marginally higher than other website builders

But once you’ve had a chance to experience what Squarespace’s platform is capable of creating, you can see why it is priced a just a tad bit higher.

The thoughts and details that Squarespace has invested into their templates, allows you the potential to create similar websites that professional developers and designers may charge you thousands of dollars.




Recommendation and Conclusion

So what’s the final verdict?




Squarespace Review - Conclusion

Their templates are gorgeous and when applied to your website, can give the impression that you paid thousands of dollars for a custom-built website.

They offer live chat and 24/7 email support in which they promise to answer you within 1 hour.

Really very powerful, especially if your website is related to design, portfolio, photography or boutique business / online shop





Squarespace Review - Conclusion

You can sign up for a trial account which gives you 14-days to decide whether you like Squarespace or not before you invest in using them as your website builder.

No credit card information is required to get started with the 14-day trial.

TRY SQUARESPACE RISK-FREE FOR 14 DAYS



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Squarespace review

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