Squarespace

Vorteile

When I first started looking for a platform to create a website for my fledgling photography business nearly 5 years ago, there were a few specific characteristics I was seeking: I needed the platform to be easy to use, quick to set up, and to showcase my photos in an optimal way to potential clients. I found all of that and more with Squarespace! I was able to get my website set up in just a few days and was able to do it without any tears or that "I'm going to pull my hair out!" feeling. If anything, it was the complete opposite! I couldn't believe how easy everything was to set up and how professional my website looked.

Nachteile

The ONE thing I wish Squarespace had more of: more creative templates. Their website templates are a great, solid "skeleton" (if you will), but you definitely have to put extra work in if you want to make your website stand out from others who utilize the same template.

Vorteile

Ease of use
Easing learning curve
layout options
customizations options
sleek templates
quick onboarding

Nachteile

Towards the beginning of my experience with Squarespace, I needed some customer sesrvice and the process to find where I could go for help was not easy. This was back in 2017 however, so I'm not sure if that process has improved since then (I'd like to think so!)

Vorteile

Squarespace makes it easy to get websites up quickly -- we've built three, and all went from zero to launch within three days. If you just need some standard startup landing pages, Squarespace is for you.

Their customer support is great if about the basic blocks.

Nachteile

Squarespace has some gotchas that make for substantial challenges beyond the first few months of business unless you're willing to either pay for external plugins or write code, and that comes with several major caveats, such as:

* weird things such as sliders for images simply don't exist
* custom CSS only applies at the site and not the page level
* spacing is somewhat odd with no fine-grain control
* certain JS plugins simply don't work on the site
* there is NO undo of any unkind except plaintext
* there is NO copy/paste or page templating

Perhaps the biggest issue is that it feels like Squarespace is trying to straddle the fence between being the leading CMS and the leading ecommerce platform and as a result it is neither. Frankly, the basic site experience is such that we'd be very reticent to ever deploy the ecommerce capability for a client, and so we use it for customers with mostly static content who blog a couple of times / week or less.

The lack of premium support for code issues further hampers their market share -- adding that as an option might provide more revenue for them and a way forward, as few other platforms do.

Vorteile

Squarespace is clean, sophisticated, modern, easy to use, and has built-in features such as domain purchasing, email marketing, scheduling, and e-commerce that make it easy to run a business. With Squarespace, I can trust that my clients will be able to manage their website 100% by themselves once I finish designing it for them. With other platforms (like Wordpress), I cannot guarantee the same. I also like how transparent Squarespace's pricing and plans are. It's so easy to upgrade or downgrade as your needs change. In Squarespace, I can design a high-quality website extremely fast and share the draft with my clients easily.

Nachteile

Squarespace is the least flexible of all the web design platforms that I work with in terms of design customization. There are a lot of different types of widgets and ways to display content that simply aren't available on Squarespace because the platform limits what you can change in the design (probably to prevent websites from turning out bad). I've also noticed that Squarespace websites typically load slower than some of the websites I've built on other platforms like Webflow and Duda.

Vorteile

What I like most about Squarespace software is that it is very user friendly. It has up to date functions and accessibility for you to use other apps in combination with this app. I also like that there is a scheduling feature to take appointments. As a Cosmetologist this was very important to me as a buyer.

Nachteile

A feature that I like the least would be the shipping page on the features within the website. I feel that it could be more simplified or more automated to link with shipping rates based on the weight and measurements of the product. I figured it out eventually but honestly that part of setting up my site was a headache.