September 14th, 2010

I’ve been using WordPress to manage my own site for two or three years, but with a number of projects coming down the pipeline, I thought I would try another alternative that previously I’ve only ever heard about – Squarespace.

Squarespace is hailed by many as being the next generation in website content management and blogging platforms, and while I’m sure that there must be some downsides to it (there almost always seems to be a downside to everything) I have to admit it looks pretty impressive.

Signing up for the free 14-day trial was easy – I had to create a login name and password, confirm my password and enter the Captcha text then click Finish.

After completing this first step, which took less than a minute, my site was created on a subdomain at middlenamejames.squarespace.com and I was logged in, ready to edit my site using the the tool-bar controls.

At this point I am familiarizing myself with the user interface and trying to decide if this is a solution that I could see myself using. In some ways it feels strange to be building and editing a site completely in the cloud and I’m wondering if I go down this route, will I miss dabbling with PHP code and using FTP to transfer .css files for design and style changes. I have to admit, the thought of streamlining and simplifying the web development process so that I can focus more on the overall strategy and creative side of things is a compelling reason to use Squarespace. Aside from getting used to the user interface and tools, I suppose my biggest question is whether or not I trust having the code and structure of my website in a controlled and hosted environment as opposed to maintaining the site files in a directory on my own web server. But when I think about the amount of time and headache this could potentially save me, like I said, it’s a compelling thought.

For the time being I have just under a couple of weeks to play around with Squarespace and see what I can do with it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

• Building This Website , Captain's Log , Squarespace , User Experience Design , Wordpress
• Comments(3)