"In general I am happy I got two sites on Squarespace. Mainly, I appreciated the freedom to get on with the work of creating and presenting content, rather than sweating the headaches of my own Wordpress installation, where I had periodically gone mad with the feeling of being hopelessly over my head in the backend and often fearing the upgrade process. I did lose data there and never felt like I had any control over the tools. As a person who wrote web entries since 2002, by the time I was drawn to Squarespace, I had done the old fashioned HTML pages, been hosted with a couple companies, used B2 and Wordpress for blogs, and then finally entrusted my site to an all-Wordpress package. And lost data some times. I couldn't decide to ditch it all and walk away or suck it up and rebuild things. Agonizing at times.
So Squarespace appeared and made the case that the backend was taken care of, and things like the drag and drop menu arrangements were quite a nice thing since I have several pages and sometimes need to rebuild things some. The ability to work the essential CSS components by the style editor was a charmer and freed me up to do things I rarely tried before.
For the first site I got running, Jubilee Economics, I was happy to find it would be pretty easy for multiple authors to contribute a range of content without any of them risking the integrity of the site. We were starting a podcast, which was new for me. Worked pretty well for a while till I got messages saying audio wasn't playing back right. Long story short, Squarespace said to me that they were not equipped with the right server equipment to handle the kind of load that podcasts can place (they don't have byte-range request ability, ala YouTube). Well, I wish I knew that a year and a half ago! What has driven me rather nuts is that there were a couple times when discussing my account and goals that Customer Service could have notified me that my request for more podcast-ability was not such a good idea, and that I might be better off with Libsyn (where I did go, after way much scrambling).
For my personal site, TAPKAE.com, I took advantage of many options to feature nearly a decade's worth of posts, galleries, endless capacity to put my old out of print albums up, etc. One thing I did was to manually and visually edit my old posts for some style and form, link checking, and general cleanup. That's 550 posts, people. It took me two weeks of pretty solid, nearly round-the-clock work! Since I just moved to Squarespace at that time, I was ready to commit to a massive process such as that in the spirit of the newness of it all.
This is where I think Squarespace falls on its face, and I hope V6 can do better... Mostly I have to complain about the limits of the so-called "content management system" part of it. Some of this stuff should be the standard issue features, not things I'm complaining about as V6 emerges... I hope they did something about this...
You know, I have not found any site-wide "find and replace" functionality for links. What a pain in the fuggin' hindquarter to have to visually skim for links and open entries to manually replace links. With sites filled with content like I have, this is a MAJOR bummer. I never swooned over Dreamweaver, but not having such a function DOES NOT speak of "content management."
One thing I still respect about Wordpress is the way posts can be managed with a bulk function, and such things as the quick edit option for tags and so on. In a similar way, I'd like for each image to have a master window to edit all its data (alt tags, not even a part of things but in HTML?) at once, including the alt tags, and a list of where that item can be found in the site, entry by entry. Audio files should be treated the same way.
Maybe I'm nuts but I am a captioning fool on images. But this business of opening each image's own caption editor is rather clumsy. They need to take a look at Facebook's model where one can just go down the page and enter text and click a few vital options as the whole gallery is visible at once. Again, this is sort of like Wordpress and the post or page management area.
And what's up with making it so hard to get a URL address to a given gallery picture with caption? Sure, I can look at the image on its own but I want to send the info along to friends. No page URL? If I have 100 pix and it's #78, all I can do is point people to the gallery and say " 'look for the one with the guy who's wearing the funny hat...' about 3/4 down"?
I've slowly learned CSS better than I used to because Squarespace made some things possible and something rather odd to work with. I still wish there was one clear view of the whole style sheet where all things could be seen together, even if the template parts are locked. Maybe V6? The template override thing has so far been an unwelcome challenge at times. I don't know why they don't provide a few presets that are sub-templates of a given template design (again, like Wordpress with full page, standard, or another option.)
Just a word to podcasters who are looking for a platform to host from... this aint the place for hosting the AUDIO files. Get Libsyn for that. You can keep your RSS feed here (do it properly from the start and use a dedicated feed from a second journal) but not the audio. Sure, you get "unlimited" storage and bandwidth, but they came out in support letters and said they aren't equipped for the load. Sure, you don't pay more for the space and bandwidth, but they can't serve your files right for that application. It's the same as they said about hosting video on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. But it wasn't so clear that podcasting would be hampered this way. If Squarespace can say they don't offer email, then they should be as clear that podcast work has to be limited to generating the iTunes friendly RSS feed, which it does well enough (that was one of the selling points for me originally).
The sorting out of the podcast disappointment caused me to have to get new hosting at Libsyn (cheap as 5/mo for 50mb), lose my iTunes feed address since Squarespace was unable or unwilling to offer the addition of one more iTunes tag that would do it automatically for any subscribers. I tried moving my podcast blog posts one-by-one over to a new journal, lost categories and tags, and then found that after I had moved things to that journal that it was not ideal given the structure of the rest of our web efforts, I had to move them back, and Squarespace was helpless to do so in any automated way. So BACK to manually reassigning posts, retagging them all, and because the upset was so big, I had decided to change the titles too, now I had to change them back and Squarespace said they had no way to recall the titles of old posts so that the links would work again! No CMS value in any of this! (I got lucky though and found that in the editor window within the browser, the names all came back perfectly in the title form field. That at least saved my bacon. I was prepared to scour old emails and Facebook posts for titles that I had sent out so I could reconstruct things so the links would not be broken. I might as well been working my way through a folder of local files like in 2002. Good thing I have the time and patience for this. What does one expect of a CMS except for content to be managed?
Okay, so maybe V6 is gonna fix this stuff. I've registered enough complaints about these that I hope they make the cut, but I'm a pretty late comer to the Squarespace world."
What's your opinion of Squarespace? Leave your own Squarespace review in the comments. If you're not on Squarespace yet, feel free to ask your questions or concerns about the platform in the comments.
