Why Squarespace? Because Wordpress ain't nothing!

Squarespace vs. Wordpress

by David A. Weisberg, M.S.

As a web site professional with more than 20 years experience, I have spent many years working with WordPress. I helped Yankee Magazine launch their first use of WordPress for their blog site. This involved  training staff on the best practices for using this system. WordPress is free and open source. It can be easily integrated with third-party applications. It offers free and paid templates produced by a robust community of developers. There are thousands of free and paid plugins helping you do more with the core WordPress system. What's not to like?

With complexity comes cost

You will find web programmers are often needed for site customization for complicated things like selling products online with WordPress. Other times website designers need to modify standard templates to make them really shine. Making everything responsive (i.e., making your site work well for all devices and screen sizes) can be tricky for novice WordPress admins/designers. And please watch out when upgrading WordPress core code connected to a customized template (AKA child theme) — it may break your site. Really!

One of our current clients — now off of WordPress — abandoned the platform because their current designer could not make the required changes to the code. Seems the first design firm had created undocumented processes and code too complicated to maintain for the current designer. They were looking at spending another $3,000 to re-vamp design changes which would roll-back the original programming.

And don't get me started about denial of service attacks and spamming posts to comments.

As the sole site manager for Antioch of New England's website, I lived in fear the site would crash any minute. If I had uploaded a buggy WordPress plug-in, then bye-bye site. [By the way, to easily recover from a site crash caused from a plug-in you need to know a little trick — you use FTP access to break the directory name containing the corrupted plug-in. Easy? Peasey?]

While working at a WordPress interactive agency we built many great sites for tens of thousands of dollars. Design customization, site maintenance, and template maintenance came at a heavy cost to clients. Whether you support the WordPress system yourself or hire it out, it can become a financial burden — with site downtime, staff wasted time, and/or costly ongoing expenses. WordPress support is only found with designers who work Monday through Friday. But what about weekends and after hours?

There has to be a better way. There is!

Instead Squarespace website builders at Keene Website Designers, can create a website for you using the "magic like" and well-tested Squarespace platform. This system gives you a professional, elegant website you can maintain yourself. Free email/chat support is included with all Squarespace hosting plans. E-commerce is built-in (i.e., with the business level plan of $18/month paid annually). The platform offers robust integration with social media, email marketing, and other third-party applications.

Our website design services also includes training time needed to get you up and running to create your own pages and adding content (e.g., photos, videos, blogs, events). Ongoing support is available as needed. However, many clients take over control of their site and happily update their own content themselves.

See a few websites I personally created over the past few years using Squarespace. 

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