Why I recommend Squarespace for your business's website

In the branding and website design package I offer to early stage entrepreneurs, I only do Squarespace websites. In this post I’ll explain why.

Squarespace makes it easy for the site owner to make edits after we’re done working together. Gone are the days when you had to pay a web developer a monthly fee for constant site updates. Now you can just log in and make the changes quickly and easily yourself. I want to empower business owners to own their websites, too.
It used to be that if you wanted anything fancy, you had to use Wordpress for all the plugins available. Squarespace has finally caught up, in my opinion, at least for most everything you’ll want to do with your online business. Multiple post types (blog posts, event posts, products) are easy, social media plug-ins are built-in, and lead generating email subscribe features are right at your fingertips.
There are enough templates and pre-designed modules that you don’t need to write any code to make a site look good. I used to hack Squarespace sites with the Custom CSS, but I don’t need to anymore with all the features their team has added in the last year or so. This makes building a website quick and way less frustrating than any of the current alternatives.

Here are a couple reasons you might not want to use Squarespace:

You want to give multiple authors customized access — i.e. ability to write/edit posts but not other parts of the site. Squarespace is a bit light in this department right now, with Wordpress having way more flexibility in author control.
You want nested navigation with parent pages and child pages all linked in the nav. Squarespace gives one level of nav, or you can use “folders” to group links into a parent-child relationship. But with a folder, you don’t get a parent page. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, you need to find a different solution. (My recommendation: Keep your nav simple. Nested nav just confuses / overwhelms people anyway.)
You don’t want to pay the monthly fee. I get it. For the features I want, I use the business plan, which is $18 a month if you pay once a year, or a total of $216. Seems pretty steep, but here in San Francisco, where any decent developer’s hourly rate is a minimum of $100/hour, I remind myself that I’m sparing myself the added expense, time, and frustration of having to ask a developer to make changes to my site for me.

Plus, it’s completely worth the money for me to experiment, try new pages and concepts, easily and quickly — something I’d never be able to do with a site that needs a developer to update.

Maybe if you’re good at hacking around in Wordpress, you can get away with not paying a yearly or monthly fee. But I only find that worth the hassle if I’m doing a really complex site (see #1 above.) For most businesses, I find the ease and intuitive use of Squarespace worth the fee.

If you have any other questions or special cases, please get in touch!