Please no!
This is the first blog post from my THIRD website. Switching my blog away from GoDaddy has been much more troublesome than I had hoped it would be.
First I tried to use WordPress and completely failed. WordPress is a bit like walking into the Grand Bazar in Istanbul and expecting to find exactly what you want in the first shop - it's just not going to happen. Given time and a lot of learning I might have got there, but I'm not looking to do this for a living so it just wasn't the route for me.
The Squarespace experience was initially excellent. Their website builder is very good and they have a great selection of templates to choose from. I was able to quickly get my site designed and start importing my blog posts. Importing wasn't particularly easy and took a long time, especially for the photo-heavy posts. For example, they don't allow easy organisation of photos into different folders to make it easier to then load into posts. But I got there in the end and launched the site.
Once launched the previously unknown limitations of Squarespace became quickly obvious It's just poor as a blogging platform. The biggest issue is the limited subscriber communication options it offers. Unlike other providers who automate new blog post notifications for subscribers, Squarespace doesn't offer this. In their wisdom, they class this as email marketing. That then sparks privacy and GDPR issues and requires you to enter a physical address to be displayed on your emails. It seems a bizarre interpretation of the rules here and an issue that others don't have. To get around this they suggest private individuals buy a PO Box. At £330/year, I think not! To add insult to injury, if you stick with the embedded mailing system they limit you to 3 email "campaigns" a month and a maximum of 200 recipients. Not much use for a frequent blogger! Alternatively, they suggest installing MailChimp. If MailChimp can understand the difference between a newsletter and speculative marketing then why can't Squarespace? To use MailChimp you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
The second, less frustrating but still annoying, issue with Squarespace is that they don't allow readers to easily share posts to their own social media accounts. This was allowed in the previous version, but they removed it. Why do that? There is a workaround though as you can install custom code from a third party such as https://sharethis.com/ to get the social links back in again. Again, that requires you to upgrade to a more expensive plan in order to access the custom CSS option. Squarespace also won't offer you any support if you change the coding. Why not just put it back the way it was in the old plan?
When doing the initial research there was no mention of either on any of the reviews. I've even gone as far as contacting a couple of the reviewers to point these issues out as they annoyed me so much! If you can't easily notify subscribers of new blog posts then how can you expect them to come back to your site? Social media sharing of posts is also an important avenue for growing subscribers, so why make that difficult too? In my opinion, these two limitations seriously devalue Squarespace as a viable blogging platform and have caused me to leave and start again.
So back to the drawing board
My initial research brought me to WIX and Squarespace as the two best alternatives to WordPress. Armed with my frustrations about Squarespace, I went back to WIX customer service and asked them a load of questions as I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have the same issues again. I also had the benefit of chatting with another WIX user, David over at https://www.iretiredyoung.net/ about his experience with them. The customer support team were excellent and answered all my questions quickly and efficiently. Especially impressive over a weekend.
Having gained confidence that this should be a better platform, I spent some time on their trial site and played around with their builder. Now, it's not quite as fancy a front end as Squarespace, but it does everything I need it to do and it's easy to use. It has better options for organising files/images too, which made bringing over my blog posts much easier than it was last time. So on Sunday, I took the plunge, upgraded to a paid plan and started building the new site in earnest.
I've tried to make the new site simpler and easier to navigate. I've done away with the HOME page I had previously, as it didn't really do anything, and you now land directly on the blog. I had some issues getting the format/display of the blog the way I wanted (the pagination option wasn't default), but the online help was really excellent and sorted me out quickly and efficiently. They also helped me get my new logo sorted.
Every day is a school day I guess. This has been a really frustrating process, but I am hopefully now hosted by a better provider and can stay for as long as I keep writing this blog. There are options with WIX that will allow me to adapt the site if my requirements change too, so there really should be no need to go elsewhere in future.
If all has gone according to plan, you will have received this post as an automated blog notification!
Comments