This is the first blog post from my new Squarespace website so hopefully it’s worked!
Having grown frustrated with certain aspects of my previous website, I started the process of trying to design a new one. GoDaddy hosted the old site on their Website+Marketing plan. It was really easy to build the site there, but it has limited functionality (more limited than expected). The biggest frustrations for me were poor navigation options and no comments being allowed on blog posts. Comments used to be available but GoDaddy, in their wisdom, decided to remove it. The reason I was given was they claimed too many malicious comments were being made. I do wonder how they know that, but surely it’s for the blog owners to decide what’s malicious or not. The really annoying aspect is that they still have video tutorials showing clients how to add comments - despite them having removed the functionality! GoDaddy help needs to be a bit more joined up.
Anyway, after many frustrating online chat sessions and phone calls, all they could offer me was their Managed WordPress option. If you want the functionality we used to provide on your plan then you need to upgrade to this more expensive plan over here! WordPress is a beast though! To use a cooking analogy, this is a bit like using a chainsaw to cut a carrot! Having tried WordPress when I first started the blog I knew it was like opening Pandora’s Box and that GoDaddy help was limited, to say the least. After my frustration with the poor level of support they were offering, I decided to look elsewhere, vowing not to use GoDaddy for web hosting again.
I spent a bit of time researching alternatives and decided to give WordPress a go again but with Siteground as the host. I found their customer support to be excellent and there was a 30-day money-back guarantee, so it was a low-risk way to experiment. GoDaddy wanted me to immediately pay for their plan and given previous issues where they lost all my initial content I didn’t want to take the switch risk. I spent several hours watching YouTube tutorials and off I went. Unfortunately, where I went was down a massive rabbit hole. It quickly became obvious that WordPress just wasn’t for me, so rather than keep on digging deeper, I decided to start a new hole. If you know what you are doing then WordPress is the most flexible option, but it takes a lot of learning and was just overly complicated for my simple site.
So I went back to Google and YouTube, made an appeal on Twitter and reached out to other bloggers for recommendations. This narrowed my choices down to two options, WIX and Squarespace. From what I could gather from the reviews, both would suit the bill well for me, but Squarespace had a slight edge for blogging. There was also a 14-day trial available with Squarespace, so no risk again.
I browsed more YouTube tutorials, which made the interface look pretty intuitive and then just piled in and started to play around. I much prefer learning by doing and I was very pleasantly surprised. A bit like WordPress, finding a good template was key to getting started. But in WIX and Squarespace this is a much simpler process as there are fewer to choose from! You also don’t have to worry about what Plugins you need to get the functionality you want or keeping those plugins up to date afterwards for security purposes. Everything you need to get up and running is built in. The process of creating my new site with their Block Editors was really quite simple and intuitive. Any time I got stuck there was plenty of help available through the Squarespace site and masses of “how to” videos on YouTube.
The YouTuber I watched the most during this process was Metics Media and I have linked some of his most useful videos below.
https://youtu.be/Pvi_metetxk - one of the best website builder reviews, I found this really helpful
https://youtu.be/8qFnLGQNO9Q - WIX vs Squarespace
https://youtu.be/kmQTck7bqsk - Squarespace tutorial (still using this one!)
One useful site I found from my WordPress experience was https://logomakr.com/ which allows you to make a free logo for your site - my thinking train!
The thing that took the most time was copying over the historic blog posts and re-importing all the pictures. Unfortunately, it loses the original publication date but I’ve copied them all over in their original order and kept the original publication date in the text. The same thing happened at the start when I had to rebuild the site a couple of times due to GoDaddy issues.
Squarespace is so much easier to use compared to WordPress. I know the latter gives the ultimate creative freedom, but it’s much harder to use. For a simple site like mine and a simple man like me, Squarespace has been perfect so far. I will continue to watch more tutorials and you might see the odd tweak here and there in future.
If you’re ever thinking about building a website or starting a blog then I would definitely recommend you take a look at Squarespace. If I can do it, then anyone can.
Edit: So far so good but now the problems begin….
After I first published this post, I went to send it to all subscribers. This was something that happened automatically with the old GoDaddy site as soon as you “published”. The difference with Squarespace is that you need to create an email “campaign” to send the post. In order to do that you need to add “business details” of name, address and tax registration. Eh, this is a blog, it’s not a business and I don’t have any of that information. I’m certainly not having my home address added to the email campaign, that’s just nuts. Their answer is to buy a PO Box - WTF?
It would seem the only option open to me is to add a MailChip, follow.it or similar newsletter implementation that will require readers to re-subscribe (and require me to learn another new trick). To me, that just seems like a massive oversight for a product that is otherwise very good and very easy to use. For now, I will use Twitter to let people know about new posts and hope that I can figure it out.
Trying to share this post on Twitter has demonstrated that I need to improve social sharing options too. Hopefully that will be easier to resolve than the mailing issue.
Second Edit: this will also be the last post from the Squarespace site as the restrictions on sending out emails and the removal of social media sharing options are, in my opinion totally mad. What's the point in having a blog with Squarespace if you can only send 3 emails a month and if readers can't share to their social media? They seem to have totally confused email marketing and newsletters sent to registered readers. Anyway, this old dog is going over to WIX. Wish me luck!!
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