Squarespace

The best thing about Squarespace is the ability to create gorgeous websites with little to zero experience. You don’t need to be an HTML wizard, but if you happen to be, you can still take full advantage of everything Squarespace has to offer.

Honestly, it’s hard to say one. For the mid level prosumer, I haven’t found a single better option.

SquareSpace has beautiful templates. They are truly gorgeous. SquareSpace also has an easy-to-use sidebar of options that puts everything that you can do on the left side. The interface is as clean as the templates. Hosting of your site is done through Squarespace. That's it when it comes to pros. There are a ton of Cons to using SquareSpace.

As a WordPress user (who has also designed with Wix), SquareSpace falls short almost everywhere. You can't import your brand font—essential. You have to use code or a back-door solution with AdobeFonts. If you want 5 items in a row, no can do. You get 4 or 6. You can't drag the amount of padding around items and sections. You must use spacer blocks (time consuming and such a bad way to do things). There's no media storage! If you upload your photo it isn't stored anywhere for easy selection later. You must upload the same image multiple times whenever you need it—frustrating. Changes can't be made on individual copy styles. Squarespace sets up its CMS as a global system so if you want to change the way your font looks in just one place, you need to insert code (markdown block). You should be able to select it and change the size or colour. But no. It's CRAZY! So time-consuming. Missing basic word-processing functionality. Squarespace has no plugin options. You can't duplicate a page of your site and you can't duplicate your site! Everything is done from scratch! In WordPress, you download a .JSON file and upload it somewhere else and you're flying. Not with SquareSpace. You can't make your overlays look different per section. Everything applies globally. You can't add borders to images. The biggest CON? There's no undo! No revision history. If you delete something accidentally, it's gone forever. Support is terrible. Every answer is "you can't do that" or "try to find code.

I have used SquareSpace for over 5 years now, using the platform to build a minimum viable product before scaling to custom built websites, to putting up new websites that look extremely professional very quickly. Everyone who looks at the websites are impressed with how they look, not knowing it only took a few minutes to build. They continue to add functionality over the years.

They have a great dedication to customer service as well that responds quickly.

Moving some objects around was not always as intuitive as I thought they could be. If there are a tremendous amounts of data on a screen it may be slower to edit than it always was. Very minor bugs discovered on rare occasions. Just nitpicking, wonderful product.

For the most part, anything I've tried to create on Squarespace is relatively easy. If I had questions, I was able to find a YouTube tutorial to figure it out. The sites look professional on both desktop and mobile and don't break the bank to create. You can also make your site transactional which is nice and the fees involved are reasonable.

I am not a tech savvy person so some of the functionality requires an in-depth online lesson to recreate something I've seen, however, it is all figureoutable.