Blogging with Squarespace: Drag and Drop Simple!

Guest blogger, Hannah Eason

I recently changed blogging platforms, moving my website, Hometown Grotesque, to Squarespace. For me, the transition sounded alluring after I read a complimentary description of it from Debbie Ridpath Ohi, who runs Inkygirl.com. Drawn in by descriptions of its highly customizable format, and Squarespace’s 14-day trial period, I tried it out. Here’s what I’ve found impressive so far:

Customization: Swapping your template, along with column arrangement and width, banner style, “active” and “hover” colors and basically any other element you could wish to personalize, is a piece of cake. In addition, you can drag and drop individual elements when in “configuration” mode or “architecture,” the latter of which offers a more simplified overview of your site elements.

Easy Integration of Third-Party Apps: With my latest bygone blogging platform, WordPress, every change I attempted consumed far more time than comparable changes with Squarespace.

With Squarespace, I easily integrated a “Donate” feature from PayPal, a “Submit” widget from StumbleUpon, as well as multiple subscription forms for the third-party service FeedBurner. Unlike my experiences with previous platforms, these installations on Squarespace did not involve error messages or piecemeal widgets displayed on my page, and I did not have to go through HTML codes with a fine-toothed comb hoping to find some mysterious offender.

Speaking of subscription forms: I opted for FeedBurner syndication for email subscriptions because this is a feature Squarespace does not personally host (they do host syndication for feed readers). I experienced no complication whatsoever, even in opting for page-specific subscription forms and a total-package subscription form as well. Which brings me to my next point …

Page Specific Customization: Squarespace doesn’t hold the patent on allowing certain widgets, text blocks, tag clouds, etc. on one page and no others, but they make it incredibly easy. With my personal website, I had wanted, for quite some time, to separate my (disparate) blogging interests into journals and offer, for each journal, email and RSS subscription links, as well as category and tag lists. Being one of these people who is all but intravenously connected to the internet for work purposes yet doesn’t have the stamina for slogging through lengthy mark-up codes hoping, by trial-and-error, to effect the result I need, I was hesitant to attempt such a journal-separating project. I could envision things going poorly enough to demand a total blog do-over.

This is where the seamless architecture of Squarespace was of the greatest benefit to me. Customizing pages (and thereby including all needed information over the course of your website without making any single page look cluttered) is every bit as simple as site customization, which is to say: drag-and-drop simple.

Promotion: It stands to reason that one main focus of writers who blog is to promote their work, reaching a wide yield of new readers. In this area, I’ve also been pleased with Squarespace. They come automatically geared to ping and crawl and latch onto SEO terms, and they also have an internal analytics system (so you can see how well these automated promotion methods work) which is more detailed than those I’ve experienced before. One of the analytical tools allows you to see the referrers of your visitors; I’ve been gratified to discover that Squarespace itself is frequently listed as a referring source.

Price: Squarespace is a paid website platform, but one which is well worth the benefits, in my opinion. There are five different prepackaged options you can choose from according to factors such as how much storage you need, your number of contributing editors, custom audiences, per-page style sheets and so on. Packages start at $8 and range up to $50. Another nice feature of Squarespace is that you have the option of customizing your blogging package to a certain degree. On top of your basic plan, you can choose additional storage, bandwidth and audiences for a fixed price (one dollar per extra gigabyte for storage and bandwidth, two dollars per additional audience.)

In my experience with Squarespace thus far, I’ve found it to be the ideal platform for writers like myself: those of us who do rely on blogging as an important mechanism but don’t have time to become on-the-side website design experts. To experience so many customization options – which are as quarrelsome as Legos are a pain to stack – is refreshing, not to mention time-saving. For any issues which do arise, Squarespace has a highly responsive customer support team. I had to email the support team once, and I received a personal response within, I would say, twenty minutes. They also have a robust help section already in place which promptly nixed most of my questions (this help section includes detailed FAQs as well as tutorial videos.)

For anyone interested in trying Squarespace, they do offer the aforementioned 14-day free trial period (which requires no credit card.) For anyone who has an existing blog and considers switching to this platform: I found their blog import system to be quick and simple.

So why use Squarespace? I think their website says it best: “You can build it 10X faster on our comprehensive platform. Seriously.”

They mean it.

www.Squarespace.com

In addition to writing UpClose interviews and book reviews for Her Circle Ezine, Hannah Eason writes fiction under the name Jane Eisenhart. Links to her short stories and additional writing can be found on her website: http://hometowngrotesque.squarespace.com/.

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