Nictopia - Space Does Not Equal Soft

Monday, March 30, 2009: 7:25PM

Space Does Not Equal Soft

Again, another couple days without an update, I apologize. My weekend was a mixture of playing with Drupal, video games (oh Top Shop, how I love yet loathe thee), socializing, and (finally getting to our topic) toying with Squarespace. It was a fun, educational, stress-free weekend, those rarely happen so I milked it.

Anyway, every time I try to recall Squarespace’s name I seem to try to substitute “space” with “soft,” if that is any indication of where my mind goes. I am an avid TWiT.tv listener/watcher, and for the past week or two they have constantly been talking about a new website for web hosting. Leo Laporte (host of many of the shows and founder) consistently, show after show, is talking about how he is trying to switch TWiT’s hosting over to it. He has even talked with every guest, whom has been on one of his show’s, about it, including Tech superstar (yes, he is without a doubt a celebrity) Kevin Rose, and every single one of these “Tech guru’s” had nothing but awesome things to say about it. So after a week (again, might have been two) of hearing about it, everyday for about two hours, I finally decided to check it out.

It is easily one of the most powerful website generators I have ever seen. You start out selecting a template, then a layout. The next part is where it truly shines, and that is the font, color, and sizes section. In this section there is a drop down for every possible tag that can be associated with text for your site. When you select a value from the dropdown you can change the font, color, size, letter spacing, text transformation, border, basically any CSS value for text that you can think of, without knowing CSS.

Once the site is created it becomes very easy to edit; you can edit most of the site simply by clicking and dragging elements. In the top right corner there are four icons, Content Editing, Structure Editing, Style Editing, and Preview. With the content editing you can edit the content of the site by clicking what section you want to edit. Squarespace provides WYSIWYG editing, which is really nice. Then of course, the feature I love if every site has, it allows its user to submit customized code.

Other features include, blogging, email forwarding, recording site updates, outside account integration with blogger and others, and RSS feeding.

There are drawbacks. I felt like the site was very limiting. For example, you can have a header and you can have a header image, but you can’t have text and an image in your header, even blogger provides that. I feel like something as simple as that is very strange to not have the option of doing for a system so detailed and complex. It is probably one of the first things I learned how to do with CSS.

Also, the bare minimum site they offer is $8/month, which isn’t bad, but the $8 does not include a domain name, short of yourname.squarespace.com. That feels expensive for a bare minimum website that doesn’t provide it’s user with a .com (or whatever extension he or she may want).

I am not saying it isn’t worth it; it’s just not for me. I feel too limited with it to spend $8 a month for web storage. When I sat down and thought about it, I felt like I could do all of the things I thought were cool, just Squarespace did it faster.

My recommendation, if you know nothing of HTML and CSS, this might be a great service for you to get into if you want to make yourself a website. However, if you do know HTML and CSS, I’d say give it a try, you might feel like the time consumption saved makes Squarespace worth it, I’m just frugal.

If you go to their website, they have a 14 day free trial, no credit card necessary, which to me is just genius. What better way to promote your product than to give away limited time service with no strings attached, people can just walk away after their time is up without fear of giving out financial information. That alone warrants me telling you to at least try it out.

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