Check the headers/titles for the following sections:
- Costs, Fees, and Pricing Versus Other Providers
- Ease of Creating a Website and Pages
- Overall Feel Of the Platform
- My Biggest Complaints & Why I Do Not Like SquareSpace
- Controversies and Other Nuances
Last year, I started a podcast… prematurely. Actually, I had started my own mobile Footcare Nursing business which launched in January of 2020. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the pandemic reared its ugly head and paused all non essential businesses from operating. Somehow, the government thought that footcare is not an essential business. The number of amputations performed in Canada due to poorly managed or treated feet; particularly those belonging to persons living with diabetes would suggest otherwise. Regardless, I had to close my doors.
After having invested thousands of dollars in equipment, education, business licenses, nursing licenses, advertising, and websites, instead of taking this as a total loss, I changed the pathway of my business. I changed it from a mobile footcare service to an online website dedicated to health and wellness and a related podcast.
I have spent literally decades creating and maintaining websites. I am no stranger to making websites and as the years go along, the desire I have to make websites from scratch has waned. No… It has died. Away with HTML, CSS, MySQL, PHP — I have no desire to look at the source code. Unless it’s a website with a paywall that is easily removed using Chrome’s source editor… 😉
As you may have guessed, I have switched to WordPress, though its popularity opens it up to various kinds of threats of attacks from scammers and the biggest assholes of the world, so I wanted to try something new. Enter Squarespace.
This is not a sponsored post; I just wanted to relay my experience. If my affiliate application is approved, I will of course be using an affiliate link in this post. (I applied December 1st and have not heard back) I saw Squarespace advertised on YouTube through sponsorships as well as actual YouTube ads, so I finally gave in to try it. I forget which YouTube channel suckered me in, but I’m pretty sure it was Drew Gooden with his lovely Picture of Hotdog website. He is a funny guy, I highly recommend checking out his videos for a lovely reprieve from the pandemic chaos.
I used Squarespace to purchase a domain name and to create a website for my healthcare website. I won’t link it from this website in this post as I would like to try and keep it separate. You can probably find it linked on this website somewhere if you are hoping to find it.
Costs, Fees, and Pricing Versus Other Providers
One full year of website hosting cost me $196.00. I added on a domain name, which was an additional $20.00 per year.
Ease of Creating a Website and Pages
Creating a website with Squarespace was incredibly easy. There is a decent selection of website templates (designs) that you can choose from, however it is somewhat restrictive with regards to how much customization you can actually do with this platform.
The platform itself seems to be geared towards ecommerce, which means that it is a really good service to use if you are hoping to easily create a website to sell items on. For example, if you have a store that you are wanting a website for, this would be a good platform to use.
It has a feature for email lists, so you can obtain emails from your clients and send them electronic newsletters through your SquareSpace website.
Overall Feel Of the Platform
It is quite evident that this service was developed with ecommerce in mind; so the user interface focuses quite a lot on marketing and sales, which is a slight hinderance when you are trying to do something quickly and can’t find where certain options might be.
There are analytics built into this website platform so you can see how much traffic you are receiving and where the traffic is coming from. Unfortunately, there is no way to involve google analytics into this website currently as you are not permitted to alter the headers of your website and there is no access to the root folder files.
My Biggest Complaints & Why I Do Not Like SquareSpace
Unfortunately, the biggest turn off for me when it comes to SquareSpace is that you cannot change the theme of your website once your website is published. One would think that this would be easy to do simply by creating themes that use similar HTML elements in order to change the look of the website.
In order to change your website’s look, you have to start completely from scratch. No. Noooo.
On top of that, the navigation that is provided for blog type websites is pretty terrible. I can’t list my posts in categories nor can I offer a searchable navigation. The website that I made using SquareSpace is a health blog that includes many different topics that I would love to be able to add as a searchable category for my users. Unfortunately, as it is now, a person would have to sift through multiple pages of content that is irrelevant to what their intentions are, which means that I will lose most of my users before I ever get a chance to retain them.
It is impossible to edit some things, such as the headers of the pages, which means that we are unable to integrate google adsense into the website properly, so we have to use many workarounds in order to make it work. If you are hoping to use SquareSpace as a website that is monetized through adsense, it might not be the best website for you. It remains a great platform for an eCommerce website, however. It just really does not fit my personal needs.
Controversies and Other Nuances
SquareSpace plays big brother in that it will watch what you are posting on your website and will delete your website if they deem it necessary from an ethical point of view rather than a legal point of view.
That’s fancy talk for “They censor you.”