Thanks to Squarespace

Why haven't I been posting lately? I've received that question a number of times from regular readers. Truthfully, there are two reasons. First, my day job had become very busy with new projects and close engagement with customers. Second, I was experimenting with moving User>Driven to a new hosting service.

Things have worked out well with my new work projects and I am getting a lot out of interacting with new customers, a new development team, and new sales and support people. I am also gaining a lot of insights into the SaaS side of the software business (that I hope to share with readers). I wish I could say things had gone as well with my contemplated blog migration.

Dealing with this has given me a new appreciation for my current hosting service, Squarespace. So I wish to thank them publicly here for creating and maintaining a useful and flexible platform for bloggers. Thanks, guys.

What's Wrong With WordPress?

WordPress had one layout I really liked but it didn't support their library of widgetsI began my search some months ago when the economy was looking bleak and I was looking for ways to cut monthly expenses. Squarespace charges a monthly fee to host User>Driven and I'd seen many other bloggers successfully use services such as TypePad and WordPress that appear to be free. I quickly discovered, however, that only WordPress had a permanently free option that had the basic features I thought I would need, including a way to import existing content from other hosting services such as Squarespace.

So I signed up, picked a layout template, imported my content and started poking around at the new interface. It looked pretty slick at first, but as I worked at trying to get the new site to do what I wanted, I gradually become disappointed. Firstly, the import process worked fine for written content (including comments, which was nice), but it failed completely with images. I had to painstakingly repost every image I'd included in every post on User>Driven since day one. (There are 95 posts on User>Driven, not including this one, and about a fifth of them have images. Most of those have several.) This took a few days of effort and I was never 100% satisfied with the look of the images in my new layout.

On that topic, I was pretty enthusiastic about the new layout I'd chosen on WordPress for a while. Check out out here while it's still up. It's clean and minimalist and I like the way it shows a quick preview of the content of the two most recent posts at the top but then uses the majority of the space below to provide organized links to content and search capabilities.

I was disappointed, however, to discover I couldn't change anything about the layout (the font is a bit small, for example) without upgrading to a paid account. I also discovered to my frustration that I had chosen one of the few WordPress layouts which do not support widgets. That would mean no links to other blogs, no del.icio.us or other tagging capabilities, etc.

I looked at the other layouts but I couldn't find one I liked as well. Worse, I was hampered in trying to find another by the fact that there wasn't an effective filter for showing which of their many templates support widgets and which don't. (There is such a filter but it shows only a small subset of the layouts it should.)

Without widgets I would also not be able to host downloads of the LookOut search plug-in for Outlook that drives a lot of search traffic to User>Driven. I also wouldn't be able to take advantage of the growing library of user-contributed widgets to WordPress' open platform. This was a strong motivator for choosing WordPress over the more proprietary Squarespace service. Losing that option to something as silly as a layout choice was the last straw for me.

Staying With Squarespace

I have reduced my Squarespace plan somewhat, limiting the maximum number of subscribers and dropping a few other features I hadn't gotten around to trying. So I am saving a bit, but in the end I decided that the flexibility and features of Squarespace were worth the money I pay each month. I'm staying.

I've made a few small tweaks to the site. I bumped the font size up a bit to 13 pixels from 12 for the white body text. I wanted to make it a little larger yet but it quickly began looking blocky. I cleaned up some links to other sites and some minor layout issues as well. I hope it is incrementally more usable.

I also changed the tagline appearing after the title from "Innovation from the outside in" to "About good products and their development" to be a little more transparent. I think this also reflects the broader product management and development themes I've been writing about than the narrower focus on usability techniques I started with back in 2006.

So thanks again to Squarespace. And to those still reading User>Driven, thanks for your patience. Stay tuned for more.

Comments

[Dan O.]

Glad to see you blogging again, and to read about your decision, Bruce.

I must admit I'm a Squarespace fan and have been using their platform pretty much since they launched. I've created several personal blogs, as well as professional blogs and micro-sites (both for my previous gig at a company you may be familiar with, and at my current job) using Squarespace.

In my opinion, it's probably the most flexible, easy-to-use professional publishing tool out there. I'm almost hesitant to refer to it as just a blogging tool, but it's certainly great for that. It's more robust than standard blogging services, and much more user friendly than more comprehensive CMS solutions I've used in the past.

The major down side I've noticed is that speed and performance can be an issue sometimes, especially since they introduced V5 a few months ago.

Is it worth the price? It depends. Can you do anything with Squarespace that you can't do with a free platform? Not necessarily, but the UI and user experience, coupled with the convenience of it being a fully hosted service, is hard to beat.

They make it easy to do complex things, and that's one of my favorite attributes of any product. That is what makes it worth every penny for me.

[Bruce McCarthy]

Thanks for your note, Dan. I didn't know you were using Squarespace as well. I thought maybe I was the only one!

It does seem both flexible and usable and more so than the others as I discovered.

I am using a v4 layout and their editor tools say that means I am missing some features (though they are not specific about what). I checked out some of the new v5 layouts and most of them seemed like copies of the WordPress and TypePad layouts I didn't like. So I will stick with this layout for a while, I think.