Why Squarespace?

It's no secret that we're Squarespace fans. Several of our customers have sites featured on Squarespace's examples page; as such we receive several requests each month from professionals and businesses alike for more information on the ins-and-outs of using Squarespace and how they can get on board (and how we can help!). Why all the fuss?

Several sources provide the answer(s) to that question in detail —some of which are linked below. Here, I'll offer a brief summary of why we continue to choose the Squarespace platform to focus on providing well designed, intuitive sites. I'll assume that you've taken the tour of their services and are familiar with their About page.

Links Services Tour About Squarespace User Examples

The Company

New York based Squarespace offers a hosted, managed environment that powers tens of thousands of websites and serves billions of hits per month. Businesses, bloggers, and professionals worldwide use the system for creating and maintaining web sites.

This small company has garnered attention from The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and TechCrunch. Currently they are ranked #339 on Inc.'s Fortune 500 list and #32 in IT Services.

Links Fortune 500 Listing About Squarespace

The System

Here we'll focus primarily on two aspects of Squarespace's backbone: Hosting & Reliability and Security. 

Hosting & Reliability

If you're new to Squarespace and have visited their site looking for information on their system, you may have missed a more detailed description of what's going on behind the scenes. Check out their User Manual to dive a little deeper. There you'll find brief answers to questions like:

• Where is Squarespace hosted?
• What sort of systems is my website hosted on?
• How is my data backed up?
• How does this compare to hosting on my own?
• What happens if Squarespace goes out of business?

For more in depth information, Todd Hoff's August 2009 Q&A with founder Anthony Casalena and Director of Technical Operations Rolando Berrios is a must read. His quick summary on the platform:

• Java: well supported and an advanced language to work in, and the components out there (Apache Foundation, etc.) are second to none.
• Tomcat: the stability of the server is extremely impressive.
• Grid: Oracle Coherence for the re-balancing and caching layers.
• Storage: Isilon Cluster. This allows them to treat their storage like another "grid" as the storage pool is easily scaled by adding more diskspace.
• Uptime: 99.98%
• Hosting: Peer1
• Competitors: TypePad and WordPress
• Hardware: they don't use "commodity nodes" or low cost hardware units. These end up costing more in the long run as datacenter power is extremely expensive.
• Cacti: a cacti instance is used to graph statistical data which helps see trends over time, predict when a hardware upgrade is necessary, and troubleshoot any problems that do show up.

And here's the money:

Often the best way to judge a product is to peruse the developer forums. It's these people who know what's really happening. And when I look I see an almost complete absence of threads about performance, scalability, or reliability problems. Take a look at other CMSs and you'll see a completely different tenor of questions. That says something good about the strength of their scalability strategy.  (emphasis added)

Links Todd Hoff's Interview User Manual Developers Forum

Security

While I've personally never had an issue with this or any other Squarespace site I've built or managed being hacked or otherwise abused, I did ask customer support for a little more information on the security of the system. Their response:

Squarespace is also extremely security-conscious. Our users trust us with their online presence and we're committed to upholding that trust. As such, we develop our application with the highest standards of security. Squarespace has undergone an intense barrage of security tests ranging from XSS exploits, email scraping, DDoS, and other more direct penetration attacks and has passed with flying colors on every account. Since every one of our websites is served on the same underlying fabric, every customer has the same rock-solid security.  (emphasis added)

Usage and Desgin-ability

There are plenty of modules Squarespace offers it's user —html page, blog (podcasting and other enclosures built in) and blog archive, forum, gallery, Google maps, file exchange, site search, site tracker, social widgets, iPhone app— but perhaps more important is how they've managed to pull this all together in a way that makes sense for the end-user. Here I'll focus on the UI for the end user and my own real world experience behind the "Squarespace is too limited" myth. 

UI for the End User

Increasingly, people want more control over their site. This is a good thing. But most people aren't coders and really don't want to know much about HTML. What they want is to be able to update their site —podcasts, blog entries, photos galleries, etc— all without affecting with the overall design architecture (and that is a good thing for us designer/developer types!). A content management solution (CMS) is the obvious choice for a win-win situation with the designer/developer and the client.

Some popular CMSs require a trip to an admin panel on the back end of the site to do all of this. To view the edits you'll go back to the front end. Then to back end to edit again. This is clunky and unnecessary. Using a branded, customized WYSIWYG editor, Squarespace's "in-cotext editing" approach puts content creation in the most logical place: the page you're currently viewing. With Squarespace, you are presented with a modal dialogue allowing you to add or edit content —including hyperlinks, adding custom html/scripts, switching to raw html and back again, uploading and depositing media or files, and more— without ever leaving the page you're editing. Reconfiguring a page's settings is a similarly effortless. 

We think this in-context editing approach is superior: it offers our clients an intuitive way for them to access their content, all without needing to know HTML or affecting the overall site design. Organizations can go a step further with user accounts and audience permissions that allow their content managers to only access certain pages or sections for editing, with specified levels of editing ability. Does the boss have an iPhone and want to monitor or update the site on the fly? Well... there's an app for that, too.

Links The Site Builder Full Feature Index Pages & Widgets Listing On Publishing & Editing Content Squarespace vs WordPress On Members & Audiences iPhone App

Flexibility for the Developer

This is well and good for the end user, the person(s) updating the site's content, but what does Squarespace offer for us designer/developer types in the way of customization and ease of use in developing a site?

One criticism of Squarespace is that it's "too limiting" when it comes to development. For my part, I've run into very few limitations when building out sites on Squarespace. It is true that Squarespace is not currently open to third party plugins and does not allow access to the server for any server-side scripting. Essentially, if what you want to do is not already encompassed in a Squarespacemodule, you will need to get creative. And that's okay, because we designers/developers make a living by finding creative solutions to unique challenges as they arise. 

Squarespace is more than open to custom coding, script insertion and the like. The journal module itself essentially functions as a virtual database, allowing for any number of possibilities. Additionally, CSS3 support is coming to more browsers and better browser handling of javascript is increasingly on the rise. Given all of this, I can't think of many situations where a client's vision was unachievable on the Squarespace platform. Which is to say, not everything can be done here —no server side access— but what can be done is more than doable with a little thought and creativity… and perhaps a javascript ninja at-the-ready. 

Links What is CSS3 Journal Module as Virtual Database On Design: Total Creative Control

Management & Support

A quick listing of some powerful features available out-of-the-box to every Squarespace user:

24/7 Support

Squarespace provides several levels of 24/7 support to every user, including:

• Live Bodies: a dedicated support team of real Squarespace users is always at the ready via the Support Tickets section of the admin area. Responses are often received within the hour.
• Cloud Based User Manual: Including a FAQ, the comprehensive online manual also includes several training videos.
• Developers Forum: the place to get the lowdown on how to customize your Squarespace website and make it learn new tricks.

Visitor Behavior Management

Squarespace provides real-time, built-in visitor tracking and analytics:

• Page Views per day/week/month,
• Unique Visitors per day/week/month,
• Robot Hits per day/week/month,
• Robot Analysis,
• Browser Analysis,
• OS Anaylsis,
• Page Rank tracking,
• Referrer tracking,
• Popular Content tracking,
• RSS Subscriber tracking,
• Search Engine Query tracking, and
• Detailed Activity on who was visiting which pages on your and at what time.

Anti-Spam

Every Squarespace site comes equipped with a network-aware anti-spam system that prevents spam from ever reaching your Squarespace site. Because of our unique access to tens of thousands of hosted sites, Squarespace collects a massive amount of real-time spam data which is used in our spam blocking process —a process developed over half a decade of experience, and one that is impossible for the independent site owner to replicate without plugins.

Blog Importing

Squarespace can import blogs from a variety of platforms including Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger and Movable Type. They boast that the results of the import will be exactly the same as they were on the old site. I'm happy to say that I've done this for some clients and it works as advertised.

Internal Site Search

Squarespace employs their own search server to index your content, providing your searchers a branded results page. It features:

• Immediate Updates: Search server is refreshed on the fly as content is added; no waiting for your site to be indexed.
• Audience Aware Results: All site data is indexed, but search results are only exposed to searchers based on their permission level. Private data will not be made visible to public searches.
• Content Aware: Search does not operate by scraping site pages but by indexing the underlying objects directly —resulting in cleaner and more accurate search results.

Other Ditties

• Custom Domain(s) Support: Point as many domains at your Squarespace url as you'd like. It points them to the primary domain and gives your visitors the branded url of your choosing
• IP Access Filters: Mask, log or ban specific IP addresses or IP address masks (192.168.0.*).
• URL Shortcuts: URL shortcuts allow you to rename any internal url on the site via URL Rewrite as well as 301 and 302 redirects. This is especially useful when porting your site to Squarespace; no broken urls.
• Website Manager Links: encrypted links to drag to your bookmarks bar, enabling you to log in or out or your site with one click.

Links Support User Manual Training Videos Anti-Spam Blog Importer URL Shortcuts Site Management Search Details

Summary

Squarespace offers an intuitive, attainable interface for average users to update their web sites without the need for HTML experience as well as a powerful framework on which seasoned pros can build their client's custom projects. All of this is powered by a world class data center and a dedicated team of recognized industry professionals who actually use their own product. Any individual or organization serious about content management should give this hosted solution serious consideration.

Comments

[Josh Braaten]

What an incredibly extensive article! Maintenance and ongoing editing can be a heavy burden for clients. I agree with your philosophy that using Squarespace is easy and that clients should only have to pay you for the strategy and the heavy lifting if they want. Squarespace's easy UI can end up saving clients thousands while empowering them to be content creators and community leaders.

Great post and thanks for the link love to my two posts about Squarespace!