Why I use Squarespace for my business

A brief history of web design.

Let me tell you a story. Long, long ago, computer terminals were enormous and screens were tiny. There were no images on most web pages and the text was a monochrome default font (green or orange if this was a really fancy system). The cursor flashed, indicating the only place on the screen where you could input text. These were the days before CSS, so everything looked blocky and awful. There was no point in loading images because they took so long to load via dial-up. If your little brother picked up the phone in the hallway (because that’s where the family telephone resided), it disconnected you from the server.

Those are the days when I started web development, using raw HTML and Dreamweaver. Oh, how painful it was to write even one line of code.

Welcome, WordPress!

Then, out of the swamp of web design misery, WordPress emerged as a blogging platform. Web developers quickly realised they could use it to code websites much faster, with images and everything. The revolution in web design had begun. It was open source, so anyone could create new plugins, add ons, APIs, and everyone did. WordPress was like a box of Lego: you could build anything with it, if you had the right pieces and knew how it all fitted together.

Over the years, other platforms emerged too: Blogger, Tumblr, Wix, Squarespace… each iteration with more exciting features and better ways to do things. They integrated with bulk email platforms such as Mailchimp and Mailerlite, creating mini-ecosystems.

Then, the website platforms started developing their own email systems, and the email platforms started developing their own website builders.

You can see where this is going…

And then there was too much choice in web design platforms.

So many choices! So many ways to configure things! So many things that could go wrong… !

As a writer with a minimum number of products and services, I don’t need a full-service e-commerce website, with all the bells and whistles. I’m already fully booked with clients, so I don’t need a massive email list either. Nor do I want to juggle multiple integrations between platforms or keep an eye on different plugins to make sure they’re up to date and don’t crash my site. I don’t want to have to back up my site every time I click an ‘update’ button, praying I don’t get the ‘white screen of death’. And I don’t want to have to log into lots of different platforms to check my metrics, or update my payments, or wrangle data. 

Farewell, WordPress!

I want my website to be beautiful, functional, easy to navigate and easy to maintain. I want it to be its own ecosystem, with the domain name, website builder, page editing, backups, ecommerce functionality and responsive email system all bundled together.

Hello, Squarespace!

This, my friend, is why I chose Squarespace. It does all of this, and more, from one dashboard. And, when you have more than three Squarespace websites, you can join Squarespace Circle, with early access to exciting new features and a very helpful community. 

Yes, there are cheaper alternatives to Squarespace, but none of them have the integrated functionality that I require or the beauty and simplicity of Squarespace. Sometimes, the cheaper alternatives turn out to be more expensive in the long run, as other platforms increase their prices to squeeze their customers, or cut back on functionality.

Now that Five Trees Digital has it’s own blog, I finally have a rationale (and content!) for the newsletter I’ve been wanting to start since 2021.

Welcome aboard!

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