OK, with the attention grabbing headline out of the way (this is really no shocking exposé), let’s get to the bottom of this – another look at SquareSpace.com to see if it fits my needs.

I had an idea. Actually, I was sold to. A lot. Many podcasts on the TWiT network and Revision 3 and others besides have been pushing SquareSpace.com as a sponsor. Many of the hosts, including Leo Laporte, keep going on and on about what a great service it is. So my idea was to see if this service could fit in for this blog, and for the Sitting Duck Podcast.

First things first, I think SquareSpace is a technological marvel. I’ve long been a fan of wikis as a means of producing content. Although they have their limitations, a wiki can allow for automatic styling of an entire site and then allow content creation to occur on its own. The construction of new areas of a site and new pages are as easy as a few clicks with no tools needed on the user’s own computer. I have two commercial web sites based on wikis. SquareSpace takes things to the next level by allowing the same in-browser flexibility for managing the site structure and design. As powerful as this is, it is the root of the problem. Anyone who has done software development, be it on the web or in more traditional areas, will know that with flexibility comes complexity. In order to keep complexity to a minimum for the user and for themselves, SquareSpace have had to limit some key areas. The first is layout.

When defining the layout of your site pages, you can choose from one, two or three columns, you can have headers and footers and you can change about what sort of content appears in each. While that suits a lot of site designs, it does not allow for what you can see on this very site. Beneath my header I have essentially three columns, but I also have a “lead story” block which spans two of those columns. This may be possible on SquareSpace, but it would involve deep diving into injected code and, when asked, the support team did not know how to do it. Not only that, but which post appears as the lead is defined by a special tag. Similarly, the lefthand column is populated by posts with another special tag. This makes all these posts ‘sticky’. You just can’t do that on SquareSpace.

Next is something that really disappointed me. I can see the layout problem above is tricky to allow for technically, but any home page of a web site should be able to bring in elements from other parts of the site easily. Again, on SquareSpace this is not possible. Or, at least, not elegantly. One of my thoughts was to combine the blog and the podcast into a single site. The immediate question was whether it should be one “Journal” or two. A single Journal can have multiple categories, each with its own feed, but the iTunes tags are at the Journal level and so would add noise to the non-podcast feeds. So I tried out using two Journals. Before long I realised it was going to be impossible to show content from both Journals on one page. Except, that is, for a simple little widget which could be inserted in a sidebar that only gave titles (and didn’t even allow for a title for itself).

At about this point I realised this wasn’t going to work. My goal was to save myself time and remove my reliance on software on my own computer. While undoubtedly no software was required for SquareSpace, the time saving aspect was clearly not panning out. Even if there was to be a solution to my problems, it would take a lot of tinkering. With my own WordPress installs – as currently used to drive both blogs – I know what I want is possible. I just have to figure out how to get there. And this is another point against SquareSpace.

Because you are expected to easily build your web site using the tools provided and because there is fairly extensive documentation, I could not find any significant resources online to help me figure out how to do stuff that wasn’t obvious, or – ideally – stop me in my tracks so I didn’t waste time trying. If you want to do something clever with WordPress there are hundreds of places you can go for help and there is a good chance someone has already done something pretty similar already.

Finally, there is the issue of price. If you pay for two years in advance and use one of the TWiT or Revision 3 coupon codes, you can get the basic plan for USD$9.60 per month. That’s actually pretty good value even if – like a mobile phone contract – they tie you down for a long time. If you’re not willing to commit the two years, then it’s USD$12.00 per month. Still not breaking the bank, but it is twice the price I am paying to my current hosting provider. Then comes the crunch. For my current plan, I host about ten domains. Five of those domains are actively updated on a regular basis. If I should wish to put all of that on SquareSpace I am looking at a minimum of USD$48 per month – eight times what I pay now!

SquareSpace does not give me eight times the value and therefore is not in my immediate future. Perhaps, given time, they can tweak and polish and allow for more flexibility but for now it shall remain an interesting, but failed experiment for me.