I’ve been using SquareSpace for years for my personal web page and this blog, and it’s worked pretty well for those purposes. This summer I put together sites for two business ideas and gave two other platforms a try: Wix and WordPress.com. Since these projects invariably start with with me spending hours of Internet time researching topics like, “Best platform for pre-launch audience”* I thought I’d share my experience for those who are searching for such terms now. You’re welcome.
This post will probably get a bit long, but should be worthwhile** for those interested in the topic. Here are some baseline assumptions to keep in mind.
My web skills are rudimentary. Need a SQL process that analyzes years of sales and gauges loyalty among your customers? I’m your guy. Want a cascading style sheet and device-intuitive formatting? I’m a slightly better choice than asking your plumber for help.
If there’s one thing I lack more than web development skills, it’s artistic talent. Not only do I need a platform that helps make good choices, I need one that can be tweaked easily, even after I’ve added a lot of content.***
I’m not going to compare e-comm storefront capability on here. I did look at it with Wix, but haven’t touched it with SquareSpace or WordPress, so it’s not a focus item.
For what I wanted to do, I didn’t find much difference in price. Usability is going to be the differentiator.
I am quite good at figuring out what I want. I develop great functional specs, I know the general feel I’m looking for, and I know what kind of content I want to present. In other words, I should be exactly the target demographic for “build a fully functioning website in just minutes with our platform!”
So, ready for some contrast?
Online Help
Winner: WordPress, with SquareSpace a bit behind. This one comes first because I consider it the most crucial. These are supposed to be self-service platforms, and self-service is much better with solid documentation. Both WordPress and SquareSpace offer pretty comprehensive knowledge bases, complete with videos, examples, etc. Most important, the help files I’ve explored have actually been useful toward solving the challenge at hand.
Wix does have a fairly large amount of content, but my experience so far has been that the quality isn’t there. Articles tend to be short, without enough detail to get to a solution. Worse, despite having a Wix business plan, I found that live help was anything but. After inputting my problem, I was told to sit tight and wait for an agent. Good thing I had a sandwich. The response came four days later, via email, and pretty much said, “It looks like everything’s working okay.”
Implementing a Theme
No clear winner here. Each system has a ton of themes to choose from, and frankly, for a web-building noob, the number of themes are rather overwhelming. Like a collection of the greatest pop hits of the 2010’s, there are hundreds of entries that are all so similar that looking at them is akin to having every band at Coachella playing at once while you try to pick out which of these new songs you like best.
Page Building Interface
WordPress is my choice here, by a fairly broad margin, with SquareSpace in second. All three have UI quirks and challenges, but WordPress has the least that I’ve encountered. (And again, this is with me staying at the designer level, not delving into coding.)
One specific where I’ve found SquareSpace to be better is re-sizing and automatic sizing of images. Much as I like WordPress’s interface, sometimes it forces an image size that can’t seem to be changed without changing image sizes in other parts of the template. Again, this is probably overcome by coding, but we’re looking for usability by someone who wants to get a business site up and running, not someone who wants to become a web developer.
Subscription Capability
WordPress wins here, no contest. All three sites are about building a long-term audience, two specifically for pre-launch of a business. Getting people to subscribe and making that contact list easy to use is critical functionality and face it, people are lazy. The subscription process must be as easy as possible, and sending updates via subscription should be simple at my end.
Both Wix and WordPress are way too fixated on trying to draw users to the Wix and WP platforms, which is annoying. They’d prefer that my viewers set up a WordPress account, then subscribe to my site’s blog and news via WordPress. Screw that. It’s hard enough to draw someone to the site and get their email address. Likewise, Wix differentiates far too much between subscribers, site members, and Wix app users.
WordPress, at least, makes it very easy to subscribe people without confusion, once you’ve learned how. (I’ll come back to that learning experience momentarily.) With almost no effort I was able to set up the right elements such that people can subscribe to a mailing list or the more frequent blog. Also, the sign-up form handles WordPress members versus email signups in a single place.
SquareSpace is abysmal at the subscription game. From what I’ve been able to find in SS’s help, I’d have to set up an RSS feed to a MailChimp account, then publish a newsletter via MailChimp. Not what I want. Likewise, it appears that I should be able to set up this blog for RSS feed for subscribers, but in this instance the documentation is weak enough that it doesn’t pass my “I want to do this in an hour or less” test.****
Social Sharing
Hand in hand with subscription capability. WordPress wins again, but SquareSpace is…pretty decent. In no time at all WordPress was connected to my FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, with plenty of options for more, and blog posts began feeding with no problems. 100% satisfaction on this.
SquareSpace has a good interface for making the connections, and for years this blog has been set to publish automatically to Twitter, FB, and LInkedIn. However, SquareSpace seems to regularly lose the connection to Twitter and FB, requiring re-validation (which I don’t know about until I realize it stopped posting) and I’m not sure it’s ever posted automatically to LinkedIn. I always have to wait for the blog to go live, then copy the URL into a post manually on LinkedIn.
My experience with Wix in this regard has been that Wix sucks. I haven’t been able to force the Wix blog to send automatically to any social media and haven’t been able to find usable documentation.
The WordPress Quick Start
This service is one of the primary reasons WordPress has won my uncontested endorsement over the other two platforms. When I signed up for the WordPress site I received an immediate offer for a Quick Start session. It was right around $50 and did exactly what the name implies. I spent somewhere around an hour on a conference call with Wyn, who listened to what I wanted to do, then walked me through basics that he thought I’d need to accomplish my goals. In fact, Wyn built pages while I watched, demonstrated specific blocks and elements he thought I’d find useful, and left me with a fantastic start on the overall site.
After the call Wyn sent me a summary, complete with links to a recording of our session and key documentation pages for the functionality we’d looked at. There’s no doubt that the WordPress Quick Start session was both time and money well spent.
Conclusion
As mentioned, WordPress is my clear winner. In fact, I’m so pleased with the WordPress experience that I’ve considered migrating the Wix site to WordPress. Ultimately I decided that the Wix site is good enough for now, but when my first year subscription ends, it’s undoubtedly moving to WordPress.
SquareSpace is also working well enough to continue without change, but I recognize that I’m using SquareSpace with less serious requirements — if I wanted to build a pre-launch product page where building a potential customer list is crucial, I probably would go with WordPress. That’s not 100%, but I’d have to find a reason to choose SquareSpace that I’m lacking right now.
If you’ve read this far, I hope this has been helpful to someone else who’s embarking on a similar project, and certainly feel free to share your feedback with me. I certainly won’t doubt you if you tell me there’s something I’ve missed. :)
* Hours of researching topics, intermixed with hours of falling into the Reddit rabbit hole, playing a little Age of Empires, watching “Umbrella Academy…,” researching kayaks, ordering a kayak, going kayaking…
** “After all, why would I do anything that doesn’t have long term value?” he asked as he wound up a 60 hour marathon playing Martian Rails solo.
*** Incidentally, I love dogs playing poker. I love the art, and love the business story behind it.
**** And seriously, I’m pretty decent at learning technical things. I should be able to do this easily in an hour or less, even if I stop to refill my drink.