What it was like to Build a Site (for the first time) on Squarespace, Part 1
Friday, January 16, 2009 at 02:25PM Liza Bouchard in which I discuss Publishing Platforms, esp. with regard to why SquareSpace is a superior one.
This post is the first that I am writing using the Squarespace publishing platform; it is being written on a site we recently designed and built for our company The Cognomen. I would like to share some thoughts and workflow tips for others who are looking at SquareSpace as a possible publishing platform, and who are specifically approaching it as such from a front-end developer mind set.
FIRST THOUGH, some thoughts on publishing platforms more generally, and then some thoughts on why I would recommend using SquareSpace as a publishing platform. Put broadly, a PP allows a user to generate content for a website without diving into html or any other markup/scripting/whatever language. Ideally, it allows you to produce content--some writing, some video, some images, whatever--and then just pass that stuff to the PP, which takes it upon itself to translate that content into whatever markup the browser needs to display it nicely. OK, so with a little human intervention up front--e.g. defining exactly what that site looks like and building a template from that--this is just like automating the web developer's role. No longer do you need to keep that web developer's number in your rolodex; and no longer does she need to keep your FTP information stored in Dreamweaver. Yeay.
But, of course, when talking about normal people using PPs to put and then manage content on their own website, there is a question about what kind of content? This is a technological as well as cultural question. What kinds of stuff can and do normal human beings produce themselves for the web? If we look at some popular PP examples -- Wordpress, Drupal, Blogger, Typepad -- it seems that the normal human either can or wants to produce a lot of blog posts. Excepting Drupal, all of the above are pretty much blog-centric PPs. Drupal presents it's own wing of the PP universe which I won't get into too much here, mostly because I have tried to use Drupal and ended up under my desk in a good old fetal tuck. Suffice it to say that Drupal is not really for the normal human being and is more a way for larger organizations to manage extremely large amounts of content for the web. Please, though, if you disagree, may I point you to the comments.
OK BUT AND SO, I would suspect that most PPs focus on blogs because A) technologically speaking, blog posts are relatively manageable chunks of content that can be handled by templates really well, i.e. titles are always in 18pt Georgia or whatever; but also B) because culturally, I think most normal people's idea of a personal website is pretty much circumscribed by their idea of a journal--here's what's going on with me sort of stuff--so when it comes time to have and produce content for a website, a blog makes sense.
This is fine, but it's also kind of limiting for anyone who's idea of a personal website extends beyond that of a journal. And definitely limiting for a business who simply does not need the fetal-inducing power of Drupal.Ok and yet those people for whom say Blogger feels limited, those people are now starting to expect the ability to update their own websites. Things like Wordpress and Blogger have broken some sort of seal it feels like, and so the old solution of calling up the web developer every time you need a change isn't really flying. And truthfully, it shouldn't. When you want to update products on your website, or information about yourself, or add something new to your portfolio, you should be able to do it. And PPs like Wordpress especially, probably because it's open source, have responded to this reasonable desire on the parts of normal people, and so like there are lots of good non-blog sites running off Wordpress.
But--and this is where I swing it back to some sort of thesis--have you tried to do this yourself, run a non-blog site off Wordpress, not to even mention one that breaks from one of the (admittedly many) templates? It can be unpleasant. When you use Wordpress, I would argue, you start to think in terms of blogs because handling blog content is what WP does really well. And so, what I am really enjoying about SquareSpace with respect to PPs is that SqSp feels to me like a technological leap forward with respect to the blog-centric beginnings of PPs. The SqSp tool for creating and styling pages, adding and updating content, and other website magic is, in a word: ridiculous. WHICH IS TO SAY: SquareSpace frees me up to think not just in terms of blogs, but in terms of great websites.
As Tyler Thompson, the current Creative Director at SquareSpace wrote before he started working at SquareSpace:
Squarespace makes it ridiculously easy to add this dynamic content. There is no scripts or coding to add, ever. Everything is accessible to all users in a straight forward interface. With Wordpress you often times run into plug-ins that require some hacking, that isn't fun, why do you think they named it after coughing things up?
If I was writing an academic paper here, I would now demonstrate the ways in which SqSp makes it "ridiculously easy to add" dynamic content. Instead, I am writing an already too long blog post, and so will let amazing HyperText be my proof. Go to squarespace.com to watch SqSp in action. Suffice it to say here that when it came time to create this website that you are currently on, SquareSpace allowed the developer in me to design and build a site I am happy with, while at the same time allowing the content producer in me to update and add stuff to the site with relative ease.
OH AND: this is the part where I tell you I am not affiliated with SquareSpace in any way. I do not even have one of those affiliate links that everyone seems to have nowadays, but which I do not really understand.
Reader Comments (1)
My 2ยข: Go SquareSpace!