Use The Web: Squarespace.com

This week in Use The Web, I am highlighting a site that is near and dear to my heart, Squarespace.com. In the interest of full disclosure, I should shamelessly plug say that my personal site SomeAmerican.com is built using this service.

As far as WYSIWYG editors go, Squarespace is by far the most powerful implementation of such a system that I have ever used. Literally every aspect of a site can be built, edited, and tweaked to your heart’s content using a simple graphical editing system that relies heavily on a real-time “slider” style interface. Widths, heights, color choices, font styles, formatting options, and all other aspects of your website can be changed at a moment’s notice, and the system is so intuitive that it encourages an almost endless amount of tweaking on behalf of the user. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent tweaking minor things like the spacing of my sidebar with relation to my header. At no point have I ever found the process to be frustrating or tedious, and what I accomplished with my minimal knowledge of website implementation actually rivals what I see on professionally designed sites around the web today. Another feature I should mention is the integrated analytics system, which provides almost all of the same information that a Google Analytics account would on another service, but with the benfit of being already integrated into your site. Search Engine Optimization is also taken care of provided your site is derived from one of the three-dozen pre-made templates that Squarespace provides as the basis for your creation.

Of course, there is a caveat: unlike other less powerful WYSIWYG sites like Blogger.com and Tumblr.com, Squarespace does not come for free. I currently pay $12 a month for hosting and twenty gigs worth of online storage, but I can honestly say that the benefits of that additional investment are well worth it for me. Depending on what you are looking to accomplish, then you may find that you feel the same way.

Squarespace Introduction Video:

37 Signals Rebuilt Using The Squarespace Editor