Squarespace

Pluspunten

The aesthetic. Squarespace's design templates are fresh, current, and appealing to begin with, which provides a lot of options for customization.

Minpunten

It's not the most intuitive interface ever, but that said, they provide outstanding how-to articles and videos and infinitely patient customer support, so it's not hard to figure out how to do what you want to do, even if you have no coding experience.

Pluspunten

At one time, Squarespace's slogan was "build it beautiful." They take this mantra seriously, as the platform makes it almost impossible to NOT make a beautiful website. Can it be restrictive? Yes. But in limiting the user's options, it often is doing them a service. If you absolutely must have functionality or an type of implementation Squarespace doesn't support, then you probably need the help of an expert (either a dev agency or a marketing/design agency) or you are yourself an expert – in which case, you probably should have started with a more sophisticated tool.

Minpunten

The one area where customization is often necessary is in CSS. A bit of custom CSS goes a long way toward making a site look less like a template. Just as having a clean crisp UI/UX is the bread and butter that makes Squarespace sites so attractive to small businesses, having a "one-of-a-kind" look can go a long way toward making those businesses look more credible. It is a delicate balancing act, which Squarespace usually nails quite well... but the lack of documentation on how the site treats custom CSS is a shortcoming. I basically end up anding "Important!" to everything, because it is impossible to tell what elements of my CSS Squarespace is going to arbitrarily overwrite with no explanation.

Pluspunten

As a former user of Wordpress, I found Squarespace to be a breath of fresh air. I've be using it since 2014 and have never looked back. It actually made designing my website and grabbing analytics fun! When navigating the software, it felt like I had been here before. It was so easy to find the tools and customize the fonts and sizing to my preferences. Adding pictures in where I need them is easy and the layouts they offer display my work in such a beautiful fashion that even I'm blown away. All in all, I love this software because it offers so many different themes and customizations without being confusing. It's actually fun and I love that a blog is included with my site. It's like a whole other site to customize and tweak to your taste. I was never a blogger before but now I don't have a choice, Squarespace makes it too easy to make excuses now.

Minpunten

There are very few things that come to mind when talking about disliking this software. I do wish there was a larger library of fonts readily available for each area of customization, across all themes.

Pluspunten

The ease of creating and managing the website are its strongest suite. There is definitely a learning curve and not everything is intuitive out of the box. However, once you get through the quirks it can save substantial amounts of time creating content and maintaining the site into the future. It takes a lot of complexity out of website creation. It's a major relief to not have to worry about updating plugins and hoping something doesn't break. It's mobile friendly out of the box and much easier to handle things like image galleries or even selling products.

Minpunten

Every website must be on its own plan. No bundles or creating multiple websites on the same server. Choosing a template upfront can be tricky because it's hard to foresee what capabilities you'll need down the line and each template has its own abilities and quirks. You can always change the template but that often requires substantial reworking of the content. Also, you must work with the confines of what Squarespace can do. If you're trying to do something relatively complicated you're likely to run into roadblocks and limitations and you'll be stuck doing it the "Squarespace way" or not at all.

Pluspunten

This software is easy to use, intuitive, and when you can't figure something out Support is right there for you. They have tons of how to videos and instructions that make everything pretty easy to figure out.

Minpunten

I dislike the spacer feature - it gets pretty annoying to use those instead of being able to snap an object to a grid and align that way. It works much like Microsoft Word in the sense that if you try to resize or adjust something, sometimes everything on the page moves.