How can I recreate this website on a service like squarespace or six?

July 3, 2014 1:49 PM

This is my company's website/portfolio. It was not created by me. It's not built well (slow and javascripty) and I want to replicate it using either squarespace, wix, or some other platform that will allow it to be very easily updated. My plan is to embed the videos from vimeo as opposed to having them actually hosted on the site. I'm trying to figure out how I can recreate the navigation for the different videos as you now see it. Is that possible?
posted by matt_od to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Looks like it should be possible to me to make something loosely analogous. You could probably pay a web designer a moderate sum to make it exactly the same.

If your goal is to save money, your best bet would be to open up a free-trial Squarespace account and start tinkering.
posted by Andrhia at 2:42 PM on July 3, 2014

Response by poster: I have done exactly that in both squarespace and wix and all I can figure out how to do is make a gallery like this.
posted by matt_od at 2:50 PM on July 3, 2014

I don't know what you mean by 'javascripty', but it's slow because it's loading giant videos and it needs to wait until it's loaded a certain percentage, and you're loading from a host that can't handle it. I looked at the source for a minute and it's not the finest javascript I've ever seen (although there is some unprofessional console logging going on in there), but it's functional and whatever improvements I might make would have a negligible performance impact.

I would focus your efforts on hosting the videos somewhere that's designed for it, rather than starting over with trying to duplicate the UI. Your plan to embed the videos at vimeo should be fine, but you don't need to throw the rest of the site away and start over in order to do that.
posted by Kwine at 3:25 PM on July 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Like I mentioned, I would also like to rebuild using such a service for ease of updating. I'd like the ability for not very computer literate folks to update the site with new videos to keep work current.
posted by matt_od at 3:39 PM on July 3, 2014

Squarespace customer service basically only uses e-mail but they tend to respond within an hour, no matter the time of day. And they're pretty helpful. You could ask them how you could do it (what templates to try, etc.).
posted by Leontine at 7:09 PM on July 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Any halfway competent designer/developer should be able to replicate this site, very quickly, using WordPress and any one of a dozen slideshow plugins. WP makes updating the site trivial and it will likely just involve adding the link to the Vimeo video.
posted by cedar at 1:38 PM on July 4, 2014