A website builder that handles long pages better than Squarespace does

April 29, 2018 1:39 PM

Allthough I love Squarespace, I've got a project where the length of each page makes populating pages with content an excruciating task. Are there any alternatives to Squarespace that handle long pages with lots of content like this better, while not sacrificing on looks or usability? Alternatively, are there hacks to fix this?

I'm trying to find a way to do infinite scrolling, but I can't see a way to do that apart from using a blog template.

posted by svenni to Technology (7 answers total)

I have not used it, but a friend who works in marketing recommends Wix.
posted by jb at 4:06 PM on April 29, 2018

I have used Wix a number of times, it handles long pages well
posted by ananci at 6:54 PM on April 29, 2018

I did a very long, image-rich page for a grad project using Wix. No complaints on display or editing.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 8:32 PM on April 29, 2018

I don't see any particular reason you wouldn't be able to do an infinite-scrolling-type behavior in Squarespace itself with code injection (of a block of javascript). As in, after writing a bunch of complex code there would be a place in that code where you'd put a list of other pages and as you scrolled down further the contents of that sequence of pages would be loaded successively. (The javascript code would probably fetch the other pages via the Squarespace "URL Queries API".)

If you don't have your own code jockey to build it and want to hire someone to develop this javascript for you, I haven't worked with them or bought any of their stuff but these guys seemed to be serving up the most sophisticated javascript samples I came across while learning Squarespace during the past year.
posted by XMLicious at 4:12 AM on April 30, 2018

Best answer: Oh, and—just in case you aren't aware of this, Squarespace themselves have a feature called "Index Pages" which in the templates I've used makes a bunch of normal pages appear in a stack (though it's possible some templates display them with an "infinite scrolling" effect, I don't know) but the problem I ran into was that the templates I looked at only allowed a single Index Page on the entire site. It looks like, if you turn on their "Developer Mode", you can create as many as you want, but then you lose the automatic updates of the improvements Squarespace designers make to the template, which is sort of the whole point of Squarespace.

I also don't know if Index Pages would solve the editing issue you describe, since when I edited them the whole stack of pages appeared in the editing interface at once, rather than individually.
posted by XMLicious at 5:08 AM on April 30, 2018

Response by poster: Yeah I think index pages should do it, for this particular problem. Pages can then be edited while in a different folder, and then moved into the index pages folder just when this is wrapped up.

Sv.
posted by svenni at 1:47 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

If you're paying for SquareSpace, their 24/7 technical team is available to answer questions like this. Their customer support is one of the primary reasons to pay for SquareSpace in an age when you can self-host your own CMS in 5 minutes for $5 a month.
posted by ticktickatick at 10:15 PM on April 30, 2018