Squarespace and blogging...

October 26, 2023 6:53 AM

I have a friend who wants to have a blog and wants to use Squarespace. I've played with it a bit and as far as I can tell, they have no real mechanism for blogging. Yes, they have templates that they refer to in a blogging category, but nothing is really meant for fast, journal-y, bloggy entries that change daily or more frequently. Am I missing something or is Squarespace simply not suited to blogging?

I'm guessing this could be accomplished with severe workarounds but am curious if there's just an element about the template system they use that I'm not seeing or understanding.

Are there any real-world blogs that use Squarespace that can be pointed to as examples?

Thanks!

posted by dobbs to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

People use Squarespace to sell things. Your friend would be wiser to choose wordpress.com, which was designed for blogging from the start.
posted by zadcat at 6:56 AM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Squarespace is a site that lets you create a web site of your own. What you do with that web site is up to you - including blogging. However, it's tailored more towards storefronts/commercial prospects.

Wordpress is a web site designed more expressly for creating your own blog.

There's nothing wrong with using Squarespace for a blog as such, but Squarespace is going to assume you know more about the behind-the-scenes programming and coding to make your blog entries look the way you want them to look and to make sure the site overall works properly as opposed to crashing each time you make a post but forget to use an ampersand or something. With Wordpress, all you need to do is click "write" to write a post, and "publish" to post it. And how much your friend knows about coding is something only your friend can answer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:02 AM on October 26, 2023

The other thing is that unless something has changed since the last time I looked at it, it is nearly impossible to export your content from squarespace, to the point where it is suggested that you run a web crawler to pull the content that way.
posted by rockindata at 7:27 AM on October 26, 2023

The last time I tried to use it (2 years ago) it was perfectly capable of creating and displaying blog entries, but it was kind of awkward to to so. I think Squarespace is totally fine for "company website that advertises services and has a blog" which is what I was doing, but it would not be good for a blog-first website which is much easier in WordPress. The main advantage of Squarespace is the visual site creator so it's good for design-heavy websites where every page looks completely different (which was very awkward to do in WordPress the last time I tried). This question probably comes down to the needs of the person who will actually be updating the website: if they're a visual person who likes lots of custom layouts then Squarespace makes sense, but if they just want to write stuff and add a few pictures WordPress will be much better.
posted by JZig at 7:39 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's their help page on it which includes a video walkthrough. I think the tricky thing, as others have said, is that you're really making individual pages rather than blog entries. It's a minor distinction but I think makes the overall experience a little different than traditional blogging platforms.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:50 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, another thought - It's possible your friend may be drawn to Squarespace for the "you can pick a custom domain" option (i.e., the website would be "mysuper-keenblog.com" as opposed to "squarespace.com/mysuper-keenblog").

If that's the case - you can do that on Wordpress too, for an annual fee of about $70. That's what I do with my own Wordpress site.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:01 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

That said, I've found that Squarespace actually features customers who've used Squarespace for their own purposes, including some bloggers.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:03 AM on October 26, 2023

A completely non-Squarespace answer, but I was just in a conversation about sociologists interviewing us old folks about the early days of blogging, so...:

[sfx: creaky old-man voice] back in the '90s, when I wrote my first weblogging/journaling/whatever we were gonna call it software, Newwwsboy, specific software for this wasn't universal, and yet people were doing it. Bryon Sutherland, Brad Graham, Cameron Barrett, and a whole list of other folks were hand HTML coding their regular updates. They just had some templates and a text editor and their own workflow and made it happen.

I don't mean to leave anyone out, back in '03 I tried to collect a list of people who weren't using Frontier as of 1999 (a number of "MeFi's own" on that list), some of those may have been using hand-rolled software, but I know that those 3 were publishing regularly with hand-rolled HTML.

Which is to say that all of these things are tools, and sometimes ya draw on cave walls with sticks of charcoal pulled from a fire, sometimes you use colored pencils, and sometimes you use Photoshop, and even in this era of tablets and computers and auto-fill, folks still do charcoal and chalk drawings.

And, to draw a closer analogy to blogging in Squarespace: Some people do elaborate drawings in Excel...
posted by straw at 8:09 AM on October 26, 2023

As others have said, Squarespace is more of a retail front-end. OTOH, Tumblr is still very much a thing, and is pretty much purpose-made for blogging.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:59 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm an internet old who has blogged on several different platforms, and made/managed websites of various sorts on several platforms including Squarespace, and my advice is, if you can possibly convince them to switch to Wordpress, do so.
posted by BlueJae at 9:09 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]