Squarespace sucks

Setting the stage

I recently embarked on rebuilding El Grupo Youth Cycling’s website for a second time since I became board chair. After much discussion with staff and my leadership team it was decided that the custom-built website running on Astro and a self-hosted Directus instance wasn’t maintainable for the team. The new executive director also wanted to combine several of our platforms and create one cohesive place for all things Grupo. After some shopping around, we landed on Squarespace. Which is where our story begins…

It’s not all bad

There were some nice surprises with how Squarespace works. I loved how easy it was to implement scheduling using Acuity. The email customization was also super nice and easy to use. The integrations are super nice, and there’s a wide array of plugins and extensions that you can tap to enhance your website, unfortunately I didn’t find use for any.

But…

It took me way too long to learn how to use the editor. I found that when I would change a variable in one place it would change it somewhere completely unrelated. There was very little indication about how changes would affect the wider website.

Why are buttons so complex? How the **** did they overcomplicate something so simple?

While attempting to customize the buttons, I found that while I could essentially get the buttons to be the way I wanted them, I couldn’t get the colors to stick. I would change the color for button 1 and all of a sudden buttons 2 & 3 were matching… Why have 3 slots for buttons when they will be the same?

I found the lack of heading options to be depressing. You can only have 4 headings, when there are 6 officially in the HTML specs 🔗. It made it difficult to achieve some of the desired effect with text. The other text customization was limited at best, almost in the sense that they want to give you the illusion of control, but you really have none.

It’s too easy for people who don’t understand how it works to break things. I spent a solid chunk of time undoing some of my collaborators work and rebuilding certain elements to look better. This isn’t a fault of SquareSpace, but I’m still putting it here anyway.

My takeaways

I still hate website builders. It’s a reflection of how I learned how to do things. I believe that if you want something done right, you need the right tools. SquareSpace is not the right tool for me, I found it rather annoying to fight against. I spent way too much time pulling my hair out trying to make a usable website, just for people with no knowledge to go through and change things. I found no version history, which was a major annoyance when undoing changes that had been made.

I know I’m not the customer for these site builders, I’m the type of person who builds my things my way. I really don’t like using other peoples tools unless I have too. Maybe one day I will find a site builder that I don’t hate, but today is not that day.