After bouncing around on Blogger and WordPress for a while, I’ve settled on the Squarespace platform as a place to be my home on the web.
Blogger for beginners
Blogger was great to get started and for my first blog the features and customization it allowed were fine. Dropping in pictures was simple and there were enough widgets available at the time that initially I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.
Graduate to WordPress.com
But, as I got a little more adventurous I started my 2nd blog on the WordPress hosted platform at WordPress.com. This allowed for a lot more customization from the popular platform’s extensive widget collection and I really liked the user interface.
As my blogging frequency increased and I began having to dig into more and more HTML code (and I’m not an HTML guy) I found myself thinking it was taking more time than it needed to do what I thought were simple changes (for example, it is next to impossible to change the size of your font!). In particular, because WordPress.com doesn’t accept any javascript in their customer HTML blocks, there were a ton of cool widgets that wouldn’t work. Very frustrating.
Try to upgrade to WordPress.org
I kept reading that all the cool widgets I wanted to use on wordpress.com were available on wordpress.org. The problem is this meant finding a place to host the site, which wasn’t that big a deal. However, I found with wordpress.org also comes the need for even more HTML knowledge. This was somethig I want to learn, but finding the time to do it was another story. At about this same time I took on a new role at Direct Capital as their Interactive Marketing Manager. I wanted a platform that would just let me do what I needed to do without having to get to techie.
Along comes Squarespace
Thanks to Jazz Gilbert, he felt my pain and suggested I check out Squarespace. While I’m relatively new to the platform, so far, it has allowed me to do everything I want to do without digging into HTML code. It was super simple to merge both of my blogs into one site using the blog importer. The possibilities do seem limitless, even for a HTML lightweight.
Best features so far: love the drag and drop, love the ability to use widgets with javascript code, love the user interface.
And as a bonus, I can change the font with a couple of mouse clicks!
Dave Criswell 