You’ve invariably heard of Squarespace and how easy it is to build a website using their platform. In fact, they have focused all of their efforts on making it easy for people who want to get a starter website built to easily put one together and they are very good at what they do. Furthermore they’ve moved further down the supply chain by also offering more sophisticated website categories and even ecommerce capabilities. So the question is should you use Squarespace or build your own website on another platform. This is a question that requires fully understanding what Squarespace is, what it can do for you and how it is different from building a website on your own.
In fact, if you simply need a website to present your business or offerings, then Squarespace can easily work for you. It allows you to put pages together, to put posts together and it also has a contact form. You can sell items and ensure that everything is secure and hack-proof. It offers a straight forward setup that will satisfy a lot of people.
So this is a recommended avenue, however if you need more functions, such as the ability to track your forms, or more integrated search engine optimization, PPC management, or if you are more so focused on marketing and driving demand for your business, then you may need to build your own website, or hire a website developer to help you in building your own website. But first, let’s look at Squarespace so that we can better understand how it can help and where it can help.
What Squarespace is and how it helps you.
Squarespace is a software-as-a-service (saas) that provides you with the whole suite of software necessary for a website. And the benefit of it is that they are the ones who invest heavily in security, in the hosting space, in the whole website platform, so that they can provide a total solution to the people who use it and in return, you pay a low-cost monthly fee to use it.
It’s kind of like instead of buying a house, you are renting a very nice condo from a condo community in which they have invested in security, maintenance, upkeep and comfort. Now there are a lot of benefits to this particular approach to having a website because it is Squarespace that will manage all the things that are usually required to keep a website secure, functioning, and available at all times to visitors.
With Squarespace, you don’t have to worry about hosting service providers, security or SSL because they take care of a lot of that in their monthly packages, although you may have to pay a little more for these features.
Great for putting together a simple website.
Squarespace is a great option for putting together a simple website quickly. You can have a website put together in 2 or 3 hours with Squarespace and it is going to look good, and it is going to respond quickly to visitors. It is a platform that allows you to immediately put something together quickly, however, keep in mind at that once you stop paying the monthly payment all of your content and information goes away and that is the particular benefit of Squarespace. Although that is depending on how you look at it.
However if you are looking for portability, and that means being able to take your information elsewhere. If you are looking for extensibility, meaning that you are able to add on new functions and features, or integrate different applications like Google Analytics or AdWords tag manager, or Facebook pixel or a host of different features that you will need to effectively run and market your website as a business then Squarespace is not going to be the best option. It will actually present a lot of constraints, consequently, in this case it is advisable to invest in building your own website.
Squaresapce is constantly upgrading and adding new feature and functionalities so lack of extensibility described above will probably fixed. So the ability to add facebook pixels, analytics and other features will probably be available in the near future. Visit their website to learn more.
Reasons for building your own website.
The reason why you want to build your own website is that similar to the analogy above. It allows you to own your house. And when you own your house you can do more things like adding an extra room, have a garden, and build different things that allow you to really engage with your customers. additionally, it allows you to grow today and into the future. However owning your own website definitely requires increased knowledge on how to prevent issues, maintaining your website and being able to troubleshoot problems when they crop up. Sometimes these comes with increased cost if you have to hire someone to help.
Squarespace is a very good option for what it provides and for those who want a well-functioning website, and that will suffice for a lot of projects, you just have to know what your objectives are as it relates to your business, or your idea and make an informed decision as to whether a managed service provider would suffice. Or perhaps it would be a wiser decision today to invest in a website that can grow with you, in which you can integrate various technologies that your business needs as it grows.
At the end of it, it comes down to information about your business, and how well you know what your objectives are and what you want to accomplish. The more you know the better informed your decisions will be and we are also here to help.
