The Design Fix

• Why I Like Designing Developing Websites with Squarespace

  

  Since transferring my own personal website to Squarespace, and even making a couple of other Squarespace sites (check out my website design projects, I have really fallen in love with their platform. I first started hearing about Squarespace through many of the podcasts that I like to listen to. While I decided to not have this site hosted on Squarespace (mainly to continue to develop my programming skills), I do really love developing with their tools. Whenever I have anybody talk to me about website designs, the recommendation I always seem to give is Squarespace. I figured that I should share a little bit of why I am such a fan of developing on this great platform.

  Templates

  In all of my other website design endeavors, I have always made my own CSS (The style sheet that tells the webpage how to look), generally editing off of a preformed template, but always highly customized. Squarespace comes with a number of templates, but each one is so easily customized and highly editable that the sites I’ve developed don’t look like any other website and it has a number of amazing features. For example, I absolutely love the parallax on the them I put together for my mom’s website.

  Rapid Development

  I can do a lot of things on a computer very quickly. I can even develop a pretty simple website at a pretty good pace, but nothing compares to how quickly I can have the basics a new Squarespace website put together. On Back to Work(one of my favorite podcasts) they frequently tell about being able to set up a site in under 5 minutes, and it’s very true. While, I can put a Wordpress website up pretty quickly getting it to have a great looking theme can take significantly longer.

  Responsive Design

  Responsive design means that the website looks the same whether it’s on your computer screen or your iPhone (yes, even your android phone). Squarespace’s code is based on Foundation, a structure that I am liking more and more each and every day.

  Ease of Use

  Everything in Squarespace is drag and drop. This means that it is easy to use, takes minutes to put together, and just blissfully simple. It also doesn’t require updating plugins and other activities which on my previous Drupal website took up a large portion of my time. You can get right to the writing.

  E-commerce

  While I don’t sell anything, if I did, I’d really want to use their e-commerce tools. They are dead simple and turn out with a great product.

  Customer Service

  I’ve had to contact their customer service team a couple of times. They were responsive, funny (I was chatting with one of their team) and extremely helpful.

  I really can’t recommend Squarespace enough, they are really a pleasure to work with for design work. If you are interested in me putting together a website using Squarespace (or another web technology), please contact me.

• Do I Really Have Time for Another Blog?

  

  I have been playing with graphic and web design since I first started community college in 2006. It has been quite a journey for me. I’ve gone from playing with the CSS for MySpace, to building my own website by hand, to using Google Blogger, Wordpress, Drupal, and now most recently my personal website is hosted through Squarespace. I’ve picked up skills in CSS, HTML, and even a bit of PHP and JavaScript.

  I spent quite a while investing into my personal website using Drupal, and added a lot of customized features and parts. I ended feeling that every time that I logged into my website I was having some trouble with the MySQL server (i.e. the database where all of the content is held), having to update plugins, or accidentally breaking stuff on my site. I decided to move to SquareSpace because it is so easy to use, with everything being drag and drop and never having to update plugins again. I’ve been absolutely loving my site hosted there, and don’t have any current plans to change it.

  As I have gotten more serious about my side job, The Design Clinic, I decided that it really needed it’s own domain and website. I also decided, because I do offer web design services that, that I ought to be something that I can put some time into coding. I used Foundation for the CSS and JavaScript backbone to give it the responsive design. I decided on using Jekyll partially because it creates a static site verses a dynamic site. While I have some experience using PHP, I wouldn’t qualify myself as a PHP developer. I also decided to use Jekyll to generate my site because it is written in Ruby, and I feel that would be a much stronger programing and scripting language for me to learn and improve my skills in.

  My current plan with The Design Clinic website is to have it mainly as a landing page for people who are interested in hiring me for my design services. I am also planning on using the blog to post some case examples of my design work. I’m really excited to be launching this new site.

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