Our graphics/media/web guy has asked me what my thoughts were on moving us from a wordpress site to a squarespace site. He’s interested in Squarespace for the lower price, more built-in design options, and ease of use. We currently are using wordpress on a VPS. I told him my main concern switching to squarespace would be lack of integration with other applications/web tools, not fully customizable, lack of 3rd party dev if we needed it later on.
Do you guys have any opinions?
Thanks!
Hello Derek, we went through the exact same decision process a year ago and went with Squarespace. Here’s our analysis.
First off, you are correct that Wordpress is still the champ when it comes to customization potential. However, we found we could do everything we wanted or could conceive needing to do with Squarespace and we avoided a potential downside. We’ve experienced customizations with Wordpress that were so poorly documented that only the developer that implemented them could support them, and even they had to do a fair amount of reverse engineering on what they did the first time.
The advantages for Squarespace that you’ve found are all true: lower price, more built-in design options, and easy of use. That last one translates into lower costs to implement by the way, which some would perceive as an additional benefit.
If you’d like, go ahead and look at our site. I think you’ll find it quite full-featured. www.cccmilpitas.org
Mark
What role does your website play in relationship to your church?
Is it a critical part of communicating information to the congregation? Recruiting new members?
What are the features the site currently has that are unique to a church and what features would you want in the future that are unique to a church?
It is in the vertical areas (e.g., churches) that Squarespace may have trouble competing - at least with as advanced/customizable functionality.
For general purposes it may be more than adequate.
I haven’t used Squarespace in years and strongly prefer open source over closed source…but hopefully the questions are at least helpful. 