Not so Square in my books

Over the years I've hosted my site on many platforms; dedicated servers, sub-domains, content management systems, etc. The one thing that all these spaces had in common was that it was inconvenient to manage, especially over time.

After deciding two years ago to re-brand myself, I concluded it was best to redesign the website, made sense anyway. I toyed with the ideas of other CMS's at the time, I was done with WordPress, it was time to move on. Joomla didn't have much else to offer in the was of ease as well.

Then someone, a client mind you, asked if I could assist in building her site on Square space. I was familiar, although I didn't have much faith in those systems that were all-in-ones, but that was her avenue and I was eager to learn. I crammed as much of the content on the site as I could, created a trial account and was off to building my own site. Although, no. You're not building a website per say, but you are customizing one.

After registering, which was quite simple - well done Square space, you're greeted with a series of templates, each catering to their respective content creator, though very pleasing to the eye and user friendly, was also lacking in variety. It's hard to appeal to wide audience when you have some 40 templates, or at least I found. Once you've selected a template, you'll be able to customize it, however you'll soon find customization to be quite limited.

The design interface rely's on a series of menus and options buried within these menus, making it difficult to remember where to go for that last option or edit you need to undo. The interface itself is clunky and unresponsive at times, I found having to click more than once to action a link or maneuver the design interface. Uploading content though is rather easy. Multimedia as well.

I did find that if you remained fairly close to the original template and tweak, more than customize, you'll get more out - less is more in this respect. Content created within the environment is best suited for publishing. For example, blogging, where creating and editing entries is best done from the blog editor than linking it externally should you have an alternate blog site.

In short, I've found it to be too cumbersome to manage, I've decided to move to a different CMS, for the sake of popularity and curiosity, I've chosen Wix. We'll see how the process goes.

Tech Me Out!