Squarespace

The aesthetic. Squarespace's design templates are fresh, current, and appealing to begin with, which provides a lot of options for customization.

It's not the most intuitive interface ever, but that said, they provide outstanding how-to articles and videos and infinitely patient customer support, so it's not hard to figure out how to do what you want to do, even if you have no coding experience.

Squarespace really has their act together in offering a clean, easy to use , beautiful web building platform. I run a media and video production nonprofit, and the needs and functionality of my site have evolved almost yearly since 2013. The way that people engage with content on the internet is always changing, and I got caught up in the flow of trying to always evolve the website to keep up. I used GoDaddy and WordPress for too many years, and eventually migrated them all to Squarespace because it was all just so much more streamlined, modern, clean and simple. I now have the basic website I need, and know that there are many many ways to customize it if needed without messing up the whole site (as happened many times on WordPress)

I changed my entire .com and .org from a WordPress template on GoDaddy, and could not be happier with the customer service I received from Squarespace, they were so helpful in getting everything aligned for the transition.

I wish there were maybe 15-20 more templates, and that a few of them were specifically meant for video galleries, as that is what my organization focuses on in our storytelling, videos. I would love a template tailor made for aggregating videos. For now I can use a photo gallery or blog and adapt it, which works fine, but my wish list would be a video focused and designed template.

SquareSpace has beautiful templates. They are truly gorgeous. SquareSpace also has an easy-to-use sidebar of options that puts everything that you can do on the left side. The interface is as clean as the templates. Hosting of your site is done through Squarespace. That's it when it comes to pros. There are a ton of Cons to using SquareSpace.

As a WordPress user (who has also designed with Wix), SquareSpace falls short almost everywhere. You can't import your brand font—essential. You have to use code or a back-door solution with AdobeFonts. If you want 5 items in a row, no can do. You get 4 or 6. You can't drag the amount of padding around items and sections. You must use spacer blocks (time consuming and such a bad way to do things). There's no media storage! If you upload your photo it isn't stored anywhere for easy selection later. You must upload the same image multiple times whenever you need it—frustrating. Changes can't be made on individual copy styles. Squarespace sets up its CMS as a global system so if you want to change the way your font looks in just one place, you need to insert code (markdown block). You should be able to select it and change the size or colour. But no. It's CRAZY! So time-consuming. Missing basic word-processing functionality. Squarespace has no plugin options. You can't duplicate a page of your site and you can't duplicate your site! Everything is done from scratch! In WordPress, you download a .JSON file and upload it somewhere else and you're flying. Not with SquareSpace. You can't make your overlays look different per section. Everything applies globally. You can't add borders to images. The biggest CON? There's no undo! No revision history. If you delete something accidentally, it's gone forever. Support is terrible. Every answer is "you can't do that" or "try to find code.

First of all, it is extremely easy to set up websites in no time. It has some cool and modern-looking templates that you might want to consider. It is user-friendly and not much knowledge of coding is required which makes it a good choice for many companies and people. Even though I didn't struggle much with anything whilst using this software, support was always there to help.

The way that the client can't change a lot, implies that expert clients are restricted and don't have much freedom. Other than the lack of freedom when choosing templates and editing fonts or just the way the website looks, I don't see any other downsides to this software.