Digging Through the Morass

After evaluating numerous Content Management Systems (CMS) including Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine, blog / quasi-CMS solutions like WordPress, and many others, Best Day has settled on Squarespace. It's certain that Joomla, Drupal and Expression engine are more customizable and more powerful tools. In the hands of full-time, expert web designers and HTML jockey's that is! While we consider ourselves fairly technical, there's a steep learning curve on those systems - and we just want a website that we can easily manage and update. If we had a development team or funds to hire one, we probably would have chosen Expression Engine - it seemed to be the easiest of the three main ones to understand and customize. But we are a poor non-profit that was wasting too much time messing around with our old hard to code site that felt stale and outdated. So, we decided to go with Squarespace.

Squarespace is an amazing tool in many regards. One of the best features is that much of its formatting features operate visually in real-time. Meaning I can use a slider to adjust column widths and watch the text flow, I can adjust the padding and make sure I'm not too close to the edge or too far away, I can pick from a pallette of colors for the background and see how it matches the rest of my site, I can move the menu, adjust the line spacing of all text and watch it all in real-time. When I'm happy, I save changes. And, of course, I can edit and upload files from anywhere via a browser - good by text editor and FTP program! Writing and posting content are one in the same and as simple and as quick as can be.

There are a slew of other features, revision tracking, various levels of user rights, statistics, dashboard for comments and journals, and many more things that will allow Best Day to have a much more engaging and up-to-date website. 

It does have some downsides, of course. One needs to know how to code in HTML for tables. A visual table feature has got to coming. Squarespace - do you hear me? Also, while it's many flexible components offer a slew of adjustable settings to customize them, it doesn't allow for custom input templates in the same manner as Joomla, Drupal, and Expression Engine. It does allow you to over ride lots of things with CSS, but that's a bit over our heads at present. And I can't put custom code into one page above the HEAD tag - it affects all of them. I can work around that for A/B testing - but can't use Google Website Optimizer. These are all minor complaints that are far outweighed by the simplicity of instant changes. All in all - we're stoked. And hopefully that'll be reflected in a much improved and more lively website.

By launch we'll have spent a grand total of 7 days working on the site! Give it a try. It's got a 14-day free trial.

<<I just wanted to disclose that I wrote this post before Squarespace became a sponsor on 4/27/09. Need to maintain "blog" integrity. - Max>>