I must say that I am very impressed with the user-friendliness of the Squarespace website creation platform. I signed up for a free trial early in the morning and had a basic website complete with placeholder graphics and text by lunchtime, despite never having worked with Squarespace before. I used the Pacific template (demo). I like its navigation options, full bleed graphics, and versatility. I have been able to easily insert a slideshow, blog, subscription sign-up, and pop-up with download. It has all been amazingly painless. I have had to search for help a few times, but have always been able to find an answer, even if a time or two the answer was that I couldn’t do what I was trying to do. At least I was able to discover that within a short time.
One of the best things about the Squarespace template is that it is built to automatically format the content for mobile devices as well. For this reason, I tried very hard not to add custom CSS code (cascading style sheet, which controls the formatting of all of the elements on a web page; I added only one simple block), sometimes giving up on things I was considering rather than add too much CSS and break the mobile version of the site. I have been rewarded in my restraint with a very clean mobile site that seems to work flawlessly. It has been a long time since I was this impressed with a new software product I have tried.
I will be back in a couple of weeks with another, more substantive blog post about self-publishing. In the meantime, I am very interested in your feedback about the site. What do you like? What would you change? Please let me know!