8 months in and I love Squarespace. Well, I love Squarespace 5 actually. The themes are great, the interface is straightforward and I have integrated Google analytics into the site with no problem. If I wanted to, I could add image galleries and Google Adsense as well.

But the release of Squarespace 6 caused me a problem. It does not work with my favourite blogging application Marsedit. Marsedit is such a good application for blogging for several reasons - ease of image uploading, scheduled posts, multiple blog management and a very approachable developer.

I don't know if this issue will ever be fixed. But until it is, I will stay with v5 of Squarespace. It suits my needs and will be around for the long run according to the site.

Give it a test run by clicking the banner on the right side of this page (shameless affiliate link).

Edit: seems all is not well with Squarespace 6. Some Internet tech nerds are leaving to go to static blogs or back to self-hosted Wordpress setups.

I had hosted Plaqueimaging.com at Bluehost as a Wordpress.org installation since 2009. I enjoyed the challenge of finding a theme I liked, setting it up with plugins to do what I wanted and learning a bit of HTML/CSS along the way. The flexibility was great - there are plugins to add almost every type feature you could want to your site - Twitter/Facebook/RSS/e-commerce/Youtube.

But recently, as I started blogging more often and adding more features to the old site, the Wordpress plug-in and theme updates just got too frequent - and too nerve-wracking. I never knew if updating the theme or plugins might break something I had spend ages getting to work.

The site load speeds also seemed to be getting slower. Like 8-10 seconds for the front page.

I had heard of Squarespace from listening to podcasts on 5by5 and 70 Decibels.

It was very easy to get a vanilla site up within about 45 minutes. I did just that for my father in law. But to move a site across from Wordpress was more difficult.

First I had to convert all my Wordpress tags to categories. this is because Squarespace only imports categories for Wordpress. So then, once I had imported the blog using the blog import feature, I used a Squarespace feature to swap categories into tags.