Squarespace Falls Short As A Content Management System

I’ve been using (and cursing) the Squarespace Content Management System for over a month now, and I must say that free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress (not to mention paid services such as Typepad) have much more flexibility and accuracy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and operating in HTML mode. I’m quickly growing tired of:

Broken tags, especially the most basic ones

The inability to customize page titles (especially for “child” pages…by default, Squarepace pulls the page title from your file name)

No functionality for inserting keywords (I don’t want to hear that keywords are passe…do you really want to take that chance?)

Odd behaviors such as uploading replacement files and still accessing the old one (even though a mouse hover points to the new URL)

Not having access to your directory tree

Their refusal to provide raw server logs for inspecting serious user problems and error messages (they say the logs don’t exist!!)

These aren’t quirks with easy workarounds; these are serious problems in conception, service, customer appreciation and functionality. Also, the Squarespace customer support is a tad worse than mediocre; they have a documented tendency to literally throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do to resolve your issue,

The bottom line? Avoid Squarespace like the plague. If you’re a client, they certainly don’t care about you. Why should we care about them?

I’ve been using (and cursing) the Squarespace Content Management System for over a month now, and I must say that free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress (not to mention paid services such as Typepad) have much more flexibility and accuracy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and operating in HTML mode. I’m quickly growing tired of:

• Broken tags, especially the most basic ones
• The inability to customize page titles (especially for “child” pages…by default, Squarepace pulls the page title from your file name)
• No functionality for inserting keywords (I don’t want to hear that keywords are passe…do you really want to take that chance?)
• Odd behaviors such as uploading replacement files and still accessing the old one (even though a mouse hover points to the new URL)
• Not having access to your directory tree
• Their refusal to provide raw server logs for inspecting serious user problems and error messages (they say the logs don’t exist!!)

These aren’t quirks with easy workarounds; these are serious problems in conception, service, customer appreciation and functionality. Also, the Squarespace customer support is a tad worse than mediocre; they have a documented tendency to literally throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do to resolve your issue,

The bottom line? Avoid Squarespace like the plague. If you’re a client, they certainly don’t care about you. Why should we care about them?

As Twitter Matures, So Does Its Audience

The New York Times includes an especially perceptive article in its August 26, 2009 edition which ostensibly focuses on the demographics of Twitter, but also illustrates the different business applications between the microblogging service and social networking sites such Facebook.  According to the Times, teens would much rather communicate with friends via text message–after all, it’s theoretically more private (barring scores of forwarded texts) than Twitter  and sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

“I just think it’s  weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,”  said 18-year-old Kristen Nagy of New Jersey, who sends and receives up to 500 text messages per day.

According to comScore, a leading purveyor of “digital marketing intelligence,“ only 11 percent of Tweets are posted by those in the 12 to 17-year-old demographic. It doesn’t get much better for Facebook: teenagers account for only 9 percent of FB’s user base.

So, who’s driving the growth and success of Facebook and Twitter, especially since teens are seen as the early adopters and drivers of new technologies? According to the Times, “Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.”

Based on personal experience and my own research, that does make sense. But Twitter’s true power is not as a social networking tool, but as a way for businesses and professionals to keep track of industry news and developments, comment on relevant trends and threads and become an authority in their industries, while of course (discreetly) promoting their products and services. I say discreetly because as much as I love The New York Times, I quit following the publication on Twitter because it seemed that Times personnel were repackaging every single article from their online edition. A few posts a day to keep me informed of breaking news and entice me over to the Times’ web site; I can appreciate and live with that. But as many companies are finding out, too many self-promoting Tweets quickly assume the air of so much white noise. Lesson learned: your business presence on Twitter will not succeed if every single Tweet contains a self-promoting link. Join the discussion. Comment on, and at, the peers you elect to follow. You’ll quickly find yourself with more followers, and eventually, more business and more traffic to your web site. Isn’t that why you created a Twitter account in the first place?

The New York Times includes an especially perceptive article in its August 26, 2009 edition which ostensibly focuses on the demographics of Twitter, but also illustrates the different business applications between the microblogging service and social networking sites such Facebook.  According to the Times, teens would much rather communicate with friends via text message–after all, it’s theoretically more private (barring scores of forwarded texts) than Twitter  and sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

“I just think it’s  weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,”  said 18-year-old Kristen Nagy of New Jersey, who sends and receives up to 500 text messages per day.

According to comScore, a leading purveyor of “digital marketing intelligence,“ only 11 percent of Tweets are posted by those in the 12 to 17-year-old demographic. It doesn’t get much better for Facebook: teenagers account for only 9 percent of FB’s user base.

So, who’s driving the growth and success of Facebook and Twitter, especially since teens are seen as the early adopters and drivers of new technologies? According to the Times, “Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.”

Based on personal experience and my own research, that does make sense. But Twitter’s true power is not as a social networking tool, but as a way for businesses and professionals to keep track of industry news and developments, comment on relevant trends and threads and become an authority in their industries, while of course (discreetly) promoting their products and services. I say discreetly because as much as I love The New York Times, I quit following the publication on Twitter because it seemed that Times personnel were repackaging every single article from their online edition. A few posts a day to keep me informed of breaking news and entice me over to the Times’ web site; I can appreciate and live with that. But as many companies are finding out, too many self-promoting Tweets quickly assume the air of so much white noise. Lesson learned: your business presence on Twitter will not succeed if every single Tweet contains a self-promoting link. So, join the continual discussion. Comment on, and at, the peers you elect to follow (@username to have your Tweets show up in their news feed). You’ll quickly find yourself with more followers, and eventually, more business and more traffic to your web site. Isn’t that why you created a Twitter account in the first place?

Squarespace, Content Management Systems and SEO

Content Management Systems (CMS) are now a fact of life–even a necessity–for companies both large and small; whether it be Microsoft Sharepoint or start-up companies such as Squarespace, the basic idea remains the same: to encourage and facilitate content contributions throughout your company, and allow your web manager(s) to spend more time planning and creating content (white papers, news releases, videos, etc.) instead of writing seemingly endless amounts of code.

So, what could possibly be the drawback with that? Although it might seem relatively minor, given the simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog-style interface of most systems, some Content Management Systems seem to more or less choke on even perfectly written code entered in HTML view. Working with Squarespace, I’ve seen brackets disappear or break (rendering, of course, the content gibberish or eliminating it entirely depending on the permissiveness of the browser) while noticing the sudden appearance of repetitive or meaningless tags (I didn‘t enter that table body tag!). Not to single out Squarespace, but it can get pretty…hinky…under the hood. And from an SEO perspective, that’s not exactly a  good thing when you want crawlers properly indexing and ranking your site (especially since crawlers don‘t seem to enjoy parsing through great amounts of extraneous code to get to the content they‘ve evolved to evaluate).

Now don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing at all wrong with the concept of creating content for your web site without getting bogged down in endless hours of writing code (hey, I enjoy coding sometimes, but I don‘t want to spend hours a day doing it…I‘d rather be writing, networking with content creators and strategizing with my boss). CMS solutions do indeed free up valuable time for other tasks: SEO, strategy, keyword research, competitive analysis, social networking and viral marketing. And that’s a good thing: it’s what Content Management Systems are designed to do.

But even though the idea is to promote a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to writing code, there are definitely times when it’s absolutely vital to customize existing tags (ALT tags, of course, to cite just one example) and to enter SEO friendly tags that form the basis for emerging best practices (ACRONYM tags, for example). And then there’s the matter of entering keywords for individual pages; although Squarespace doesn’t permit such editing and claims their sites are already optimized for SEO (questionable at best, since I’ve never, ever heard of out-of-the-box optimization). You’ll hear a lot of conflicting opinions these days about the importance of keywords, but given that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach, do you really want to live without them? My own research indicates that keywords are decreasing in importance, but I’m not exactly ready to do without them entirely.

Ultimately, however, the regular publication of keyword-rich, market-relevant content is the single most important factor in gaining search engine traction and, ultimately, higher rankings. The main idea should be to use your content to increase qualified traffic and conversions, and leverage relevant social networking opportunities to increase the number, quality and inbound links to your site. This is the most important key to an uptick in traffic and the search engine placement you (realistically) desire. All it takes is hard work…ready to get started?

Content Management Systems (CMS) are now a fact of life–even a necessity–for companies both large and small; whether it be Microsoft Sharepoint or start-up companies such as Squarespace, the basic idea remains the same: to encourage and facilitate content contributions throughout your company, and allow your web manager(s) to spend more time planning and creating content (white papers, news releases, videos, etc.) instead of writing seemingly endless amounts of code.

So, what could possibly be the drawback with that? Although it might seem relatively minor, given the simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog-style interface of most systems, some Content Management Systems seem to more or less choke on even perfectly written code entered in HTML view. Working with Squarespace, I’ve seen brackets disappear or break (rendering, of course, the content gibberish or eliminating it entirely depending on the permissiveness of the browser) while noticing the sudden appearance of repetitive or meaningless tags (I didn‘t enter that table body tag!). Not to single out Squarespace, but it can get pretty…hinky…under the hood. And from an SEO perspective, that’s not exactly a  good thing when you want crawlers properly indexing and ranking your site (especially since crawlers don‘t seem to enjoy parsing through great amounts of extraneous code to get to the content they‘ve evolved to evaluate).

Now don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing at all wrong with the concept of creating content for your web site without getting bogged down in endless hours of writing code (hey, I enjoy coding sometimes, but I don‘t want to spend hours a day doing it…I‘d rather be writing, networking with content creators and strategizing with my boss). CMS solutions do indeed free up valuable time for other tasks: SEO, strategy, keyword research, competitive analysis, social networking and viral marketing. And that’s a good thing: it’s what Content Management Systems are designed to do.

But even though the idea is to promote a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to writing code, there are definitely times when it’s absolutely vital to customize existing tags (ALT tags, of course, to cite just one example) and to enter SEO friendly tags that form the basis for emerging best practices (ACRONYM tags, for example). And then there’s the matter of entering keywords for individual pages; although Squarespace doesn’t permit such editing and claims their sites are already optimized for SEO (questionable at best, since I’ve never, ever heard of out-of-the-box optimization). You’ll hear a lot of conflicting opinions these days about the importance of keywords, but given that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach, do you really want to live without them? My own research indicates that keywords are decreasing in importance, but I’m not exactly ready to do without them entirely.

Ultimately, however, the regular publication of keyword-rich, market-relevant content is the single most important factor in gaining search engine traction and, ultimately, higher rankings. The main idea should be to use your content to increase qualified traffic and conversions, and leverage relevant social networking opportunities to increase the number, quality and inbound links to your site. This is the most important key to an uptick in traffic and the search engine placement you (realistically) desire. All it takes is hard work…ready to get started?