Do any of these sound familiar to you?

you’re intelligent, creative and fairly tech savvy
you’re busy, running your own business has a lot of moving parts and pieces
you like technology but don’t want to spend the bulk of your precious time thinking about your website
when asked ... apple or pc, hands down you’d say apple
you like options but believe in the value of limited choices and just maybe you’ve experienced analysis paralysis before … I know this one well :-)

My evolution with websites

website with flash when it was the “cool” thing
wordpress site
squarespace site

FLASH

My first business’s website was built by programmers and included flash on the homepage. It was cool, until the flash broke and we had no idea for months, until someone brought it to our attention—and then flash wasn’t cool anymore—bummer. So we reworked the homepage to have a static image with clickable links.

WORDPRESS

Next came a wordpress site. Our old one used wordpress for the blog only ... weird in retrospect, right? We essentially had two CM systems. Yay for technology advancement!

Isn’t it always fascinating to look back at how today’s latest and greatest has become so old school from the future’s vantage point?

With wordpress came ALL.THE.OPTIONS. That’s part of the beauty of wordpress for sure but I found it a little overwhelming. So many plugins and is the author of that plugin I love so much maintaining it or have they moved on to the next best thing leaving your absolute fav in the dust?!

And picking a theme, and customizing the theme, and asking for custom code snippets for said theme, and then realizing I need to set up a child theme to protect our precious layout before wordpress goes through an update and …. you get the point, right?

As an intelligent, fairly tech savvy designer, I gave up and called in a programmer to finish the thing and then make sure we had a child theme installed and put the site back together whenever anything went missing ... and things did go missing on occasion. So I didn’t feel 100% confident in the site 100% of the time. And then there’s the web host and hosting option to choose and I’ll just stop right there …

SQUARESPACE

So when it came time to build Salt + Sass Design’s website, I was ready to try something else. I’d admired the Squarespace look and style but had also heard something you may have heard as well “What if Squarespace goes away, what happens to my SEO?” This admittedly put me off Squarespace for a while but they’ve been around for over 12 years and continue to win awards for “little things” like being in the top 10 best places to work lists by Fortune Magazine and Crain’s.

And you can export your content so it’s not lost if you ever decide to leave. So sure, since Squarespace is a business as opposed to Wordpress’s open source format, there’s a chance Squarespace could close but I’m comfortable with that risk.

While there are definitely some businesses whose website needs don’t fit well with Squarespace, for a lot of us, Squarespace is just right. We entrepreneurs are risk takers after all, aren't’ we?

With Squarespace came much fewer BUT really beautiful theme options, style, style and more style, a host that offers fast speeds without having to select from overwhelming options, I never have to worry about a child theme, going through updates and wondering if my site made it through in one piece, and there’s a visual interface. As a visual person, this make me so happy. I get to make beautiful websites—visually—yay!

Are you recognizing a theme here yet?

Simplicity, great design and functionality and set it and forget it technology. For me, this means streamlining my systems and processes … making everything I need to get done easier and less time consuming. I love to make things easier for myself with smart business decisions, leaving me more time to get back to my zone of genius. Don’t you?

Fun to reminisce right? I’ll bet you have some “remember when” website stories too, yes? Thoughts on Squarespace? Any other systems or processes you’ve learned that have had a tremendous effect on your business? Let me know in the comments below. I love learning what other entrepreneurs are doing to streamline their workflow!