Squarespace vs Wix - Why we champion Squarespace
PixelHaze Creative Director Ken Rees shares why at Pixelhaze, we champion Squarespace over similar sites such as Wix.
Wordpress sights can be a nightmare for beginners who are new to web design. There is a lot to digest and take in straight from the start, and without a decent knowledge of web design or coding, it can often be difficult for start up businesses to create a bespoke website which best fits their business.
Here at Pixelhaze, we have the necessary skill and knowledge in our team to create Wordpress sites from scratch, but why do we use Squarespce instead? The answer is simplicity.
Respect the Grid
Squarespace’s intuitive design allows any user to be able to learn the platform and basic features within a few hours. Squarespace uses a grid system which allows you to snap in content in a spacious grid format, making it difficult for amateur designers to mess up the structure of their site. Compare this to the unstructured freedom of Wix. This online web builders decides not to use a grid system, allowing the user to place any item they want on a website. This sounds perfect, enabling you the creative freedom, but can lead to sites which aren’t symmetrical, giving an end product which is messy and cluttered. So arguably, having less control by sticking to the grid, gives a more professional finish. This is also perfect for a client who may wish to make changes to their site once we at Pixelhaze have finished our job. The grid ensures a client can’t seriously mess up their site.
This grid system also allows our web design to be made in a far quicker turn around. Instead of painstakingly coding or moving everything about, all we have to do is drag and drop the relevant images, videos & content into the right section of the website, the grid then ensure all information is set out correctly. Depending on the brief, we can have websites turned around within a day.
Custom CSS
Although the Grid setup is perfect for amateur web designers, we often find ourselves needing to break free from traditional, basic grid setups to create more creative outcomes with our own custom code (CSS). With our combined skill set at Pixelhaze, we are able to use CSS to the fullest using Squarespace’s built in CSS editor. Although you are able to use this feature in Wix it is no where near as intuitive, adding an extra layer of difficulty to a topic which is already hard. The CSS editors allows you to edit its code on a page by page basis rather than the code affecting the entire site. This means that the code will only effect one page at a time rather than it disrupting other pages.
We’ve used CSS in a multitude of ways throughout our sites ranging from animations to plugins. We offer a range of plugins we use on our online store now available on our plugin’s page.
Maintaining your Site
Squarespace was built with simplicity in mind. People new to the platform can easily pick up how to use it’s many features in a few hours. For start up businesses, the easy to use E-commerce features are perfect for listing new items on your store within minutes. This makes maintaining your site simple whilst retaining the professional finish. Along with the many E-Commerce applications, Squarespace has profound blogging features allowing you to update your customers on new events and stay relevant in Google searches. One of the main selling point of the Blog feature is that you can have multiple people working on the same blogs as contributors, meaning the work load can be split between a team of people.
Again, Wix also has a blog feature in it’s own site but is not as intuitive and does not have as many applications. More thought has been placed into the overall user experience of the Squarespace site.
Templates
Beginning a website can be a daunting task. You’re presented with all this new information, be it branding or page content, you have to make sure the website facilitates both these features. Squarespace offers around 70 fresh, high quality templates you can use from the very beginning and adapt to suit your needs. It’s simple to use a template provided, apply your logo, branding and images to instantly make the site look like your own. You could argue that because Wix has 600+ starting templates, there is more variety, but, if you look at these templates, even the best starting sites don’t have the same polish as Squarespace’s. This may be due to personal taste, but from a designers perspective, some of the templates can look rather outdated which doesn’t help with the aesthetic to begin with. Even though Squarespace only offers around 70 templates, these are quality starting points to push you in the right direction. Less is more.
Squarespace Template
Wix Template
Conclusion
Having been involved with Wix myself in past projects throughout my time in university, I’m able to have a wider view of both the platforms. It could be argued that my views are slightly biased toward Squarespace but I can say that here at Pixelhaze we can confidently use this online web builder each time and deliver a project which is on par with websites that would be made by a design studio charging far more.
Don’t believe me? View all our previous work and projects we’ve created using the Squarespace features and platform here.
- Kenneth Rees
