One of the most common questions we get in the web design department is which website platform is best for a small to medium business website. With more website builders popping up by the day we decided to take the popular Squarespace website builder and pin it against good-old WordPress. The showdown rages on and to help you decide between the two we tried to gather some of the most basic but helpful information.
Squarespace is a beautiful design friendly website builder that provides rich imagery and mobile responsive themes. Squarespace is fairly easy to use and offers many customization options for users to take advantage of to better tailor their website to their preferences. Squarespace is not open source which means that the options given to design and enhance your website are closely controlled, tested and monitored to ensure security and function. Squarespace offers a few different monthly pricing plans to choose from, it is a subscription based tool which means if you stop paying the monthly fee your website comes down. Squarespace offers a dedicated support team and multiple online tutorials to assist users. Once the website is built, there is very little maintenance to keep it running.
WordPress is a content management system that allows users to be in control of their own websites. You can customize a WordPress website as little or as much as you want by writing custom Css or you can purchase pre-designed layouts. WordPress is a free publishing platform that allows you to update themes, software and plugins with the click of a button. There are many free resources available across the web about WordPress including tutorials, guides and help forums but it does take time to search for these. There are also many free plugins available to continue the optimization of each page or blog post. Something that not everyone is comfortable with in WordPress is the fact that you have to rely on third party builders for a lot of aspects like plugins. WordPress is browser based and you can use it on any type of computer or browser.
Even though you are looking for a small business website and your needs are different than the large corporations below, we have listed some companies that use both WordPress and Squarespace so that you can take a look at the websites and see how elaborate you can build out both platforms.
Big companies that use Squarespace: HaloTop, Airwalk, Pixar, Lyft
Big companies that use WordPress: CNN, Forbes, Ford, Ebay, Sony, Best Buy
The best way to decide on a platform for your website is to sit and write down what the most important things you want out of your website are. Do you want a website that you can fully customize and control all aspects of? If so, WordPress is probably the best CM system for you. Do you need an user-friendly imagery heavy website? Then Squarespace may be the right solution for you. If you still need help deciding what the right platform for you is, contact us at Ideability and we would be happy to discuss your website design needs.
