So, as many of you have noticed, a few weeks ago I did a complete revamp of the web site, and part of that was because I wanted to upgrade from SquareSpace 5 (or was it 4?) to version 7. I knew it would take a rewrite, and I wanted to do it, but it was going to be a fairly big job. In any case, am I happy I did it? Yeah.
The main things I've noticed:
- Now my plan has e-commerce in it, which I hadn't used before, and has been great for the few sales of eBooks I've done, everything worked the first time, including payment processing via Stripe.
- Available template styles are just different, but feel cleaner, I didn't do a whole lot of mods on this or another site I updated for a painter client
- Uploading and WYSIWIG blog post editing work more reliably
- WYSIWYG blog post editing is cleaner
- Like and share on blog posts is a nice increment
- Ask me down the road if I get much comment spam, I've only seen one attempt so far
- Being able to auto-share out to Twitter and Facebook is a real benefit, I wish they could do that for G+ as well.
- Documentation for the internals of the templates is weak, but part of the problem is that I'm not very CSS savvy
- Technical support for the switchover was first-rate
I know many of you will understandably cringe at any non-roll-your-own solution, but I think this is a great fit for my needs with respect to maintainability, security, design, and features.