site: Squarespace

This site is a sponsor of "This Week In Tech" (T.W.I.T), a podcast that I've recently started listening to again.  Their designs are very nice and the sites are quite customizable.

I signed up for the two week trial and had my new site up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Let's start with what I really liked about this concept.

• It's an extremely well designed website hosting platform that guides you through getting your site up and running very fast.
• The management of your site is very intuitive as there are icons and many hints to get you to the places you need to go to edit things very easily.  Edit your text and content in Content Editing Mode, move to Structure Editing Mode to add pages, move content boxes around, add features such as RSS feeds and the ability to share content. Style editing will allow you to choose a new site style, layout, customize things like text and colors, lots of options and manipulations to allow you site to be completely unique.
• On top of the three main editing modes is a Website Management feature that gives you access to great things such as Access Controls, Publishing Management, File Storage and Organization, Site Structure, excellent Web Statistics Tracking modules and much more. (see below)
  

 I really liked a lot of things about the Squarespace model.  It is a great way for someone to get a very professional looking site up quickly.  Hosting starts at $8 per month for the basic site.

This is where I started to see some reasons why I likely wouldn't switch from my current platform for blogging to this offering.  I'm currently using Blogger and although it doesn't have all the features I'm looking for, it's fine for right now, and it's free.

I would love it if Squarespace decided to give you a little bit more control into the types of files that you could host on the site.  For example if they had the ability to upload PHP or other types of dynamic pages and gave the ability to interact with things like MySQL through a PHPMyAdmin type interface, I could definitely see switching and paying the $8, since I'd be able to host my blog and some of my applications off the site.

Don't get me wrong, the amount of built in page types through the add new page interface will show you that they've definitely got the casual web user, professional blogger covered.

If you're looking for a new spot on the web to publish written content and you'd like to have a very attractive site up quickly, you owe it to yourself to check out Squarespace and try the the two week free trial.  I think you'll be impressed, I was...