Choosing Squarespace Platform

I needed my own website for a while now. Last time I made a website was in 2008, using Actionscript. Things have changed considerably since then. I was delighted to find out about Squarespace, as Wordpress editing capabilities left me unsatisfied. I took the plunge and signed up. The built-in editing tools for 7.1 are impressive and easy to use. I spent about a day on creating the skeletal structure for the website, and as I did, new ideas flowed into my brain. They were about the content I could post and how it would be presented.

On the second day I was a taken by surprise, finding out that although the system is very straight forward, it is also rigorous, due to the fluid engine which provides device scaling. This meant that realizing my ideas would be more difficult than I thought, because I would be dealing not with just a website, but a system that manages it. In practice it provides obstacles for implementing CSS, Javascript, HTML, and the less basic functions, such as comment sections and chat boxes. Basically, if Squarespace hasn’t implemented it themselves, there is no way to leverage their hosting service for anything else but the content of the website. Implementing CSS, JS and HTML was achieved eventually. Turns out it is not hard, just not straight forward. It is also housed in specific places which aren’t user friendly for editing it.

On the third day I have decided on the theme of my website and its iconography. At this point in time I had zero knowledge of Javascript and an outdated understanding of CSS. However, it was time to implement certain rules into the design to further personalize it and I had to learn everything I wanted to use. Many sessions with ChatGPT and Google and Squarespace forums and Youtube later, I now have a very decent ability to script almost any functionality desirable.

Further posts will be mostly focusing on me finding creative scripting solutions to the problems with my website and how they keep me from buying expensive plug-ins.