It’s 4am. My phone buzzes as an email arrives from WebGazer Alerts with the subject, “Heads up: Barnard.co is down”.

I visit wp-admin, the Wordpress backend, and the favicon in my browser tab just spins. I’ve got no way into my own site. I drop a message to a friend of mine, a back-end developer and ask for help. When he wakes up, he tells me, “Hmm, I’m struggling to connect to your box via SSH”.

U wot m8?

This happens ALL. THE. TIME.

Someone has hacked into my site either via an outdated Wordpress plugin, or is trying to brute force my Wordpress password and has subsequently crashed my site by overloading it with traffic.

I once logged onto the homepages of all of my client’s websites to receive the creative ditty in the top left-hand corner, “Site hacked by hacker”.

I don’t have a clue how to fix issues like this. So, flustered (usually with clients screaming at me) I go pleading to my back-end mate to help me fix it. It is a nightmare.

The other day, I logged into the backend of my portfolio website to receive the message that multiple pages on my site had experienced page errors. As usual, I hadn’t touched a single thing on the site in months, so an automatic update to either the theme, Wordpress or a plugin has caused a bug that has destroyed half of my website.

And without extensive knowledge of PHP, I won’t be able to fix it.

NO MORE!

This month I followed the advice I’ve been giving to my clients for the past year, and moved my portfolio onto Squarespace. I completed the site migration in about two days, and needed zero help from any developer. The site is cleaner, easier to navigate and I even managed to set up 301 redirects so that my old content links after a few url changes.

There’s even an import tool to migrate all my old Wordpress posts into Squarespace, so the bulk of the work was resizing images into a new, larger format.

Let’s be clear

I am not a developer. I’m a freelance graphic designer that knows enough CSS to be able to hack a Wordpress theme into doing largely what I need it to do. I’ve only ever built simple poster websites on my own. The largest Wordpress project I have tackled is a wine shop with e-commerce functionality.

Sure, I have designed some complex systems in my time, for some massive companies. But I have always worked as part of a larger team, usually with front and back end developers to build my designs for me. And most of my personal clients these days are smaller businesses, that don’t require masses of bespoke functionality. They just need a website that they can be proud of, that looks nice and tells their story. I can help with that.

When I first discovered Wordpress (around 12 years ago) I was astounded by it. It meant that I could design a website for a client with a CMS system built in. And it was free! So with a carefully selected theme, and a little CSS jiggery-pokery I could give a website to a client that they could make changes to themselves (and I could charge slightly more for the privilege).

But somewhere along the way drag-and-drop website editors actually became useable. And Squarespace allows you to get surprisingly granular with the styling. So lowly designers like me now have a chance at building something beautiful.

“If Squarespace is so easy to use, then why do I need a designer?”

A fair point, and a question I get asked a lot in briefing sessions. After all, the Squarespace model is software as a service. You have to pay a subscription fee to use it, so why not save some costs and build it yourself using the amazing editing tools?

Because, good-looking websites still need that special something to stand out (aesthetically) from the crowd. Visual assets.

That, and a watchful eye for layout. Start adding your website content to the templates in Squarespace, and you’ll quickly find that the design gets away from you. Plus, without good iconography and decent image edits, your site is going to look the same as everyone else’s. The templates in Squarespace are a brilliant starting point, but after a few hours of tinkering, inconsistencies in spacing, text hierarchy and colour schemes will soon become apparent. And that polished theme you started with starts to become Frankenstein’s monster.

A map asset I made for the National Forest Trek website

There are other advantages. A designer will protect your brand, especially if they’ve worked with you to create it in the first place (a common situation for a logo designer like myself). Customising fonts and colour styles can be a little laborious, no matter how you cut it. So having a professional work through your site to optimise the styling for different screen sizes can be a real bonus.

On top of this, there are more cost savings to my clients. I mostly charge based on my time, and if a project takes longer it costs the client more. Setting up a Wordpress install and tinkering it until it looks and does what I want it to takes ages. The yearly fee for Squarespace is £180 (for a business plan), but the money saved on design costs pays for that ten times over. Because the simple fact is that I can knock up a Squarespace website three or four times faster than I can a Wordpress site.

But wait, there’s more

Yes, you can obviously make changes to your site yourself. And it’s a damn site easier than using Wordpress. But more importantly, if your website goes down in the middle of the night, and I’m in bed asleep (or more likely tending to a teething one-year-old), you won’t have to wait for me to wake up to fix it. Squarespace’s 24/7 support will handle that, which also benefits me massively as I can hand off the site completely at the end of a design project.

NXGN: I site I made for a sports mentorship project

Also the Squarespace subscription is basically what you would pay in hosting costs for a website with semi-decent traffic. And you can migrate your old website over incredibly easily (see above).

And, for me, this is the real clincher.

It allows me to offer payment options for non-profits or startup businesses that just don’t have the funds to invest in an all-singing, all dancing website. I can design a basic page template, set up their logo implementation, pick the right colours and fonts and just let the client run with this.

The editing tools are designed specifically for anyone to be able to do it, so clients can go ahead and do the grunt work of populating a basic template without me. Sure, the end product might not have the same polish that it would if I could complete the entire project, but it allows for professional grade design to become accessible. And I have already worked with a number of one-man-bands and charities to help them get their businesses off the ground. Building Wordpress sites for clients like these would result in me having to turn the job down due to lack of funds.

I still love you Wordpress

I’ll always hold a soft spot for Wordpress, and there’s a reason why a quarter of the world’s websites run on it. It’s a powerful product, and I’ll be forever indebted to the founder Matt Mullenweg for giving it away in an open source format.

I based my career off of building CMS websites for clients, and having knowledge in how to use it has opened up so many opportunities for me. I started as a ‘web designer’ and that job title has morphed and eventually been cast aside as I’ve delved more and more into graphics and less and less into development. To the point where the basic coding I learned at university (building table-based websites) is now utterly useless, and instead of investing the time to stay up to date with HTML/CSS and what ever the f*ck coding languages there are now, I’ve invested my time in learning video editing, animation and picking up new skills in design software.

So when a product came along that allows me to really design a website and see it live, quickly, with no knowledge of coding needed, I just had to make the switch. That and I’ll never get chills again from receiving an email with the subject “Your site has updated to Wordpress version 4.9.11”.

EXAMPLES

Here are some gifs of sites I’ve made with Squarespace. Note the video backgrounds, parallax content blocks and some subtle animations. They are a mixture of the powerful editing tools of Squarespace, combined with video edits/animations and luscious graphics that I have created for the clients.

If you’d like my help creating something like this, then by all means get in touch.

National Forest Trek (sorry for the jittery scrolling)