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Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

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Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#31

Post by temp0826 »

I recently moved someone's setup to Wix and was so pleasantly surprised. The old setup (put together by someone else years ago) was a security nightmare bleeding all kinds of warnings about outdated PHP and such, and was too fragile to update safely without grokking it way more deeply than anyone (me, helping these non-techy friends for free) for. I dumped all of the assets from the old site and basically remade it using wix over a few days in my spare time. Pretty easy, boatloads of features if you wish to dig into them (alas, the most complex thing we needed was a contact form), and I no longer have to worry about a bot/script kiddy using a 10 year old PHP exploit and taking it down (the biggest selling point to me). Additionally the admin app for it is pretty impressive. Lots of integrations, seo, analytic type stuff available.

It's gotta be a game changer for non-tech folks. You could really easily run a small business out of the features available.

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#32

Post by kjellsbells »

I used Squarespace for a domain and website for a relative who had a very low tolerance for futzing around. No major issues. They also have O365 for email and there have not been any problems with eg email being rejected.

The biggest issue: I've learned that SQS really doesnt like people trying to go their own way, even if technically it is supported.

For example:

- you can embed your own JS scripts...but it's clunky, and debugging is not fun, because you are fighting with objects wrapped in squarespace's own object model.

- you will have a far, far more pleasant time using their payment systems, appointment tracking systems, etc than trying to integrate your own choice of third party. Thats great if they already do what you want, less so if not. So you def want to look at all the ancillary services like those that your client might need and confirm that they can live with what SQS offers.

- Finally, I no longer work on this site, but I do not remember seeing any versioning, source file backup, etc. They do have a staging system though. So you might want to consider how to preserve your client's site in case of screwups.

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#33

Post by jareds »

I'm very happy with Squarespace. I'm a Backend developer primarily focused on Java, but since I'm the person who knows tech I was handed a WordPress site for a preschool. The original creator picked a budget hosting company that had no automatic upgrades and didn't force you to migrate off unsupported versions of PHP. The site was running on a several year old WordPress version and an unsupported version of PHP. I told my wife "I need to look at this at some point, were going to get hacked." Her response, "no one is going to hack a preschool site." Two weeks later the site was trying to send you to a malware site and the database was destroyed. While I was able to rebuild the WordPress site on nearlyfreespeech.net and run it for less then $5 a month we moved to Squarespace. It's well worth the $20 a month because my wife can now manage the site with out any help from me. More importantly the fact that she can manage it with out being in the technology field means it's going to be very easy to hand it off to someone else once our children are no longer in the preschool.

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#34

Post by chrsstrm »

solardev wrote: post #13
malfist wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static

It's not about what I (as a web dev) need, but what works for "halp, I need a website" clients who don't know anything about tech. Hugo still implies the need for a build setup and hosting, which in turn means DNS, SSL, CLI, etc. Which often means more dev time. Your average yoga teacher or restaurant or nonprofit would have no idea how to deal with all that (and they shouldn't have to). That's why the page builders…

I recently moved two sites from GoDaddy's predatory WordPress offering (they were charging $1k a year just for some security add-on) to use Hugo + DecapCMS + AWS Amplify. Decap is a fantastic "good enough" CMS to do anything clients of this size need, the only downside is it takes about 1 minute to deploy any changes. Amplify let's you lock a version of Hugo to use, or bring your own, and it will build and deploy your site on any new commit if your repo is in Github or Gitlab. Both clients are currently billed $0.51 per month, and the only reason it is that high is because Route53 costs $0.50 per month per hosted zone. So both these clients went from paying nearly $3k each year for a WordPress site to paying just over $6 a year for a site with nearly the same functionality and none of the maintenance or security concerns. And once everything is all set up, which honestly is not that hard, the only "tech" they need to know is how to sign into Gitlab, which are the credentials they use to log into their Decap admin.

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#35

Post by Leprowix »

Wix has alot of integrations included so it is interesting in terms of saving costs! For clients its a really nice platform that requires no maintenance whatsoever and less headaches for me!

No more panicked clients email late in the evening no more headaches in that sense…

Their new version Wix Studio offers even more flexibility and you can even go headless if you wanted! They offer alot to devs that takes the time to understand Velo code (JS)

I may sound biased at this point but Vevo has 10m monthly users and their website is built using Wix…

Only downside for the moment is performance in terms of loading times/general performance and i think thats mostly related to their native CDN thats offered by default… this becomes more apparent when browsing Wix sites on mobile

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#36

Post by Leprowix »

bigiain wrote: post #21
ipaddr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely expensive. At $17 or $21 a month which works out to $250 a year you could go to a million other places. For $5 dollars a month wordpress will include a domain and 6 gigs. Hostinger is $2.99 with domain. Wix doesn't let you move your files.

> Wix doesn't let you move your files. That's skeezy behaviour on Wix's part. BUT hope you're not using your web host as the only copy of "your files". You should never _need_ to "move your files" away from Wix.

Thats fake news you CAN move away from wix for one and second of all in terms of cost it is pricier than other platforms but they have sooo many integrations that you would end up buying plugins for anyways on wordpress…

Oh and Wix has top notch SECURITY!

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#37

Post by Leprowix »

What personally made me switch over is when i had a client project for a restaurant that needed to setup delivery/takeouts it took me literally 2 days to have everything up running setup!

I was even able to configure that when orders are placed on the website they would get a phone call with a automated voice telling them an order #xxx has been placed all with no code whatsoever and this was integrated by default!

Re: Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

#40

Post by mediumsmart »

They are worth not having to pay a Webdesigner. And the clients these systems are made for get all the SEO penalties they deserve while having peace of mind. And If the site has the core search parameters where am I and what service am I looking for in the domain name there should be no issue in finding them on google after a couple of months.
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