I’ve been publishing this website in one form or another since back in 2011. That’s fourteen years ago! Over that time, I have changed a lot, the world has changed a lot, and this website has… well, changed a bit, but frankly, not enough. The amount of time I’ve spent posting here has consistently dropped off recently, and I realise that at least part of the reason is that I kind of hate this website now. I know that’s quite a strong response, but it’s true. Well, mostly.

Originally, I hosted my site on a web hosting service and ran it on WordPress. But over time, I felt that I had outgrown that, and the service kept having problem after problem. So eventually, I switched to Squarespace in 2014. So I’ve basically been on this platform for 12 years now, and to be honest, lately I’m not entirely happy with it. I’ve blogged about this a few times, and I’ve regularly mentioned that I wanted to move on, possibly back to WordPress. But the problem is, I can’t. There is so much content on this site now that exporting it to WordPress is borderline impossible. After all, there is 15 years’ worth of content.

I’m currently using the previous version of Squarespace’s website software. The reason for this is that the newer version loses many features, some of which I actually use here. For example, I use the sidebar on my site, but on the new version, you can’t. So in a way, I feel trapped now. Part of me just wants to start over, but then again, as I said, there are 15 years’ worth of blog posts on here. While I can technically export my blog posts, it will lose a lot of the formatting and embedded content, such as images. It’s a precarious state to be in. I have exported it many times as a backup, but extracting the information from it would be challenging.

Ant therein lies the danger in relying on a hosted service like Squarespace. You’re entirely at their whim. Should they decide to stop supporting blog posts in the morning (which could technically happen), I could lose years of work. But apart from that, I want to move forward, and at the moment, every time I look at this, I’m reminded of the situation, and it puts me off blogging.

So for now, I’m probably going to bite the bullet and upgrade to Squarespace 7.1 (the latest version). This will mean a redesign and the loss of some features, but, in fairness, it is generally more flexible. I have already done this on my portfolio site, and while it has been a pain in some respects (there is one broken feature there that they are aware of but don’t seem to want to fix, which is holding me back). Still, I feel that I don’t have a choice because this has gotten stale and old, and the viewership is down, and my enthusiasm for it is down.

The current work-in-progress version of my site running on Squarespace 7.1

I feel that Squarespace first went all in on e-commerce at the expense of their traditional portfolio and blogging customers. Now they’re going all in on AI (like every other company out there) at the expense of, well, everyone. Which is kind of ironic given that they still sponsor loads of photographers to promote Squarespace as a way to make a portfolio site. One of the features that was really handy with Squarespace in the past was that you could import images with metadata attached for things like title and description, and it would populate that into the galleries and posts for you. This is broken in the current version. I asked support about it, and they know it’s broken but said it wasn’t a priority for them to fix. This is a crucial feature for photographers, which they still promote heavily, but they don’t want to fix it. The workaround is to re-enter all your metadata manually.

I think every platform is going through something similar. In an effort to constantly evolve and keep up with market expectations, services have become more complicated, and everything has gotten just a little crappier. I was planning to set up a mailing list again, but the platform I used, MailChimp, was acquired by Inuit, and it’s now all about driving sales. Things that used to be one or two steps, even just here in Squarespace, are now multiple steps. Simplicity has died in favour of cramming more and more features in at the expense of user experience. And with AI, everything has to have AI bolted on, even if it’s not necessary or no one wants it.

There are still some good points, though. It is still one of the best and easiest site builders for designing your website, and the newer version 7.1 offers some nice features. You can do some nice setups with it, although it takes a bit of work. It’s still far less complicated than with WordPress to set up a decent-looking site. I have been playing around with a copy of my current blog, which I upgraded to 7.1, and it looks much better than this, despite the missing elements. I mean, I don’t hate Squarespace. I still like the platform overall; I just think it might not be the best fit for magazine or blog type content, especially if it is an extra-large site like mine.

I’m planning on doing this sometime in the next few weeks. The update process takes a little time, and I have to rebuild some elements manually, so if you see things looking funky for a bit, you know what’s wrong! In the meantime, I will do my best to keep up my motivation and keep posting. I do apologise for the rant, but this has been very frustrating.