Some Custom Squarespace CSS Code

22 May 3 Comments Filed Under: Web Development

As most of you know, this site was run on Squarespace’s web server plat­form. Its simple to use and the server soft­ware is tuned, main­tained and updated by pro­fes­sionals. But, if you need it, there is power beneath the sur­face in the form of cus­tomizing the CSS that defines the look of the site.

I wanted to have the sidebar with my blogroll and other links appear only on the pages of the site that were not my image port­folio pages. There was a thread on the often helpful Squarespace Developers’ Forum that got me started. From there I added my own custom CSS that looks like this:

/* Remove sidebar from all pages and set the con­tent width */
#sidebar1Wrapper {display:none;}
#con­tentWrapper {
width: 890px;
margin: auto !important;
padding-right: 40px;}

/* Put the sidebar back on the Blog page and set its con­tent width*/
#modulePage6068502 #sidebar1Wrapper {display:block;}
#modulePage6068502 #con­tentWrapper {
width: 680px;
margin: auto !important;
padding-right: 40px;}

/* Put the sidebar back on the About page and set its con­tent width*/
#modulePage6068416 #sidebar1Wrapper {display:block;}
#modulePage6068416 #con­tentWrapper {
width: 680px;
margin: auto !important;
padding-right: 40px;}

/* Put the sidebar back on the Contact page and set its con­tent width*/
#modulePage6070158 #sidebar1Wrapper {display:block;}
#modulePage6070158 #con­tentWrapper {
width: 680px;
margin: auto !important;
padding-right: 40px;}

Whenever I’m messing with the CSS code behind a web page,  I find the pro­gram CSSEdit, from Macrabbit to be invalu­able in snooping around the code to see what part is for­matted by what CSS state­ments. Recommended.

Squarespace Pros and Cons

7 Mar Leave a Comment Filed Under: Opinion, Web Development

While trying Squarespace to see if a switch from self-hosted WordPress would be a good idea, I began to gen­erate a list of the pros and cons for Squarespace. After all, WordPress is a hugely pop­ular and tremen­dously pow­erful pub­lishing plat­form, so Squarespace was going to have to show some ben­e­fits for me before I would make a switch. My WordPress site was working fine.

The Squarespace Pros:

  • Consistent inter­face across all themes — it all feels like a single piece.
  • No pro­gram­ming — you don’t have to be a web coder to get a nice site going (but if you are good at CSS, you can make many customizations).
  • Follow up posts — rather than having to create a whole new post, you can create follow-ups as an exten­sion of the orig­inal post.
  • Fast servers — speaks for itself. Plus, they promise high capacity in case your site is SlashDotted.
  • Blogroll link flex­i­bility — (a pet peeve) its easy to put your blogroll links in the order you want them
  • Easier to tweak common CSS style set­tings — many (most?) of the mostly com­monly tweaked CSS styles are exposed in the Squarespace inter­face which makes them point-and-click easy to modify.
  • Support! — and amazing sup­port it is: fast, knowl­edge­able and truly helpful; if the system isn’t designed to do it, they’ll even point you to unsup­ported resources about how to do what you’re trying to do.
  • Built in traffic reporting — there’s no need to splice on Google Analytics (although you can).
  • iPhone App — yep, there’s an app for that and it offers access to most of the Squarespace functionality.
  • Auto updates — if there’s a bug fix or a fea­ture addi­tion there’s nothing to do, no manual updating needed. And you don’t have to worry about a core system update breaking other features.

The Squarespace Cons:

  • WYSIWYG Editor — while it cer­tainly works, its some­what lim­ited and its HTML mode is weak.
  • Cost — fast reli­able servers, a first class inter­face and world class sup­port do not come for free (but the entry level account is still only $96 per year).
  • Limits to flex­i­bility — Squarespace out of the box has many fea­tures (blogs, pic­ture gal­leries, search, com­ments, spam pro­tec­tion, etc, etc) but devel­op­ment of new fea­tures is up to Squarespace; there are no third party plug-ins or themes.
  • Limited tem­plates — what’s there is good, but there aren’t many. Be pre­pared to do your own cus­tomiza­tion (which is not too hard) so your site doesn’t look like many others.
  • Not much server side freedom — no server side scripts, no PHP, no mySQL.

I made the switch.

If you’d like to try Squarespace, they have a free 14-day trial. And its easy to move your blog since they have a slick import fea­ture for most of the common blog­ging platforms.