#104: WordPress or Squarespace…Which One is Right for Me?

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Well, hello there. Thank you for joining me for episode 104 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find the details shown us for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 104. You know, it seems like for a long time WordPress was the only way to go if you needed to build a website. And it's not like it was the only option for people like us, freelancers, solopreneurs who needed a website. But it seemed as if it was the only practical option. You know, I remember when I got started, HTML was the only thing and WordPress was really more of a blogging platform. But it very quickly became kind of the de facto option. And then suddenly, seems like a couple of years ago, a whole group of website builder platforms started gaining some serious steam. And they've been around for a long time, but it seems like they reached critical mass a couple of years ago. I'm talking about platforms like Squarespace, Strikingly Weebly, Wix and others. And at first I honestly thought it was a passing fad or maybe something that would be a viable option for someone who was dabbling or just needed an extremely simple like a one page website. But the more I looked into these options, the more I realized that there was something to this movement. It seemed like this would be a viable option for many freelance professionals. So I looked more into it and I didn't want to speak about it myself because I'm certainly not an expert in this area. In fact, what I've done here for this episode is I've brought in someone who works in both worlds with both options every day, both in WordPress and with some of these platforms, specifically Squarespace, which is one of the most popular ones. And my guest this week is a lady by the name of Lisa Mullins. And Lisa is a principal and Director of Marketing and Outreach at Blue Marble Creative. Blue Marble is a design communication firm and Lisa and her team work with cause based organizations to improve their communications for better visibility and more successful fundraising. Now, I will tell you right away there's a lot of passion in each of These camps, the WordPress camp and the website builder camp. So I suspect that this episode might create Some controversy, and that's fine. But I really wanted to bring you more detailed information on a topic that keeps coming up. And when I look out there, I don't seem to find straight answers. It seems like no one's. At least that I've found bringing in a serious discussion on the pros and cons of each side. And what I like about what Lisa offers here is she walks through the pros and cons of both sides and she gives you a different way of looking at the issue and making the right decision for you. So with that, let's go to that interview. Hey Lisa, welcome to the show. So good to have you here.

Thanks so much, Ed. I'm really glad to be here.

I always start these interviews by having the guests tell me more about themselves. So, you know, I'll do the same with you. Tell us a bit about the work you do, a little bit about your background so people have some context going into this.

Sure. I am one of the principals at Blue Marble Creative. We're a design communications firm. And my actual role is as director of marketing and outreach. And what we do is we help cause based organizations significantly improve their communications so that they can be a lot more successful with raising support or funds or visibility. And so our goal, our ultimate goal is to help our clients express themselves with clarity and confidence. And so this happens through, you know, a variety of media. And websites, of course, is the central piece for most people's communication efforts. And so as we worked on websites over, you know, I think over 10 years now, we've seen the evolution of the technology for that and how a lot of times, even though, you know, everybody agrees that content is really the key for a website, oftentimes what happens is that technology can get in the way of, you know, being able to produce content, you know, regularly or well. And so we're always looking for things that will help people in that publishing process. And you know, and. And so as we have started working in some newer platforms, it just came to our attention, you know, that we maybe we should be talking about some of these different publishing platforms and what the differences are. And so that's why I'm here today. I want to just share the information we found and our perspective that we have had from building websites for all these years and what we think about that.

Excellent. Well, I know I get asked about this a lot and I'm certainly not an authority, so I'm glad to have you here to talk it over with us and give us a lay of the land and before we get into the details though, let's start with the basics. So in a nutshell, what is. Even though I know a lot of people already understand it, but let's start there. What is WordPress? What are website builders and how do these things differ?

Sure. So In a nutshell, WordPress is an open content management system or platform that's been around for about 15 years. It originated as a tool for bloggers primarily, but there's been such a huge community, a worldwide development community around WordPress that has really extended what the platform can do. And it was probably about six or so years ago we recognized the potential for WordPress and being much more than just a strict publishing platform for bloggers, and many people did. Now WordPress is powering about, I think it's about 24% of the Internet.

That's a lot.

That's a lot. Website builders are sometimes referred to as drag and drop website builders. They've been around for a while too. And I'm going to talk today primarily about Squarespace because that's the one I'm most familiar with. And I know for Squarespace they've been around for about 10 years or so, but it's only been in, I would say from my perspective in probably the last one or two years now that the technology has matured to a point where now it's been become a pretty viable alternative or just another solution to be looking at for producing a really professional, dynamic website. And the difference, I think between the two, the primary difference is that WordPress is an open source system, Squarespace. And I think the other website builders like that are proprietary, so they're closed where you pay like a subscription or a hosting fee or something like that.

For people who are not familiar with the term open source would mean specifically what?

Well, the code itself is free for people to use, for anyone to use. And the people who work on the code are basically doing it for free. They're contributing to that. There's a lot of paid aspects that latch onto that. But the. But that's sort of the concept behind Open source is free and accessible and usable for all.

You know the first website I created for my freelance copywriting business in 2003, I actually used a website builder and I was went through Yahoo. So I set up my hosting account with Yahoo, my email through Yahoo and they had this thing called the Yahoo Website Builder. And yeah, I remember it was super easy to use drag and drop and you can move like where the text fields were and where they appeared, images and so forth. They had pre built templates and then you could move elements around and you know this is a long time ago, right? So that was like 13 years ago. But it was very easy to use, very dummy proof, which is exactly what I needed.

Yes, yes, that's a good point. They have been around for quite a while, but they've again, that technology, it took a while for it to just mature to a level where it's really so much easier to use and can do a lot more.

Well, let's start getting into the nitty gritty and specifically the kind of the steps and the costs of building a website for your freelance business with either one of these tools, if you will, still kind of generally speaking. So WordPress versus a website builder like Squarespace. Can you talk to that?

Yes, yes. I think we should start with just thinking about costs generally for website, no matter what system you're going to build in or how that's going to come together. And I'm taking this inspiration from a great website called Website Builder Expert, talking about how they had a great way to frame the costs. And so there's really four factors into the cost of building or maintaining the website. The first is time, the second is technical skills, the third is design expertise, and the fourth is money. So out of all of these four things, money is the one that is most flexible actually and time is the one that people have the least of. So as you think about how you're going to approach the website building, you want to consider how much of a resource do I have in each of these four areas? So you might, that's a good way to start just kind of assessing yourself like how much time, what the technical skills and design expertise aspects are and how much money do I have. And then kind of combined with that, you want to think about the steps in building a website. And again, this is applicable to whatever platform you're going to use. But I would say the steps to kind of make it a simplified view of it would be first of all you got to figure out your hosting and setup and sort of that technical environment. Then there's always some sort of learning curve there with whatever system you're going to use, how does that work and getting familiar with that environment. And then you have, you know, developing all of the content. You know, if you're working in, well, in either WordPress or Squarespace or another drag and drop website builder, there's themes and templates to customize. So you're doing that work in conjunction with, you know, the text and images etcetera and then there's kind of the final step, which is maintenance and sort of that ongoing level of support and updates that the website will need. So as you think about both the costs and the steps, I think the two questions to keep in mind are what are my resources? So what do I have in each of those four areas? And then what steps in that process am I willing? And I think this is more important is am I ready to be responsible for.

Okay. And by the way, how does the fact that maybe I have a website already, how does that factor into these? I'm assuming it's still the same thing, right? So whether you're starting from scratch, you're building a new site, or you already have an existing site that's outdated and you want to replace or revamp, then you still have to consider these factors.

Yeah, exactly. Really? Because I'm sure many of us who are listening today have had the experience of updating the website, thinking it's going. It's going to be a rather minor project, and it ends up, you know, you end up kind of revisiting everything on the site. And so again, you would want to look at sort of both the cost, those factors of cost, and kind of walking through those steps again. Okay. And I would just say, Ed, the big thing to think about in terms of like, the costs and the, and the steps in terms of like, looking at WordPress versus looking at Squarespace would be their differences in their business models and how that impacts your level of responsibility. So because WordPress is open source, you know, it's free for you to use, you can have it, but it requires quite a lot of responsibility. Whereas Squarespace, you know, it's a closed system, it's proprietary, you pay for that. But the level of responsibility is quite a bit different there. And in many cases it's lower. So, and I can talk a little bit more about that if we, you know, when we get into kind of maybe the specific aspects of the two systems.

So let's, let's try this because I think there's this. We could take this in many different directions, but I like this. Compare and contrast, right column A and column B. I think that's going to be most helpful for people. And I know for me, as I'm trying to distinguish between the two and which option might be best for me. So why don't we compare these options based on how they handle and address some of the most important aspects of, of building or redesigning your website. So things like, you know, your domain name, hosting, Installation themes and plugins, that kind of thing. Maybe we can run down each of these options through each of those elements, if that makes sense.

That sounds great.

I'll let you lead. So wherever you think it makes sense.

Yeah. Okay, so let's start with dealing with domain names and hosting and installation, since that's our first step in the process is getting that technical environment established with WordPress. Basically how it works is, and this is for those of you who would be new to the system and maybe you're just building a site on WordPress, but you need to go to WordPress.org to download a copy of the software. Sometimes with a web host. A good web host will have this process automated for you, but it still is a matter of you have to physically move, you know, do an installation on your web host of WordPress. And that's sort of the other second part of it is you have to find a web host. And there are a lot of really not so great ones out there and there are some really good ones. One of the ones that we like a lot for WordPress based sites is called WP Engine. They are very specifically host WordPress sites and have excellent technical support. So they make the installation of the WordPress install on your server easy. So anyway, basically WordPress has those two aspects of finding the web host, doing the installation, and then your domain name, you can purchase it wherever you need to, but then you'll need to just kind of make sure, you know, you have that information handy for later when you want to launch the site. For Squarespace, how it works is you go to Squarespace, you sign up for an account and they take care of the hosting for you. And the software is already installed on their servers, so there's nothing more you need to do besides setting up your account. And right now Squarespace offers like two week trial, so you don't even have to pay anything right away to experiment in there. So they also with domain names they will, if you don't have one already, you could buy one through them or you can connect a third party and they have a little wizard that'll walk you through connecting a third party domain name. So at the bottom, the sort of, the bottom line on the technical environment is that you know who's responsible for getting the domain name, the hosting installation taken care of. In WordPress you are. And in Squarespace they are primarily responsible.

Yeah, it reminds me, it's like buying a vacation package from a travel agent versus piecing it together yourself.

Right? Right.

So you have more flexibility when you do it yourself, but it's also more work. The other is all bundled together. It's just kind of plug and play.

Exactly, exactly. So again, when you think about, like, are you the sort of person who likes dealing with those technical things? Because a lot of people do, they enjoy that part of it. But if you're not, if that's not what you want to deal with or focus on, then Squarespace or another one of those website builders is pretty attractive in that regard.

I have a very specific question there. Somebody who knew I was talking to you asked me about this and I told him, well, you know what, I'm going to talk to Lisa, so I'll just ask her. This guy was concerned that if you go with a website builder and you buy the domain name through them, that they could kind of hijack that or hold it in there. If you're trying to move to a different. Let's say you're trying to move to WordPress, after that, your site to WordPress or to another website builder, that they could hold it in there without letting you go. Have you seen that before? Have you heard about that?

No, I haven't. I think that's a great question, though. And first of all, I'll say I don't know the answer to that, but I will find out and maybe we could include it in your show notes or something. So since we're mentioning it, absolutely. But also I would say that in my experience it's been. Well, first of all, there is a mechanism to import and export content between Squarespace and WordPress. So if you want to move from one platform to the other, they make it fairly easy. And I'm going to put that in quotes, easy. It really is going to depend on how your particular site is set up, but there is the mechanism in place to do that. And just from what, from my experience with Squarespace, I would not expect that they would hold that hostage. But it does sort of point to some of the misconceptions that are out there, misperceptions that are out there about website builders and this concern around how much of that content do I own if I want to leave? And that was certainly for us, a big hesitation years ago when we looked at some of these, and in particular when we were looking at Squarespace, our biggest hang up was, but do you own the content? And can you move that content if you wanted to go elsewhere? And like I said, nowadays they have this mechanism for exporting content, so technically you can move it.

Gotcha. Okay, okay, fair enough. All Right, so that's domain names, hosting, installation, what's kind of the next category.

So I would say then, you know, now you're in your system, now you're going to start looking at themes or templates. And so I'll just talk a little bit about how those work. In WordPress, it's called a theme. And with WordPress there are over, let's see, I think there's over 10,000 different themes that you could choose from, which is a huge amount. I mean, whatever you could imagine you'd want your site to do. There is probably somebody that's built a theme for it and posted it somewhere. But the problem is, of course, who has the time to vet all of those themes. So there are companies out there that do develop really, you know, really solid, high quality themes. I certainly recommend that you go for a paid theme because of this, because you're going to get more solid and less erroneous code. And usually these companies will continue providing support for those themes as, you know, as technology across the Internet changes, you know, and they'll, they'll have those themes updated, et cetera. But the point is there's a lot to choose from which is, which is good and bad, right? And then with plugins, so then, so once you have your theme in WordPress, you know the overall how it's going to look and feel. Well then there's plugins which will allow you to do all different types of functionality, you know, anywhere from like having an event calendar to, you know, an image gallery. I mean just, you name it, there's themes out there for it. There's over 30,000 plugins. Sorry, plugins. Over 30,000 plugins out there. So again, you're kind of dealing with the same issue of there's a quite a big variance in quality amongst themes and plugins. So if you're going with paid themes, sometimes these will come also with some, some plugins, some paid plugins, you know, they're already vetted and are compatible with each other. Otherwise I, you know, in our experience you kind of have to do some trial and error to find plugins that will, that will work with your site and not cause conflict. And some of the problem with, with themes and plugins in WordPress is if they're not compatible, of course you're going to end up with, with bugs or just things not working right on your site. But you also end up a lot of times with what we call code bloat or page bloat, where the whole site is just way bigger than it really needs to be for what it's trying to do. And it ends up slowing down page load time, which is not that big of a deal if you're accessing your site through, you know, on a desktop or something. But it can totally kill it if you're trying to access your site, you know, on a mobile device. So that's kind of the issue with, with themes and plugins in WordPress. In Squarespace, they call. Themes are called templates. And There are about 25 templates in Squarespace. So, you know, I think that's a pretty fair amount. There's definitely. Every time we've built a Squarespace site, there's still a lot of time that goes into just considering, well, which template's going to work best for what we need to do and who the client is, etc. And all of those templates are created by Squarespace developers. So they're already, you know, they're already vetted. We know they're high quality, we know they're supported. And then sort of analogous to the plugins for WordPress. In Squarespace, they're called content blocks. So they do the same thing. They add, you know, bits of functionality to your site, different ways of adding text and images to your site, these content blocks. And there are, I think there's about like 40 or 50 of those. So again, significantly less than what's available in WordPress. But they're all developed by Squarespace Squarespace developers, and these are developers employed by Squarespace. So, you know, again, they're, they've been vetted. We know that they're perfectly compatible with the templates, with the Squarespace templates. Every, every template comes with all the content blocks available. Whereas, you know, in WordPress, you, you have to kind of go out and sort of cherry pick what plugins you might want to add to your site.

And by the way, in WordPress, you have to buy your theme, right? And in individual plugins, which may or may not be free Squarespace, you have, you said there's 25 of them. If you choose number 11, do you have to buy that separately or you have your choice there and it's just kind of included in the plan?

Exactly. Good question. It is included. Everything, all the templates, all the content blocks, everything's included as part of your, your base fee. I'll go ahead and just jump to the pricing on that. So, in fact, I should probably, should have looked today to make sure it's accurate, but it's around for like a business site. You're Going to pay around $18 a month, $20 a month. And that's if you, I think if that's, if you pay annually, like basically it's about between 200, 250 bucks or so for a business. The base business package in Squarespace, that fee includes everything. It's your hosting, it's all of the templates and the content blocks, it's all of the customer support they provide.

Okay. And then it probably doesn't include, if you were starting from scratch, you needed a domain name that was not included. That was a one time thing you have to pay extra for.

Actually, if you purchase your domain name through the Squarespace system, I think they do include it, it as part, like for the first year or two.

Okay, okay.

Yeah.

So just to kind of recap so far in terms of costs, with WordPress, the platform itself is free, but you have to buy a theme, which is called a template. In Squarespace, you got to buy a theme, unless you use a free one. Let's just say you buy one, let's say that was, you know, $80. Then you have to buy the domain name, which could cost you whatever, $10, a one time fee, or actually depending on how many years you got it for, and then the hosting, which could be, let's say, $10 a month. So it's kind of all broken up like we talked about earlier, Squarespace, it's all packaged in, you pay an annual fee that includes all those things.

Right, exactly. And so you kind of come back to that question of like, well, what do I want to be responsible for? So when it comes to themes and plugins in WordPress, you're responsible for all of that. And really where that definitely plays out is over the long term, over the long run, you know, say you're six months, year, two years down the road with your site and it's, you know, you have to update things because you know, for whatever reason you've changed, technology's changed, you are responsible for implementing those updates to the themes and the plugins. Now again, if you're with a, with a paid theme provider, they may help you with some of that, they may offer some of that, but it's kind of on your shoulders. Whereas in Squarespace, they're doing all of that for you. They are updating their templates and content blocks constantly, you know, to make sure they're compliant with browsers and devices, etc. The other thing I wanted to mention too, about themes and plugins and templates and content blocks between those two systems, so in WordPress, the theme itself is not necessarily going to be mobile responsive, so it may not translate to your different mobile devices very gracefully. Now, what I've seen with more of the newer WordPress themes as well as like those that are developed by repeatable theme developers, they are often responsive, but it's just something you need to keep in mind. And if you're in the market for a new theme or just building a whole new site, that's something that you'll want to keep in mind. Because we have, we've already passed that tipping point of the number of people accessing websites on mobile versus desktop. I think it like happened in 2014 when, you know, more people now are access, accessing websites through mobile devices. So it's become, it's kind of shifted from this. Well, that would be nice to have to. You know, you really kind of need that. Especially if you're going to invest the time and money into making your site and building, you know, building that into a really viable platform, you want to start off on the right foot. There's in Squarespace, all of their templates are all mobile responsive. And what's nice with their system is when you're in there and you're working on your site, on your pages, they have a pretty easy way to just view what it's going to look like if I'm looking at it on a tablet or on a phone. Whereas kind of in the old or more traditional model of, of development, you might do, you know, design mock ups for each of the different screen breakdown sizes and then, you know, you send those off to the developer, the developer main, then you're in this, you're in this, you know, sort of staging site and viewing these. It's just kind of a complicated process to see, you know, how that's going to translate. Whereas in Squarespace, it's pretty immediate. You can see it right there how that those different devices that are going to affect your content.

One of the things that you mentioned that might scare some people is the fact that with 25 templates, that seems like there's not a lot of variety. So, you know, is there a danger that, you know, suddenly if a lot of people want to go to Squarespace and a lot of people have, you're going to see all these sites that all look the same.

Mm, yeah, that's another good question. And it's something that we think about too as well, because, you know, the last thing anybody wants to do is look exactly like someone else. So I think it's Kind of a there. It's sort of a complex answer to that question or that concern. And on one hand, yes, there is that danger. There is always that danger if you know someone's going to just kind of take that template right off the shelf and not do any customization with it beyond maybe just dropping in some new images where they're already images. There is a fair amount of flexibility with customizing the template to the degree that it really does look a lot different than maybe even what that original template looked like. And that's certainly something we've experimented a lot with. There's a whole community of people building on Squarespace that have a lot of advice and suggestions for how to further customize the site. On the flip side of that, I think the real benefit of working in a system like Squarespace, where it is constrained, is that you have those constraints to basically make decisions for you. And so rather than getting so hung up on the world of possibilities is at my feet, where do I go? And the overwhelm of that, you're already sort of filtered into this framework that you have to work in. And I think that in and of itself is a really great thing. I think that's a great thing for creativity and also just progressing the work that needs to be done. You know, at the end of the day, if you're not in the business of building websites, you're doing something else. And so therefore, you don't want to be hung up, you know, trying to get this site together. You want to just be doing what you're doing. You know, for most of us in your community, it's writing, you know, or whatever it is. And again, that's sort of the whole kind of goes back to the whole reason why we really wanted to explore these platforms a little more closely and talk about what the differences are so we could make more informed decisions about which one would be right in which situation.

Well, and it sounds like the templates have enough flexibility that you can customize them enough to make them. To make them different so they're not as rigid as they might appear.

Right, right.

So from a design standpoint, I guess that's the same thing with WordPress templates. Right. So there are some templates out there. I mean, templates, themes. There's some themes out there that are extremely popular, but you get a web designer behind one of those things and they could transform it. So I guess it goes both ways. One quick question, then we'll move on. As a follow up, have you experienced any problems with so you do all this customization to one of their templates and then Squarespace does an update and it screws everything up. Has that been an issue?

Well, not for us, but it could be an issue. It could be an issue. There's a way to add custom CMS or sorry, cms css, which is cascading style sheets for those of you who don't know what CSS stands for. But it's, it's, it's the way, you know, it's a, it's the way that like the text and images present themselves. So there is a way that you can add, you know, you can add some custom CSS to your site and there is a warning on there that when you do that, you may in fact run the risk of breaking, you know, kind of breaking some of those links in the template that would allow for updates to occur because the updates are, they're happening just kind of continuously. I mean, there's not like a big button like in WordPress WordPress, you'll see the big button that says, you know, version, you know, 5.2 is out. Are you ready to update? Which is kind of another issue. But in Squarespace it, it just happens automatically. So there is that. There is that potential. I think you would have to be fairly well. I think you'd have to be fairly well versed in some of that, that putting in that custom code. There's other areas in the site where you can put in custom code. I think you would have to be pretty advanced to, to really break it. That's just my, my perception on it, my opinion about it. But yeah, that's a good point to raise.

So I know that E commerce is another area where it's another factor to compare. Although most writers aren't really taking payments on their websites. But before we move. But I do want to touch on it real briefly before we move into the next area, just in case somebody is taking payments on their site. What considerations? WordPress versus Squarespace.

Yeah, so like with themes in or. Well, themes and plugins. In WordPress, if you want to add commerce functionality to your site, you're looking at adding another plugin or maybe moving to a theme that's built like. I think WooCommerce is the one that comes to mind as a WordPress theme oriented. I think they offer theme and plugins for E commerce. But bottom line is, you know, you're kind of responsible for getting all of that in place. In Squarespace they have a whole content block that's specifically for setting up a Shopping cart and setting up all of your commerce functionality. And they make it pretty straightforward. And I believe that with the baseline business package, you can set up up to like 25 products or services within that current subscription level. So they, and I think that's something that's relatively new that they changed. I think you, before you had to bump up to the next level to have commerce to your site. But the point is there in their system, it's everything's already there for you to do it. So if you want to kind of quote unquote, turn it on, it's pretty easy to do that. There's no other further installation or anything like that to do.

Okay, so let's get to the last category, which is a big one comparing security, backups and maintenance. So tell us about both options.

Yeah, so this is a really big one. I think it's probably the, in our experience, it's the crux of the matter because when you look at the investment you have to make in your, in your time and resources, all of those factors, time, resources, skills, etc. Over time in your website, the costs for having a WordPress based website are much higher than they are for having a site in, you know, in Squarespace or one of the other website builders. And that's because more times than not you will need to have some outside professional assistance with doing a lot of what's required for website, you know, for updating the themes and the plugins, handling any bugs, security breaches, you know, all of those aspects are your responsibility. And what happens, what we've seen happen, we see this happen a lot in WordPress sites, is that you get into a situation where the platform itself is outdated, the theme might be outdated, there might be a lot of plugins that people have installed over time and it's opening up a lot of holes for hackers to get into. And if you think hackers are only dealing with the big people, think again. Because there is, there's a website out there that's called Internet Internet, I think it's called Internet Stats. But you can go in there and kind of like see what's, what's happening online at any given moment in time. And there's probably about 30,000 site hacks that happen a day. So you know, these hackers there like training ground is the small sites. And so if you're on, it kind of goes back to having a poor web host because some of these more mediocre web hosts are not doing the kinds of things for security that they should be doing. One of those being they're not backing up your website. So if your site does get hacked and they have to take it down or you have to revert to an earlier version, well, I hope that you've done a backup yourself or I hope you've set up a system in place to do that, because they're not. The web hosts themselves are not going to do that for you in the WordPress world. So it's like all of those factors sort of are costs that add up over time. In Squarespace, they're taking care of all of the security issues themselves ongoing. There's no, you know, again, you're not paying for the updates that are happening to the templates and the content blocks. Will they change their subscription rates over time? Sure, I'm sure they probably will. But, you know, as you look across time with your site, the costs are going to be lower. So that's sort of the big thing that I can, or I want to impress upon people is this idea that open source isn't free. I mean, technically it's free, but it's not, it's not really free when you think about everything that has to go into it. And so I hope that people are aware when they make a choice what that entails for them. And this is a big area, the security, backups and maintenance piece that a lot of people don't think about because it's. It feels kind of far down the road and it's a little nebulous, but that's where a lot of the costs can creep up.

So I have another area that I wanted to ask you about briefly, which is SEO search engine optimization. Are you aware of any significant differences between going with WordPress or a website builder? I did read some articles a few months ago that there were some problems with some website builders where Google was just not recognizing them.

You know, frankly, I don't have a lot of information on that area. It's not an area that's ever been in our wheelhouse other than just beyond what organic sort of search engine optimization techniques are. So that's, that's, again, it's another good question and something I'll need to look into further. And so I don't have a. I don't have a good answer. I know that there are some areas in Squarespace where you can add metadata and, you know, description keywords, those types of things for SEO, and there's a place to add Google Analytics code, but beyond that, I really don't, I don't know much about the differences I think.

The article I read was not with Squarespace, was with another website builder, and I forget which one it was, but it was one of the smaller players, so I'll have to look into that also. But it might be something to maybe do some research on if you're listening and you're trying to weigh both options. Having said that, I. I really do believe that freelancers in general tend to place way too much stock or emphasis on SEO. They count way too much on that as. As a source of prospects, when in actuality it's just not going to necessarily yield what you think it will yield or yield the kind of prospects, the quality that you really want. So I think, you know, when I hear the SEO discussion, I think it's an important thing, but not something that it tends to kind of go at the top of the list for many people, where maybe it should be somewhere in the middle, in my opinion. So, yeah, what I'm hearing then is really this, I think is there's. It's not a clear choice, but when you. And I love that you broke it down by those factors to consider, time, money, technical skills, and design expertise. When you factor those in and then you look at your specific situation in each of those areas, then that gives you a framework from which to make a good decision. Because at the end of the day, especially writers and copywriters, you know, we're looking for something that can get us started as quickly as possible, that looks good and professional and will work.

Right.

So that might point to a lot of people to Squarespace, but there might be some other factors where, you know, WordPress is going to be a better option, but you won't know unless you kind of go through all these areas.

Exactly.

Awesome. So any other parting thoughts or advice or ideas that you might have before we sign off?

Yeah, I would just point out that there. I know it probably comes across that I'm a huge fan of Squarespace and I am. I also love WordPress and we still build in that platform. It's still an excellent. It's an excellent system. You just have to be aware of how these two systems work and what your role is, what you want your role to be in that whole picture of developing, maintaining your website. There are definitely some disadvantages to the Squarespace platform, and I think one of the bigger ones is, is there's not the ability, like version control is one aspect of, you know, in WordPress, if you're on a page or a post, you can kind of go back in time. If you really mess up, you can go back in time and sort of re establish a previous version of that page or post. And there's not that capability in Squarespace. So again, it's a different environment. There are some ways to work around that, but that's, that's a drawback. And there's, I think related to that there's not the ability to create what we call a staging site. A staging site would be basically like a copy of your live site somewhere. It's probably on the same server, but somewhere else where you can kind of fiddle around and do with, you know, do the updates or whatever you want to experiment with before you push it out to your live site. Well, that workflow does not exist in Squarespace. So again, it's something you have to be aware of and whether or not you want to have that or not, depending on what your goals are for the site. I will add we can include a comparison summary of costs between the two systems. I think that will be helpful for people to see sort of the breakdown. We've kind of talked about some of these different costs in piecemeal, but if you want to kind of look at, get a sense between the two systems what you might be in for, I think that will be helpful.

Yeah, I would love to include that in the show notes. So let's send that to me. We'll get it in there.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I definitely will. Well, just one other point I wanted to make was just when it comes to the answer to that question, you know, WordPress or Squarespace, which one is right for me? I would say if you, the things, the things to think about, if WordPress is good for you, it would be good for you. If you need non standard functionality, like say you're going to host an online community or you have like a lot of data that you're going to present or something like that. WordPress would be great for you. If you have a lot of access to technical and design expertise, whether that, you know, you have that yourself or you have that on your team, WordPress could be great for you. And if you want, if you really like the idea of having more control over things, you know, and you value that more than you value the ease of, you know, when you give up some of that control, WordPress is going to be a good fit for you. On the other hand, if really your primary goal is just to present information and connect with your audiences and let's say for us and our audience with you, Ed, most of us are just wanting to publish content and make sure people can find us and connect with us and you're willing to give up some of that control to have more ease in that system than Squarespace is going to be a great fit.

That's, that's the sense that I got. And, and you've really, I think, clarified a lot of this and given us how some good ways to think about this in all the different areas to consider to make the best decision. So I really appreciate coming on the show today and sharing these ideas with us. I guess before we sign off, though, I want to make sure people know how to contact you and how to learn more. More about you and your work. So where can I send them?

Sure. Yeah. Our website is bluemarblecreative.net so you can find us there. We're on Twitter bluemarblec. Let's see, is in creative and I also have, I have a lot of the information we share today and more written up as a white paper for anyone who would like that. I'd be happy to share that with you. We don't have it posted on our site at the moment, but I'm happy to share that and you could email me for that. And my email is Lisa. L I S a.

Thanks for making that white paper available. Again, thanks for coming on, Lisa. This has been great. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to share this information.

Well, I hope you found this discussion helpful and maybe will become a good starting point for your search. And as you start thinking through your options, you can come back to this and the resources that Lisa has shared and make the best decision for your specific situation. I wanted to remind you that you can grab the detail show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com forward/episode104. And that's it for today. Again, I'm your host, Ed Gandia. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you have an awesome day. Take care. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.