146. Why Squarespace 💻
Some thoughts on personal branding for marketers
I share a weekly update on ways to be a better marketer, brand-maker, team-builder, and person. If you enjoy this, you can share some love by hitting the Substack heart button above or below.
Hi there 👋
A few weeks back, I shared that I had moved my personal website from WordPress to Squarespace and freshened it up in the process. Nebojsa, a friend of the newsletter, hoped I could share more of the thinking behind the switch to Squarespace. Happily — albeit several months later — I’ve put some thoughts together in this post.
Got a cool website to share? I’d love to check it out.
~ Kevan
Lulu Miller
These are 4 cool things I read this week
1 - The MOZ guide for how to rank on Google (plus a bonus behind-the-scenes on how this post was refreshed)
2 - Freemium vs. Free Trial: Which is better for your startup?
3 - Social media managers are not okay
4 - New substack: Super Rad Jobs by Adam
Why Squarespace
Marketers can craft great narratives, especially their own
I have owned my kevanlee.com domain for 15 years, which is eons in Internet time and long enough that my very first homepage was built in Microsoft FrontPage.
I cringe to share it, but oh well here goes …
Yes, that was really my website! 🙈
This, along with many, many other poor iterations, exist forever at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I clearly knew very little about personal branding back then. I was just having fun, playing with new tools, learning new things, toying around in a digital sandbox.
I more or less kept treating my website like a sandbox as I went from FrontPage to Tumblr to WordPress.
WordPress was especially experimental for me because I wanted to learn how to build, code, and launch WordPress themes. My website was the guinea pig. I attempted to build new themes from scratch and then ship them to my site, very much in the “move fast, break things” vein of the early 2010s except with great weight on the “break things” side.
My websites weren’t bad (which is another way of saying they weren’t good).
And I was successful in one important aspect: I taught myself HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP.
But ultimately I realized that I wanted a custom, high-quality website that accurately reflected me — a marketer who knows a thing or two about growing brands to big heights. Squarespace was it.
There were a handful of things that drove me to Squarespace:
With the Squarespace editor, you could design a completely custom website that looked fantastic
Squarespace suggested font pairings and color schemes, two areas I would constantly second guess when I was picking them myself
You can tweak and fiddle with your Squarespace site all the time, and it still looks amazing. This was obviously not the case when I would tweak and fiddle with my WordPress site
Related: What I love most about my new site is that I spend waaay less time trying to make changes to it and far more time writing Substack newsletters, connecting in Slack communities, and chatting with folks over email and social
All the core website functionality was there: email capture forms, banners and modals, best-practice SEO, social sharing, etc.
They make it easy to get a domain with G Suite so that you can have an email like hello@kevanlee.com — which I already had, but it was a pain to do it myself and Squarespace made the transition much easier
At the same time, I had to make some concessions:
Squarespace is not a CMS for bloggers, not by a mile. You can have a blog on Squarespace; but their strengths are portfolios and e-commerce, not blogs
You do give up some omnipotence to make your website exactly how you want it. For instance, I couldn’t always figure out to get the buttons where I wanted them to go. But I believe this might be a good thing: with great design power comes great responsibility that I can’t handle
Whether it’s Squarespace or WordPress or any other website maker out there, I can highly encourage you:
Get yourself a website, make it beautiful, own your story, and show off your best stuff.
I’m still working on that last point — portfolios seem to always be important but never urgent enough. But the rest? Squarespace helped a ton, especially with the beauty and the story.
Just before launching my new Squarespace site, I came across this advice from Peep Laja of CXL Institute. I’ve paraphrased a little bit, but the core was this:
If I were a marketer looking to establish an online presence, here's what I'd do.
First, realize that a marketer is someone who markets—time to show them what you can do.
Clean up your LinkedIn profile. Make it sell, show off your copywriting chops. Start posting daily. Sum up your key lessons learned. Tell your best stories. Pin those posts on your profile.
Build a landing page about yourself. Show 'em how it's done. If you wanna be known as a DTC expert, design it like an ecommerce product page. If it's SaaS, make it a SaaS features page.
Add a portfolio of your accomplishments. Share how you overcame the obstacles, what you messed up, and how you eventually triumphed.
He goes on to list a number of other things you can do like networking, video teardowns, etc. And he ends with this:
Whoever is willing to put in that much work to tell their story—that's someone you wanna know.
—
Quick footnote on choosing a website builder:
Squarespace: Super high-quality, fully custom websites that tell great stories
WordPress: Great for blogging, tons of themes to choose from, highly customizable if you want to learn code
Ghost: Especially great for blogging and monetizing a subscriber base
Substsack: Now with custom domains, so your email newsletter could be your website
Wix: Never used it, but I imagine it’s more Squarespace than WordPress
Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!
— Kevan
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