Monday, November 8, 2021

Squarespace website

A New Squarespace website for Hebridean Photography

Following our move to The Western Isles in 2021 I’ve been working on a new Squarespace website.

The new website is specifically intended as a showcase for my Hebridean photography and details of my workshops here on the Islands.

Although it was a hard decision, there are a number of reasons why I decided to leave WordPress in favour of a Squarespace website. The main reasons are to with with the very complicated and tedious (for me!) back-end maintenance of the ProPhoto 6 theme this site is built on.

I’ve never got on with working with ProPhoto themes and have always found changing or amending anything, whether text or images, is a nerve-wracking and often frustrating business. This isn’t so much a criticism of ProPhoto themes, it’s more an admission that ProPhoto and I are not very well suited to working together. Moreover, I find ProPhoto’s move towards support-only hosting rather unpalatable after a terrible and costly experience I had with BluHost and Sitelock before I moved this website’s hosting to SiteGround.

I need simplicity and transparency because I’m a photographer and not a website designer or IT geek. I want an easy life and the time has come for ProPhoto and I to part company.

Squarespace vs WordPress

Personal incompatibilities aside, there is also the constant updating and occasional incompatibility issues with plugins, not to mention the cumulative annual cost of renewing numerous plugin subscriptions and this has finally become the deal breaker for me with having a WordPress based website.

The difficulty that I had with my decision to move to a Squarespace website template is that I still like WordPress as a CMS and SEO vehicle. In this respect WordPress has distinct advantages as well as being more versatile, but I had to balance this against the ease of use that a Squarespace website offers.

My new Squarespace website

My new Squarespace website will have full details of my Harris and Lewis photography workshops and numerous image galleries for the projects I’m currently working on, along with my thoughts on cameras and equipment that I use. Primarily, though, Trace of Time is intended as a showcase for my landscape and seascape images of the Outer Hebrides.

My Blog

With all the above said, my blog is staying put here, self-hosted at SiteGround. As I said earlier, I like WP as a blogging and CMS platform and whilst another autumn gale is driving torrential rain against the window about a metre from my left ear as I write this, it’s nice to be comfortably ensconced in familiar warm and dry surroundings!

So far, though, my new Squarespace website creation has gone without issue. Even this IT philistine has encountered no usability problems with such a simple UI that Squarespace offers.

It’s a work in progress but little by little, image by image, my new site is evolving into something more in tune with the vision I had for my old ProPhoto 6 site but never achieved it.

The take-away from this preamble is quite simple; if you’d like to keep up with my current work, both film and digital, please go to my new Squarespace website, Trace of Time and if you want to keep up with my occasional ramblings in both text and images, please continue to keep an eye on this blog!