5 ms·

I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year

I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier and more reliable than building it myself despite being more than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile, upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our website.

kevinob11 5y ago
Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.
philjr 5y ago
Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.
pazimzadeh 5y ago
I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the site is down: https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one? https://www.oyster-ventures.com/ https://www.oyster-ventures.com/
- nattaylor 5y ago
  His is https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from residential Comcast in the U.S.
debaserab2 5y ago
I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats: * The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode. * The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load. That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.
- kevinob11 5y ago
  How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so far. Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish. Do you add a lot of custom scripts?
  - debaserab2 5y ago
    Zero custom scripts other than some vanilla JS I wrote that loads on a few pages. Your numbers are pretty similar to mine. It's not that much different than the WordPress site that replaced it, but it still seems higher than it should be.
    - kevinob11 5y ago
      Good to know, thanks!
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  Have you tried using a static site generator instead? I have used one for my personal site on S3 and it works pretty well. In my opinion figuring out Squarespace was harder for me .
  - debaserab2 5y ago
    I'd love to use a static site generator, but no simple WYSIWYG for the people that create content on the site make that a non-starter.
    - luke2m 5y ago
      Check out https://forestry.io https://forestry.io or something on https://jamstack.org/headless-cms https://jamstack.org/headless-cms

kevinob11 5y ago

Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.

philjr 5y ago

Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.

pazimzadeh 5y ago

I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the site is down: https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one? https://www.oyster-ventures.com/ https://www.oyster-ventures.com/

nattaylor 5y ago
His is https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from residential Comcast in the U.S.

debaserab2 5y ago

I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats: * The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode. * The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load. That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.

kevinob11 5y ago
How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so far. Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish. Do you add a lot of custom scripts?
- debaserab2 5y ago
  Zero custom scripts other than some vanilla JS I wrote that loads on a few pages. Your numbers are pretty similar to mine. It's not that much different than the WordPress site that replaced it, but it still seems higher than it should be.
  - kevinob11 5y ago
    Good to know, thanks!
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Have you tried using a static site generator instead? I have used one for my personal site on S3 and it works pretty well. In my opinion figuring out Squarespace was harder for me .
- debaserab2 5y ago
  I'd love to use a static site generator, but no simple WYSIWYG for the people that create content on the site make that a non-starter.
  - luke2m 5y ago
    Check out https://forestry.io https://forestry.io or something on https://jamstack.org/headless-cms https://jamstack.org/headless-cms