My First Day With Squarespace

On day one I started out with the knowledge gained from reading the first six chapters in the Miko Coffey book Building Business Websites with Squarespace 7, and also having read a bunch of blog posts in the Elle & Company website. Both of these are great resources, by the way.

In spite of all that background research, I still couldn’t figure out how to do much of anything. That seems to be the way it works with technology. There is no avoiding the painful learning curve.

The view from the Site Manager led me to believe that you could change page attributes by interacting directly with the web page. And, to a limited extent, that’s how it works. To make many changes though, you need to use the menu system. From the Site Manager Home menu you need to navigate to the Pages menu and then in the Main Navigation section click on the Gear Icon to activate the Page Settings panel. In this panel I found all the settings I thought would be accessible with Right-clicks or Mouse-overs from the actual web page I was trying to modify.

To be fair, the Miko Coffey book does discuss this fundamental operation. It’s on page 93 after she has been talking about template selection for dozens of pages, and in the context of creating new pages. I have to tell you that I, and I think many other people, would like to kick the tires a little bit and dig into the theme settings before finalizing theme choices.

This may have by now started sounding like a rant. It’s not. It’s more of an observation on how inevitable this sort of thing is with technology. With Squarespace and so many other products like it, the complexities are overlapping. One way or another you are going to get caught up in the web of complexity.

At work recently I’ve been using XSLT to process XML documents. XSLT is a programming language with a formalized syntax. You can study it and read books about it. The language grammar is easy enough to understand. What’s not so easy to master is the semantics of the language. Often, it doesn’t work the way you expect. The semantics aren’t what you anticipated. The program you write is grammatically correct, it just doesn’t do what you wanted it to do.

My day one experience with Squarespace has an element of semantic mismatch. I was thinking it worked one way, when the designers of the system had something different in mind. With software, complexity is multifaceted. When you’re starting out, you are going to struggle. It’s unavoidable. I’ve been through this learning curve thing so many times now that I have come to accept it. Not enjoy it, just accept it. The trick is to shrug it off and move on to day two.

If you move on to day two and day three, you will have made it to a place so many others never get to experience. Persistence pays off. Web design and software development are not for everyone. If you have the patients to stick it out and wait for the lines to connect the dots, for things to come together and make sense, you may find some joy in the end results you product. My advice is to not give up too early. Best of luck.