#014 Which Website Platform Is Right For My Business?
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A lot of businesses know they need a new website or want a new look or functionality. If you’re a small to mid-sized business, you may be overlooking platforms that will make managing your website so much easier. In this episode of the podcast, Beth Trejo, Kelsey Martin, and Chris Severn talk through Squarespace, Wordpress, and Shopify and how to pick the one that’s right for you. We know there are a million different CMS (Content Management Systems) to choose from, but we’ll walk you through why these three are our go-to picks for businesses that want to manage their sites in-house.
Biggest Takeaways From This Episode
The very first question you should answer BEFORE you start the process: Do I want to start fresh and completely scrap what we have? Or do I want to change content and adjust the visuals but keep the same platform?
If your site does not have a good mobile experience, you need to start from scratch.
Building a website is a lot like building a house. Think about the work and detail it takes to build your office, and go through that same process when it comes to your website.
Define the initial blueprint and plan
Who is going to build it? Internal team member, intern, nephews/family, college help, agencies, freelancer
Where is the land or plot that our site will be on? This is your website hosting.
Where is our address going to be? Are we moving locations? This is your domain hosting.
Who is going to maintain it? Internal team member, intern, nephews/family, college help, agencies, freelancer
Are we going to grow? Do we need to easily be able to scale the content?
What’s our timeline?
What are we going to to use to build the house? There are a lot of different types of content management systems. We want to help you pick the right one!
Expert Tip: Get a password system to help you manage your access points. Don’t leave it up to your agency, developer, internal team member to manage your access. There are awesome tools like LastPass or 1pass to help you.
Shopify
Best for eCommerce brands that are ready for one all-inclusive system.
Shopify Pros:
Straightforward clean interface/platform.
Their online store is REALLY easy to use and very user-friendly from a management perspective.
Amazing built-in marketing features like social integration, messenger, Amazon and Ebay integration, plus cart abandonment emails.
The mobile experience for customers is really easy.
The inventory management system is very easy to use, including the tags, categories, shipping and distribution.
Shopify has really advanced Apps that you can add to your site to build out some helpful integrations and layouts.
It’s very easy to scale your entire inventory from both the back end management and the way it filters out visually on your website.
Shopify Cons:
The interface and templates are pretty progressive but they aren’t very flexible if you really want to customize and don’t have experience.
The interior pages aren’t as visually appealing and challenging to build because of the lack of framework.
Their verbiage is different than other sites, they use “liquid code.”
If you have an inventory system that doesn’t integrate into Shopify and/or you’re not wanting to use a new inventory management system.
Expert Tip: Take really great photos of your products before you do your site! Take multiple angles, a lifestyle or environmental shot, maybe a quick video.
Maybe consider something else if you: have less than 10-15 products, you could totally get away with a simpler platform like Squarespace.
Squarespace
Best for an organization that wants to own their website, hosting, and domain as their own digital asset and doesn’t want to rely on an agency or outside help.
Squarespace Pros:
This platform is the EASIEST to maintain and manage. This is a platform that we feel like organizations can manage in-house.
It’s an all in one platform: web hosting, domain hosting, content management system, email management, marketing emails, analytics.
Lower price point for cost of build and hosting.
The templates are the BEST! They’re so visually appealing and easy to use. You can even customize if you need to.
Automatically mobile optimized and responsive.
Can scale content very quickly.
If you want to use outside integrations, it works well with other platforms, it still is very flexible.
Maintenance is so easy. Squarespace has gone down, don’t get me wrong. But the updates and changes are automatic and minimal. There’s just a lot less panic and things that you “have to do” on a monthly basis.
Squarespace Cons:
Not a lot of plugins that you can add to the site like you can with WordPress.
It’s really easy to make changes, so someone without a web design eye can mess up a beautiful template very easily.
WordPress
Best for an organization that has someone who can manage the site in-house or has a trusted expert. This platform is also great for an organization that has a customized vision on what they want the website experience to be like. On Wordpress, most designs are possible!
WordPress Pros:
The customizations and flexibility are endless!
There are a lot of support options that businesses have to hire out. Upwork, Codeable, Flywheel, etc.
There are awesome plugins made for just about anything!
The platform is moving more to a visual builder.
We love this platform.. but it’s a little more of a tougher love. 💜
WordPress Cons:
Okay, the plugins are awesome but it’s completely open source and leaves your site susceptible to vulnerabilities.
Using purchased themes leave you accountable to those developers. You’ll have to trust they’ll make the updates and setup that’s necessary.
Frankenstein sites are the worst! Having multiple languages and styles of code on one site make it really challenging to to maintain.
Hacking is a thing. It is on most sites but WordPress gets a little more
New updates to manage PHP, WordPress Updates, Gutenberg.
Many many hours of website maintenance and security monthly.
Transcript
This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).
Hi, this is Chris Severn and I'm joined by Kelsey Martin and Beth Trejo. Today we are talking about websites and if I'm a small to medium sized business, where do I go to either get a new one when you start refresh my old one.
Yeah, I think that's I'm excited to talk about this question. It's probably one of the most commonly asked questions that we get at Chatterkick. Primarily, I think it's because a lot of people know they need a new website or they want a new look or they feel like the functionality isn't quite up-to-date on their current website. But really the question that you need to start with if you are a small to midsize business, so we're not talking about big major corporations, although they could potentially fit into some of these categories. But is "do I want to start fresh", like scrap what I currently have and start from the ground up or "do I want to take what I have and expand upon that?" Meaning, maybe you're going to keep the same platform that it's built on, or maybe you're going to keep some of the same layout or experience.
That's really the first question you need to ask. And then once you have that kind of feeling or answer, then you can start deciding, okay, now where do I go? What's next? What platforms do I use? We're going to talk about a handful of 'em today, specifically Shopify, WordPress and Squarespace. There are other many other content management systems out there. Godaddy's doing one, Wix, Weebly, all of these other platforms. We're not going to go into those today because we just don't feel like they're providing the best experience at this point. That may change. Sostay tuned for that. But right now we're going to go over those three and talk a little bit more about what are some of the benefits to them. What are some of the maybe challenges when you're building a website? So, Kelsey manages our website department and Kelsey do you want to start out by just giving people a little bit of a framework for, okay, so now you decide, let's say I want to start my website from scratch again.
Right? So we're, we're going to scrap the old one and we're gonna start fresh. What are some of the things that you want businesses to consider or you would encourage them to consider when picking a platform or just like the whole process in general? I think either one. I think the first thing that I would do if we're like, okay, we're answering that question. Like are we refreshing or are we completely starting from scratch? And there's really no wrong answer there other than you should never consider a refresh if your site is not responsive and does not work on mobile. Like if your site does not work on mobile and it's not a good user experience, you're going to have to start over and you're going to have to switch to something else. Because the way that Google is indexing your site is mobile first. So if your, if your site doesn't have a good mobile experience, Google will say, meh, this is probably isn't a good page to go to. So that automatically qualifies you to start from scratch. But after you get that question answered, it's really time to get the
Decision-Makers like try not to have too many cooks in the kitchen on this because you're really building your brick and mortar location online. So there are a lot of people that need to have a say in this, but you need to get everybody in the room and we really need to talk about what is the user experience, what's the journey that we want someone to take. And the reason that we get in this conversation a lot, like I know this is Generation Social Media Podcast and websites are not social media. But the reason that we get in these conversations is because social is driving so much traffic somewhere and the best place is to continue that experience online. And so that's kind of where we started developing and creating websites in the first place. But getting everybody in the room and really answering and talking about those major questions of like, okay, what do we want them to do?
Do we want them to call? Are we ready for people to call? Do we have an infrastructure to manage a bunch of calls? Or do we need people to fill out a form? Like whatever the call to action is or whatever the number one thing you want people to do, like that needs to get defined at the very beginning. So then you can start kind of planning out the journey. And then we need to talk about what kind of information needs to be on there. Like what do people need to be educated on and we have to give them all the goods so that they can research it, research it, or what can we give them information and then get them to get a consultation or you know, get on the phone. I'm really defining those journeys super, super well. And then once you kind of figure out what type of content you want on the site, what things need to be there, don't need to be there. You get into really nerdy stuff like creating a site map and really mapping those things out.. Who is shooting the content? Are we doing videos? Are we not doing videos? There's so many things in that kind of frame of reference, but really trying to put on a whiteboard or a notebook or whatever, a good like frame of what needs to be there to represent our brand well and create a good customer journey.
Yeah. You know my husband and I built a house about four years ago and that whole process to me was so parallel to building a website because I think that, you know, there's so many businesses that I see that literally have two to 10 mid-size businesses, right? It takes a lot of money to build a new location or to remodel, and they do this amazing build out of their space and then they really want to spend $300 on a website, right? Like it's just this misaligned resources, misaligned time to figuring it out. And you know, you would never build a house without a blueprint without even an idea of like, is this a one story? Is it a two story? How big of a project are we getting into? And then the amount of research that people do to decide who's their builder, are they going to build it themselves?
All of those different decisions are so critically important and they are so critically important on a website too, maybe in a little bit different scale but still very important. And so I think if you can put that into the same mindset of okay I built a house, I would need to have a blueprint. I need to have the colors I want, I need to have like what I want this to be like in my day to day life. And you just kind of put that over to a website. It starts making a lot more sense and becomes very clear of like, okay, I got to have a plan before I start. Then once I have that plan, I need to decide who is going to do it. Because that's something that we don't always talk about because we get to people when they decide they need help or they want us to do it, right.
But I think the conversations I've had with friends and family, it's like, do I build it myself? Do I get my uncles, cousins, friends to build it? Do I find an intern? Do I have a college do it as a project? These are all messes we've cleaned up. And not the, in not in a negative way, but it's very true that we get people when there's problems. There are a lot of people out there that can build beautiful websites and some people can do it themselves, just like some people can build their own house, right? It's just, it's a matter of really identifying what players do you have on your team, who are you going to need and what time you need to do it. Even these simple platforms, they're hard to do. There's, you know, it still takes time. Right? So let's talk a little bit about platforms because again, I'm going to use the house analogy.
You gotta do the good one, but to that point, before you jump into that it's not just about building house, it's what's gonna happen afterwards. Who's going to insure it, what like is who's going to maintain it? Do we know how to do those things or we're going to have to hire like a handyman to come in. Like all of those things are super relevant to what happens after your website is built. Is our family going to grow. Are we going to have more things we want to add on later or is it just going to be the same thing? Is this a five year thing? Is this a 10 year thing? Yeah. All those things I think are so important to really consider before you start the process and know that this process is going to take time. Even if you have the quickest website builder in the world, most of the time you're still looking at, you know, several months and sometimes it can be, you know, up to a year just depending on how much time everybody has to devote to it.
Right. And much like home-building you get what you pay for, right? I mean you do! Right. And I think when people ask me a lot of times, cause it's confusing, right? Cause you have two hosts, you have a hosting for your domain, you have a hosting for your website and then you have the content management system, also considered platforms. Some people just know it by WordPress and all of those things. A lot of people don't really know what to even where to even start. And so I think if, if you put that in that analogy of like, okay, what are we going to use to build the house? Like that's, that's WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify. And then where is it going to, like what's our address going to be? Is your domain right? Cause you need that address, right? And then the land or the plot that you have is the actual hosting of the website. It has to live somewhere. If you are not paying someone somewhere for your hosting of your website, you will not have a website. That's just how it works. Right. So those are kind of the ways that I've helped others to figure out what all this means. But let's start with Shopify because I think Shopify is probably very aligned with e-commerce. Right? So tell me a little bit about who you would recommend to use Shopify.
So that'd be the first one. Um somebody with e-commerce. I feel like Shopify has come a long way over the last couple of years. Most brands, especially in like the beauty space are if you have an eCommerce and merge all that. It's built on Shopify. There's many many other platforms. But from my personal experience, Shopify is probably the one that's the most user-friendly. Like, I didn't have a ton of website experience before we really started doing this. And so a lot of this was trial and error and really learning what works and what doesn't work. But Shopify is one of those eCommerce sites. It's very overwhelming to think about all the possibilities of things that you can do. But if you just start and you just pick a template, it really walks you through and it has a lot of the, the cool features built in.
If I were an eCommerce, you know, I would want the what the creepy stuff, like the cart abandonment, that's literally a check Mark that you check with with Shopify. On other platforms, you'd have to build a whole like system and workflow to get people like re-engaged. So I think Shopify just has the most features and is the easiest one to continue to build on and expand on. And the templates look good. And they're automatically created for mobile. And so I just think the experience is so much easier. I will say though that Shopify of you start off on the wrong foot or you bring in multiple people to build at different points in time, it can get messy very, very quickly. This isn't like a, Squarespace is a very, you can be a visual build on Squarespace. Shopify: if you change a template too much, you have to go into like liquid code, which is terrifying to change things on. And so it can get really technical really quickly. But I do think from a, anybody being able to jump in and start, it's definitely the one that I would recommend if you have e-commerce.
Right? And so when we're going through these, we're talking to all the listeners as if it, most people were beginner levels, right? Like we're assuming that no one is like literally getting into the code. Kelsey mentioned the liquid code. Shopify has just a little bit of a different code. The verbiage is different, right? Right. And so let's assume that people don't need to go into those. But what Kelsey was saying is that there are some limitations to customization. If you don't do that, and you can, and some people are not afraid to get in there and read a tutorial online and figure it out. I mean that's something that people that are interested in that step will 100% be okay
With. I think the other thing for Shopify that I've seen some really good strengths with is if you have a lot of inventory yeah. And you just want to upload your lists to Shopify and you want Shopify to be kind of your inventory management system, that's awesome. Now it does connect to other third parties. However, if you have a very, I don't even want to say dated, I just want to say a inventory management system that doesn't talk well to other integrations. Really. Yeah. Then it's hard because you're literally doing inventory management on two separate, I just wouldn't even do that. I mean, if you're really thinking about updating your eCommerce site, you do need to be open to the idea of managing your inventory somewhere else. And if you're not, then you're really going to narrow down the platforms that you can use because you're going to have to find something that integrates with whatever your system is.
But that totally, yeah. I had no experience with inventory management and then just getting into Shopify and seeing what you could do with changing categories and tags and how that shows up. I'm super visual. So how it shows up on the site was really important to me. You have all of the levers available to you without having to have extensive like coding experience. Right. And I think I would encourage people, you know, if you're starting small and you're just really launching a e-commerce portion of your business, just start with a handful of products. It's so much easier to add later and you can upload a whole CSV file. So you know, you don't have to do it all manual. You can do it manually. There's a lot of kind of baby steps that you can take. And that's what's awesome about all three of these platforms, WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace is all of these can be started with in a very small price point.
We're not talking about a massive investment. You know, we're talking less than probably $50 a month in most cases. And at least you have the opportunity that if you want to do this on your own or you want someone else to help that you know the right questions to ask. I think regardless of which platform you choose. And like Chris, you've been involved in just like selecting like visual products with a couple of clients lately. And I know that they're not like selling those, but we, we had this this last year of if you're going to do an inventory and you're really going to try to make your user experience like something that's very, very easy for people to buy, your pictures need to be like next level amazing. Because there are companies right now popping out of nowhere who are very, very, very niche and they're just making the best looking green tee shirts ever.
And so the people have just so many different ways and different options. Right now on purchasing. So if you're going to move your product into the eCommerce space, your pictures need to be so visually appealing and so clear. I mean, everybody knows this just from like the Amazon experience. If you get something and you're like, that looks absolutely nothing like the picture. I mean, people will really call you out in reviews. So I think it's super important to make sure that if you're committed to moving to eCommerce, you're committed to doing a pretty substantial photo shoot with all of your products that look legit. Food photography is no joke. It is really hard. And so all of those things are things that you need to consider in the planning part of the website,
Right? And you need to have more than one angle. You need to have more than we need situational and environmental shots, right? So like your product in the world, and then you need standalone shots so people can see all sides of the product. And I think we just as users take it for granted because we do like, we know it's Amazon. I can see four different colors. I can see four different viewpoints and apparel is a whole different world than if you're trying to sell, you know, products or especially machinery or something that has very detailed parts that people care about but maybe aren't pretty, right. Like if you're trying to sell some sort of a device it's tricky. All right, so Shopify, what are some of the places you wouldn't use Shopify for or some of the, like, if this is important to you, hold up.
Oh, a lot of customizations. If you're really trying to make a, like I want this banner to be above the navigation and I want it to animate and then I want these four things here. If you have a very, very clear vision of this is going to be gray, this is going to go here and it's going to be red and you've either mocked it up in Photoshop or drawn it on a napkin, whatever that is. If you have a very specific look that you're going for, Shopify can do it, you're going to have to hire somebody else out to do it because you can completely customize everything. But that's probably not, I would not try to do that in-house unless you really have some coding and design experience, which we didn't mention earlier, but there are a million different types of people who make websites.
There is designers, developers, engineers, there's software, there's databases. It gets overwhelming very, very quickly. And so even if you're like, okay, I'm going to reach out to my friend's nephew, like I know he does stuff online. He might not be a designer, so he might code the crap out of a website, but it might look terrible. Yes. And so there's all of those things to consider, but I think extreme customizations I think you already mentioned this. If you have an inventory system and you're going to try to manage them on two different things, that just sounds like a just not great investment.
Yeah. And I think sometimes, you know, there are reasons why businesses do that and I get it. And maybe your current system doesn't need to fully speak to your other system. But I think my biggest kind of hold up with Shopify, which you mentioned a little bit, but the interior pages are just not super visual. And if you have a look field you're going for,
It can be done, don't get me wrong, but it's, you're going to have to use maybe some other tools or they're just a little bit more difficult to build then let's say a Squarespace or a WordPress where there's already some framework. Kind of out of the box. Which do you think would be easier? Like if I'm a business and I maybe am not eCommerce, but I do have a few items, would it be easier to add those items to maybe a Squarespace or a WordPress or to try to customize.
Like lower inventory? I honestly have been super impressed with Squarespace's. That's what I would agree with. If you have like less than 50 products, 25 products, I know they've really gotten up there, so I can't remember what their limits are. And I think you can have a customized plan, but if you have like less than 10 products, I'd just go with Squarespace. I don't even think Shopify is even worth all of the extra things unless, like you were saying before, you're planning on scaling, right? If you want to start with these 10 to figure out what's the, what are all the other plugins, which Shopify has very similar to Squarespace, a bunch of plugins, what do they call them? They're not called plugins. Apps. Apps. Yeah. Other apps that you can add to your site. If you, there's some really crazy ones on there like I was talking about earlier, cart abandonment and then it will send them an email and then if they click on that email it will send them another email.
If you're looking to release like a handful of products and then figure that out and then scale, I'd go with Shopify. But man, if you only have a couple of products, I just go with Squarespace. And literally anybody could manage it. Right. I agree 100% and I think that Squarespace has really upped their game on the just e-commerce side of things and it's just so easy to use. And we're not just saying this because - this is not sponsored by the way. It's just a matter of like, here's what we take into consideration. If we train people, when we do Squarespace websites, we train, we do WordPress websites and when we train people and we hand over those Squarespace sites, we have less people that are terrified, number one. Two they come back to and say, I don't get this. And three, like they're just like they use their site, they change their site, they make improvements, they can have other people help them.
Like they're not always tied to us at Chatterkick. And I think that all of those things really show that it's not just the service that we're providing. Right. It's the platform itself tends to just be easier to you. Yeah, it's an asset that they can own and manage. And I'd say like Shopify might be like second in that space, especially if it's somebody who has e-commerce experience. A lot of that e-commerce language is definitely the same, but it's just, even if you're managing e-commerce, like you're going to have to manage a website. So there has to be a little bit of crossover there. But I'd say like Squarespace, we get the least amount of questions on, Shopify would be next. Once people really get a hang on, right. Cause they're really managing their own system at that time and they're doing their own inventory.
Like they're, they're owning in it and then WordPress is just the worst. It's, but that's the one that we get like constant questions all the time. It's just such a mystery. Yeah. Always changing. None of them are the same. Yeah. No WordPress sites are the same. You really need a both a front end and a backend or somebody who can kind of straddle both of those roles. Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about Squarespace. So benefits we, touched on, easy to use, easy to change, lower price point. Any others? Scale content quickly. There's a lot of the Squarespace. I think the best thing about Squarespace is visually, agreed. The templates are amazing. They just did a huge update and kind of did it like a 2.0. A lot of the templates, the visual aesthetics are amazing. And my number one suggestion would be like go to Squarespace and stick as close to the theme as you possibly can.
Don't try to change a lot because then they start looking really wonky and weird. But the themes are really amazing. The templates are really easy to use. It's automatically mobile friendly and everything is just so responsive and built all in one. And a lot of the things that you were talking about earlier, like the domains and the hosting and the website hosting, it's all in one thing. You can even have your emails managed through there. So it's just like the best all in one scenario. But there aren't limitations in like you can do custom code, you can build the thing from scratch. You can have videos in the banner. Like you can use a lot of the things that are trending. Like a lot of the design components that are trending you can do in Squarespace. The things that you cannot do or like there's not a lot of crazy plugins, which could be a pro.
And a con depending on like where your business is. But I just think it's the most user-friendly. I've had a lot of friends that I'm like that I went to like this design school with zero web experience at all. I'm like just get in there and start messing around. And they end up with like a seven page site in two days and it looks amazing. Yeah. And I think you mentioned that, so Squarespace has these beautiful templates that they have front end developers, which in if you were a large business, you probably are very familiar with this, but in website design you have front end developers which do all the pretty stuff and they make a good user experience and Squarespace is doing all of that for you. Like the amount and value that you are getting with that is so important as opposed to you know, WordPress where people are kind of doing it on the side.
You may have a really good one or you may have one that's like pretty, but the backend is messy. Squarespace really puts that together well for businesses. And so I would highly recommend we, especially our friends and family that are like not necessarily the best fit for us as a partner, but they just want something quick and easy. That's where we would send them to Squarespace. It also can be very challenging depending on how big of a site you do. You can mess up a pretty template really, really, really quickly. And you know, let's say there's three columns. If you only want two columns there, all of a sudden that's a completely new plan. And so that's why
We come in and we can help with that. Yeah. You've kind of been getting into website a little bit more I think. Just to kind of tie to that up a little bit too. I think all the built-ins, I'm not sure if you touched on it, but like analytics do, I know they're trying to hold up their part of that. It's we're seeing some different stuff versus like Google analytics, but still just seeing, you know, what pages are being visited, what's working, what's not. But then like you said, you don't have to do the front end really the backend, too. I mean if you want to just be the content creator and gear stuff on a website, that's probably the easiest way to do it.
They have email marketing now you can send out like gorgeous looking emails directly from there. I just think from a, if it, if I had a small business, the last thing you want to do is spend more money on tools that you don't have time to use and this is one tool where you can really build a lot of it together. That's a very easy to use, especially if you don't have a designer on hand or on staff or you're waiting for your intern in the summer. It's just so much more visually appealing and it's easy and it's which saves time and saves money in the long run anyways. Yeah. I think too, the thing I love about Squarespace and I said we weren't going to talk about Wix and Weebly and all those other ones, but is the fact that you have an option so it will do everything for you.
But if you want to add Google Analytics, yes, add it. If you want us to send email through MailChimp, yes, do that. Like it's not closed. And some of these other platforms they just won't play with anybody else because they want to be that one stop shop but they don't allow you to make changes or adjustments or get into the code or really have any flexibility. So I think Squarespace is a really good use of both sides of that. The other thing, and we talked a little bit about kind of the, the pricing, but when it comes to development, I know for us our Squarespace sites are actually less expensive than maybe our WordPress and definitely for Shopify primarily because some of that cost savings is passed on to the clients because we don't have to start with a mockup that we are Photoshopping.
The templates are great, the templates are awesome. And so we have a, I always say it's like buying a Lego kit. You can pick your, your kit out and then we can customize it for businesses. And so the cost savings there has really been attractive for a lot of businesses that they don't feel like, man, you know, it's expensive to get a website developed regardless of platforms. So the number, okay. We talked like, I think visuals, all that number one, the number two thing that we, I don't think we've really touched on this a lot. Well, maintenance, oh for Squarespace? Yeah. The fact that people can take over that and really manage it in house is huge. And I think for anybody who's ever managed a WordPress site, especially over the last year, there has been so many changes and it's been absolutely crazy to now I have to go with all these servers are changing and the PHP and the WordPress 5.0 or whatever is now, and now Gutenberg's a thing.
And all of these words are things that I didn't know a lot of and I had to Google the crap out of. But there's been so many huge changes that have literally forced us to like move this site to a staging site, update it, and then see if anything's gonna crash and then move it back. Like I haven't had to do any of that in Squarespace. It just updates and says when there's going to be an update and then they make changes and I haven't seen anything crash. Like don't get me wrong. There's been a couple of days this year where Squarespace has been down. So that does happen. It happens with all platforms, but I haven't had to have crazy panic conversations from a lot of different clients about, well it hasn't been working for a month or these things aren't working. And usually if we do get those questions are kind of mostly user-error.
Sorry. But it is. And so just the maintenance side of things, like we want to make sites that people can just take over and manage on their own. They know when content needs to be changed. If the President changes or the board members change, they should be able to go in and change the names. Right. Somebody gets married or whatever, they should be able to go in and change the names. I just don't think that as a small business medium sized that any business should have to call a partner to go change a name and then get charged whatever. I just think you should have some level of control of that kind of content. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that we see and I will preach this all day, every day is have your access points. So know who manages your domain, know where it is.
Is it on GoDaddy, is it on Network Solutions, like where is this information, where's the password is not in a written down notebook. I'm telling the amount of times I've been asked for what, who manages this for us and what's the password like I have no idea. Sometimes people set that up. So get a system, I'm going to plug Last Pass or 1pass, like get a password system and not like a shared Excel doc cause that's kind of risky and absolutely, definitely not written on a notebook or a whiteboard somewhere, but get a system that has your list of assets and who has access and what the passwords are or what the different points are. Because if you lose access to your domain for example, and we need to make a change, it is impossible to get that because Steve set it up and Steve's no longer there and it was under Steve's old email, which isn't active anymore.
It's crazy the amount of like hoops you have to jump through to get some of this if you lose it. Yeah. And I just think that your domain, which is your www.chatterkick.com Right. Like that is really important that you keep the same cause it really makes a difference for search engines. Right. So don't let that go and have ownership of it and know who manages it, who has access to it, what credit card and credit card it's on. And try to log in every once in a while. I mean I, we get such again random pieces
Of information, passwords and old emails and pictures of people's notebooks and how many of those just don't work anymore. It's like, well I don't know your first pets name and I don't know your secret security answers and don't rely on your agency's to keep it either because I mean that stuff should live with the owner of the business and or the principals or your IT professional. Like you need to have that live somewhere and multiple people need to be kind of in the loop of where that lives. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to put this in here at this point, but also keep your logos. The other thing, like we build a site for somebody and they're like, hey, can you send us our logo? I know you had it for the website. Like keep your logos. That should go with the other important assets, logos, photos, whatever.
Like, make sure that you get those things. I mean whether we develop it or somebody else develops it or whatever. Make sure that you get all of those photos that somebody puts on your website and your logo so that you can have them for other assets that you have. But just make sure that you're staying on top of saving things. And I think it's like the last thing cause you're so excited cause you got a website, but I'm telling you the world of digital changes so quickly with technology that who knows what's going to happen in a year from now with the advancements in mobile. Like you might have to make significant changes to your website and you don't want the problem for you to not be able to do that. The barrier to be, I have no idea what our password is. Like that's just the last thing that you want to deal with.
If something happens or you get hacked cause it happens, it happens. I mean it happens locally. We've seen it happen. I mean like these are bad things that, that people can put inside your website from scams to weird international problems. We've seen them and we've seen them locally. So redirecting, it's not good. So definitely make sure that you have all of that information. This is a really good transition to talk about WordPress. Let's talk about the whole security beast. So first of all, let's say something nice about our friend WordPress because we have built our so many, our site is on WordPress. We have built lots of WordPress sites. Wordpress can be a great option for some businesses. The reason we always say it's kind of the redheaded stepchild of all of our website problems in watch and babysit. It's rules. It's just babysitting it. That's those sites you have to - I'm a middle child too, so I maybe shouldn't have that. I just feel like those websites, you just need to make sure that you are on top of, you need to make sure that you know how, what it was built, what theme it was built on. There's a lot of flexibility with WordPress. Like you can do anything. A lot of the major sites are built on WordPress. And if you're a large business, that's a great option for you because you can customize it all. And the thing I do love about WordPress is
That a lot of people know how to manage it and build it, and there's a lot of kind of support options that businesses may have with WordPress and in a lot of businesses have already started using it. So if your team already knows how to use a WordPress site and they love it, then that may be a good option for you to rebuild your site on. But let's talk a little bit about what your biggest concern is with WordPress, Kelsey. What do you see the most? I mean, WordPress is trying to catch up to the ease of use of Squarespace. So they're, I think they're making really big changes and it'll really come to fruition I think in 2020 of like how visual, the visual builder works and how some of these other platforms are changing. But I think um did you say some of my biggest concerns are some of my big, it's a pro and a con the amount of plugins that there are available to do really cool stuff and embed codes and whatever.
It's amazing. But what I've seen happen in the last couple of years is they're super susceptible. Like a lot of the times the plugins are super susceptible to being hacked, which then leaves your whole site. I'm just not in a good place. A developer made a plugin and they haven't made any updates, but WordPress is so far updated that now the next update, none of your stuff works anymore. Like just the vast difference of it's an open platform so anybody could develop anything and then you can plug it into your Lego kit and it could look really cool, but then all of a sudden that person's like, I don't want this plugin out there anymore cause I can do better. And they delete it. And that huge feature on your front page is now gone. Like you're really at the mercy of a lot of other people. So I think that that leaves things really in a scary place for, for businesses, especially small to midsize businesses.
But I also think the responsiveness if you're even at a basic level or intermediate level of design and development on WordPress. You have to make sure that everything that you're designing, you have to literally go in and make all the other input changes for mobile. Whereas like we were talking about Squarespace earlier just automatically happens. So like building our website, for example, when we did this was the last year, the year before, it might've been 18. Yeah. You know, we were, you know, two days away from just doing Squarespace instead, cause it was a pain. Yeah. But I wanted to show some of these other features that you could do with WordPress and I just thought, let's make it really unique to us. And I love where our website landed. There's obviously always things to change, but it was for another six months going in and like tweaking things on the mobile side.
Like, well this looks super weird on mobile. Why is this? Like the spacing is doing this. And even to this day, some of the pages on our site just like look like shit on mobile. Crap. Beep that out. I guess. The, I just think it's so much more hands on. So just from a design and development side but then just the amount of time that I am doing on a day to day basis right now, managing and maintaining access. This looks weird today. It didn't look weird yesterday or major changes. We have a lot of like medical clients that are like, okay, we're using this system, we need to embed it. And we embedd it and we go through the process and it looks bad and you know, the app people are like, that's you. And we're like, that's you. Like it just, there's no accountability in that when there's so many pieces involved. So you just gets really messy really quickly. And then the clients are like, I don't care which of you like, just figure it out. It just causes so many issues. We've seen a lot of WordPress sites get hacked. Yeah.
A lot. Let's talk about what a hack means because I think some people think that like that means they're stealing your information. That's not really, I mean, they might, they might, but that's not really what's getting what causes most of the problems. What a lot of these, I don't even know who does it and it's probably bots half the time, but they put these like backlinks within either your content or they try to back, it's called backdooring it and I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. But should we beep that out too. But they do that and then they try to send you to other sites. Some of them could be very strange. A lot of pharmacies, weird pharmaceutical type companies. It's just spam basically. That's what a lot of the "hacking" happens. Or we had this happen a lot like a few years ago. Like the robot text, they changed the name of your listing in SEO, how it comes up in, in Google.
The revolutionary cider was like a big, weak point. A couple of sides we've taken over recently have had like major plugins that are super susceptible to being hacked and crashed. Basically the issue is if you use this plugin, people are finding like crawling online for people who use this plugin and then they're going in and they're switching out that content that's in that spot and it kind of becomes this like banner ad for really weird stuff. And so those plugins or they literally just been crashing sites. Yeah. And so they completely remove them or they hold, this is been a whole other scarier area, but like they hold your site for ransom or like, and they were able to get in there and change the password and won't give it back unless you pay money or start a new one. So those are like the scarier ends of things. But I mean, I, I really do like WordPress. It's the only other platform that we will build on. So I don't want to say that it's all bad. It's just if it takes me one hour a month to manage your Squarespace site, it takes me like four or five to do the same basic things on WordPress
Yeah. We just want businesses to know that like if you are going to use WordPress, you need to be and you're going to manage it. You need to commit to managing it. Or if you are having someone else manage it, like it's important you realize
That four hours a website maintenance, even though you may not see any change on the front end, but there's still a lot of work that happens on the backend of that stuff and it's, it's necessary. I mean, you're kind of screwed if you don't do it. Yeah. All right. So I think we're ready to wrap this up. So let's just do a quick pros and cons about all the different sites for what you think the top benefit is and the top maybe challenge for each of the platforms. Kelsey, go first for which one? For all of them. All of them. Yeah. Okay. So Shopify, like managing your eCommerce and doing marketing all in one spot. Amazing. Not amazing. If you are not ready to completely give your inventory to that platform, like not a great fit. If you have a lot of products and are going to try to connect to multiple different things.
Squarespace is the number one, the most visual appealing and the easiest to maintain. Not a lot of plugins or flexibility when it comes to like completely making something from scratch. You can do it but it's a little bit more challenging but it's the easiest one to get just jump straight into. Wordpress. Amazing flexibility, amazing creativity, innovation, the ability to, you dream it, you can pretty much make it. And there aren't barriers like if you have a database or you want a major search input all of those things or you can do on WordPress. Not a lot of limitations there. It's just so much maintenance and it just gets so technical so fast. Okay. Chris, anything to add?
Yeah, it's a, with WordPress, like it's free to get started. I mean, some of the plugins, a lot of them are free. There's some paid stuff, but if you're just trying to get in and mess around, you can do that for pretty low cost. And like you said, if anything that you want to do on a website, you can do pretty much on a WordPress website. I think a, a third of all websites are built on WordPress. So there's that. But again, a lot of the, the upkeep as a trade off. So
And you're still going to need costs for your host. Free all the way around. You're not paying anything like theme and some of the plugins and they have some free ones. But yeah, that reminds me, you were talking earlier about like keeping your assets. A lot of these plugins you have a login separately and monthly cost. So like put that in that list of things because if you lose access to one of your plugins and it's the one that manages your entire search database, which is your conversion, like those things need to be kept sacred. So plugins are another thing to put on that list. Hot tip.
Yeah. And then going into the other platforms that if you just want to follow with what they do, it's going to be really easy to do, but then you're going to pay a little bit, obviously every month for that. But kind of just what you said, if you have a lot of skus and you want to go that way, stick to Shopify. Don't try to add a bunch of other stuff to it, just use what they sort of give you otherwise go with and kind of the best of design. You can have the other plugins too I guess if you are trying to do some commerce. So I would say all around if I, if without even talking to anybody, probably go to Squarespace. But then I think with anything you want to know what you're trying to do, why you're trying to get there and if something else makes more sense, obviously go that way
Before you, before you jump into yours, Chris, what like CMS, like what platforms of sites does your pod manage? Like, I know that you guys have been getting into a lot of social tracking and being able to like track where people are coming from and placing pixels and using Google tag managers. But and you guys don't have a developer in your pod, but which platforms are you guys managing or have you had to log in to make small changes to?
Squarespace and WordPress? Probably more so. Wordpress just with the few clients that we have. I think we built those a few years, maybe five years ago, six years ago. So for some of these, but and those, those changes, you know, it's either I have to go get help from somebody else. Even small stuff too, just because
Like changing the heading names. Yeah.
Like, because some of the plugins are outdated or you know, it's not, everything works together. Almost like a Frankenstein website. You're careful if you make a change somewhere, it might affect something on a totally different page or different functionality for reason though. There's no logical reason. So you gotta go,
I remember like Chris was and he's like, it wasn't even my fault. I know, but like Chris is like amazing at just like Googling something and like figuring out how and it will look right. But like he was just trying to change like one thing bold, one thing, not bold. And he ended up just like coding something specifically on that page. But like when he started, if you go in and start changing the design, it changes like all of your formatting for all of your headings. And so it was,
What about the cache or something? So I thought I brought, I mean I did, I made something bold and I updated it and I went to the live page and nothing, it was just, there was bare HTML. Like there was no formatting and I was just like, Oh, this was at like nine o'clock at night. And I was like, what the heck? And so I undid it and it was fine. And so then they changed it again. It's still, it just kept breaking.
So that's WordPress though. But that is one of the benefits of WordPress is the undo, right? Because because you have access to your host and if you have a good hosting company, you can revert to the last save backup, which could be a minute before individual page, there's restore. Squarespace. I can't restore any, no. I always suggest even on any site like CMS that you're making changes on, take a screenshot of the page before because, and especially on Squarespace, if you make a change because it's alive. Yeah, you cannot undo that change. But I always keep a screenshot so I'm like, Oh this is what the said or this is what this look like. You can save deleted pages altogether, but most of the time, like you're not accidentally deleting a page, you are literally like deleting sections and you cannot revert back on Squarespace. So that's a good point because that is scary that the, you know, quick change that you made and to be able to go in within minutes, I mean undo it, like is an awesome benefit and it's not the same on all those sites.
And so there's also IT companies that actually want full access to hosting or they want it hosted on their servers. And so sometimes that's where the deal breaker is with Squarespace and Shopify is, they're hosted, you know, on their servers. So you are a little bit at their mercy there. Right. I do know like these three and we're really talking, we're, we're talking to anybody but we're really talking about small to mid size businesses. But I do know even just in a conversation last week there might be susceptibilities to all of these that certain IT companies are just not willing to do and like they want to do a completely custom CMS and sometimes your organization has to figure out who, who has the biggest say, right? Is it user-experience or is it our IT team because they don't know, well, whatever, I'm not digging IT teams, whatever. But some of them just like aren't going to build the most visually appealing or the most like user-friendly site, but it will be secure as heck. Right. Well I think there's cost benefits to all those things. So hopefully we've given people a little bit of, at least the questions they need to be asking themselves or the team that's working on their new website build. And I appreciate your guys' input and time today. Thanks so much.