Goodbye Squarespace!

I take full responsibility for trusting the advertising from content creators. Pretty much every channel on YouTube, photography-related or not, had high praise for Squarespace. Get your website up in minutes. Super easy interface. Drag and drop. No coding needed.

At first, it was cool. Pick a theme, upload logos, match it to the branding I'd made for myself. Click, tap, boom, and I had the bones of a website.

Then I filled in the gaps with galleries of photos. Awesome. A dedicated blog section. Yes, this is what I want. Publish, and it's all cooking with gas.

My little space on the internet. Somewhere I could put up photos and point people to a URL that wasn't bolted to Instagram or another social platform. Great. I own this space. Instagram can't mess with this.

It was an illusion.

Squarespace is just another platform. There's nothing wrong with its ease of use, but you quickly discover all the systems hooked into it. They conveniently point you towards Squarespace's services and third-party agreements that keep you wired to them.

The shop is bolted to a specific vendor. Email campaigns and automations are connected to a higher-tier plan.

Any time I wanted to shift the site even slightly outside the templates, there was another wall. Custom code blocks. Custom HTML workflows. All outside the simple plan.

Then came the recent price hikes. I was done. If I didn't start getting off the platform, I'd become more glued in, and the break would only get harder with time.

I wanted a pocket universe to showcase my photos. Somewhere my visual diaries could live. Something I could change on the fly, move whenever I wanted, and never ask permission for.

So I decided it was time to get out. But that came at a cost: time and knowledge. I had to dig into my technical knowledge, outdated HTML, and baby coding skills that are pretty thin in practice.

It became a huge project. I learned new skills, consulted people I know, and used some AI workflows to fill in the blanks.

The goal was to keep the site content locally, with the new hosting platform essentially acting as a mirror of what I build. If something shifts, migration is smooth.

Once I got that down, the rest was simple.

The new site is mine. I can change it whenever I want, move it whenever I want, and never ask permission. It costs a fraction of what Squarespace did. In fact, the upkeep is essentially free. The migration had a minor cost because I had to move media and data across.

The switch itself was invisible. No downtime while the domain flipped over. Everything is the way I want it. The vibe and feeling of the site are all me. That includes the quirks.

It's the rough edges that show it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to work.

Right now, it does what I need it to do. The polish will come later.

If you're sitting on a Squarespace site, or locked into another platform with the same itch, I documented the whole move. Hit me up anytime and I'll see if I can help.

Same photos. Same address. No Boss.