myotis
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- Messages
- 4,503
- Name
- Graham
- Edit My Images
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There are a few threads on this, so sorry to start another one, but it would be useful to me and hopefully others if it was possible to have a broad discussion about the differences in capability and cost. I, for example, wasn't aware of the likely additional ongoing costs that may well be necessary to run a high quality Wordpress site, beyond paying for a hosting service.
SquareSpace seems to be a good all round solution, easy to use, good templates for displaying photographs, possibility of more than one blog (so you could have one blog possibly aimed more at potential buyers of your photographs and a different blog aimed at photography topics), plus tools for eCommerce. There are some limitations with SquareSpace in terms of templates and flexibility, but it seems a good price for what it offers.
A hosted Wordpress site, seems to initially cost less than SquareSpace, but it would also appear that to get the sort of facilities needed to match SquareSpace, you probably need to add the cost of a commercial theme, maybe a gallery plugin and an eCommerce (plugin? theme?) which have annual fees that will quickly bring the costs up to matching, or exceeding SquareSpace. But with a lot more flexibility, for example, you could easily do a "photographer to photographer" blog that was completely separate from a customer orientated blog, with little extra effort or costs.
The obvious trade off is that the time spent learning Wordpress will be more than the time spent learning SquareSpace, and working out the division of responsibility between your wordpress host and you in terms of maintaining the Wordpress install (e.g. updates and security). In return you probably have a more capable tool, and not everyone will need the extra costs of an eCommerce facility, though in my mind I am thinking more of selling single "fine art" images than hosting proofs for client, where it would seem something like pixieset is a better option than either SquareSpace or Wordpress.
Although I have spent the last week, off and on reading up about this, and installed Wordpress on my NAS, and started to build a trial site, I would appreciate, any comments from people here on how they think they compare, when one might be better than the other, what sort of costs would be involved to emulate the SquareSpace capability in Wordpress.
Many thanks,
Graham
SquareSpace seems to be a good all round solution, easy to use, good templates for displaying photographs, possibility of more than one blog (so you could have one blog possibly aimed more at potential buyers of your photographs and a different blog aimed at photography topics), plus tools for eCommerce. There are some limitations with SquareSpace in terms of templates and flexibility, but it seems a good price for what it offers.
A hosted Wordpress site, seems to initially cost less than SquareSpace, but it would also appear that to get the sort of facilities needed to match SquareSpace, you probably need to add the cost of a commercial theme, maybe a gallery plugin and an eCommerce (plugin? theme?) which have annual fees that will quickly bring the costs up to matching, or exceeding SquareSpace. But with a lot more flexibility, for example, you could easily do a "photographer to photographer" blog that was completely separate from a customer orientated blog, with little extra effort or costs.
The obvious trade off is that the time spent learning Wordpress will be more than the time spent learning SquareSpace, and working out the division of responsibility between your wordpress host and you in terms of maintaining the Wordpress install (e.g. updates and security). In return you probably have a more capable tool, and not everyone will need the extra costs of an eCommerce facility, though in my mind I am thinking more of selling single "fine art" images than hosting proofs for client, where it would seem something like pixieset is a better option than either SquareSpace or Wordpress.
Although I have spent the last week, off and on reading up about this, and installed Wordpress on my NAS, and started to build a trial site, I would appreciate, any comments from people here on how they think they compare, when one might be better than the other, what sort of costs would be involved to emulate the SquareSpace capability in Wordpress.
Many thanks,
Graham
