Having received the notifications about the 7.1 upgrade, I finally decided to see what the process of upgrading was all about. After reading about it and pouring through the help center, I'm absolutely appalled.
Final answer: SquareSpace offers no options for upgrading other than completely recreating our sites.
Not believing such a thing could possibly be true, I kept searching the help forums.
The first alternative I found involved using SquareSpace's competitor, WordPress, as a temporary holding spot to move my photography blog into version 7.1.
"I'm sorry, sir, but to upgrade to the new version of gMail, you'll need to first create an AOL.com account, then forward all your archived messages to AOL, then upgrade gMail, and finally email everything now in AOL back to gMail. The process will only take you countless hours/days of your life, quite possibly change how every email looks, and destroy your will to live. But hey, it's all free!"
The next option I uncovered was to use a third-party, paid plugin.
So apparently we're expected to believe that the programmers over at SquareWebsites ("Not affiliated with or endorsed by Squarespace") have figured out how to migrate from 7.0 to 7.1, but the SquareSpace team can't build a beautiful new platform that is directly accessible from their previous platform.
The last option I read about is that we simply pay a third-party consultant to do all the work. Sorry, but I don't even want to consider what that might cost.
How can it possibly be true that SquareSpace upgraded its own product and then provided no reasonable method for existing customers to move to their new version? Are you mad at all of your existing customers? Is our subscription money insufficient? I swear I've never said anything bad about SquareSpace and have only recommended it to others, and for seven years running have always paid my subscription on time!
Apologies for being so blunt, but have you people lost your minds?
Certainly, this must be a bad dream and your upgrade process/tool-thingy will be along soon and is just delayed for some reason, right? C'mon, please tell me that's what is happening. Please?
