Site URL: https://www.rochestertag.com/
So... I hate it — like, hate hate it, like can't use it without screaming curses... and I'm honestly confused as to why this isn't the dominant conversation topic in the SS community.
Can anyone shed light on this?
My experience: I've made oodles of sites in SS. I love(d) SS, and have been an enthusiastic evangelist.
When I started my newest site, I found out that I'm required to use FluidEngine. I wasn't excited about this — it promised a learning curve that I didn't want to take on in a busy month — but, whatever. Gotta roll with the punches.
My experience of FluidEngine so far has been nothing but woe. I have three questions for anyone who can share their experiences.
1. What's the benefit supposed to be, again?
The primary benefit (to judge by all the videos I've watched on YouTube) is that now we can stack words on top of images. This is a neat feature that I do not need to use. So the primary improvement is, for me, no improvement.
(Am I wrong about this? Is there another, better feature that FluidEngine is supposed to give us?)
2. Now it's more complicated to make a page, right?
Even if I were really good at using Fluid Engine (and... maybe I will be, someday? maybe I'll stick with SS?... maybe?), it seems like it would still be significantly more work to make a simple page.
I get the drift that the old philosophy of Squarespace ("Build it beautiful") was to limit the number of decisions we could make, to nudge our sites into elegance. (Wanted to complicate it? That's what CSS was for.)
Now it feels like they've flipped the philosophy — we're forced to make tons of decisions just to put up something simple.
(Am I wrong about this?)
3. It's hard to get the spacing to work on mobile, right? Like... REALLY hard, right?
I loved — loved — how effortlessly my sites used to appear in mobile. There were times I had to wrestle with it, but they were rare, and only when I was trying to do something weird.
But now — please, please tell me if you have a different experience — the spacing for mobile is really hard to work out! Like, IMPOSSIBLE to work out.
I didn't trust my judgment of this until I saw this video by Will Myers. His solution (a code injection, some custom CSS, and some juggling) is ingenious — and should not be necessary to ensure a site looks good on a phone.
(It's telling that, during his explanation, he struggles to make it work. Check out 7:20 — "This is something you need to be careful of, because I don't think Squarespace really likes you doing this, it wants to just force the extra space for some reason, I'm not really too sure why.")
(God, am I wrong about this? Please tell me I'm wrong about this. Whenever I try to imagine the folks at Squarespace — who have up to now been such fastidious designers — saying, "ah, screw spacing, nobody cares about spacing!" my mind explodes.)
Is anyone else being driven flipping insane by this?
And does anyone know if there's a way to opt out of Fluid Design, even if for the near-term future?
