dev_willis

A friend with a Squarespace site wants to refresh their site with a new theme/template but couldn't figure out how to do that. I volunteered to investigate the issue for them, which led me here. I'm flabbergasted to find that it's really not possible and the only way to refresh the design of a site is to cancel the whole account and start a new one. Even if you wanted to go to the trouble of manually changing all the things, it appears there's no option to do it in a staging area and push it live once it's ready. You'd have to either do it live where everyone will see it as you're working on it or shut your whole site completely down until you're finished. Unbelievable. I can only assume that this is some kind of cost-savings measure on the part of Squarespace, possibly to minimize man-hours spent by their team, because, from a UX perspective, it sure seems exceptionally bone-headed. And, while I'm ranting, what's going on with the versioning system? They push the biggest change to the system in years but instead of incrementing the major version number they increment the minor version? Going from 7.0 to 7.1 implies a feature update, maybe some bug fixes, and that backwards-compatibility has been maintained. A massive change like this which is incompatible with the old system should require a major version change; this should be 8.0, not 7.1. Some really perplexing decisions from Squarespace here.