Why I Built BetterBlog (and Designed 40 Blog Layouts to Get There)
I love Squarespace. I build on it all the time, and I recommend it to clients constantly, usually while waving my hands around.
The blog, though. Oh, the blog.
When I started a blog of my own, I wanted it to read like a real publication: a sidebar, a table of contents, a header I could actually design, related posts that pick themselves, reading time on every piece, and room for more than one name on a byline. You know, the things every magazine site has. Squarespace 7.1 does none of them natively.
Fine. I customize Squarespace for a living, so I figured I'd build these things myself. Thirty hours later I was still fighting it, and the problem wasn't my code. The 7.1 blog post is one fixed column with nothing for custom code to hold on to. There's no sidebar region, so a sidebar has to be faked and wedged in. Related posts mean a Summary Block built by hand on every single post. Every feature on my list meant rebuilding the page around it, post by post, and the whole thing would break the next time Squarespace changed something.
So I stopped, went looking for how other people were solving this, and found the forums.
It was not just me. It was SO not just me.
A lot of people want the same thing
The Squarespace forum is full of people asking for better blog tools. This July, a Squarespace Platinum Partner posted a plea on the public forum that included this line:
"WE. NEED. BETTER. BLOGGING. FEATURES."
I felt that deeply!!
Quick nerdy background: a few years ago Squarespace launched a new editor called Fluid Engine, and it made regular pages wonderfully flexible. Blog posts still don't have it. They run on the older classic editor. Squarespace's own sidebars only exist in version 7.0, so if your site is on 7.1, you don't get one. Related posts are something you add by hand to every single post.
Meanwhile, designers like me patch it one site at a time with custom code.
So we built it
When a gap keeps costing me or my clients time, I tend to do something slightly unhinged about it. That's how CalButton happened: clients kept asking for a real Add to Calendar button, and Squarespace's event pages only have two little Google and iCal links. BetterBlog is the same instinct, aimed at the whole blog.
I hit up my engineer friend Scott Duane, who jumped on board the project. He's now my co-founder, and we've spent most of this year building BetterBlog. He built the back end, meaning all the parts you never see, like payments and comments. I did the design, which is how I ended up drawing five blog page layouts and five post layouts, each on desktop and mobile, with and without a paywall.
That's forty layouts. FORTY. My exact words when I counted were "40 [bleep] templates, dude."
Then we tested them. Our test blog is a fake space news site, so I've spent a lot of 2am nights reading made-up articles about rockets and checking whether a heading was 32 pixels or 28. (It was supposed to be 28.)
What it actually does
BetterBlog is one snippet you paste into your Squarespace site, once. (You'll need Squarespace 7.1 and a Core plan or higher, because that's where Code Injection lives.) After that, you run your blog's design from a dashboard. You can:
pick from up to ten templates (five for your blog page, five for posts), depending on your plan
turn on extras like a sidebar, a table of contents, reading time, related and popular posts, breadcrumbs and numbered pages (which ones depends on the template)
let readers search and filter your posts
put more than one author on a post
turn on threaded comments, with a moderation inbox in your dashboard
collect emails with sign-up forms and lead magnets
see how far people really read
It's built to pick up your site's fonts and colors, so it blends right in.
You can see the templates and the full feature list at betterblog.co.
Yes, it's a subscription
If you read our CalButton post, you might remember us side-eyeing every other option for coming with a monthly subscription. So yes, I see the irony.
BetterBlog is different because it runs a real back end. It stores your comments and sign-ups, crunches your reading stats, and has to keep working every time Squarespace changes something. That's ongoing work, so it's a subscription. Plans start at $9 a month, billed annually, and there's a 7-day free trial if you want to poke at it first.
Who we made it for
Me, first! But also:
small businesses whose blog brings in real clients but looks like an afterthought
writers, and anyone running a publication on Squarespace
fellow designers. If you've ever coded the same blog sidebar for the fifth client in a row, the Studio plan is for you.
Come say hi
BetterBlog launched today, October 19, and I'm a little giddy about it. If you're going to Squarespace's Circle Day in New York on October 21, come find us. We'll be the ones in the very purple shirts.
And if you'd rather not touch any of this yourself, that's my job, not yours. Book a 15-minute call and tell me what your blog is doing that makes you want to pull your hair out. I'd love to help!
