We Used To Build Websites. Now Our Own is on Squarespace.
As we approach our 10 year anniversary at Cobble Hill, we decided to relaunch our website, and this one is something I never thought I’d see when I started this company.
For nearly a decade, we’ve designed and built websites for a wide range of brands, so naturally our own website was a big component of our personal advertising strategy and reflected the various iterations of Cobble Hill. We updated the design every few years, and each iteration reflected where the company was at that given moment.
Our original website was built with plain HTML and quickly converted to a Wordpress ‘custom’ theme. At the time, custom websites were somewhat of a novelty for brands, but also a way to stand out. We certainly got a lot of business inquiries in our early days because people liked the way our website looked. Over the next several years, we would launch updated website designs to reflect our evolving agency, process, and core values. I looked a lot at Gin Lane in the early days for inspiration: I would giddily scroll through their new site the day it launched, amazed at the attention to detail and ‘artistic’ elements they would throw in.
As the web evolved, more agency sites began to look similar and homogenous: about page, service page, work page, etc. Each new site at Cobble Hill required lots of overthinking and a time investment for our team. In 2020, we spent the majority of the year designing and- more importantly- coding our new website. We decided to move away from Wordpress, which has a negative connotation among savvy web developers who much prefer a more modern framework and codebase. Understandably, good developers want to push their limits and use the latest and greatest technologies. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a web developer on staff, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain these newer custom codebases and technologies.
This is exactly what happened to us in 2021. We narrowed our focus into digital marketing and away from web development and, as such, lacked an in-house development resource. When it came time to add new case studies or blog posts to our website, the site would crash and I would have to fix it. This obviously wasn’t sustainable for us, I immediately regretted the decision to move off of Wordpress.
Over the past two years, I have championed the idea that brands, both new and old, should use Shopify or Squarespace’s pre-built template suite and instead of investing in a custom website, use that money to invest in content production, branding, and strategy. I finally decided to take my own advice and worked with our designer, Janelle Riolo, to find a Squarespace template that would mimic the website we had as closely as possible.
To our surprise, it was quite easy to find one that had the basic bone structure we were looking for. I initially tasked Janelle with transitioning the homepage to the Squarespace template as closely as possible. This wasn’t a problem, and her success reinforced my gut feeling that these templates were a simple launching pad to build a world-class modern website without sacrificing what was once considered ‘custom’ design.
The overall design transition took about a week and couldn’t have been easier to go live. The benefits of having Squarespace now are pretty apparent. Like Shopify, Squarepsace has a lot of the modern SEO features built-in, so you don’t need to utilize plugins like with Wordpress for SEO capabilities. Image compression happens automatically, so the site is fast and stable with Squarespace’s servers. We also have the added advantage of getting rid of the ‘hosting’ service we had for our custom site, so we save money.
As the world transitions into web3 and typical brand websites become even less important for discovery and commerce than ever before, it behooves most companies to invest- at least in the short term- into content and brand development. Not only are custom websites incredibly expensive, but they come with a tall technology stack that will inevitably change over the coming years with the adoption of blockchain technology, the ‘metaverse’ and AR built into the web experience. We will be comfortable with Squarespace and likely thrive on it as our designers - who have little coding experience- can make adjustments on the fly. We have the reduced headache of having to keep up with maintaining stable code between developers.
There is a time and place for brands to utilize custom ‘headless’ technology when it comes to Shopify, but I will continue to urge the brands we work with to invest in content, marketing, and their product before trying to build the best website. As we see brands continue to homogenize their digital experiences, I believe that even the worst websites will have higher conversion rates than the best websites if the product is truly of value.
Other companies may benefit from a custom website with headless technology, but I have a feeling Squarespace is just the thing to launch our second decade at Cobble Hill.
- Austin Dandridge