Simplified Plans and Pricing

Today, Squarespace is pleased to announce new service plans and across-the-board price reductions which we are making immediately available to all customers.

In an ongoing effort to simplify our service, Squarespace now has only two service plans. We’ve also doubled discounts for annual purchases to 20%.

• Our new Standard plan, beginning at just $8/month (with annual purchase), is appropriate for personal blogs and small websites, and allows you to use a custom domain.
• Our new Unlimited plan, beginning at $16/month (with annual purchase), is perfect for business and personal sites of any size, and includes absolutely everything our powerful platform has to offer, including unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Visit our pricing page for all the details about the plans, their pricing, and their features.

Switching to one of our new plans is easy. Simply go to your Website Manager > Billing & Support > Account Center, and select the plan that best suits your needs. Please note that existing coupon codes won’t work with the new plans. Of course, if you are happy with your current plan, you don’t need to do anything and can keep any previously offered rate.

If you have any other questions, please review this FAQ page on our help site, or contact our support team. They’re available 24/7 and usually respond in well under an hour.

From the Help Desk: Image Issues

This post kicks off a new series, “From the Help Desk,” where we explore some of the questions seen in the support queue.

One of the most common issues we see day-to-day has to do with images. Specifically, “What size should my image be?” Sometimes this is accompanied by, “Why don’t my images show up?”  While we have a checklist for helping to ensure your images are all set for the web, I’d like to call out the main culprit: your digital camera.

Whether it’s a point-and-shoot or a fancy DSLR, your digital camera does not take web-friendly images. (Unless, of course, you’re still using that hot ticket from 1996.) Your camera's images are meant to be printed. Printing requires quite a bit more detail than displaying an image on a computer monitor. More detail equals more data, which equals larger file sizes, which, of course, equals slower load-times on your website.

Since you want your images to display nice and crisp, think pixels. And to think pixels, you also need to think photo editing. You'll need to use an image editor to get the most of your photos and we have a few recommendations.

Once you have your image-editing program of choice, open it up and decide how large (in pixels) you want your images to appear on your site. For content areas look to the column widths you’ve set in the Style editor. For picture galleries, look to the maximum width you’ve set in the gallery properties. (Hint: unless you’ve changed it, the default max is 1200 pixels wide.) Once you’ve determined your picture widths, save your images to be no larger than that size. Be sure your pixels per inch (PPI) are set to 72, as this is the most common pixel density for screen display. The result will be a crisp image that loads quickly.

While we’re on the subject of saving images, the other common issue we see has to do with files that aren’t images at all. While PDF and Word documents may contain images, they are not a valid image format and (most) browsers will not display them. We recommend you use one of these 3 file types: .jpg, .png, or .gif. You can convert non-image files to one of these formats using the programs I mentioned above. After that, you're good to go.

For more help with images, visit our help site, contact support, or sign up for our “All About Images” workshop. 

#nomnom

Our three-story banners have been hung, the food truck has been wrapped in jet black vinyl, and Team Squarespace is on the ground in Austin, TX, ready to feed you – for free – the city's finest fare at SXSW 2012.

To get on-the-ground info, pick up your phone and visit austin.squarespace.com for our mouthwatering menus and more. Bookmark the page on your home screen for an even fuller experience. This site is built with Squarespace 6 and highlights a number of features native to our new platform, including:

• Responsive design
• Distinct desktop and mobile experiences
• Calendar page and event items linked to time, images, and location
• Auto image scaling and focal point cropping
• Geolocation

We'll be in Texas for 9 days so please swing on by and say hi. We'd love to see what you're working on, and show you the all-new Squarespace 6.

P.S. Don't forget our meetup on Sunday at 5PM.

Squarespace is not affiliated with SXSW Inc.

9 Days in Texas: SXSW 2012

It's that time of year again and the Squarespace team is heading to Texas for South By Southwest. After the massive success of our food truck last year, we've decided to it again—but bigger. This year we'll be in Austin, TX, the entire week, from March 9th-17th. That's nine whole days of amazing food from Austin's best vendors.

But of course, that's not all. Swing by to get an inside look at Squarespace 6 from the people who built it. We'll be showing our new product all week, and giving out beta invitations right on-site. Don't miss out.

Here's everything you need to know:

THE LOT

Come and visit us at the Squarespace Food Truck for free food all week! You can find us in the same spot as last year, parked at 5th & Neches (one block from the convention center). From March 9th through the 17th, we'll start serving every day at 11AM, stopping when the food runs out. Enjoy a custom playlist of killer music, courtesy of our friends at exfm, while you eat.

Here's the whole mouthwatering list of vendors:

• Friday, March 9th: The Peached Tortilla
• Saturday, March 10th: Salt & Time
• Sunday, March 11th: P. Terry's Hamburgers
• Monday, March 12th: Three Little Pigs
• Tuesday, March 13th: Izzoz Tacos
• Wednesday, March 14th: East Side King
• Thursday, March 15th: Man Bites Dog
• Friday, March 16th: Franklin Barbecue
• Saturday, March 17th: Foreign & Domestic

Finally... did you order your MOO "We met at SXSW" Business Cards? The Squarespace Food Truck is happy to be serving as a pick-up point. MOO will be at our lot March 9th-13th from 10AM-1PM. Pick up your business cards and grab some food at the same time.

A TEXAS-STYLE MEETUP

We're hosting a special meetup for our customers and friends on March 11th at 5PM. Swing by the lot for demos, drinks, and conversation. RSVP here.

STAY UP TO DATE

+ Want to know what we're serving? Need directions to the lot? No problem. We've built a mobile web app for you to do just that. Visit our official event mobile web app: austin.squarespace.com

+ Be sure to follow @Squarespace on Twitter to keep up with where we are.

See you in Austin!

*Squarespace is not affiliated with SXSW Inc.

Update on 2012-03-08 17:50 by Squarespace

Food Truck Updates: Beverage Edition

• Coffee drinkers, come get your morning fix at SXSW courtesy of Cuvee Coffee. They'll be serving all kinds of caffeineted delights every morning before the food truck opens, from 8:30AM until 11AM. 
• And during meal times, we're excited to offer an array of flavors from Maine Root Soda to pair with your food. Enjoy!

Build. Code. Collaborate.

It’s no surprise that engineers have more ideas bouncing around the back of their minds than time to work on them. There are always a million things in the queue that have to happen first. A few months ago, some of my co-engineers and I were venting about it over some beer, and started talking about what we could do. We came up with the idea of a company hack day. It’s a perfect solution: a time to bring these ideas to life, try something new, and move quickly, without everyday deadlines looming.

The real goal of a hack day is to build something, usually from scratch, in a single day. The idea itself doesn’t matter so much—it’s more about getting that idea built so that it can be demoed at the end. The code doesn’t have to be perfect or even elegant...that can be fixed later. But it should be functional to give your idea life. It’s amazing what can be built in a day.

Squarespace held its very first company hack day a few weeks ago on a Saturday in January. The day included about 15 engineers, who all started coding at 10AM. The office had a vibe of quiet intensity—with most of the day spent diligently hacking out code. Of course, there were numerous breaks for food, drink, and discussion. At 10PM the coding stopped and each group demoed what they had built. (This is always my favorite part.) It was incredible to see what everyone had put together in such a short amount of time, and a lot of fun to show off the result of our efforts.

Some developers had worked in groups, and some alone, but everyone tackled an area they were particularly interested in. A few people explored their own wishlist third-party integrations like audio-players, while others had some fun with bookmarklets. And of course, we'd never leave out the hack-day-standard map with real-time data visualization. 

When you think about it, a hack day is an act of creative expression. It’s also an incredible source of new ideas, approaches, and a great learning experience, all of which made it a real boost of energy for the team. For me, it evoked memories of late nights spent in my university’s computer lab, hacking out code with my teammates in a rush to meet our deadline. I always found this rush exciting, especially the sense of moving quickly to bring something from idea to functioning program. I’m glad we got to bring that to Squarespace.

We can’t wait to do it again.