Wordpress or Squarespace - it comes down to the templates

I wrote previously about how Squarespace templates and their whereabouts.  Recently I've been helping a friend with a new site for his business.  Initially we went with Squarespace and started modifying one of the standard templates, but my skills aren't up to the job of completely transforming the site to look unique and to lose that squarespace-templated feel.  We decided to have a crack at Wordpress once more and were very impressed.  It's been a little while since I last played with Wordpress and it's come on a long way.  What's more, the range (and quality!) of templates is phenomenal.  I'm afraid that until the template selection improves, I'll be using Wordpress for clients needing a professional looking site with little effort.  Themeforest was the site of choice for themes for us and we bought and used an excellent template - Traject. Take a look.

I'll keep Galoomp with Squarespace for a while - mainly due to the fact that I haven't got the time to shift it to WP, but also because I don't have a need for anything flash...yet.

A list of Squarespace tutorials and tips - video and otherwise

Having signed up with Squarespace a few months ago, I've spent a lot of time looking for tips and advice on how to make a squarespace website stand out and how to achieve it with Squarespace's tools and built in templates.  I've been putting together some sites for friends and colleagues, and was looking for some tips and inspiration.  In the process, I've come across a bunch of really good video tutorials that I wanted to share.

Naturally, the Squarespace Developer Forums are an excellent place to start as well as Squarespace's own Help Videos. On that page you'll also find some excellent live build videos.

A video demonstrating the build of Dan Trachenburg's blog at www.trachenburg.com

T3chH3lp demonstrates some tweaks to their site here too:

Other Tutorials

Various ways of displaying images for photography sites

Examples are displayed as well as the code and any tweaking necessary

Jerermy Blanchard's site - Bathrobe Warrior - has a bunch of great, short how-to clips.

For me, the best videos are the live-builds.  Each video starts with a vision of how the site will look in the end, a brand new clean empty squarespace template as you'd see it if you had just signed up and then all of the steps to get from start to finish get demonstrated. This is perfect for those taking their first steps and want to see how the pros do it.

If you come across any other useful Squarespace videos...let me know.

Update on Sunday, June 6, 2010 at 3:05PM by galoomp

For Pierre - A video that touches on creating Data Snapshots within Squarespace.

Squarespace Ad from Nick McIntyre on Vimeo.

Where are all the Squarespace templates?

I would have thought that with the increased popularity of Squarespace, there would be a corresponding increased demand for professionally designed templates a la Wordpress.  As flexible as Squarespace is...and it IS, it's still a little challenging for the novice to be able to come up with an an innovative design by adjusting some sliders and picking some colours and fonts here and there. Great for tweaking designs but starting from scratch is tough.

The built-in templates are very good, but limited, and with Squarespace users increasing in numbers day by day, it becomes difficult to be original.  Clearly I've not played around with this one too much....but if I could find some templates it'd be different.

Anyone know of any sites offering CSS templates for download? Either that or some advanced tutorials on how to make it look different?