What platform should you use for your website?

Squarespace is a great choice for brochure- or information-style websites.

We recommend the Business plan for all pro users of Squarespace, which gives you unlimited(ish) pages and all of the features of Squarespace. This will allow you to create nice landing pages, a clear customer "journey map" and a professional, yet easy to maintain site.

If you see yourself wanting to grow aggressively in the short-term, you may be better served by exploring Wordpress + managed hosting as an option–many of the new page builders work much like Squarespace and you'll have more flexibility to add features like memberships and granular SEO. If you're starting a store with a large inventory that needs to work with a point-of-sale system, you'll want to consider Shopify.

Wordpress has come a long way from the clunky blogging-focused platform that many people associate it with. Modern page building tools like Beaver Builder and Elementor combined with secure hosting like Flywheel can create a stress-free Wordpress environment. Plus, you can go deep into search engine optimization, thanks to some very cool add-ons for Wordpress.

Keep in mind, however, that there is often a bigger learning curve for Wordpress than other platforms and that unless you commit to quality hosting and security, you can have trouble. Don't skimp on hosting–seriously!

When it comes to stores, you can't go wrong with Shopify. If your primary focus is selling goods online, you can go far with this platform. We love that there are a number of apps you add to the system to highly customize the shopping experience for your target audience and many of the features–such as auto-categorization of new items–can make complex, large inventories less of a headache to manage.

If you're just testing the waters of selling goods online, some folks prefer to start with Squarespace and offer a handful of items to see what sells and to fine-tune their fulfillment processes. This is fine, just be aware that as your shop grows, you will eventually need to make a change.

We all start somewhere, so it sounds like you really want to test the waters and see if there's a place for your voice online.

A free or low-cost option like Medium or Wordpress.com can be great for this!

Another choice may be Squarespace's Personal website plan, which has a limited number of features but has a relatively low cost of entry and is pretty easy to use. You should know that with options like free or "freemium" services, you will probably eventually need to make a change, but both platforms allow you to export your data into Wordpress.org or Squarespace, so you won't be locked in. Just a note: We don't like Blogger as a beginner platform–it consistently has trouble when you try to move your data.