Is SquareSpace Better than ZenFolio?
To start, I am a geek that loves photography. The geek side of me helps with technical work such as my website and a fast learning curve on software. I initially started on SquareSpace years ago but moved to Zenfolio because Zenfolio filled a niche that I thought I needed so I hosted my website there for about 3 years.
TLDR;
Zenfolio is too expensive and SquareSpace has a much better set of tools to customize my website.
I was fine on Zenfolio and was very pleased with their support and service. However, in recent months they raised the price and added a fee of .99 cents on all transactions including when providing free images. So, what is the big deal with just .99 cents? Read on.
On occasion, I provide my services free for Non-Profit organizations. In addition to my time, I provide free digital downloads. Now Zenfolio wants .99 cents per download which can get very costly. I can see about 90 photos or more during the day. If all of the images are downloaded it would cost me an ADDITIONAL 90 dollars on top of my base annual fee.
Zenfolio essentially just priced itself out of my budget.
I was not left with a choice. After opening a ticket with Zenfolio, the response was to provide the images via a sharing technique that they have specific YouTube videos to not do. However, that would be temporary while they are working on a way to pass the cost through to my customers. However, with my customers in this case I would be carrying the cost.
My move to SquareSpace was not without issues. Zenfolio does not have a way to export their information - but to be fair if you are switching platforms no service has an export that would work with your destination. Also, when I started rebuilding my site on SquareSpace I used my original site that was there. I still had an account on SquareSpace but it was a free account so it was just dormant. About halfway through rebuilding, I noticed some features missing that I was reading about and discovered my old site was on version 7.0 and I needed to be on 7.1.
There is no migration option for going from 7.0 to 7.1. I opened a ticket with SquareSpace and they provided me with an article that could have been written much shorter with two sentences: “We’re sorry. To migrate from 7.0 to 7.1, you must rebuild your site.”
To wrap things up here, my site is officially on SquareSpace 7.1. I have moved all my Photography Tips and Tricks and will be working on other blog posts as well.
