What’s the best website platform for your luxury brand?
Knowing which website platform to choose can be a minefield for a luxury brand. So we break down the options and cut through the fluff…
Luxury Brochure Websites
A brochure website is similar to an online version of a printed brochure. It shows the products or services your company provides, but unlike an e-commerce website, doesn’t sell products or services online.
The vast majority of small to medium sized luxury businesses need a simple brochure website that is visually beautiful and easy for visitors to navigate. The options here are typically Squarespace, Wordpress and WIX.
Our most recent luxury brochure website: TailorMadeAntigua.com (built on Squarespace).
LUXURY eCommerce WEBSITES
Shopify and Magento are eCommerce platforms favoured by luxury brands that sell a large number of products online followed by BigCommerce and WooCommerce (which sits on Wordpress). Squarespace, WIX and Wordpress can also handle eCommerce perfectly well too, unless you have thousands of products to sell.
Website redesign for a luxury belt manufacturer: lenlifestyle.com (built on Squarespace).
The others
There are many other popular choices for building a website such as CMS platforms (like: Drupal, Joomla, or Concrete 5), front end frameworks (like Bootstrap) and even web hosting companies like GoDaddy, 123-reg and Host Gator who are now offering their own web building platforms. But without completely overwhelming and confusing you, none are really high quality enough for luxury businesses in our opinion.
The exception to this rule is WebFlow. WebFlow is a new kid on the block and allows web designers (with basic coding knowledge) to create stunning, dynamic websites online. We love how WebFlow looks and works but it is in its infancy at the moment and has had a number of security and functionality issues recently. For this reason we need to eliminate WebFlow from our list of candidates although it is definitely on our radar for the future.
Ok, let’s narrow things down even more…
If we have done our job property and you are reading this, you are probably a small to medium sized luxury business looking for a beautiful luxury brochure or small eCommerce website. If so, this effectively leaves you with three choices: Squarespace, Wordpress and WIX.
WIX and Squarespace are online drag-and-drop website builders. Anyone can build a website from scratch with either platform but in our opinion WIX just doesn’t cut the mustard. We’ve never seen a WIX site that is up to our standards, but we’ve seen a lot of Squarespace ones that are. So now we have just two choices: Wordpress or Squarespace. Let’s explore the differences between the two…
we often say
Squarespace is like Apple and Wordpress is like Android.
squarespace
Squarespace is a walled garden. You have to use the tools they provide you with (in the same way Apple provides custom tools to App Developers) but the pay off is that the result always looks amazing on every device. Security is never (ever) an issue and everything works like a Swiss watch.
All the code is ‘baked-in’ and doesn’t need a ‘geek’ to make it work. This means a traditional web designer can build a beautiful Squarespace website without the need for a web developer.
wordpress
Wordpress on the other hand is a fully customisable, online content management system and is more unstructured than Squarespace. To build a Wordpress website you ideally need a web developer AND a web designer. This increases the scope for errors to occur and creates design compromises.
We can and do build Wordpress websites (and Shopify and Magento) but we tend to build them on Squarespace first and then migrate them over, as Squarespace is also a very good prototyping tool.
our clear favourite is
Squarespace
In our experience, Squarespace is by far the best choice for the majority of small to medium sized luxury businesses, where look & feel is probably the most important consideration. It offers a bespoke, stunning online presence that works elegantly on all devices and gives the owner the ability to add and edit content quickly and easily.
We feel Squarespace is superior to Wordpress for luxury businesses in so many ways. The problem is however that Wordpress is a well recognised brand. But well known doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Here are three tough-to-shake-but-completely-unfounded myths about Squarespace that have been doing the rounds online (and probably started by web developers ;-). Let’s dispel them now…
1. a squarespace website is not a ‘clean’ website
Web developers are obsessed by ‘clean’ code. Its a geek thing mainly but at the end of the day code is binary - it either works or it doesn’t. The creativity should be entirely in the hands of the designer and the client, not the web developer. Code doesn’t have to look beautiful, that’s the job of the website.
All the code is already baked-into Squarespace. This includes forms, images, video, social media integration, eCommerce, Payment Gateways, email integrations, so on and so forth.
Most web design agencies spend 50% of their time building a website and 50% designing it. In contrast, we spend 95% of our time creating and designing the site that your customers want to see and 5% making code tweaks to make sure it works perfectly.
The days of spotty web developers with wispy moustaches are numbered! You heard it here first.
2. SQUARESPACE IS A TEMPLATE-ONLY PRODUCT
Some people think Squarespace is a template-only web builder. It’s true that anyone can create their own Squarespace site - but chances are it's going to look similar to hundreds of other Squarespace websites.
Our answer to this is always the same: give a paintbrush to Monet and the same brush to a 6 year old. Who’s going to create the best work? We design completely bespoke, from scratch, custom-made luxury websites using Squarespace. Everything about them is unique to the client: branding, images, fonts, colours, layout, etc.
3. squarespace is no go for SEO
There is a completely unfounded myth that’s circulating for a while suggesting Wordpress is the best platform for SEO (search engine optimisation). This is simply not true. SEO is great on Squarespace. Period.
Site speed is also important to search engines in 2019 and Squarespace is very clever in how it optimises and compresses images. Most of the sites we build naturally perform at over 90% site speed, which is excellent.
And in terms of Analytics, Google Analytics can be integrated with a simple paste and click - plus Squarespace has its own built in Analytics which is very easy for the most techno-phobic person to use.
So, that’s our run down of the best web building platform for small to medium sized luxury businesses. It’s obvious that for a luxury brand who isn’t selling thousands of products online, Squarespace is our clear favourite. But most importantly it is our clients’ favourite too.
So if you are looking for a drop dead gorgeous luxury website… Let’s talk →