So you may have noticed from the different look of this page that I decided to scrap my old website and make the move to a new WordPress site. In the past I’ve always treated my homepage like a learning project and have written everything from scratch – from coding the rss feeds to designing the css – but recently I’ve been working longer and longer days at work, and the idea of adding new features to homepage has started to just feel like a chore. Besides, nowadays there are a pile of decent blogging systems, all providing more functionality out-of-the-box then I’d ever have the time to turn out myself.

I haven’t tried any blogging software before (apart from a little holiday blog I wrote whilst we were traveling around Japan using Blogger) but from doing a bit of research the two most impressive-looking solutions were WordPress and Squarespace. As I wanted to put two sites together recently – a site for the touch rugby team I play for, and the rewrite of this site – I had a go at making one with each system. So if you’re trying to decide whether to go for a Squarespace or WordPress blog, here’s what I though about them.

How much did they cost? I chose to self-host WordPress using one of their recommended hosts, Dreamhost which you can find discounted for about $4 a month and got my domain name through Yahoo which cost another $10 for the year. For Squarespace I went for a package that, after a discount voucher for 12% and another 10% off for paying for a year upfront, ended up costing about $120 for the year. Weirdly you can’t get a domain name through Squarespace, so I ended up getting one through GoDaddy. Squarespace ended up costing roughly twice that of WordPress.

So what do you get for the extra money? Squarespace sell themselves on being the easiest to use solution, but really their big advantage is their architecture. Sites hosted on Squarespace can take massive amounts of traffic without going down, even if one of you’ve pages ended up getting hammered by the Reddit or Slashdot crowds. If you’re measuring your daily hits in thousands of uniques then Squarespace will be the choice for you. Even if you’re not pulling in that kind of traffic, sites hosted on Squarespace get served up incredibly quickly.

In terms of the time spent setting up the two sites it was pretty much a wash. Squarespace is ready to go immediately, but Dreamhost offer a one-click install of the WordPress software so there was nothing to do in either case outside of sorting out the domain name servers.

Changing the design of your site is handled impressively in Squarespace. You can edit everything directly on the page to see instant results – don’t like the size of a column, just drag it until it looks right. It’s slick, and definitely easier than editing CSS files, but if you don’t want to create a complete design from scratch, you only have a handful of starting themes to alter. Editing in WordPress requires some CSS know-how, but with thousands of beautiful, free themes available you probably won’t even bother.

As well as the extra themes, WordPress also has thousands of free plugins available if you want to add extra functionality to your site. This is a huge advantage over Squarespace. They also offer a good set of plugins, and the average quality is much higher, but if the functionality you want isn’t included you don’t really have any options.

So there isn’t a clear winner as both solutions offer features the other can’t match. But if I was going to make another site and handling large amounts of traffic wasn’t an important issue, I’d say keep the money and go for WordPress.