GRZZ featured in Squarespace Project Spotlight

We were super thrilled to be featured in the Squarespace Circle January Newsletter in the Project Spotlight.

That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight…

We submitted the work we did for Albury Florist Thistle & Fern last year and were thrilled to receive some good news from Squarespace Headquarters in New York.

Snippet from the newsletter - you can view the whole thing on the Squarespace Website

We are big fans of the Squarespace Platform and it was exciting to be chosen as January’s Featured Project.

Artificial Intelligence

A.I, GPT-3, DALL·E

If you’re unfamiliar with these words then you might have been on holiday recently. The Artificial Intelligence movement has been creeping up on us for some time… and it’s now here with a bang!

I had a play around with it and used ChatGPT to generate some headlines for the GRZZ website.

I used the prompt “Write a tagline for a WordPress and Squarespace specialised digital agency” and it came up with:

“A Digital Agency for WordPress & Squarespace: Innovate, Design, and Grow Your Online Presence"

Pretty good, so good that I used it on the front page of the website.

A.I Generated Image

I used the prompt “artificial intelligence black and white illustration sketch” to generate the image above. I can see now where Radiohead gets their album covers from.

ChatGPT

Check out what ChatGPT responds to with the following question:

Write a biblical verse in the style of the King James bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.

Its reply:

And it came to pass that a man was troubled by a peanut butter sandwich, for it had been placed within his VCR, and he knew not how to remove it.

And he cried out to the Lord, saying, "Oh, Lord, how can I remove this sandwich from my VCR, for it is stuck fast and will not budge?"

And the Lord spoke unto him, saying, "Fear not, my child, for I shall guide thy hand and show thee the way. Take thy butter knife, and carefully insert it between the sandwich and the VCR, and gently pry them apart. And with patience and perseverance, the sandwich shall be removed, and thy VCR shall be saved."

And the man did as the Lord commanded, and lo and behold, the sandwich was removed from the VCR, and the man was saved.

And the Lord said, "Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in thy VCR, for it is not a suitable place for such things. Rather, keep thy sandwiches in thy refrigerator or on thy plate, where they belong."

And the man heeded the Lord's words, and from that day forth, he kept his sandwiches in their proper place and was saved from trouble and woe. Amen.

🤯

It’s pretty amazing. The possibilities are endless: writing copy for blogs, articles and headlines, entire websites, and novels with 3 parts.

Google keeps saying they will penalise A.I.-generated content but I just don’t know how they will do it.

I’m sure that it won’t be too far away when Squarespace introduce A.I. prompts directly into the application. It’s not just text either, there are A.I. generated stock photography sites out there that work pretty well. It won’t be too long until they are indistinguishable from the real thing.

It’s interesting times ahead and there are applications for A.I. that will blow everyone’s mind that haven’t even been thought of yet.

Squarespace and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is an important factor to consider in all web projects.

Google Ads are a good option but can be very expensive. There is also a trust factor to “natural SEO results” rather than ads.

SEO changes constantly and it can be a battle to keep up with it.

I’m a big fan of Notion and I have checklists for everything!

Here’s our 10 Point Checklist for making sure everything has been completed for “on-page” Search Engine Optimisation and your website will rank well in Google.

10-Point SEO Checklist

1. Descriptive file names on all images - e.g. thistle-and-fern-delivery-van.jpg

2. Descriptive title tags and header tags - H1, H2, H3, H4

3. Descriptive Alt tags on all images

4. Images optimised and checked with google Pagespeed

5. All product pages contain descriptive URLs, e.g. - https://website.com.au/order/category/descriptive-file-name

6. Custom Social Sharing thumbnail

7. Permanent 301 redirections from the old website to the new website to maintain your “Google Juice”

8. Google Analytics setup and integration with Squarespace Analytics and Google Analytics

9. Connect and verify the site with Google Search Console

10. Submit XML sitemap to Google Search Console

    and a bonus point!

11. Check for any broken links and pages (404) using Google Search Console

No-Code Revolution

The No-Code revolution is here and I for one welcome our no-code overlords!

No-Code has tried to become a part of our lives and has been held back time and time again, but this time it’s here to stay. I remember using Dreamweaver and other pseudo WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools 20 years ago, but they were frowned upon as creating bloated code and slow-loading pages and were not something a coding purist would use.

Many technologies have been held back as they were seen as “non-enterprise”. PHP was a big “no-no” for a while, as it couldn’t scale… UNTIL Facebook made it scale. Then it was ok, and people started using it for enterprise applications.

The people telling you that you can’t do something had vested interests, and it usually came down to that person protecting their job and what they knew best. They didn’t want change, they wanted to keep getting paid for something they knew how to do. Well, it’s adapt or die and anyone that ever worked at Kodak will tell you that for free.

GRZZ is embracing the "No-Code" movement as we can see that's where the future is. Just like WordPress was a blogging tool that became a development framework, Squarespace and Webflow are just starting to gain that traction and acceptance as enterprise tools.

The issue in scaling is not in the software; it’s in the server architecture and using tools such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) now makes that part of it easy.

We have done so much work lately converting WordPress to Squarespace sites, as they are so much easier to update and use.

Figma is another kind of No-Code / Design tool that has been gaining a lot of attention lately. It makes creating prototypes super easy without a line of code, and deserves its reputation, although I’m not thrilled about the buyout by Adobe. Adobe makes great products, but their pricing structure and monopoly on design industry tools are not good for anyone (apart from Adobe).

Shopify used to be considered a "non-enterprise" tool until the likes of Frank Body and Who Gives a Crap started selling millions on it. Squarespace will do the same, eventually bringing out a Pro/Plus version just like Shopify did.

We plan on being there and ahead of the curve when that happens. Steep learning curves are hard, gradual learning curves are easy.

Which CMS should I use?

It can be a confusing choice, but it depends on your end goal. What are you trying to achieve? You don’t need a Ferarri if you only drive to church on Sundays, and a Toyota Camry won’t cut it in F1.

We have been using Squarespace a lot lately and it kind of started by accident, I never expected it to be such a capable tool - you can read more about how that happened here.

I can see a bright future in Squarespace, but it’s not suitable for all scenarios.

Creating forms on Squarespace is fiddly and not very good. That said, it is effortless to use a tool such as Hubspot and embed the form directly into Squarespace.

Squarespace doesn’t have a “Revision History” feature as WordPress does, so if you have a lot of users editing your site it’s not going to work well, and you’re in danger of losing content which is not much fun.

Squarespace is so much easier to use than WordPress though, it’s point and click and very easy to change things whilst still being limited to the site styles (fonts, colour palette), so you don’t need to worry if the intern prefers Purple Comic Sans.

WordPress or Squarespace?

A lot of the time it comes down to what you know and what you are familiar using and many people have grown up with WordPress and it’s quick and easy for them to update their site.

WordPress needs to be maintained regularly, WordPress code and Plug-ins which can take a lot of time. It also breaks. I would say 10% of the time when upgrading WordPress and Plugins something will break.

If you are just focusing on selling I would use Shopify. If you are a government agency or a publisher I would look at Drupal.

Having the right tool is important but it’s not everything. Coming from a music background I used to get stuck on what DAW I should be using, Logic or ProTools, or what are the best software synths and I would spend hours comparing them when in hindsight I should have spent more time just writing music.