The blogging space is cluttered with lots of options including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Squarespace, and many more. Today Squarespace is releasing a new blog importing tool that hopes to attract many bloggers over to Squarespace’s blogging engine. Squarespace had originally provided a simple importing tool to its users.
Squarespace’s new blog importing tool supports most of the main publishing platforms; Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type. After entering your login credentials, the Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. Squarespace is also working directly with Amazon S3 — Squarespace will bring all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to Squarespace’s Amazon S3 account. For users who want to retain custom domains, Squarespace will use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts automatically.
Squarespace’s founder, Anthony Casalena tells us that Squarespace submitted an iPhone application to the App Store two weeks ago, which hasn’t been approved yet and should be coming “soon.” Also, this is the only current way to exit a self-hosted site right now. This importing tool is a big plus for any blogger wanting to move over to Squarespace, because you keep your SEO and page ranks, as well as all your content.
The title of this article really makes it sound like you have something against Squarespace.
I agree. He probably does.
I have absolutely nothing against Squarespace. There are just so many blogging platforms trying to get customers. I also wouldn’t make allegations before you know the truth.
Sorry. I personally never liked SquareSpace. But, after you wrote this post, I gave it a try. It is actually pretty nice and simple.
I think there importing tool will work.
You gotta check out the live customization it’s pretty cool!
No one’s making allegations
An attractive tool from the Squarespace to all the bloggers. Squarespace have also submitted an iPhone application to the App Store and waiting for its approval. Will Apple approve the tool?
To be honest, all of our activities fall into the category of “trying to attract users”
The article is both much appreciated and timely, as this is the only automated method we know of to move a self-hosted site into the cloud.
Thanks again guys!
Hmmm. The relentless Squarespace ads on Revision3 and TWiT have been pushing their import/export feature for months. This seems to imply that those ads were lying about how good it was previously.
Don’t think I’ll be tryiing them any time soon.
They have had an outstanding import tool for a long while now, this is just a big improvement to that tool. I don’t think the ads were lying – this is just stepping it up a notch.
Nice work, Squarespace.
+1
Blogging plays a major role in web world. Many blogging engines are coming up to provide rich services, I feel WordPress wins over there. Lets wait and see how far Squarespace’s new importing tool attracts the bloggers.
The features seem good.
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t see why anyone would use anything other than Wordpress. Its plugins KILL.
Yeah, competition does nothing but benefit the consumer. What a horrible, horrible thing.
Why would anyone use anything other than Wordpress? WP is fantastic but it’s not for everyone, everywhere, every time. Reasons? Um, let’s see:
1. You don’t want to allocate time to maintaining Wordpress, researching plugins, installing plugins, upgrading Wordpress just at present.
2. You don’t want to have to worry about finding reliable, affordable web hosting.
3. You have multiple sites to manage and you’re waiting for WP to merge with WP Mu. (Depending on your hosting, it can be a real pain to get Mu to manage multiple sites on multiple domains — and not every WP plugin will work with Mu.)
4. You are flipping a website and want to hand over the keys to one single account with a content management system, flexible design platform, and basic statistics all in one.
I’m deeply sorry if those reasons are not deemed good enough, but there it is. I am not presently running anything on WP but I do use a hosted CMS called Big Medium in addition to Squarespace. It just depends on how much time/effort I am able to devote to a site at a given time.
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As for the rather sanctimonious accusations regarding SQSP “lying” about the old importer tool, the old tool was industry standard at least. It imported all the text, comments, etc. very well. Now they are upping the ante by migrating your pictures, etc. and preserving your URL structure.
foget a d in had in the first sentence..
opp never mind. it just looked like that on the main page of TC. my bad…
I have been wanting to try Squarespace (like you I have been bombarded with the Rev3 ads) but I think they have priced the small business user out. I run several business and have their sites hosted on GoDaddy. I have never had a single instance of downtime and have had no issues with service.
I looked at the multi-site features rolled out on SS and it just quickly becomes unrealistic price-wise. I would rather see unlimited domains sharing bandwidth. The customization options sounds nice on SS but not enough to justify the expense for me personally.
I don’t see any difference in the blog importer. If I don’t have a wordpress (etc) blog how do I import while assigning URLs?
happy to be back on wordpress… squarespace imported stuff incorrectly & was rife w/problems it will take earbender.com a while to dig out of.
And yet, the freedom with which you can customize your design is way behind compared if you have a self-hosted WordPress site. And the packages are too expensive!
 ”the freedom with which you can customize your design is way behind compared (to) WordPress.”
Since when is customizing a design with CSS considered “way behind”?
Thats a pretty cool tool, I have been really impressed with this company so far. I use squarespace for both my sites (jasonrukus.com and rukusminded.com) and plan to launch more in the future.
They saved me a ton of time by allowing me a nearly code free design experience and answer questions I have at 4am. That in itself is just great. They also added a discount structure if you own more than one site which drives the cost down pretty nice.
I’ve worked on SS sites as a web developer. I’ll never understand the success of sites like that. SS is too complicated for novice users, and too limited for advanced users. It’s like they don’t know who their target market is and end up catering to noone. By the time a novice user has figured out how to use SS, they could have learned to use an HTML WYSYWIG program. And, no server side scripting (php/asp etc). Don’t plan on doing anything useful with your website on SS. I guess it’s good for bloggers and people who want to share a few photo galleries. The real sad part is that I think their interface is done fantastically and is as good as it’s going to get for a ‘on the web’ editor, and it’s still so clunky it’s just proof it’s never going to replace real web editing software for real websites.
what do you mean it’s working directly WITH Amazon S3? It’s using the cloud service, or working with Amazon (i.e. the company itself)?
I just moved my blog over to squarespace and couldn’t be happier!
I’ve been using Squarespace for a few years and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Easy as pie to create your own website, and easy as well to revise and tweak as much as you want to. The customer service has been great.
Before moving to Squarespace I’d been running a WordPress site. Didn’t really like the whole WordPress experience. Squarespace makes much that’s a pain with WordPress very simple.
For the convenience and the quality of service you get from Squarespace, the pricing is very fair.
If you can afford it, it seems like a great service for bloggers. However, most bloggers have a budget of about $5 a month for hosting. I spend a little more than that, but not near as much as SquareSpace asks.
If you only have one or two sites it might be worth it, but otherwise it’s just not possible.
If people take the time to actually see what you get for the $-it’s worth the extra. I don’t want to mess with coding when content is what’s important.
Sounds like a good move, I’m surprised an import tool wasn’t a high priority early on. I hope old URL’s are mapped to the new ones (assuming they are different that WP’s).
As Nate put it: “They have had an outstanding import tool for a long while now, this is just a big improvement to that tool… this is just stepping it up a notch.” ^_^
Be a cheap bastard= get your site hacked.
Pay for a reliable service= don’t worry about it.