I hope this learn Squarespace video was helpful. There are a few more videos in this series, so I’ll continue to post them throughout the week. Be sure to leave your comments below. Please, we encourage you to send us more Squarespace videos and “how-to” Squarespace references and resources. We do not have the resources or bandwidth to research videos on our own all day as we are continuing our Squarespace review. But, that is why we know our loyal reader base will help :)

So it is our pleasure to present our first video Squarespace tutorial and review. If you are looking for a in depth Squarespace tutorial, here is a great example:

We will be sure to do our best and highlight more in-depth video Squarespace tutorials as they are engaging and we can assume preferential for visual people. Please send us Squarespace video reviews and/or tutorials to highlight and we will do our best to post them to the site. A written summary or synopsis to accompany the video would be uber sweet as well.

Totally Rad Show’s site is clean and easy to navigate. The simple layout allows for an enjoyable experience. They have surfaced the conversation from Twitter which we value here. Squarespace’s official blog noted the commenting functionality, so we took a look. We have already done a posting or two about Squarespace’s commenting functionalities, but one thing that stood out to me this time was that they automatically converted URLs into hyperlinks. I thought that was a nice shortcut, though, for an SEO guy, I worried about adding my title and anchor tags.

However, in conclusion, I am not impressed with the site. For the purposes of simplicity and cleanliness, they get an “A”. But, the site just did not engage me and I felt it was too simple. I wonder if Rev3 has the resources to devote to site development… probably not.

If you are a Squarespace user and iPhone owner, the Squarespace iPhone App will allow you to completely manage your site and check your web analytics right from your phone. The development of the iPhone application is a smart and logical move for Squarespace. Back in June, you may remember the promotion where they were giving away an iPhone each day.

One unique feature to the commenting module is the text “My response is on my own website »” which is hyper-linked. There, you have the option to respond to a posting with a response from your own site. You can either use the Trackback URL for the respected entry, or link to your response directly. I think that is a pretty rad feature for blog.

For those of you who fear that any change in platform, hosting, domain registrar, etc. will offset your infrastructure and SEO rankings (including we who have had nightmares with Open Source), Squarespace states on their site that the blog importer feature will maintain all.

Concerning SEO, an interest of ours, the blog importer migrates over all your existing permalinks from your previous platform and conducts a complete URL remapping; more so, all inbound links to your pages and posts will remain unscathed (totally the word for that). Squarespace importer automatically redirects the inbound links to your new blog pages and posts sustaining your search engine rankings.

Using Amazon S3, the blog importer will migrate your data to your new Squarespace blog. They claim to be the only service that will migrate your media, saying “Other importing tools only take your post text with you, making a real migration impossible.”

Probably one of the most interesting transfers that the blog importer feature from Squarespace performs is transferring over comments. That really impresses me. MY HOMEWORK: Something I will need to review and report back to you all is what authentications they allow for commenting. If they allow for OpenID then it is very valuable, as you would hate to lose a reader who is actively engaged and can no longer comment without having to re-register or use another account.