How do we become familiar with such a wide range of customers to build them the products they need? Many Squarespace sites are heavily visual and contain a lot of images and photos. If we were to only search with text, we’d miss crucial visual and stylistic features of many Squarespace sites.
Squarespace Templates are powerful tools used by millions of people every day to build their websites without writing code. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve released two of our newest consumer templates—Endeavor and Wright—on GitHub.
At Squarespace, we strive to provide our customers and their visitors with fast and responsive browsing experiences. Today, we proudly announce HTTP/2 support for all Squarespace sites with TLS enabled.
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve user experience on the Squarespace platform, we added a feature to display thumbnail previews of all of your account’s sites in the account picker. Since we didn’t have any existing functionality around screenshot generation, this was something we had to build from scratch. In this post we’ll talk about the screenshots microservice solution we came up with.
Every other Wednesday, the Frontend Engineers at Squarespace convene in a large room to hash out these issues. We discuss and shop around new technologies and patterns. We decide which haircuts to give our yaks, and what shade of gray looks best on our bike shed.
One of the newer programming paradigms we have been enthusiastic to adopt is functional reactive programming, which combines functional programming and reactive programming.
At Squarespace, we believe we are responsible for providing a platform on which customers and their visitors can be assured a secure browsing experience. Today, we’re proudly announcing completely free Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) for all custom domains on our platform.
In early 2013, we began constructing a replacement template compiler in Java, Squarespace's main development language. The new compiler, now open sourced, was designed and implemented from scratch, which enabled several improvements to be made.
Automated UI tests are a crucial part of our QA process. Before going to production, we run a set of smoke tests which navigate around parts of the UI, recording screenshots and comparing them against a set of golden images. If a significant mismatch occurs, we consider the test failed and halt deploys while we investigate the issue.
Today, we’re announcing a new developer tool called the Squarespace Local Development Server. With it, developers can preview changes to template code locally (on their computer) before pushing them to a live website.
Data scientists, business operations, finance, and marketing teams are all working off our curated data stores to make critical decisions about the direction of the business, and there will inevitably come a time when somebody looks at a report and asks: "How do we know these numbers are correct?"
As a DIY platform, the approach Squarespace takes with taxes is to let merchants enter in the rates they need to collect, then provide a calculator that can apply those rates to a shopping cart. Squarespace’s role is thus not to know the exact details of a given tax system, but rather, to provide a tool that can effectively model the most common ones.