Moving on from Posterous? We can help.

Last week, Posterous announced that it will be closing down on April 30th, turning off its online and mobile apps. Users are advised to back up their posts as soon as possible, as they will be unable to view or edit their posts from that point forward.

Moving your website to a new platform can feel like a daunting task. Fortunately, Squarespace provides an easy-to-use importing tool that you can use to move over your content from your existing Posterous account within minutes. Like Posterous, Squarespace is a platform centered around simplicity – so you'll feel right at home. 

All the features you’re familiar with using Posterous – such as posting via email, custom domains, and professional templates – are available on Squarespace, as well as a wealth of additional features (24/7 customer support, e-commerce capabilities, and our innovative page building tool called LayoutEngine, just to name a few.) Of course, all your data remains your own.

To move your existing Posterous Space over to Squarespace, sign up for a free 14-day trial by selecting a template of your choice. Select “Import/Export” under Settings in your Website Manager, and click on the Posterous icon to begin the import process. Please note that trial accounts have an import limit of the most recent 20 entries and a maximum file size of 20MB; however, all of your data will carry over seamlessly once you decide on Squarespace and have a paid account.

For more detailed information on moving your Posterous Space over to Squarespace, please check out the following guide. If you have any specific questions regarding the transition, send us a tweet @squarespace. We’d love to hear from you.

Squarespace Commerce is Here

Today, we’re excited to share with you a major release that our team has been working on for quite some time: Squarespace Commerce.  

Giving our customers the ability to manage and sell products on their websites has been the most requested Squarespace feature of all time. Thanks to the powerful architecture of Squarespace 6, we've built a truly integrated commerce solution that gives our customers amazing power and flexibility within a single platform.

This is a significant release for us. Here are the major points:

1. Works with every template. Squarespace Commerce works with every Squarespace template. Click the dollar sign icon in your Website Manager to create a new product collection. Your products are presented in a flexible, minimal grid designed to fit nicely into any website. Customize the style of your products grid right from the Style Editor, just like any other area of your website. Commerce is currently available to U.S. customers only.
   
2. Sell digital and physical goods on a single platform. Squarespace lets you sell any type of product using a single interface. Your digital goods are delivered via customized email links that expire in 24 hours from delivery. You can control link sharing and re-send delivery links from the Commerce panel in your Website Manager.
   
3. 30-second merchant account signup using Stripe. We’ve partnered with Stripe to provide a painless way for you to start accepting payments immediately using Squarespace Commerce. From your Commerce area, click “Connect Stripe”, and fill out the form. Once you make a sale, payments will go directly into your bank account. Stripe and Squarespace are completely integrated – there are no confusing codes to enter.
   
4. Simple pricing. No Squarespace-imposed transaction fees. Squarespace Commerce is included in our Business Plan, priced at $24/month with a yearly purchase ($30/month if you pay month-to-month). There are no other pricing tiers, and Squarespace does not impose a transaction fee on your store. Stripe, our integrated payment processor, charges a simple and transparent fee of $0.30 + 2.9% for every successful transaction.
   
5. Flexible product variants & unlimited SKUs. Our product implementation supports multi-dimensional product variants (such as size and color) as well as sale prices. The Squarespace Commerce interface is ideally suited for use with small stores (< 200 SKUs), but we do not place any limits on the amount of SKUs you can have in your inventory. We will be expanding the interface in the future to easily accommodate larger stores.
   
6. LayoutEngine integration. Squarespace Commerce is fully integrated with the rest of our content block system. We’ve developed a Product Block, which works much like our Amazon Block, except it pulls items from your product collection. You can use this block anywhere LayoutEngine is enabled (blog posts, pages, sidebars, and more) – meaning that you will be able to create an editorialized commerce experience for your visitors.
   
7. Unified inventory management. You can quickly sort items across your entire store by stock level, price, or title.
   
8. Coupons, taxes, shipping. Squarespace allows you to create multiple types of coupons for your store. Create coupons that apply to all orders, orders that meet a certain minimum, or for specific products. Coupons can expire, and you can create flexible discounts depending on what you’d like to discount. Full tax and shipping rules by region also help you run your store.
   
9. Order fulfillment interface. Printable packing slips. Squarespace’s order management interface lets you easily track outstanding orders, resend customer update emails and print packing slips from a single interface.
   
10. Mailing list integration at checkout. Building a loyal customer base is a crucial component of running a successful store. We’ve integrated MailChimp to let customers sign up for email communications from your store at checkout.
    
11. Express checkout mode. Don’t need a cart? Squarespace offers a streamlined checkout mode that lets your customers jump directly to your payment page, bypassing any kind of shopping cart interface. This option is great for selling single products.
    
12. Customizable order emails. Customize your emails with personalized messages for your customers.
    
13. Order exporting to CSV. Need your order data? Export easily to CSV format for importing into accounting and spreadsheet tools.
    
14. Store manager role. Our permissions system lets you give select individuals access to manage inventory and orders in your store, but they will not be able to change your website design.
    
15. Automatic Google Analytics and Mixpanel integration. Plug in your Google Analytics or Mixpanel IDs for deeper insight of your commerce transactions.
    
16. Stay connected with your customers. Our social integrations let you easily share store news and product updates to Twitter, Facebook, or any other social service supported by the platform.
    
17. Import from Shopify and Big Cartel. Move your existing Shopify or Big Cartel inventory over to Squarespace with just a few clicks. All images and available data will be transferred over.
    
18. Available in our developer platform. Squarespace Commerce works perfectly with our developer platform as well, so developers can create custom Squarespace stores with a totally unique design.
    

This release represents a huge step in achieving Squarespace's mission to power any sort of website within our integrated platform. We've been working on this project for a long time, and we're thrilled to finally share the results. 

Thanks for being a part of Squarespace. We look forward to seeing what you build!

Squarespace x SmugMug

Today, we’re pleased to announce a new partnership with SmugMug – the incredibly popular photo hosting and commerce service for photographers. With our new integration, photographers can easily showcase their best work with images from their SmugMug galleries and direct customers back to their SmugMug site to purchase gifts and prints.

With just a few clicks, you can easily browse and import selected SmugMug photos into a Squarespace gallery. We grab the original image and generate multiple sizes so your pictures look great on any device. Plus, we keep your metadata intact and auto-populate the click-through URLs to your SmugMug lightbox.

You can create as many SmugMug galleries on your Squarespace website as you like (with a limit of 50 photos per gallery), and use them as standalone gallery pages or in gallery blocks within pages and blog posts. Once imported, your photos can also be synced with our Portfolio App, an unbranded, simple way to take the work in your portfolio with you and access it without needing to connect to the Internet.

Getting started is easy. In the settings section of your website manager, simply visit Connected Accounts, select SmugMug, and provide your SmugMug credentials. Once the SmugMug logo appears under your Connected Accounts, click Import Albums, choose an album, and select which photos you’d like to import. A new Squarespace gallery with these photos will appear in your content manager. We've created a helpful guide to walk you through the steps.

SmugMug is a great addition to the Squarespace platform, and joins Instagram, Flickr, Vimeo, and 500px in our lineup of photo and video integrations. Want to see others in the mix? Send us a tweet @squarespace!

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To celebrate our partnership, SmugMug is offering 25% off all new accounts for Squarespace customers. Click here and use coupon code SquarespaceNow by March 13th to take advantage of the discount.

SEO Improvements: Google Author Rank

Anyone who publishes content on the web cares about that content being discovered, and it is the job of a good content management system to ensure that your content is effortlessly tracked and ranked by search engines using modern SEO techniques.

Every Squarespace website is optimized for search engines out of the box, without the need for any additional plugins (see this Squarespace Answers Post for some specifics). Today, we're reinforcing our built-in SEO offering by announcing a simple but important change to our member profiles: Google Author Rank support.

As you may already be aware, Google is now using Google+ as a major factor in how search results are ranked. With Author Rank, Google is verifying individual writers through Google+; once you connect your website with your Google+ account, search results will show your headline and byline next to the result for your content.  This helps you cross-reference your content across multiple channels on the web under a central identity.

To link your Google+ Profile with your Squarespace Member Account, enter your Google+ Profile URL in your member account settings by clicking on your account from Contributors in your site manager, and then verify that link from your Google+ Profile.

Happy writing!

Squarespace x CreativeMornings

CreativeMornings presented by Squarespace

This month, Squarespace is proud to be the sponsor of CreativeMornings, a global initiative bringing creatives together on a monthly basis. In 2013, each CreativeMornings session is centered around a single topic. This month’s topic: money.

Any creative professional or creative company operating today has had to, at some point, find a balance between creative values and business goals. How do I know what my work is worth? How does one value creativity? When creative work is being used for commercial purposes, how true can it remain to its original purpose as art?

At Squarespace, we aim to provide creative tools that power the future of the web. Our vision has always been to provide a platform that allows not only for self-expression, but also to help creatives to make a business doing what they love. With this month’s CreativeMornings sessions, we hope to start a discussion about how people reconcile this tension between making art and making money.

You can sign up for a CreativeMornings event at: http://www.creativemornings.com/.