It is with joy in ours and our families hearts that we welcome Rolando Berrios to our team. Though you may never see a pretty image, template or boring business blurb from him, his presence will be behind every second of every day we keep our 99.98% uptime.

Rolando Berrios (a SenseNet alumnus) has been a systems engineer and developer working at internet companies for a long time now. His work experience includes several high profile web sites, including TD Ameritrade, the NYTimes.com and Forbes.com where he was responsible for maintaining and improving upon the infrastructure of some of the most visited sites on the internet. Prior to joining Squarespace, he played a major role in developing a stable systems platform for Vidavee, which was subsequently sold to Vignette. Throughout his career he’s been focused on increasing availability, uptime, and scalability, always striving for the perfect night of uninterrupted rest.

Cheers,

The Squarespace Team

Jennifer Konig! As the lucky winner, she received a website makeover (courtesy of our very own designer extraordinaire Krystyn Heide) and a free Squarespace account. Jennifer was nominated by her pal Jodi who
said:

“My friend Jennifer could definitely use this! She recently quit her corporate gig and is looking to pursue photography full time. She has a web address, but it just links back to her (amazing) portfolio on
flickr. It would be wonderful if you would consider giving it to her as she is an amazing photographer and fantastic person!!”

After viewing her new website, Jennifer candidly remarked “Holy crap it’s gorgeous!!! You ROCK!” Need we say more? The experience proved to be educational as well; as Jennifer uploaded new work on her site, she became more familiar with Squarespace’s formatting options and found that “the admin UI is really, really intuitive”.

Jennifer, you ROCK! We’re thrilled that you loved your new site. Enjoy!

You can view Jennifer’s stunning art on her stunning new site at
www.jenniferkonig.com.

It is with much excitement indeed that we would like to announce a new and sparkling addition to our team here at Squarespace…(drumroll please)…meet Tyler Thompson, our new Creative Director! Some of you may already be familiar with Tyler’s work, as he is no stranger to Squarespace. In fact he’s been a member since 2003 and has designed over 50 sites on Squarespace. From experimenting with graffiti art in the Northwest to fine arts school to package design, Tyler has been immersed in the design world on a variety of levels, and his impeccable aesthetic has won him multiple awards and international recognition. After admiring his web designs over the years, we realized what an awesome addition to our team Tyler & his mad skills would make. Fortunately, Tyler agreed (whew!)

You can view his most recent work on the sqcommunity.squarespace.com site we just launched, check it out! We are absolutely thrilled to have Tyler on board, and you can expect to see some seriously awe-inspiring work emanating from Mr. Thompson’s direction in the near future.

Cheers,

The Squarespace Team

We are officially launching the Squarespace Developers Community! With this site we hope to bring together the hundreds of developers who use squarespace as their main CMS platform. The gathering of minds almost always stimulates growth, and we hope it will do the same for us.

Our goals for this community site is simple, push development and share ideas. What is it that you really want to see in the next Squarespace upgrade, what feature do you really think would make Squarespace unstoppable? All these questions and ideas can now be spoken in one place with many ears to fall upon. Bringing together the developer community is one more piece of the puzzle that will help the Squarespace platform continue to grow.

We are hoping everyone will stop by the site and share their input. Meet other developers, learn from others work, and join in the open conversations. This is an ongoing project that will continue to grow and evolve, please feel free to offer any suggestions or ideas for ways to improve the community.

Click here to visit the Developer Community »

When Steve Jobs says there are 160 thousand podcasts, it has to be a thriving business, right?  Well for some it certainly is, but those are few and far apart.  Basically, podcasts are recurring video shows, served on-site and through RSS.  Recurring should mean weekly, but now daily is the new weekly, so the more the merrier.  The ad carrot for podcasts is far more enticing as it can be north of $50 per cpm.  That ad is sold as a sponsorship and has a list of prerequisites a mile long.  More realistic are bulk ads which come in form of pre/post-roll or banners that pay $1-8 per cpm, which is still a lot.

How do you get to that carrot?  Well, you have a few factors to work with: viewer-ship, content type, your brand, and infrastructure.  The general rule of thumb is 100k views a month.  This is measured by actual downloads from various sources, and is the minimum bar to sign a real ad campaign.  Now, that number is skewed up if your content isn’t clearly related to a market, and more so if it is concerning for advertisers (like sex or cursing).  One method completely at your disposal is your brand, which lowers the viewer bar greatly or raises it, depending on where you land.  So, if you’re not Sony, it’s time to get building and make your show a property and community.

The best first step is your own destination site, which will usually directly handle 30% of your viewer-ship.  Your infrastructure is adjustable by you but at great cost, as this is principally hiring ad sales, management, and staff.  Today, internal infrastructure better maximizes ad value, but outsourced infrastructure at least gets you in the game.

We have a number of highly successful podcast communities built out in Squarespace — Break-a-Leg, and Dad-Labs for starters.  Many use Blip.tv for their streaming service, and they’re highly recommended for a good experience.  To sum up our advice: focus your energy where you can on a good show, a brand, guerilla marketing and outsource as much infrastructure as you can until you reach your magic viewer number.

Also, check out our manual guide for posting audio podcasts in your journal entries here.