Our website is now hosted on Github Pages using Jekyll! We decided to transition from Squarespace to hosting on Github for several reasons.

Flexibility & Control

Squarespace had nice templates and was easy to use but customization was a bit challenging. The web interface always felt slightly clunky and slow. It works great for a lot of people but I always ended up wishing I could tweak things more easily. Jekyll gives us complete control over every part of our site while providing the flexibility of a content management system. One of Jekyll’s best features is collections, allowing organization of custom types of objects & metadata. We use collections to represent all of our apps. Adding a new app is as simple as adding a new markdown file with our app metadata and our site is instantly updated using that data everywhere our collection is used (navigation links, pages, etc). Very powerful stuff.

Git

Everything is stored in a Git repo giving us content versioning and making collaboration easy. A nice consequence is that all of our content exists as individual files stored locally, easily browsed, searched, or edited locally.

Cost

Transitioning to hosting with Github Pages will save us hundreds of dollars per year. We weren’t really taking advantage of the more advanced e-commerce and business features that Squarespace provides so it was really an overkill solution for us.

Overall we are really happy with the new website and the transition to using Jekyll for managing our content. I’m looking forward to building more with Jekyll and exploring the utility of static websites.