Transitioning from Squarespace 5 to 7

Over the three-day weekend, I upgraded my Squarespace 5 website to Squarespace 7. If you are seeing this post you are seeing my new site!

A screen snap of the last post done on Squarespace 5

Squarespace provides a 12-step process for doing the transition. The first 2 are in the ‘getting ready’ category and then comes the import (step 3). It was significant in my case since I had been blogging daily to my Squarespace 5 site for 5 years. I started the import from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 7 on Friday and was concerned that the import interrupted before finishing when I stopped for the night…then pleasantly surprised Saturday morning that it had restarted and finished overnight. 3 steps down and 9 more to go!

Enabling content (step 4) was very easy for the blog posts…it was all done with one ‘enable’ and then moving the page from ‘not linked’ to the ‘main navigation’ area within the new site. The galleries were another story. Each of the galleries (sets of pictures), were imported as a separate page so they had to be enabled and moved one at a time. They now are in the galleries archive segment of the site. The other single pages were easy to enable too. Fortunately, I did not have anything I needed to manually move so Step 5 did not require any action. Step 6-9 were all about getting the site looking like I wanted and learning how to use the Squarespace 7 interface to add new content. I experimented with several of the templates before settling on Five and then worked to tailor it the way I wanted. The first days of using a new interface are always a little frustrating and this was no exception. I’m still not sure I understand how do everything but I’m confident enough that I can figure it out that I consider myself transitioned to Squarespace 7 at this point.

Step 10 was to upgrade from a 14-day-trail site. That happened on Sunday afternoon and I moved the domain to point to it (Step 11). I was surprised and pleased at how fast the change propagated. I’m waiting to cancel my Squarespace 5 site (which I can look at using the internal Squarespace address) until I am sure everything imported correctly. There are still a few issues related to galleries that I am working.

I’ve been thinking about what has happened to me over the past 5 years as I’ve looked at the content of my blog and the galleries. It been quite a journey! There are probably some blog posts about the trends I’ve noticed that I’ll post about in the next few weeks.

Use the ‘Contact’ button to let me know anything you notice that I need to fix.