So, I've been hosting my new site with SquareSpace for a couple of months now and on the whole I'm impressed. The content management is simple and intuitive, the templates are sleek and well designed, SEO is built-in and, most importantly, my images look great.
However, and this is a potential deal-breaker for me, the lack of deep-editing for most users (apart from if you sign up to be a developer) makes it really REALLY difficult to fix the inherent problems with the platform.
An example - I am a commercial photographer who often sends my clients a link to a password protected gallery of edited images from a shoot. From this, the client makes their final selection and I get the images retouched. Job done. HOWEVER (and I really can't stress enough how frustrating, annoying and impossibly crazy this is) when I upload my images to SquareSpace, all of my EXIF data (Image titles, keywords, description etc etc) is IGNORED and replaced with blank fields!?!?!?! This means that NONE of my images have a title, meaning that my clients cannot refer to any of the uploaded images by name, meaning they have to resort to describing the position of the image they want within the gallery.
Mind blowing, face melting insanity. And there's no way (according to customer services) of changing this other than by submitting a feature request to their developers.
I'm currently working with a long-time friend and developer, Chris, to write some custom code that I can inject into my pages to fix this.
Update to follow.