Just been playing with the newly launched Squarespace V5 when I should be out weeding the allotment in the sun. I've been excited about the launch, and to see what's going to change, and wow - it's quite a lot.

Squarespace has become even more powerful, with the ability to manage horizontal navigation, and multiple side bars. As you can see the Adopted Domain look has changed to take advantage of these changes, and well, anyone who returns over the next few weeks can expect the site look to keep changing whilst I play around with the new options (It's not perfect yet). Interestingly, you can keep the same template, whilst inserting or removing or rearranging any combination of sidebars and menus and colour schemes, so there's loads of flexibility there. 

The whole user interface has been redesigned - it's pretty fast and pretty slick, with the same high design values used throughout everything squarespace does. This new UI is going to take someone like me a bit of time to get used to it, so I'm going to hold off criticising anything yet as I am a stick in the mud. However, when I'm trying to put myself in a newcomers shoes to the Squarespace I am wondering whether it's actually easier to use? It's definitely easier to set up than a 'self-hosted' wordpress blog, but it still takes a wee while to get your head around the way that different functions have been separated out.

As before with Squarespace, there is a relatively small number of basic templates to choose from, but more than ever the interface encourages you to tweak the design and layout of those templates, so there shouldn't be the blogger problem, where the standard templates start to become a bit too familiar.

The only annoyance, and it is super minor, is that the 'open in a new window' setting for adding hyperlinks to text, has been moved to a secondary window, so you have to make an extra click or too to get there - and it's easier to forget to select it.

All in all, nice work squarespace, even if I do feel like I've been pushed out my comfort zone a bit!