Columbus Ohio-based psychology group

  • Columbus web design firm's homepage design for Metta Psychology
In the Pali language, the word "metta" means loving-kindness.

Category: Template Website

Industry: Medical & Surgeons

Client: Metta Psychology Group
Project Description

Of course, your next question is going to be: where is this "Pali" (Pāli) language spoken? well, it's a language native to the Indian subcontinent, and is the language used in much of the earliest literature of Buddhism.

As the clinicians of Metta Psychology state: "Metta is an attitude, rather than just a feeling-a cultivation of compassion by focusing on goodwill, empathy, and connection. If we direct metta toward ourselves, we can connect more fully with others and experience openness, awareness, and love. By intentionally accepting the virtue of loving-kindness, we can find wellness and connection."

We like that.

Why is this website different than our others?

What makes this website different than our others, is it's done using a SquareSpace template.

And what makes this different than your usual SquareSpace template, is with our coding knowledge, we're able to modify the SquareSpace code to customize the template in ways that other designers (who use SquareSpace) can't. And that's because most of the people who use SquareSpace use it because they DON'T know code. We do, so what we bring to the table for SquareSpace templates is more than your average web designer.

So we merge the best of templates (cost savings) with the benefit of custom coding (to customize the design) which results in a one-of-a-kind SquareSpace-based website.

The limitations of templates:

Wix and SquareSpace offer great templates, but a template is only so customizable, so it’s not as if you can do anything with them, and there’s a distinct possibility you’ll eventually want to do something those templates can’t do. It's hard to say what that is until you ask for it, but some issues with templates are outlined below.

From what we’ve seen, the SEO capabilities of Wix & SquareSpace aren’t the best, despite what their respective websites say. Secure websites (those with https in the URL and something Google likes) can’t be done in Wix, plus both have other SEO limitations, such as:

Wix doesn't allow for "clean URLS."

You can read why a lot of web designers don't like Wix here. To summarize, it is a "best practice" in the web world, to allow a web designer to code a "clean URL" in your website. However, the default page URL in Wix, includes what is called "junk code."  Of course, Wix says this additional type of code is required for “deep linking,” however, what they're really saying is they’ve built their templates to require this junk code. So it disregards the best practice of "clean URLS," by inhibiting many other tasks needed to maintain your SEO rankings in the long term.

Some SquareSpace templates don't let us use unique Page Titles,

For good SEO, every page must have its own unique Page Title and Meta Description. To see how critical Page Titles and Meta Descriptions are, watch the first 40 seconds of this video. In addition to your very basic Page Title and Meta Descriptions, there's a host of SEO procedures that can be done with Drupal and Wordpress, but not with SquareSpace and Wix.

There's more, but this give you the idea. Plus, if you ever wanted to move your website from their servers (though not sure why you’d want to), you couldn’t, since their code is proprietary.

But as we mentioned, we were able to do SOME work around for SEO in the particular SquareSpace website, so it is better than what is offered by default.

Should you have any questions about template-based sites versus custom built websites (in WordPress and Drupal), please let us know.