Collage of diverse graphic design posters.

Vintage Jaguar ad that says “capture a Jaguar”

Joyful woman laughing with a website layout overlay.

Welcome to Particle News

Website registration form with checkboxes and buttons

Justin Mabee is a top-rated, professional Squarespace web designer and expert with 12 years of experience and 500+ projects completed. Available for hire now.

Squarespace Web Designer and Expert  |  Justin Mabee

Keep your eyes peeled during the Big Game to see what Martin Scorsese has been working on with his daughter, Francesca.   Visit https://www.squarespace.com/hello-down-there to learn more. — Start your free website trial: https://www.squarespace.com Read our latest blog post: https://www.squarespace.com/blog Chat with our community: https://forum.squarespace.com — Connect with us: ➤ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@squarespace ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/squarespace ➤ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/squarespace ➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/squarespace ➤ Twitter: https://twitter.com/squarespace ➤ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/squarespace   👋 About Squarespace Squarespace empowers millions of dreamers, makers, and doers by providing them with the tools they need to bring their creative ideas to life. On Squarespace’s dynamic all-in-one platforms, customers can claim a domain, build a website, sell online, and market a brand. Our suite of products combines cutting-edge design and world-class engineering, making it easier than ever to establish and own your online presence.  #Squarespace #martinscorsese

Marty & Francesca Make a Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_33RvpEK-E

Learn about the WP Engine and WordPress dispute and why switching to Squarespace offers a secure, stable, and user-friendly website platform alternative.

The WordPress and WP Engine Dispute: What It Means for Your Website

Get tickets to Circle Live: Money Matters (with Justin Mabee Design), taking place 03/27/2024. RingCentral Events is your source for engaging events and experiences.

Circle Live: Money Matters (with Justin Mabee Design) - Mar 27 | RingCentral Events

It's not real unless it's on the internet.

Explore the effects of Permira's $7B acquisition of Squarespace on users, service changes, and future pricing, from a Squarespace Expert.

What Does Squarespace Going Private Mean for You? A Squarespace Expert Weighs In.

https://justinmabee.com/blog/squarespace-acquisition-permira-impact

Squarespace Website Designer. 
Go Birds 🦅 Go Phils ⚾️
Full-time Philadelphian, part-time Icelander 🇮🇸 
justinmabee.com/links

Justin Mabee (@justinmabee.com)

Register now for Ask Us Anything - Justin Mabee & Christy Price on crowdcast, scheduled to go live on March 25, 2024, 09:00 AM CDT.

Ask Us Anything - Justin Mabee & Christy Price

My Notion profile pic made me look Amish. What do I do 🤣

Started playing with other AI models over the last couple of days thanks to Raycast and Poe, and so far my favorites are Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Opus, all of Mistrals models, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and of course Perplexity’s own model. GPT4 Turbo isn’t bad either.

Started a design, got 2/3 through and hated it. Duplicated it and changed the nav and a few other elements, along with moving from a bold heading to a serif heading, and now I like it, but it's still not quite there....

Client's inspo was really cool and I wanted to recreate the old school magazine style on the web, but give it a bit of a modern vibe too.

Recently switched from Loops.so to Kit, because Loops was a bit too complicated for me in terms of coding forms and setting up email sequences. It just wasn't the product for me, I still recommend it for startups! But Kit has been a great sigh of relief, as it just works.

Keep seeing more and more people complaining about Arc and how it’s a terrible browser, terrible company. I refuse to use any other browser. Arc has done wonders for my ADHD. if you don’t like something, just don’t use it; don’t try and convince others they shouldn’t like it.

Why didn’t Jaguar just go with their previous vintage look? It’s so much better than anything else.

Gotta admit, Meta's Llama 3 rivals Claude 3 Opus and its speed is even more impressive.

Design concept for a client from yesterday. Inspo was vintage, graffiti, bubble style, minimalistic. This is the landing page, and we stripped it back even further to just have Home, Work, and project pages. Created the logo too.

Testing out Particle.news now that I got an invite finally, and it’s worth the hype and wait. It’s 2024 and my main news apps are Particle and Yahoo News. Who would have thought?

Portfolios are the bane of my existence. 

Getting a website to look nice on a website is just so hard. Strongly considering just putting like 4 case studies and being done.

Traffic on my website has increased significantly over the past few weeks, but my bookings have stagnated. 

Decided to try an A/B test of removing all questions from my booking link, and adding a generic contact form as well; 24 hours later, a new booking and a form fill. 😳😩

Midjourney + Squarespace in about 2.5 hours.

What is the point of having the check box there if you can't bypass it? 🙄

Any photographers near Boston or Providence? I’m in desperate need of new headshots.

Next step: creating my first Framer website.

When you're applying for jobs, how do you tackle "why do you want to work here", "what excites you about this job", "why should we be excited to have you on our team" type of questions? This always trips me up, and I'm always lost trying to answer these questions.

Used Llama 3 to fix and test a handful of code for the first time today and it went really well. Continued to refine the code until I got what I needed. And it even helped me minify my code.

Current stack:
Squarespace
Kit
Notion
Notion Calendar
Superhuman (but soon Notion Mail)
Cal.com 
Canva
Stripe

This is probably the simplest my stack has been in years.

Wordpress and custom websites are super complicated for non-devs. I’m a designer, not a dev. 

just spent 5 hours trying to install an SSL certificate on a new domain. I was able to do a smart install of WP but can’t get the domain live to make design edits. It’s maddening.

@leland nice CV bud! on the front of the email today! :D

My old website’s positioning and design, while excellent and sophisticated, wasn't helping me convert clients.

Now I'm focused on one-day or multi-day projects and live Squarespace support now, presenting my work in a new way and streamlining my process.

justinmabee.com

I’m experiencing the worst decline in my business that I’ve ever had. All leads have dried up, traffic is minimal on my website despite having solid SEO, and the last 5 proposals I sent out, the clients said no because they went with someone at a lower rate. 

And I feel lost.

Can't wait to see the full Squarespace ad with Scorsese and daughter Francesca live on Sunday!

👉 Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_33RvpEK-E
👉 Get in touch: info@justinmabee.com 📩

I’m getting more and more annoyed with Squarespace and so are a lot of my clients. What’s the next best DIY platform with a solid user base that needs websites built? 

Last time I used Wix it was worse than SQSP. Framer, not enough people use or know about. Wordpress???

Anyone else feel like all they see is negativity, especially in their job?

Microsoft’s new Phi-3 LLM is insanely fast at general knowledge. My latest stack of LLMs include Llama 3, Perplexity, Sonar Small and Medium, and Phi-3. There’s also an insane image generator from HuggingChat I’ve been using that is leaps and bounds better than Midjourney.

Finding myself turning more into a website manager / maintenance person / fixer than a designer these days. So many clients can't really see the vision behind their businesses and how their businesses can be improved with a new design/logo/branding. 

I miss designing.

Put together a post on my blog today about the WP Engine/Wordpress debacle. Is Squarespace a viable option for these customers? It very well could be. People who moved from Squarespace to Showit might consider moving back soon. 

Post below.

Spent upwards of 5 hours changing fonts on my website.

Hated them all.

Ended up going back to what I had before, just a heavier weight on the navigation and headings.

🫠

Interested in learning more about how to make money work for you in your business? In collaboration with Squarespace Circle, I’ll be hosting a live session to discuss ways to earn and spend your money more efficiently.
Register for the March 27th event here: https://rb.gy/4bevi3

Act II from The Browser Company feels big. Like iPhone big. Like it could drastically change the future. The key point in this video is about cutting out the search engine and giving you what you’re looking for right away.

youtu.be/WIeJF3kL5ng?si=bAUhpTS6AO1MsgmK

I hate dropbox. It's the same email address.

I’ve tried three AI headshot generators so far and they all make me look weird. I guess that just means I need to get some actual proper headshots. Or illustrated avatars.

Still looking for work or a job.

Despite a new redesign, work has really dried up. I have one open project, a few maintenance clients, and no open proposals or leads in the pipeline. Trying to improve my newsletter and create new blog/SEO content on top of applying for jobs.

Squarespace going intergalactic with their new SB ad, directed by Martin Scorsese. But this is the biggest truth from the whole thing.

Launching my new website today. Excited to hear everyone’s thoughts. Fixing some links and blog posts now, should be able to get it up in a couple hours.

My wife is opening a bookstore, and instead of business cards, she wanted to get bookmarks made. Canva doesn’t do printing of bookmarks, so she had to go to Staples. They came out nice, but…not in bookmark size. 🤔🤔

What to do now?

Looking for an assistant again. Main tasks I need help with: email marketing + potential client follow-ups. Budget is $20-$25/hr for up to 10 hours a week max. I’m a solo freelancer, this is the one main thing I need help on. Shoot me a DM if you’re interested! Prefer US-based.

I went with desert titanium this year and starting to regret it a bit. Right out of the box, it looks more like rose gold than it does desert or gold. It’s like a more pink copper. I wish I had stuck with black.

I own futureofsearch.ai and .org. What should I do with them?

Seeing a large influx of spam bookings from my website. Seems it's a mailinator fake clicks spam attack. Tried Clickcease to no avail.

Switching my booking system to cal.com which has email verification for bookings, maybe if I have that on temporarily it'll stop.

I designed something I’m really proud of today. 

I hope the client likes it.

Instead of arguing with people on Threads about Squarespace’s recent acquisition by Permira for $7B, I wrote a blog post exploring the facts and giving some ideas of what the future might look like. https://justinmabee.com/blog/squarespace-acquisition-permira-impact

I swear if I see one more website for a major startup with over a million dollar valuation using Poppins on their site, I'm gonna lose it. 

It's so over used. Stop using Poppins.

Sad this little community will be going offline soon. @andy has done an amazing job at cultivating a wonderful sense of community among designers and artists here. I’ll definitely miss it here. 

Abandoning Meta too, find me on Bluesky.

https://bsky.app/profile/justinmabee.com

Do any of you ever get into a rut where you are hating everything you design? Like you get started working on something and it just immediately isn’t going how you want; and the more you fiddle with it, the more you hate it? 

Really killing my mojo here.

Next Monday I’m co-hosting an AMA with Christy Price, one of my favorite people in the Squarespace community. Ask us anything about Squarespace, marketing, growing a business, or anything else!
👉 Register for the event on March 25th here: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/ama-mar24

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