Nice post Austin. I managed to worm my way into the beta a little early and I couldn’t be more horrified with this thing. As a print and graphic designer I’m always looking for tools that makes managing my web content easier since I don’t do much web development, myself. The “intelligent” design of thegrid.io is quite bad. Despite the preferences I set, the colors end up being wacky combinations that don’t reflect my content at all, and the layout and navigation is just plain bizarre and unintuitive. The backend controls are just as bad. Overall, thegrid pretty much breaks every basic principle of solid design.

While I know this is the beta of thegrid, I can tell you that these are core, fundamental missteps that will no doubt spell doom for the service. Stick with Squarespace folks— at least you get some control over your site that way.