Wow — what an incredible night.

Our first Squarespace event was a monumental success, drawing over 150 amazing people to our new offices in SoHo on Friday night. Most stayed quite a while, and the crowd was lingering fully past midnight. I was completely stunned at the turnout and I’d like to thank all of you for coming out!

When I started Squarespace 5 years ago, and even just a year ago before our NYC team was formed, I never imagined we’d be at this point. The best part about the event, for myself — was that it didn’t feel like a tech event to me. The crowd that came out spanned industries. Everyone who came out was incredibly diverse and talented. and it was a very validating experience to see that what we’re working for is attracting the sort of people that are so inspiring to us. Something is going right.

We’ll be posting pictures of the event here Monday. Thanks again to everyone who showed up, and if you didn’t say come say hi this time, please do next time!

We’re insanely excited to announce the first billion dollar company using the Squarespace platform for their website — a big welcome Marc Ecko Enterprises (the global fashion/clothing brand). Check out:

http://www.marceckoenterprises.com/

Which is a Squarespace site just like ours and yours, using the same technologies, on the same platform. And for those interested, here’s how dead on we were with respect to keeping the design of the original non-Squarespace implementation:

http://stage-marceckoenterprises.ecko.mp.advection.net/

It’s of course more functional and scalable on our service than the hacked-CMS that ran it prior.

Another very interesting point: There was no cheating in this conversion — and by that I mean this conversion was done with absolutely no modifications to our base XHTML templates, no special Javascript or hosting, and no special backend code. That’s right. No rewriting of our core code — not even a single line, and the site matches up that closely. This is what V5 is all about.

We’d like to extend a huge welcome to two members of our community, Stephen Parker (designed the Messier template) and Shaune Horne — who have recently joined our team. Stephen and Shawn are easily recognizable to anyone who has spent any time on our forums, and represent a huge jump forward for our support team.

Our internal goal is to get every question responded to within 15 minutes at every single point in the day. We’re not there yet, but we’re close.

If you’ve got a moment to spare — nominate Squarespace for the Webware 100 award.

Webware 100 Nomination

Oops! Only one nomination required :) We’ll let you know when the voting phase begins. Thanks! Do not send another nomination at this time.

If anyone needs any inspiration, we’ve just added 10 featured Squarespace sites:

http://www.squarespace.com/directory/

Great work guys!