Templates play an essential role in controlling the look and functionality of pages, yet not all templates are created equal.
The Grove template is an elegant and minimalist solution, ideal for bloggers seeking to showcase their work in an elegant manner. Its clean layout allows long-form content and images to shine while its appointment booking functionality supports services such as hair salons or real estate agents.
Creating a Blog Page
If your website features a blog, it is vitally important that its content remains organized. By creating a blog page and listing posts alphabetically or categorically on it, readers will easily be able to locate exactly what they are searching for.
Squarespace provides a selection of blog templates with unique features and styles, such as post thumbnail images that display on your blog list and page banners that create featured posts.
Grove is one of the most flexible Squarespace blog templates, providing plenty of whitespace that allows your writing and images to shine through. This template also works well for photographers looking to showcase their work while promoting services and pricing. Alternatively, Rally features a clean layout which can be tailored for any business type or purpose.
Adding a Blog Post
Once your blog page is set up, writing posts becomes much simpler. Take advantage of the easy editing environment or rich text toolbar for writing posts; add multimedia such as videos, polls or slideshows for extra engagement with readers while improving search engine optimization (SEO).
Once your post is ready for public view, click Publish to make it live. A window will pop-up confirming its liveness and offering options to view or share it, along with public URL and social sharing icons for Facebook and LinkedIn; plus an option to create campaign drafts if applicable. Furthermore, here you can change its status or visibility; for instance marking it for review by other editors on your site, moving it into trash or setting its position at the top of your blog if appropriate.
Adding a Featured Blog Post
If one blog post strikes a chord with readers, making it a featured post is an effective way to keep it front and center on your site as new posts come along. This will keep readers coming back to it even as more posts come online.
To feature blog posts, navigate to your Blog page editor and select the Featured tab. Choose which post(s) will be featured – only one post at a time may be marked as such as adding more will push down previous ones in the list.
A Featured Post will not appear in either Recent or Archive indexes, making them visible only to readers of that blog page editor. To switch the status back from “Featured” to regular posting, navigate to Post Settings within that blog editor and switch off “Set as Featured Post”.
Adding a Sidebar to Your Blog
As with other Squarespace templates, sidebars do not appear automatically on our Bryant template (or any of our Brine-family templates). However, they can easily be added and are especially helpful for posts which perform particularly well – like Instagram reels or newsletter sign up forms.
To add a sidebar to your blog, it is necessary to create a standard page and insert a summary block displaying blog posts from that particular category. From there, you can decide how many and where on the page each one should appear.
Building a sidebar this way is the easiest and most practical method, since updates will affect all pages that use it compared to hard-coded solutions like search bars and archive dropdowns, which require you to update each individual page individually. Plus, this method looks cleaner and more professional! This approach also works seamlessly with our AMP-compatible designs.
