Squarespace provides an extremely user-friendly website building experience, keeping editing and SEO under tight control while offering beautiful templates.
Templates designed by Site123 are specifically tailored towards high-resolution images. Your website will look best with lots of high-quality photos displayed prominently.
Your website’s primary objective should be to entice visitors to work with or purchase from you, guiding its structure, content, and style accordingly.
1. Choose a Template
Choosing a template may seem daunting for those new to website development, and many DIY business owners rush into purchases only to later realize they weren’t suitable due to lacking certain elements or being mismatched with their branding needs.
Squarespace currently offers 58 templates, with new ones continuously being released. Each category varies in its design, layout and included pages; additionally they’re separated into families and variations depending on their flexibility. When selecting your template make sure you consider what kind of work you do (the more specific the better).
There are certain aspects that are consistent across all templates (font pairings, color palette, spacing). Before making your decision to purchase any template it’s advisable to look at its demo content to get an idea of its appearance and decide if it suits your business goals.
Squarespace template collection provides easy, user-friendly websites you can build yourself. Red Met Yellow’s template features include professionally-designed websites with page-by-page guides showing what content to write, customizable brand kits to make everything look beautiful, an SEO keyword planner to help find potential clients online, and step-by-step video training so that anyone can do it all themselves!
Hire a professional designer to build your Squarespace website can be more cost-effective and save you from having to figure it all out yourself. I have written extensively on finding Squarespace designers here; and you can view some examples of their work in my gallery.
2. Add Your Content
Once you’ve selected your template and entered all key business information onto Squarespace, it’s time to start adding content. This may range from web pages, blog posts and online stores – using Squarespace’s intuitive content editor it’s simple to personalize the design and layout of every section; additionally you will learn about content blocks – drag-and-drop site elements which display text, images and buttons for display.
As you add content to your Squarespace website, it is crucial that you consider how users will interact with it and their needs for information about your services and offerings. Before diving in to Squarespace itself, it can also help to map out a comprehensive navigation (commonly known as’main menu’) plan on paper; this ensures a user-friendly navigational system for site visitors.
Dedicated service pages for each service that your business provides can help your visitors better understand what you do and the outcomes or experiences they can expect when working with you. Furthermore, including clear calls-to-action on every page can encourage visitors to take the next step toward working together with you.
Squarespace features built-in SEO features that can help your site appear higher in search results for relevant keywords, which is especially helpful if you have a blog on your website. Furthermore, if you upgrade to the Squarespace Business plan or higher you can even add custom CSS directly onto your website!
3. Upload Your Images
Squarespace automatically adjusts your image sizes based on where they’re added (backgrounds, banners or site-wide). This ensures your website looks its best whether viewed on mobile device, monitor or both!
It’s essential that when selecting images, they be high-resolution (at least 1500 pixels on their longest side). This will allow them to appear sharp across any device when uploaded onto the site, as well as making their placement on your site simpler. Saving them in their intended aspect ratio makes managing effective placement simpler.
Once your photos have been uploaded to the site, they are stored in your Asset Library – where all of the photos and other files uploaded by you can be easily found and edited from. Here you can access and manage them easily.
To upload files to your site, use the “Add File” feature in the editor and then select your file from your computer before clicking ‘Open’ to automatically upload them to the website.
Your Squarespace website allows you to upload various types of files, such as PDFs and documents. If you would like your visitors to download them easily, Jotform provides an easy solution that lets them do just that by creating forms which you embed directly onto Squarespace pages.
Squarespace’s built-in forms tools are reasonably robust, but lack the sleek and polished feel of dedicated form tools like Jotform. Thankfully, it’s relatively straightforward to integrate one onto your Squarespace site – although setup time may take more time compared to their built-in forms options – for an enhanced visitor downloading experience.
4. Create Your Pages
Squarespace offers an exceptional website builder, and our recent testing showed it remains at the top of its game for design flexibility. Choose from various templates for your site and customize as much or little as desired to create something completely unique to yourself. Alternatively, use Squarespace Blueprint to design it from scratch using more tailored-made templates without losing your unique aesthetic.
Squarespace makes creating any type of page simple by using different sections (similar to blocks in a page editor). For instance, you can easily add blog, image and contact form sections – whatever may be necessary – into any website page. After adding sections you can move them around by holding down on one with your mouse button before moving it higher or lower in its order. Moreover, edit, reformat or add pages as needed at any time!
Consider your site goals when designing your site. Your main aim should be getting visitors to purchase products, book consultations with you or simply reach out; this will allow you to focus both design and content creation accordingly.
Make your website easily navigable by including an effective navigation menu and intuitive layout, to avoid leaving visitors feeling lost or disoriented. A clear structure for your pages may help reduce confusion among visitors, while images that clearly convey what you offer can also add clarity; rather than listing all items available from a restaurant menu for instance, consider choosing several to demonstrate quality and care that went into each dish instead.
5. Finalize Your Design
Creating an account on Squarespace is the first step toward building your site. You can do this either by connecting with Google, Apple, or Facebook; manually enter an email address; or connecting directly. After creating an account you will be asked to select from various templates or build your own through “Build Your Own Templates.”
Once you’ve selected a template, it’s time to begin adding content. Squarespace boasts an excellent page structure and content management system that makes creating and organizing pages effortless – adding and reformatting sections, moving elements around freely, managing multiple sites at the same time… all are just some of its capabilities.
All Squarespace templates are responsive, meaning that they automatically adjust to fit various sized screens. This feature can be invaluable to users targeting mobile audiences exclusively or taking advantage of Google AMP (which speeds up loading times for mobile devices).
Squarespace provides plenty of options when it comes to managing images. Galleries, carousels and grids can all be used to display them for visitors’ perusal, while you can even select an ‘image focal point’ so photographers’ most vital parts remain visible no matter which viewing mode is chosen.
Squarespace makes website management even simpler by providing seamless integrations with various marketing tools such as social media links and email capture forms, making promotion simple while increasing website traffic! Plus, its comprehensive analytics tools give you insights into your audience engagement with your site!
