5 Super Helpful Tips for Beginners to Build Your Own Squarespace Website
One of our lovely clients Audrey Paige Communications, who we did a branding photoshoot for.
There’s no doubt about it, we love, love, LOVE Squarespace. Our own swanky website is built on it, along with many others we have had the absolute pleasure of creating for our wonderful clients. Its super user friendly, easy to maintain and is very designer-friendly (without needing to learn any code - unless you want to of course!). So we thought we would share some super helpful tips to making it as easy as pie so you can start your own Squarespace website from scratch without tearing your hair out ;-)
1. Before you begin decide what key pages you would like.
Most people have a Home Page, About, Services, Booking page and a Contact page.
You need to have a think about your goals - what would you ultimately like your audience to be able to do once they find you? Book your service? Contact you? Make these things really easy to find otherwise people will unfortunately just close your tab no matter how lovely you’ve designed it!
2. Have a browse through the Squarespace templates. If you’re unsure (as there are quite a few!) choose one that aligns with your industry. This will help give you some ideas for calls to action, user experience layout etc. Make sure you take particular notice of the navigation because there isn’t usually much play/adaptability with this part of the template. When browsing the templates you can click “Preview” to see what the website looks like with placeholder content.
3. Once you have chosen a template click - “Start with *template name*” And your FREE trial has begun - YEHAH!! Choose a name for your website and you’re ready to go.This is where the magic happens - the fun of designing! Go into your new site and click on Design. From here, you can enter all of your branding guidelines - you can add your logo and even your colour palette (which will be used universally across your website - so clever!). Click on Fonts to add your heading fonts and body fronts (primary and secondary). Lastly, to add your logo this is usually on the home page. If you click Edit, then hover over the header and click Edit Site Header. In here, you will see Site Title & Logo - drop your logo in here then click save!
Our own website backend - in Squarespace! Under the design tab you’ll find Fonts, Colours and your Favicon
4. Click on the browser icon to add a favicon - “what in the heck is a favicon” you ask? Have a look at the top in your browser and you will see our mini logo! This is a favicon! When you’re not on the tab you have opened for us, it shows this. Cute right? :)
5. Lastly, but not least-ly - you can create your very first page. The template will come with some pre-loaded pages and designs for you. If you like the layout and are really wanting to keep things simple - awesome. Just click the top left button on the page that says “Edit”. For each section, every image can be changed by clicking once on the image and clicking on the little pencil icon (usually on the left) which means Edit.
We really hope this helps you to hit the ground running with your first Squarespace website. Once you have these things down pat, the next best thing is to just spend some time (this could be days, weeks or months!) learning the platform, making your way around and getting yourself familiar with it all. If you’ve started and are still struggling, or you just want to take the headache out of designing your website completely - get in touch, we can definitely help!
