I love Squarespace! There, I said it, loud and proud! It’s my number one website builder when creating gorgeous websites for my clients.

A quick intro:

Squarspace is a drag-and-drop website builder with customisable templates.

If you’ve been thinking...

“Gahhhh I know I need a website for my new business but have no idea where to start? There are so many things I don’t know about! Will it be easy to use because I’ve never done this before! I want it to look slick and professional yet beautiful, not like I’ve just done a crappy DIY job!

There are loads of moving pieces I know I need to get but don’t know the first thing about where to find them (or even what they are?!) Domain name, email provider, hosting, will it have things like pop-up boxes, sign up to my newsletters?”

Let me answer some of those questions you may have been voicing in your head and also some answers to ones you didn’t even know to ask but Squarespace have your back on those ones too!

1. Beautifully Designed Templates

No crappy looking DIY job for you, look like a pro from the get go! I don’t think you can match Squarespace for the beautiful and free templates that they have on offer.

What’s really great about their templates is that they break it down into categories from; professional services, health & fitness, fashion & beauty, creative services and a whole bunch of other industries making it easy for you to get going. Although I think it’s good to have a look at other templates too, not just what they suggest as you can alter the pages as you go within the templates, they’re just a guide for you.

I’ve worked in the design industries for over ten years now and I‘m a sucker for a good looking website. The fact that you have gorgeous websites already nicely created for you and all you have to do are a couple of tweaks, add your own content and voila - your website is live!

Plus everything looks just as good on the desktop version as it does on the mobile, gorgeously responsive!

2. Easy To Use

Did I mention how easy Squarespace is to use? The reason I use this website builder is because I know that after only a 60 minute tutorial my clients will be able to edit their website easy peasy! I really believe that you should be able to edit your own website and not have to get your web designer/developer to tweak any small change you want to make. I love that you have the skills and know how to do it yourself.

For those of you that are DIY’ing your site and not using your designer… It will only take you 1-2 hours to learn the basics with the tutorials Squarespace have on their website. For anything custom, building your own pages and site designs this may take a little longer but if you’re just wanting to use their already gorgeous templates then you’re winning!

No need whatsoever to know coding, it’s just drag and drop!

3. Cover Pages

As easy as it is to create your website, it may take you a little while to get it looking exactly how you want it to. I mean there are endless possibilities, from the styling of your site to perfecting your copy.

In the interim what’s great about Squarespace is the beautifully designed templates they have for a coming soon ‘cover’ page. So whilst you’re working on your site and you want to send people now to your site to capture their email addresses, this feature is pretty badass!

4. Style Editor

I love love love the style editor aspect of Squarespace. They have the really easy to use drag and drop aspect of building the actual pages, but the style editor is all about tweaking the already there pretty templates into something more bespoke to you. Of course you want to use their templates, but you may not want your website to look like everyone else’s out there! With the style editor this is where you can really shine and have fun.

You can change your fonts (their colour, spacing, style, size), the background colour, the spacing of how the copy appears on the site, the button colours (there are three different sizes of buttons, do you want them solid or as an outline?), you can play around with your navigation bars and how/where they appear.

There are so many options and fun things to do, you just need to hover over each section on the site and Squarespace intuitively knows what section you want to play around with!

5. SEO Friendly

Squarespace has made it so that you don’t have to be an expert in SEO to be able to make your site

Not only does Squarespace give you great tools to optimize your website or blog for search engine results, they also make it easy to have your content shared on Facebook and Pinterest - which are both HUGE platforms to drive traffic and sell products on your site.

Ultimately, having that content shared drives your ranking up on search engine indexes and helps you pop up in front of more people when they search for things relevant to your site. They make it easy to integrate Google Analytics to help further your search engine optimization efforts too.

6. One-Stop-Shop

No more having to look in a million different places for all the things you need to have to get your website up and running. You also don’t need to worry about backing up your website as it’s all cloud based.

Squarespace have the following features;

• Domain name - you can purchase it with them, no third party needed

• Hosting

• Beautiful Templates

• E-commerce (You can have an online shop)

• Blog

• Newsletter Marketings Tools and Analytics

• Pop-Ups

• Everything Is Built In

• Acuity - the scheduling platform has been bought by Squarespace so it can now be seamlessly integrated into your site
  

This may seem like a similar point as above but let me go a little deeper…

When you’re looking at websites you like, perhaps it’s a direct competitors, you may notice certain things they have featured that you know you definitely want on yours.

They might have an announcement bar at the top of their page, telling their customers about a Webinar they’re hosting that week or a new book they have out, that you can buy on amazon.

Or loads of bright Call To Action buttons, prompting their audience to book in a call.

Perhaps a newsletter subscriber box letting their peeps know that they could get a freebie if they enter their email address and subscribe.

All of those things I’ve listed can be really tricky/sticky to do on other website template builders, with some you have to buy them from a different companies as plug-ins. With Squarespace they’re all built in and soooo easy to drag and drop in!

For all you service based businesses, coaches/yoga teachers/whoever you may be, if you set up your website thinking this is just for me to showcase my services and not to sell products (physical or digital), but you change your mind… don’t worry, Squarespace have you covered! At no extra cost to you, you can set a product page easy peasy within the drag and drop features!

7. Responsive Across all Devices

What do I mean by responsive? This means that your website will look gorgeous on all devices from your desktop, to your tablet, to your mobile phone. You can toggle between looking at the design of your website as it would appear on a desktop and a phone, by clicking on the top right button whilst you’re in the edit mode of your website. Awesome, right?!

8. Help!

I’ll keep this short and sweet. Squarespace support is awesome! They have 24/7 email support and live chat during their working hours, which differs where you are in the world.

They also have an incredible source of learning materials available for you to teach you whatever you need to know Squarespace; Guides, Videos, Forums, Webinars

9. Pricing

For me I think the pricing is really reasonable for everything that they do, and I like that the fact that it’s all in one. I don’t have to pay a bunch of different people for things like hosting etc. Here’s their plan pricing in US$. That’s unlimited storage and data, yaaaaas!!!