Squarespace Delivers For New Website
Why Squarespace should be your first choice for a brochure website - best for service business and sometimes product companies.
For the past 45 days I have been re-imagining my business (from EcomSpence to The Small Biz Pathfinders) and my website on Squarespace. Website design, especially for an evolving business, can be an organic process as one learns what one wants and what the website platform is capable of. Up until this new website, I spent most of my time in Shopify and a little bit of my time in Squarespace (where my old site was). Well, the past few weeks has been enlightening as I manipulated Squarespace into becoming the type of site that Mark Schaefer recommends in his Personal Branding Class which I was part of in June.
The main design tweak I had to figure out is The Sidebar. These days a blog post is a landing page, so Best Practice is to include various important bits of information and calls to action in The Sidebar. I was able to create and style this without a plug-in while future-proofing it for information additions. Check out the sidebar and see what you think. >>>>>
Additionally I had to dig into the new Squarespace 7.1 site interface. It is different enough than prior versions (which I built EcomSpence on), so that took some getting used to. But, once I understood how it works, the process was easier and much more flexible. I knew before why I recommended Squarespace over Wordpress nine times out of ten for small business owners, but really see how the new features are even more friendly to service providers who are not afraid to dig into tech a little bit. That being said, a professional Squarespace developer will help you complete the site in record time and with the best set up.
Top features of Squarespace 7.1 that I find useful
The Design Grid allows you to place anything anywhere on the page and keeps your content aligned and spaced equally.
The Mobile View is fully customizable allowing you to drag and drop content for how it should appear on a mobile device. Still, you have to test it on a phone and tablet to make sure it does what you want but, it is easy to tweak. Mobile friendliness, ignored too often, is so important since around half of users.
Lots of choices for Section Dividers, image shapes, and special effects but in a lot of ways those are mainly distractions that can lead one to a cluttered design. Keep it simple, unless art or creativity are your primary bread and butter.
You can “hack” The Sidebar into the blog (or any page for that matter) and populate it from a dashboard. The only caveat is that the sidebar structure (vs. content) cannot be set up universally, so you have to make sure it is what you want from the start, and has room for expansion (which mine does).
There are many kinds of Blocks you can add to your site including Images, Newsletter, Summary, Video, Forms, Reservations and more.
Just about every color and every font can be specifically or globally modified with sliders and clicks. No coding needed.
Should you ever want to talk about Squarespace or website platform considerations hit me up for a FREE 20-Minute Coffee Break.
What about your logo? you ask.
I created the logo using a combination of tools including Canva, MidJourney, and Pixelmator. The evolution of a logo, captured on my iterations on Canva, is a good story for another day. Suffice it to say I had great help from members of the RISE Community, and am forever appreciative of this resource that grew out of the pandemic. Look for a future post showing my logo creation process.
