5 Tips For Getting Started With Your Squarespace Design Project
It’s no secret that Squarespace is one of the most popular website building platforms available today. And for good reason. Their interface is extremely user-friendly, they have tons of templates to choose from, lots of design customization options, built-in website security and a great support team (I typically get questions answered within minutes using their live chat). Squarespace makes it easy to design and build your dream website. However, as intuitive as it is to actually put the website together, getting started and taking the first few steps can be overwhelming (isn’t that the case with any project we try to tackle in life?). This article will walk you through 5 tips that will help you get started with your next Squarespace Design project.
The very first step is to obviously create a Squarespace account. So go ahead and do that now (USE CODE PARTNER10 FOR 10% OFF). I’m going to save step #1 on my list below for something a bit more fun 😊
1. Plan out your website pages and gather all of your content
Take some time to think about what pages you’d like to include on your website. Here are the most common website pages I typically include on most of the websites that I design: Home, About, Services, Portfolio and Contact
Take a look at competitor websites for ideas and inspiration. See what top performers in your industry are including on their websites.
Intentionally think about page headers and paragraph headlines. You’ll want to come up with headlines that are both captivating for your website visitors and SEO-friendly. For example: If I were a Wedding Photographer in NYC and I was writing content for my Services page, I might want to include these 2 headlines: “NYC Wedding Photography” and “Capture The Magic Of Your Big Day”. These headlines will grab the attention of my visitor and will tell Google exactly what I offer so that I can be ranked among the other wedding photographers in NYC (hopefully at the top of the list 😉
Keep a Google Doc and organize your content by page. For each page, write out your headlines, bullet points, descriptive blurbs, etc… When you’re ready to actually start creating your website pages, it’ll be easier to visualize the layout you’d like to create if you already have content ready to go for each page.
2. Optimize your website images for SEO
Rename your image files (before uploading them to your site) so that Google can read them
Are you uploading images to your website with the filename “image-asset827469.jpg” or “stock-photo832469.png”? 😨 If so, you are missing a HUGE opportunity for SEO. Google reads every single one of your image file names and uses that information to decide where to place you in Google search results. So you’ll want to optimize all of your image file names with keywords that you’d like to target.
Example: Going back to the NYC Wedding Photographer scenario — If I was uploading an image of myself to my About page, I would likely name the image: “Jane Smith Wedding Photographer NYC”. This title is SEO friendly and will tell Google exactly what the image is so that they can rank me in search results as a NYC Wedding Photographer.
Resize your images
Try to get all images down to 500KB (or less). This is important for both website speed and SEO.
Large banner images should be 2500 pixels wide
All other website images should be 1500 pixels wide
If you’ve already resized your images and you’re still struggling to reduce the file sizes down to 500KB, use: Compress JPEG
Remember: JPG images are always smaller and load faster than PNGs. So convert PNGs to JPGs when necessary: PNG to JPG
3. Pick your Squarespace website template
Choose your template based on the design, rather than what type of business Squarespace is marketing the template for.
For example: If there is a template that already has fonts, colors, layout, etc… that you love but Squarespace is marketing the template for a travel blogger and you’re a photographer, so what! You’ll save yourself a lot of time down the road choosing design styles if the template already looks the way you’d like it to. And you’re going to change out the website content anyway!
4. Set all of your Site Styles from the beginning
Before you begin uploading your content to your website, head over to the Site Styles and pick your fonts, colors, button styles, etc…
Typically, if you try to choose design styles as you go, you’ll likely end up changing things on one page, unaware that the change is also affecting another page. If you set all of your styles from the beginning, you can avoid this altogether.
5. Take advantage of Squarespace’s grid layout
One important thing to note when getting familiar with Squarespace is that Squarespace pages are not just blank canvases. Squarespace pages use a grid structure. Take advantage of this when organizing your content blocks on your pages.
For example: drag and drop spacer blocks next to each other to create columns. And then you can add content to each column (and delete the spacer blocks when you’re done).
In the example below, I’ve created 3 columns by dragging and dropping 3 spacer blocks next to each other in a row. Then, I’ve added a text block underneath each spacer block. This allows me to create 3 columns of text, nicely in one row. I would delete the spacer blocks after I’m finished setting up my columns.
You can create rows of two, three, four, six elements. And you can use the drag feature to the left & right of blocks to resize your columns.
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