Squarespace For Dummies

Kris Black

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118181331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Web Design

Discover how to build your own blog, website, or portfolio with Squarespace!

Squarespace is a fast-growing all-in-one solution for creating and maintaining a blog, website, or portfolio that allows you to drag and drop various site elements and manage your finished product on the free Squarespace iPhone application. In this fun and friendly 224-page ebook, Squarespace For Dummies helps you discover the variety of modules to choose from, including blogs, maps, social network integration, HTML code blocks, photo galleries, and more.

Packed with valuable information on how to maximize your website and the visitor experience, this guide offers tips for installing widgets, adding new widgets from third parties, and customization instructions. The author explains how Squarespace offers you the ability to use real-time visitor analytics, page rank tracking, and more.

• Examines the possibilities and potential of Squarespace, a publishing platform for building and maintaining a website
• Zeroes in on the various modules that you can choose from, including blogs, social network integration, photo galleries, and more
• Includes advice for getting the most out of your Squarespace website

Squarespace For Dummies will get you started building your own website in no time!

Chapter 1

Hello Squarespace

In This Chapter

Understanding your website building options

Finding out what Squarespace can do for you

Getting support 24/7

Choosing a pricing plan

Signing up for Squarespace

Squarespace is an online website builder that provides you with everything you need to create a website, even if you don’t have a clue about coding! With a little bit of planning and an understanding of what Squarespace can do, you can create a compelling website that is easy to manage and modify.

When building your website, you want a solution that is easy to use, enables you to create a custom design, and provides helpful resources and support from real people. In this chapter, I show how Squarespace meets these requirements. You also explore the different pricing plans, and end the chapter by signing up for a free trial account.

History of website builders

You can create web pages in several ways. You can write all the code by hand, you can use desktop software such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, or you can use an online solution such as Squarespace.

Do-it-yourself solutions: In the past, people coded their own websites from scratch because website builders generated messy and disorganized code, resulting in websites that loaded slowly and often didn’t work correctly. Today, many good web designers still code their own custom HTML and CSS even if they are using the following options because they get maximum control over the details of their websites.

Offline website solutions: Some people build and maintain websites using desktop applications such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Those who go this route must set up and organize online data hosting and domain registration, send files to and from servers using FTP, and buy expensive software and updates, which can be used on only the one computer on which they were installed. An offline solution can offer many benefits and flexibility but can also result in unnecessary headaches and hardships, particularly if you’re not comfortable transferring files to a web server, writing code, and designing a site from scratch.

Online website solutions: Online solutions let you create a website or a blog from your web browser. The entire experience takes place online. Ease of use, both in website setup and management, is the primary reason to choose an online solution such as Squarespace. Online solutions also free you from having to maintain offline versions of your site. Everything is hosted within the service, so you don’t have to transfer pages to a web server. In addition, you can access your site from multiple computers to make updates or add new content.

These online solutions — sometimes referred to as content management systems (CMS) — enable you to not only build a website but also add, edit, and manage the pages and content on your site. Two major categories of content management systems are available. One type of CMS is manually uploaded to your own web host’s servers, similar to how you transfer files when using an offline website builder such as Dreamweaver. Squarespace is one of those other types of CMS solutions, self-hosted and preinstalled on a web server for you, so you have one less setup step.

Exploiting the Versatility of Squarespace

Squarespace provides everything you need to create a website:

Prebuilt page modules for adding pages, blogs, picture galleries, forms, and more

Automatically built and updated navigation menus

Website analytic features

Social media widgets that display your latest personal updates on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, foursquare, Facebook Places, and more

As described in this section, you can use Squarespace to create just about any website you can think of, such as a simple blog to share your thoughts and writing, a creative portfolio to attract potential clients, or a persuasive business site to promote your company’s services.

Personal site users and bloggers

Do you want to create a blog or a personal site that you can use as the center of your online identity? The Squarespace blogging module, called a Journal, is a robust publishing tool that enables you to add multiple entries, much like a diary or written journal. Organize posts by date, tag, or category. Collect comments to facilitate ongoing conversations. Customize the display and style of the posts to best suit your needs — all without touching a bit of code. You can also share images; host a forum using the Discussion module; add social widgets that will pull in content from popular social sites such as Twitter, Flickr, and anyone serving up RSS feeds of your content; and more.

If you want two blogs on your Squarespace site, one for you and another for your business partner or a loved one, simply add two Journal pages. Squarespace doesn’t limit the number of page types, or page modules, you can add to your site. (For more information about the types of page modules, see Chapter 3.) And when your blog grows in popularity with increasing traffic and comments, you can expand and add site editors to contribute to the content and to moderate comments.

Business site users

Interacting and engaging both existing and potential customers are typically the primary focuses of a business website. A successful business site will not only share information about the company’s products or services, but also open a dialogue with clients and prospects to communicate the company’s messages and get feedback.

Some businesses favor public discussions facilitated by comments on blog entries or in a public forum hosted on-site. Other businesses prefer to communicate in a more private and controlled fashion through online surveys, contact forms, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) pages. All these options can be set up in minutes using the Squarespace Form module to collect information. This information is then available as a spreadsheet that you can download and manipulate using, for example, Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers.

Website developers

Experienced web designers can create fully customized templates for clients, then hand them a website that they can easily learn to edit on their own. Squarespace’s business-class support team can handle most of your clients’ questions, keeping small web projects from morphing into long-term support nightmares.

Squarespace’s advanced options provide complete control over the styling of your site by allowing you to override CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) properties with your own code. Access to HTML injection points within the layout of a Squarespace site enables you to add HTML or client-side code such as JavaScript for more advanced customizations.

A brief history of Squarespace

In 2003, Anthony Casalena was looking for a way to publish a website. None of the solutions he tried efficiently brought together everything he needed to publish even a basic website with static pages and a blog, so he decided to build what he needed. He spent his days attending college classes and his nights pursuing his coding hobby. Before long, he built Squarespace, which simplified the most difficult parts of building a we...