Chapter 1
Hello Squarespace
In This Chapter
Understanding your website building options
Finding out what Squarespace can do for you
Signing up for Squarespace
Squarespace is an online website builder that provides you with everything you need to create a website, even if you donât 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.
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 companyâs 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 â 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 doesnât 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 companyâs products or services, but also open a dialogue with clients and prospects to communicate the companyâs 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. Squarespaceâs business-class support team can handle most of your clientsâ questions, keeping small web projects from morphing into long-term support nightmares.
Squarespaceâs 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.