Squarespace Business Websites

Beautiful designs and smart features that work for many business types.

Squarespace is positioned as a DIY website builder with a strong emphasis on design. They have been around since 2004 and while their products have changed several times they've made bold visuals with a minimalist approach to design their calling card.

Squarespace is good place to try out a lot of things before committing to a more specialized and expensive platform.

Grow Your Audience

The built-in RSS integration allows you to publish a blog post automatically to third-party newsletters, social and other feeds. Squarespace also has an add-on email campaign service that allows you to manage everything within one interface.

Teach An Online Class

Courses are a new service that gives you the tools to design, promote and sell your own classes on Squarespace. You will not find the same features as one of the newer LMSs designed from the ground up like Thinkific, Kajabi, or Teachable but this is a good place to test the waters.

Manage Your Schedule

Squarespace acquired Acuity Scheduling in 2019. For several years they offered 2 parallel services but they are currently merged under the Acuity banner. It is well integrated with Squarespace and has client management, accounting, and invoicing features that might be good fit for you. Its highest pricing tier is HIPAA compliant.

Sell Digital And Physical Products Online

Squarespace's E-commerce is a good place to test the waters on selling services, digital, and physical products where a tight design integration between the story on you website and your products is essential. They've partnered with Square to offer point of sale purchases. The Squarespace app allows you to scan shipping labels, fulfill orders and track inventory from your mobile.

Sell Content With Memberships

This much awaited Squarespace product lets you paywall pages on your website and sell hosted or downloadable videos, classes, newsletters. This is included with a Business or Commerce plan or can be a Digital Products add-on with other plans.

Version 7.1 is their latest release and it features one master template with multiple built-in color and design options. The different content blocks are easy to drag and drop into a responsive layout that works well on a wide spectrum of devices. This version simplifies their code base while offering more functionality through new built in features and integrations with third party services.

As a general solution with designs and workflows designed for, say, 80% of the businesses out there, it might not be the best choice if you fall into the other 20%.

Pros

One easy to customize master template.
Responsive layouts works on a variety of devices.
Pre-built blocks for most content types.
Great controls to optimize search appearance.
Three Levels of extensibility.
Built in forms.
Comprehensive Documentation.

Cons

Design geared towards visual content.
Limited folder depth not suitable for all content.
Some blocks need custom CSS to work on tablets.
Lacks some E-commerce features.
Matching the latest trends requires CSS coding.
Useless human tech support.

Networking
Group

Com-X Network

The Com-X Network is a quarterly networking event for commercially minded Life Sciences executives. The group needed a website to attract new members, build an email list, and collect RSVPs for the events. They didn't have hands-on experience with the tools but were willing to learn. The latest version of Squarespace coupled with Mailchimp and Google Workspace turned out to be a good place to start.

Medical Practice

Downtown LA Gynecologist homepage featuring Dr Sarah Yamaguchi.

DTLA Gynecology

Dr Yamaguchi needed an informational website for DTLA Gynecology, her new solo gynecology practice. When we spoke in August 2020, she was juggling seeing patients and finalizing leasing details for a new office, and business registration for her new practice. Her move-in target was the start of 2021. The website was straightforward. The challenge was to get to the final result with minimal stress.

Business
Consultancy

Potential Dialogue

Peter Nixon is a Hong Kong based business consultant who offers keynotes, workshops and consulting services. The Potential Dialogue website serves as a hub for managing client inquiries and scheduling engagements. The new site is responsive, easy to navigate and self-update with current content in the form of videos, podcasts and blog posts.

Squarespace Resources

General Documentation

The documentation is very comprehensive covering all the interfaces, block types and common processes. Most articles show the information in both written and video form.

Templates

Squarespace changed their approach dramatically with the latest 7.1 release. All their templates are derived from a single flexible master template. This simplified their code base, documentation, and maintenance greatly. Each design builds off a 5-color palette creating 10 different color combinations ranging from a light to a dark.Text sizes are partially decoupled from HTML semantics. The approach to CSS grid allows a patient beginner to achieve Swiss style graphic designs out of the box.

Pricing

Most people can get by with the business tier that allows code blocks for customizations and some experimentation with basic ecommerce and hosting video. Serious ecommerce and other add on features can be added on a la carte with pricing that's competitive with more featured top of the category leaders.

3rd Party Integrations

Squarespace official integrations with a number of services extend your site's functionality in areas as diverse as blogging, commerce, social, design, domains, forms, images storage, marketing, multi-lingual sites, online ordering and videos. These are fully supported by Squarespace so you can contact them about any issues that you encounter.

Extensions

These are third-party tools that are the equivalent of plugins, add-ons, or apps. The majority of them pertain to e-commerce. Squarespace can help you connect or disconnect an extension but support falls to the tool authors.

Custom Code

You can directly paste your own code or that provided by a third-party into a code block or by code injection to modify your site's appearance or add functionality. Squarespace parses html, css, and javascript. They do not provide support for code base modifications.

Two months to launch. A Squarespace website project typically take 4-6 weeks depending on the website size. The design is developed in browser on an actual Squarespace site to work within the limits of the main template.

50/50 Fees. Design Fees start at $US 4000, with half paid in advance to confirm the engagement. Before launching the site you will be given billing access, followed by full access after all the final content is locked down.

Preparation. This package requires some preparation on your part. Please collect all the site graphics and copy in an accessible Dropbox or Google Drive folder. Connecting your domain hosting service or other accounts might require password access.

LETs TALK

Describe the business context for your website.

What service do you provide? Who is your target audience/user? What does your website do?

How can I help you? Tell me your primary goals.

Do you need to generate leads? Streamline new client intake? Book appointments?

When do you want launch your new site?

New sites take a few days. Is there an important deadline you need to meet?

Website URL

If you have an existing website, it likely has traffic and search pedigree. We need to look at it.

Content

Please share the url of any other relevant content such RFPs, graphics, comps in a Dropbox or Google Drive folder.

Contact info

I will not add bother you with any marketing emails. The information collected here will be used solely for the purpose of responding to your business enquiry.

Name

Last/Family Name

Title/Role

Company

Country

State/Province

City

Email Address

Tel/Skype/Whatsapp

Preferred Contact Method and Time

Do you prefer to be contacted by email or phone? If by phone, let me know what times work best for you.

Referral *

How did you hear about VeryCleverDesign?

Let's make you shine online

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Squarespace Business Websites

Pros

Cons