Choosing a design based on where the navigation text falls
I guide people through the overwhelm of decisions and designs when they are creating a website from scratch.
Choosing a design based on two preferences
When you get started with Squarespace, you are faced with a design decision before you even provide a domain name or a credit card number. You will be asked to choose a design template. Templates have all the styles for text, buttons, headings, images, and pages already created in a way that the components look good together. As I browsed through many templates in doing work for clients, I started to realize that there was a pattern in the designs that could help me narrow down template choices for my clients. Whenever I start working with a client, I ask the client to make one or two decisions to narrow down the design choices.
The first decision is the width of the banner image
The first decision I ask clients to make when choosing a template is to decide how wide they want the image on the first page visitors see. They can either choose a large image that goes the full width of the page or choose a narrower image with some "breathing room" on either side. I described and showed examples of both choices in another blog post, "The one trick to starting a Squarespace website."
The next decision for the widest banner images
If clients prefer a wide edge-to-edge image, there's a second decision I ask them to make. Do they want the navigation text to appear above the image or within the image? Making that second decision narrows down design template choices to just a few. Here are a few examples of both types of navigation text placement.
You can browse through Squarespace templates before you start working on a website to get a sense of what your preferences are. For my clients who have preferred a wide edge-to-edge image on their first page, they have also had a preference about whether they liked the navigation text within the image or outside of it.
