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. As I browsed through many templates in doing work for clients, I started to realize that there was one design decision about the banner image that narrows down template choices right away.

The personality of a website comes across with the choice of three design elements: images, colors, and typefaces. In this blog post, you’ll see examples of how the choices of images, colors, and typefaces help define the website personalities their owners wanted to express.

If you are starting a blog for your website or adding one to an existing website, it’s helpful to review your choices for your blog page’s design. Most websites, including those on Squarespace, can include a blog.

Adding links to your website gives people a convenient way to learn more about a subject that interests them. Links can be built into text, buttons, or images. Learn more about the guidelines I go by when deciding which type of link to use.

Classes are a type of recurring group educational event, held in person or online. Each time the class runs, it will have a different date and possibly a different time. You should make the classes easy to find and sign up for on your website. Using a scheduling program can automate the processes of registration and payment.

The steps for redesigning a website are similar to creating a new website. You can save a little time re-using some text and images, but you’ll also write new text, add new images, and possibly change the navigation.

To guide website visitors from being mildly interested in what you are offering to becoming clients and, ideally, your biggest supporters, your website needs clear paths to encourage them to take the next step.

If you have never had a website or have only created a website on your own without help, this blog post will explain the steps my clients and I take to go from our first talk to a finished website that helps their businesses shine online.

Every website needs a Contact form so that visitors have an easy online way to get in touch with you. Learn about what a Contact form should contain and where it should be placed on your website.

I always love it when I find something that speeds up repetitive tasks. So when I discovered the Squarespace shortcut of copying website pages to create backups, placeholders, and archived pages early in my website design career, I was sold.

Squarespace offers a special home page called a lock screen that you can use while you're designing your website. The lock screen appears when people go to your password-protected website. Use a lock screen to build excitement for your brand, get a head start on Google search results, and provide a preview option for reviewers.

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 I ask clients to make is to choose a large image that goes the full width of the page or choose a narrower image with some "breathing room" on either side. If they prefer a wide edge-to-edge image, there's a second decision. 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.

On December 1, 2017, Squarespace changed which features are included in its lowest-cost Personal plan. Many simple customization and third-party integration features are now classified as Premium features, only available with the Business and Commerce plans. I'll have to take this into consideration as I talk with new clients about their options.

Squarespace is the platform I recommend for new websites, especially if you want to update it on your own later. One of the features I love in Squarespace is the ability to exit without saving so you can dismiss all changes you've made to a page if you don't like them.

When I started my website design business, there was lots of room on the Portfolio page. When I took a look at that page some months later, I knew it was time to do a major redesign of the page because its overcrowded design no longer worked with the number of samples I had added throughout the last year. In that version of my website, I used a Squarespace 7.0 gallery pages to create a multi-page Portfolio that allowed for expansion.

People have been asking me recently what they need to put on a new website. What pages do they need? What information do they need to include? It occurred to me that a website is like an old-fashioned bakery, like those I've seen in the North End section of Boston or in small European villages.