Squarespace website builder review
Squarespace is one of the established website builders, a brand well known for many professional web designers. As Apple enthusiasts, we always loved the style of Squarespace website, templates and layouts. Hence, it was a pleasure for us to write this Squarespace review. Even from the homepage you can feel the good taste in design and style. It is obvious that the team behind Squarespace has a strong expertise in design.
We found the Squarespace website and its template as modern and stylish. The main landing page is using a lot of white space to emphasize key USPs. Large photography together with simple large headings create an impressive and cinematic appearance.
An impressive collection of stylish templates
There are many professional templates available. Some are from key industries such as travel, interior design, while other are for personal websites or magazine layouts. You will find the collection of templates quite comprehensive and intended to cover a wide range of scenarios. For example, Squarespace has templates optimized for selling memberships or for getting appointments.
The templates we have checked have rendered beautifully on all devices. No matter if it was a desktop, tablet or mobile device the template kept its professional and stylish look and feel.
An easy way to present your portfolio
Do you need a solution to present your portfolio? Then you will be glad to find that Squarespace has templates with predefined galleries which were designed for building a portfolio showcase. The galleries were designed to list in a stylish manner your photos or project examples.
Digital marketing tools & features
Building a website is not sufficient for getting visitors. If you want to attract visitors, you also need to promote your website. Normally this is done through digital marketing using channels such as SEO, SEM or Paid Advertising.
There are many digital marketing tools provided by Squarespace to support your overall marketing efforts. The analytics tools will help you to get insights on your traffic. Then, you will find support to create your own email marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, Squarespace provides apps such as the Squarespace Video Studio app for creating marketing videos. Another app is the Unfold social media app that will help you to write and design content for social media.
And there are many other tools designed to promote your website, such as tools for Search Engine Optimization, banners, social integrations with Facebook, Twitter, and many other.
Good integration support with many third-party tools
Social integration is just one of the third-party integrations supported by Squarespace. Also, with extensions you could add third party widgets and apps to your website. For example, you could integrate external shipping or order management apps. Depending on the industry you are in this could proof to be quite useful.
How about your website logo?
We were surprised to find out that Squarespace also provide a logo maker. We loved the simplicity of the interface while designing a logo. While designing your logo you will be able to preview it in three different preview modes. First, you could see it as it will look on a business card. Then you could preview it in a digital environment. Finally, you could check out how your logo will look on merchandise item such a t-shirt branded with your logo. All these previews are happening in real time. This means that when you are editing your logo you will be able to preview all your adaptations. While you are editing you could view live all the three preview modes.
The overall interface of the logo creator is extremely simplistic. Thus, some user like experienced professional designers might find it quite limiting. The tool lacks professional editing features comparing to Sketch or Photoshop. Therefore, we won’t recommend it for a professional designer. On the other hand, novice and general user will find the tool extremely easy to use.
Build an online ecommerce store
With Squarespace you can create far more than a simple corporate website. For example, you can build your own online ecommerce store. There are powerful templates available for listing and showcasing your products. Furthermore, the website builder is providing solutions to manage your products inventory and to create easily your product catalogs.
There are many ecommerce features available such as scheduling when a product should be listed or managing SKUs. In regards of your inventory, you could receive various notification or integrate it with third party Commerce solutions.
Another powerful feature is the checkout experience. Here you could integrate with popular payment solutions such as Stripe or PayPal.
And it does not stop here. On the official website you will be able to learn also about other solution for different business cases. For example, you will find custom solutions for scheduling appointments of for selling services.
If your business is a restaurant or hotel, you will be impressed by the integration with the Tock reservation tool. The tool provides reservation features for business from the hospitality or restaurants industry. Tock will go far beyond a simple reservation for you. First you will be able to manage reservations or tables. Then, you could benefit by social media integration. Furthermore, there are solutions for reducing the no show rate.
You can learn more about Tock here:
The editing experience
During our Squarespace website builder review, we found the Squarespace editor sufficiently easy to use and intuitive. Users with no coding experience will be able to easily customize and build their website. However, from time to time we found the left side navigation too cluttered. This was merrily a minor inconvenient, since overall, it was quite clear how to achieve key tasks. Advanced developers with coding skills might find the tool too limited for their needs. However, the tool is perfect for most users out there who want to build a beautiful website.
Squarespace review – conclusions
Squarespace remains one of our favorite website builders. And the area where it excels is the look and feel. Its templates are beautiful. Many of these have a modern and stylish appearance, with a balanced white space and amazing typography. Thus, your website could look beautiful as well. This is extremely useful if you do not have an eye for design.
Find more about Squarespace on:
Squarespace logo creator: