Teaching Guide
Welcome to my Squarespace teaching guide, which includes everything you need to know when it comes to making small adjustments yourself or maintaining your new website.
The beauty of Squarespace is that its interface is designed to make life as simple as possible, but it’s flexible so that more advanced designers can create bespoke designs, and use code to augment them.
So if you’re not an IT wizard, don’t worry!
To access your site, go to https://login.squarespace.com, and once you’ve logged in, you’ll see your website property. Hover the mouse over it, and click the ‘go to website’ button that appears to access the editing suite.
Once you’re inside the editing suite, on the left-hand side of the window, you should see the menu:
Assuming you won’t want to make any big changes to the site’s design, I’ll focus on the ‘Website’ section, as I’ve likely already taken care of the work that needed to be done in the other sections. (This includes connection to Google Analytics, your business information, plugins, bespoke coding etc).
By clicking on the ‘Website’ option, you’ll see each of your site pages listed. Clicking on each page name will take you to the specific page on your site. You can then adjust each page as you’d like.
Making simple adjustments:
If you want to make changes to your content, just click the ‘edit’ button in the top left corner of the page, and then double click on the item on the page you’re looking to adjust. With text, you’ll be able to type in that section. With an image, you’ll have the option to replace it, delete it, and so on.
To add a new content block, hover over your page section and click ‘add block’, which is in the top left corner. Then pick the type of content you’d like to add.
To move it, drag the block across the page grid to the position you want it. When you’re done, click ‘save’ in the top left corner, and then exit.
Sections:
To add a new page section, click the blue ‘add section’ tab, which is at the bottom of each existing page section. A pop-up menu will give you the options of a blank section, or pre-designed sections for various types of content. Once you’ve chosen one, you’ll see the icons below on the right-hand side of the section, when you hover over it. Clicking ‘edit section’ allows you to change the formatting of your grid, your background image, a colour schemes.
The squares icon and trash can icon will respectively duplicate your content to another section on the page, or delete the section. If you’d like to move the section up or down on the page, click the up or down arrows.
Setting up a blog:
If you’d like to start a blog, you can do so by navigating to your ‘Pages’ section in the menu, and clicking the ‘plus’ (+) near the top. Click ‘Blog’, and a group of templates will appear for you to choose the layout you’d like. Click the layout you’d like, and then click on the Blog page itself to enter the editing section. You should see a list of sample blog posts running down the left-hand side:
To create or edit a post, click the ‘plus’ button, or click on an existing post in the list. Then click ‘edit’ in the top left corner of the page you’re viewing to access it, and you can add text or other media, as detailed in the ‘Making general adjustments’ section above.
If you want to adjust the image that’s displayed on your blog home page for each post, add tags, categories, allow comments, and so on, click the 3 dots when you hover over your blog post in the left-hand menu:
Then you should see this menu:
From here, you can make adjustments by clicking on each section, and adding the information you want. Tags help readers find the specific topics you’re writing about, and categories are a more general classification. It’s a good idea to allow comments by clicking the button, as readers will enjoy being able to give feedback and appreciate when their comments are responded to by the author, creating a dialogue.
To change the image readers see when landing at your blog home page, click ‘options’, and then upload an image by clicking ‘remove image’ and then ‘add image’.
To add your SEO text, go back to the home menu, click on ‘Marketing’, then ‘SEO’, and scroll down to the SEO site description. Then simply highlight the text, copy it (click Edit-Copy in your browser menu), and then navigate back to your blog post, and paste it into the SEO description section on the Blog Post Settings menu. If space allows, add a few words about your blog post. Adding a strong title is a good idea too of course.
Other options are available in the Blog Post Settings menu which are pretty self-explanatory.
Finally, to publish a post, go to the ‘edit’ button, and simply click ‘publish’, or ‘schedule’ to set a time and day you’d like the post to go live.
Creating an online store:
Note: to set up a store, you’ll need a business or commerce plan with Squarespace.
If you’d like to start an online store, you can do so by navigating to your ‘Pages’ section in the menu, and clicking the ‘plus’ (+) near the top. Click ‘Store’, and a group of templates will appear for you to choose the layout you’d like. Click the layout you’d like, and you’ll be ready to go.
So now you’ll see the sample products on the left-hand store menu:
You can reposition items just by clicking and dragging the item to where you want it to be. You can either edit these existing samples by double clicking on them, or to list a new product, click the ‘plus’ button on the menu, and then click the type of item you want to list:
This menu will appear, which will allow you to add all the necessary details for your item:
Now you can go through each tab at the top of the menu, filling in your product information as needed. Again, it’s made very easy to do by those clever folks at Squarespace, and you can add tags and an SEO description just the same as detailed in the Blog section of this guide. Don’t forget to add a thumbnail image in the Options tab, as this is the first thing your customers will see when viewing the product.
To adjust the design, or for another way to get to the menu shown above, click on the product on the web page itself, and two buttons will appear in the top left corner - one to ‘edit product’, and the other to ‘edit design’. If you’d like to edit the design, once you’ve clicked on this option, you’ll see all the adjustable design parameters listed on the left-hand side. I’d suggest playing around with these to see what you think suits, but remember to keep things as simple as possible, so your customers will be able to find their way around easily.
To monitor orders and adjust other aspects of your store, such as shipping options, go back to the home menu, and click on ‘Commerce’. Here you’ll see all the options listed. Again most are self-explanatory, but the most important one is payments! Scroll down the list to ‘payments’, and you’ll have a range of options to transfer funds into your bank account from your online sales. In my experience, I’ve found Stripe to be the simplest to use, and it has the best rate in terms of percentage charges on each sale. (I have no affiliation with Stripe). Head over to https://stripe.com/, and set up your account there, then click on the Stripe option in your Squarespace payments section, and you’ll be prompted to access your Stripe account so that the two can be connected. Remember to set your store currency to your home country, by scrolling to the bottom of the payments menu and clicking ‘store currency’.
In summary:
Hopefully, this will see you on your way to adjusting your site as you wish in the future, but in case you need more help, Squarespace has an excellent support centre that details every aspect of their sites, and how to manage them. They also have a very handy live chat, in case you need to speak to them. This can be accessed by logging on to your account, and then clicking on ‘help’ on the top right of the dashboard. Once inside the help centre, you’ll see this icon in the bottom right corner:
Click the icon to get started on a chat with a member of their team. Likewise, there are a myriad of helpful videos on YouTube that cover just about every issue or question there may be about Squarespace websites.