If you’ve listened to any podcast ever, you understand the spiel: Squarespace is an all-in-one internet site builder that makes it smooth to create a stunning online presence. Numbers-clever, it’s the second one maximum popular web building and website hosting carrier out there, helping greater than 1.8 million websites throughout the net.
One of the primary motives why Squarespace has visible this success — well, apart from all of those Ira Glass-narrated advert slots — is that it’s inherently all-inclusive. For $12 to $forty in keeping with the month, Squarespace plans provide get admission to web hosting, 24/7 customer service, website metrics, cellular optimization, SSL security, limitless garage and bandwidth, an intuitive drag-and-drop web page builder (read: no coding required), and dozens of unique, cutting-edge templates.
Most of these functions are self-explanatory, even though the latter may want to advantage from a bit extra elaboration: A Squarespace template determines how your website seems and works. Users have greater than ninety extraordinary alternatives to pick from, every of which has been designed and coded exclusively for Squarespace (which means you received’t find them on WordPress, Wix, or different website online-constructing platforms).
Every Squarespace template belongs to a so-known as template family, or a set of in addition coded templates that are alike of their simple structure, capability, and customization options. (More on the latter in a sec.) Squarespace categorizes its templates this way, in step with its guide web page, “to show off their versatility and to help you find the layout and pre-set fashion options that paintings quality as a start pointing in your web page.” Poking around within a family can be beneficial if you need to look at how Squarespace’s tools can be used to make websites look exclusive, it adds, pointing to Brine and Thorne (below) as correct examples of two templates that might be inside the equal own family of template, but styled in another way:
What’s remarkable about Squarespace is that it caters to customers of all net design skill stages, with each template falling somewhere on a customization spectrum. Some templates come up with the tools to head all-out with fonts, colors, photograph consequences, border sizes, landing pages, and more, letting you nice-music every element, whereas others offer only a few style options to get rid of any capacity hassles. It’s as much as you to decide how a great deal of time and effort you’ll commit to designing your web page. (And if you ever feel like switching things up, Squarespace helps you to easily switch out templates without dropping any of your content.)
At this factor, you’re in all likelihood wondering: How do these capabilities set Squarespace aside from, say, WordPress, every other famous platform?
The short of it’s far this: You get what you pay for. With WordPress, you’ve were given surely limitless customization alternatives in case you cough up some dough for website hosting offerings, nice topics, and legit plugins. (You might also rent a developer if your coding skills aren’t as much as par, or in case you need to switch themes without risking content loss.) Squarespace gives some distance much less flexibility in contrast, but all of its templates are ultra-dependable and mobile-geared up. And even as they’re now not as prolific as WordPress plugins, Squarespace helps the legitimate integrations of positive services, which include Acuity Scheduling (to allow site visitors agenda an appointment), Apple News (to go-put up your content), and Paypal (to allow your website to be given PayPal payments from customers), amongst a few dozen others. Plus, the maximum of the technical drudgery to your website online — i.E., security and hosting — is dealt with with the aid of Squarespace’s crew of experts so that you can direct your cognizance elsewhere.
If Squarespace sounds just like the proper answer for you, know this: You really can’t go incorrect with any of their templates. Like, it’s almost not possible to make an ugly Squarespace website. But simply in case you want a little assist to get the ball rolling on the web page of your goals, keep yourself a Google search and just preserve reading: Below, you’ll find our choices for the ten nice template alternatives for all sort of purposes, from podcasts to portfolios and beyond.
