How to build your dream website with a custom Squarespace template
You know you need a GREAT website for your brand new small business to thrive. One that will blow your competitors out of the water, and one that will... well, sell itself! 💸
You know having an online presence and a perfectly on-brand website are the keys to success, but you've done your research, and the only solutions you found were:
go broke before you even launch with a custom-built website that is way out of your small business budget
pick a pre-made website template that needs a ton of customizing to actually work for your business (with time and skills that you don't have...)
or build it all yourself... (cue tech-rage, wine-fuelled, imminent mental breakdown because where do you even start?? 🙈)
One thing that we can all agree on is that these options are bad, bad, and worse. So we came up with a little something new 👇
Create your Own Custom Website Template
Totally customizable, and a fraction of the price that a custom website designer will charge, building your own, custom-made website template is the perfect happy medium between a custom website and ready-to-go template. It gives you all the professionally-designed pages you need, with your choice of colors and fonts built-in.
This means you can save a ton of time, money, and energy to reinvest right into your business, and if that's not a super smart small business move, we don't know what is! ✨
Why design your own website template?
Other than getting just that much closer to your dream website with a custom template that will actually work for your unique business, there are a few extra reasons why designing your own template might be a great option for you:
Designed and developed by professionals
Our unique template page library was developed and strategically designed by Squarespace pros (like ourselves) using Squarespace 7.1 's newest Fluid Engine editor. This means, gorgeous, professional website pages that meet all your specific small business needs, a responsive design that works just as well on desktop and mobile, and access to all the latest Squarespace tech-updates so that you don't have to spend hours mastering website design by yourself.
Easy on your wallet
Keep it small biz budget friendly! By choosing exactly how many website pages you need (or want) in your website template, you can really tailor it to your own budget! Each template page has also been purposefully designed to attract and convert your dream clients into paying customers, and our tutorials will teach you everything you need to know to maintain your website and update it as your business grows without any extra help 💸
A breeze to customize
Building your own template means a totally custom combination of website pages, color palette, and fonts (without the custom website price tag). Just about everything you can think of is also totally customizable (text, images, fonts, colors, layouts, etc), and Squarespace’s Fluid Engine editor makes adding in your own content as simple as drag and drop!
👉 Why we recommend Squarespace for small business owners
High level support
Scared you might get stuck? We're here to help! You’ll have your very own support team on stand-by to answer any questions, anytime, as well as our detailed video tutorials to guide you along every step of your dream-website-building journey. If you've never used Squarespace before, that's totally fine! The whole process is beginner friendly and you'll come out of it with a new set of skills up your sleeve to maintain your own website like a pro!
How to design your own website template?
📄 Choose your pages
We know all small businesses are different. We also know all small businesses have very different styles. That's why our Squarespace pros have professionally designed multiple versions of any type of website page you could think of so that you can pick the perfect combination to create the website of your dreams!
Look through our extensive library of designs. You'll find all the crucial ones likes Home pages, About pages, Services, Contact pages, Blog pages, and a few extras like Shops, Resources pages, 404 error pages, Instagram Links pages, all the way down to Footers! Check out the demos, and choose all the pages you actually need to showcase your business in the very best light.
Start with a home page, and follow our page by page guide. We recommend 4 - 6 pages as a starting point, with at least a Home page, an About page, an Offer (like a shop, sales page, or services page), a Blog or Portfolio, and a Contact page!
Use our industry filters to help you narrow down your options. You'll find pages with everything you need to win over your dream customers in just about any industry, with galleries and featured images for photographers, call-to-action buttons, sales pages, and FAQs for service based businesses, featured blog posts and fun blog designs for bloggers, and so much more. Whatever your small business looks like, we've thought of it all so you don't have to 😉
🎨 Choose your color palette and font combination
Once you've carefully crafted the perfect combination of website pages for your biz, give it that extra custom something something by picking a color palette preset OR add your own totally custom personalised color palette (👉 How to create the perfect color palette for your website (easy DIY!))
To tie it all together, pick from our selection of sleek, bold, rustic or romantic font combos that have been designed to fit perfectly with any of our template pages.
This means a totally unique website design that looks and feels custom with even less work from you. And it’s totally customizable! If you want to make any changes to your colors and fonts at any time, our Squarespace tutorial library that comes with your new template will teach you exactly how 🤓
💌 Choose how you want us to deliver your brand new template
Whether you're just starting out or already have a website that could just do with a little spruce up, we've got options for ya!
👉 Delivery
Our standard delivery is free and will deliver your brand new custom template as a new website directly into your Squarespace account. A delivery is for you if you don't have a website yet, or if you don't mind starting fresh!
👉 Install
For a small fee, we'll install any or all of your dream template pages into the Not Linked Pages section of your existing Squarespace 7.1 site.
This option is ideal if you already have an established Squarespace site with lots of content (like Blog Posts, Shop Inventory, Image Galleries, strong SEO, etc.) that would be hard to move.
It's also a great option if you want to come back and add more template pages to the dream template website you just built at a later stage. We know businesses grow quickly and different pages might serve you better down the track!
👩🍳 Hit submit and leave it with us!
We’ll do the hard yards building your dream template behind the scenes and deliver it to you, exactly as you dreamed it, within 48 hours.
What happens after I build my template?
So you've built your dream website template and checked out, congrats on a huge new small business step! 🎉 Here's what comes next:
Instantly: jump into the resources
Check your email, as you'll receive instant access to our best-in-the-biz resource library 📚
You can dive straight into these tutorials to learn all about Squarespace and get started prepping your content and branding for your new site! Our tutorials will run you through the whole process from purchase to launch with just about everything in between!
We recommend going through these tutorials even if you already know how to use Squarespace, as you're going to learn a lot about the process of customizing your website, and we'll give you lots of important tips about how to best work with your new template.
Within 48 hours: receive your template
If you chose Standard Delivery
Your Template will be delivered exactly as you designed it, directly into your Squarespace account as a new trial website. We build it on our end then transfer it over to you via your Squarespace account email address.
The new website comes in with a 6 month free trial which gives you lots of time to edit it before you want to make it live.
If you don't have a Squarespace account yet, that's totally fine, when we send you the template it will prompt you to sign up!
If you chose an Installation
After completing your purchase, you'll receive an email asking you to fill out a form to give us a few more details as well as give us access to your site as an administrator.
You'll have the option to choose whether you would like us to leave your site styles (fonts, color palette, etc) as they are, or if you would like us to replace these with the template styles you may have chosen at checkout.
We'll then go into your site and load the template pages just as you see them in the demo into the 'Not-Linked' pages section of your existing site. We'll leave everything else as is though we do recommend setting an Under Construction page as some design elements may shift around, especially if you've chosen for us to update your site styles.
🚀 Add your content and launch your new site!
From there, you can follow our tutorials to customize and launch your new site! We cover every step you'll need to write your words, edit your graphics, update colors, layouts and images, optimize your SEO, and of course... launch! 🥂
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