Sara Nguyen

Helping Sassy Solopreneurs Reach more people and get more clients

Squarespace Tutorial: How to use Squarespace for beginners

Looking for a Squarespace tutorial to show you a step by step, how to set up a Squarespace website? Well, in this video, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know to get your Squarespace website up and running quickly and easily. Stay tuned.

Timestamps:
2:02 – Choose a template
2:38 – Create an account
3:11 – Add a logo
6:14 – Edit a page
7:43 – Page settings
8:27 – Delete a page
9:22 – Add a page
11:34 – Ordering the navigation
12:17 – Create a page from scratch/blank template
13:20 – Add an image
15:12 – Add a video
15:12 – Deleting blocks
16:29 – Changing footer links
18:30 – Changing a Squarespace site theme

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Squarespace Tutorial: How to use Squarespace for beginners – Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I make tech and social media easier for awesome entrepreneurs like yourself. If you’re new to this channel, consider subscribing for all of the latest product reviews, social media marketing tips and training. And at any time during this video, check out the description for links to all of the resources mentioned in this video.

Squarespace is a fantastic service that allows you to set up a gorgeous website and online store quickly, particularly if you’re not very technical and just want a beautiful website that works. Squarespace is an amazingly easy platform.

If you’re looking to start selling products online, Squarespace is a great solution to help get your store up and running quickly so you can start selling right away. Here are the timestamps to all of the areas I’m going to cover in this tutorial.

You can check out the description for the links to jump directly to the specific areas. Let’s go over to my computer now, and we’ll start setting up your Squarespace website.

We’re going to start by going to squarespace.com and then selecting on the Get Started button in the top right-hand corner. After you’ve done that, you can write down the goal of your website.

So I’m going to write down for the purposes of this demonstration, Blog. Based on the keywords that you put here, Squarespace will help you determine the best template. Then click on Continue.

We can then continue to answer a few questions, or we can start by browsing templates. I’m going to go ahead and select the start by browsing templates. You can then have a look at all of the designs by category on the left-hand side here and pick a design that you like.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the perfect one because one, you’ll be able to change it later in Squarespace, and two, this is just to get the website started so you can make changes along the way and you’re not forced to stick with this template for the rest of your Squarespace website life. You can change it later.

I’m going to go ahead and select this template here. Then go ahead and fill in your details to create an account, fill in your first name, last name, email address and password, and then select, Create Account. You can alternatively create an account by selecting the Google, Facebook or Twitter account options.

You’ll get a confirmation email from Squarespace which has a link to your website as well as your login email address. The template that you selected earlier will have displayed, and you can go ahead and start making changes to your site.

I’m going to select, Go to Editor, and walk you through setting up your site. The first thing we’re going to do is add our logo and change the site title. So we’re going to start by selecting the Design label here, and then we’re going to select, Logo & Title.

So now we can add our site title, which typically is the name of our business or our website. So I’m going to go ahead and write it here, and you can see that it’s changed the text as I’ve written it in the top corner here. The tagline I’m going to add.

And I have two options here, I can leave the site title to be the text in the top-left hand corner here, or I can add a logo instead. I’m going to add a logo.

So I select the Add a Logo, little arrow here, and then I can choose the logo that I’ve prepared earlier. If you want to know how to create a logo from scratch, I have a tutorial that shows you how to create a logo without needing any complicated software such as Photoshop.

I’ve put a link to that video in the description in case you need to create your own beautiful logo. So I’ve selected that, and when I select save, I’ll be able to then see the logo replaced in the corner here. I can also add a Favicon logo.

So they’re the little logos that appear in the top corner of your browser tab, which is not mandatory, but it’s something that you can add. And you can also add a Social Sharing Logo. So this is a little icon that appears when your page is shared to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

Once again, it’s not mandatory, it’s optional, and you can just upload the logos if you want to from these sections here. Then to go back to continue editing our site, I’m going to select the Design with the arrow on the left to go back, and I’m going to go back again and then we’re going to select, Pages.

You’ll notice that the pages that have loaded will be the pages that have been set up according to the template. So if I click on introduction on the left-hand side, then the introduction section of the homepage that I’m currently on will appear.

If I click on Summary, then this Summary Section will appear that I can edit and so forth and so on. So if I click Large image, then lo and behold there’s the large image and testimonials.

If I click on other the pages, so for example, services, the services page will load with all of the demo content that has been included in the actual content. And if I hover over the page and then select Edit, this will open up the page so that I can then start writing on top of the actual sections that have been pre-populated.

So I’m just going to go ahead and write dressmaking. I think that’s one word. And I’m going to do alterations, and delete the text here. You’ll see that as I select areas. Then I have a basic text editor, so I can select some text, make it bold, I can make quotes, and then you’ll see this indented quote section here.

If I want to undo it, I just click on that same section. I can put things into some slight format. So I’m going to have some numbered lists here and here. I’m going to create some bulleted lists.

I’ve selected the texts, and at the top, I’ve selected the bulleted ones. So there are a few different things that you can do from the editor.

Pretty much any basic editing functions that you need will be available here so you can go in that way and make the changes to the existing page and it will save you a lot of time because the formatting’s already done, things are already in headings and paragraphs, so you don’t have to manually do that yourself.

And once you’re happy with the changes, you select save. You’ll also notice that if you hover over the little cog icon on the services page that I was editing, this will open up a dialogue box and from here you can make other changes.

So you can add a page description, you can select SEO, and you can do some of the SEO titles and an SEO description. You can also hide the page from search results if you don’t want Google to index the page.

You can also add a social image, so this image will appear if you, if someone shares the page to their social media or if you share the page to your social media. So there are a couple of other options that you can play around with.

If you’d click on the cog next to the actual page, now if you didn’t like this page at all or there’s nothing about it that you liked, you can delete it, so you’re not stuck with it at all. To delete the page, just hover over it in the left-hand navigation again.

And then see this little bin icon? Select that, then confirm that you want to delete this page and then voila! The page is actually gone. If you for some reason had regret and wanted to bring the page back, you’ll see that if you scroll to the bottom where it says deleted pages, here’s where there are pages that have been deleted, and they’ll remain here for 30 days before they’re automatically deleted.

Unless you hit that empty trash, then it’s gone forever and never to be able to be brought back again. So that’s how you can access the deleted pages. If you accidentally delete them and get a little bit, click-happy.

If you want to add your own pages, you can definitely do that. You would start by selecting this plus icon on the left-hand side, and this will open up the create new page section, and there are layouts.

You can have a blank page layout if you wanted to build the whole thing from scratch. Otherwise, you can see there’s an about page layout.

If you select that, then you’ll see that there are horizontal layouts for the page, a vertical layout for the page. There’s also a contact page layout where there’s maps and no maps or a small map. There are lots and lots of different pages which they’ve pre-populated for you.

The theme page has one column layout, two columns, four columns if you really wanted to go that route. So there are all these different page layouts. Alternatively, you can select a blank page. We’ll do that in a second, but if you did want to choose a layout, so for argument’s sake, you wanted to create a contact page with one of the layouts.

I’m going to choose this large map one, select this page, then name the page. So I’m going, I’m going to call this Contact Us, enter, and now I can go into the page and edit it just like I did the services page before.

So if I go on the page, let it load, and then just start hovering over sections, I can edit that, I can change the text to be whatever I want it to be, I can select it and make it a little bit smaller. Let’s try and do something else. It’s a little bit big.

Then I can change the text, delete and change it as I want to. And then I can — with the form, if I select edit, then I can change the fields that you collect, and I can also decide where I want the form details to be stored, and where I want it to be sent.

So there’s a lot of things that you can do, but we’re editing it just as we would any other page once we’ve chosen our layout. So in terms of the page navigation, you’ll see that Contact Us, because I created the page, it just put it at the top here, and on the navigation on the top right-hand here, it actually appears before Home.

Now I don’t actually want it to be there. I want it to be where this contact is. So, first of all, I’m going to delete this one so that we don’t get confused. And then, you’ll see that contact has been removed from the navigation.

Then to put this where I want it, I simply select it and then drag it. And now, like that, I’ve ordered the pages so that it appears in the order that I want it to appear in the navigation.

Now to create a page completely from scratch without any of Squarespace’s templates or designs, I select the plus again and select blank, and then this will once again create a new page. So I’m going to call this, About Us.

And now I have a blank page that still has the navigation and the footer, and I can start adding content the way that I want it to appear. I’m going to start by putting my mouse cursor on the page so that these edit settings appear. Then I’m going to select Edit, and this opens up the page so that I can start to build it.

Now by default, there’ll be a text section so you can start adding some of your texts. So I’m going to go ahead and add some there. So I can see the page start to appear. There are all the formatting options at the top in this bar.

And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to select this plus button in the top right-hand corner, and this opens up a series of content blocks.

There’s a whole range of things here so I can add more text blocks. I can add an image field. I can add videos. And this is lots and lots of things that you can add when you’re building your page.

And this is where you start to add them from. You can scroll to find the different things that you can add to format your page. Or you can search for content blogs.

So, for example, if I wanted to see what type of image blocks I can add, I typed image, and now all of the image related blocks appear. So I’m going to select image, and then this automatically adds a place holder. I’m going to then add an image by uploading an image from my desktop.

Let’s go with this one. Have that there. So my image has appeared there. There are other options to format the images well, but I’m just going to apply that. So I’ve got text, I’ve got an image. I’m going to select this plus icon again.

And this time I’m going to add a video embed. So you can add videos to the page. So if you have videos that you have on YouTube, here’s where you can add them and embed to the page that you want them to be.

And then you do that by pasting the URL of the video. And Squarespace will populate that video into the actual page that you see here. And then you can select apply, and the video will appear embedded on the actual page.

And I always have the option; if I don’t like things, I can delete them. So let’s say I didn’t like a certain section, I can just hover on it, and then I select the trashcan icon. See they appear on each of the little blocks that I’ve added. So let’s say I didn’t like this video. I can select this block to remove it and then it’s gone.

Alternatively, you can move things around by dragging and dropping, which is pretty cool because this allows you to have a feel of the page and change things around to be what you want them to be. And you just continue to select this plus icon to add more sections and to add more blocks to your page and build it out.

And once you are happy with the page, select Save and then this will finalise the page for you. And when I say finalise, that means, just save it, but you can always go back into the page and edits it and make changes as you see fit.

So hopefully by now, you have had a bit of a feel of Squarespace, and you can see that it really is about selecting the section that you want to edit and then going through that section, clicking on the Edit button, and going into the page and making changes.

Same deal with the navigation. So this is the template folder that they pre-populated for us. If I wanted to go in and make changes to the texts and to the button or to add or remove links, it’s all about selecting the section, clicking edit.

So now I can change this to be whatever I want. This button, once again hovered over it, edit it and I can change this link to be whatever URL that I want it to be.

Click Apply, click Apply, and then the changes will take place. Now once I’m happy with that, I can click save. And you’ll see here that it has footer navigation.

And with these Instagram and Facebook links if I want to change them, and I will want to change them because I would want them to be my own links and not the populated demo links that Squarespace has provided for me, all I did to get there was hover over that section.

Click the little cog. This opened up the box where I can then put my own URL in there, so my own handle for Instagram, click save and same deal with Facebook. Click on the little icon, put in my own URL.

If I don’t want the link there at all, I just click, Delete Link and then it will move itself. Alternatively, I can add more links to the footer by clicking on this plus icon and then I can add more links here and then just continue to add demo link and save.

There you go, and there are the changes right before my very eyes. Now if we go back to Home, and then go to Design, and select Template — when I started the tutorial I said that you can change the template at any time and this is exactly how you do it.

So we have the template that we installed when we originally set up our square space account, to install a new template, we go to Home, to Design, and then to Template. And then we select Install New Template, and this will load up all of the different templates available to us on Squarespace.

And just like when we created the account, we can select the different portfolio categories to browse the different templates. And then we go ahead and choose one that resonates with us.

And as you can see it’s installed the template here. Now it hasn’t gone ahead and made all the changes yet. As you can see, it’s still got the other one. But what I can do is I can go preview, and now this will set up the site so I can see what it looks like with my new template.

See my logo’s still there. It’s got the tagline there. So I can see what it will look like with this new template. And if I’m happy with that, cause this is just a preview, I can go set as live template, and this will put the changes throughout the site.

If I don’t like it, I can just cancel the preview and then I can install a new template. But I’m going to go ahead and select save as live template and then confirm it. And now it has updated my pages with this new layout.

Yep, it has. If I go back to Home, go to Pages, I can see that it has the new pages based on this theme’s pages, but it still also has that about us page that I created earlier. And here it is, let’s just put it in that template. There’s that image and that text as well.

So this is how you change the theme. Even if you’ve been playing around with the pages, you’ll still be able to swap and choose whichever templates that you want at any point.

Now, I’ve shown you the basics of creating pages, editing pages, playing around with sections and changing the theme. There are other sections in Squarespace which you can feel free to peruse on your own time just by selecting them.

You’ll see that there are all different things that you can have a play around within the Marketing section, in the Analytics section, and it’s all kind of self-explanatory.

Otherwise, there’s lots of help text around that Squarespace provides you with to help you understand what you’re actually doing in this particular area. Now, let’s say that you’ve gone through the whole site, you’ve edited everything that you wanted to, you removed all the pages that aren’t relevant.

If you’re still within your 14-day trial, you’ll be able to upgrade to the paid version of Squarespace so that you can configure your domain name. If you need to know how to buy a domain name, I have a link in the description as well to that video, so you know how to buy one and then set it all up.

But if you want to go ahead and publish your Squarespace website, select Upgrade Now and Squarespace will force you to pay for and select a plan. You’ll need to have a look at the Plans and figure out which ones work best for what you need as a business.

So go ahead and have a look at the Plans, read through them and see what they include. And then you can select a plan, and you can pay annually, and usually, there’s a bit of a saving, or you can pay month to month.

And go ahead and put in your name and credit card details and this will set you up with Squarespace. There are some other things that are involved in getting the site up, such as configuring the domain name and other settings.

But this is out of the remit of this tutorial. This tutorial is to help you get up and started with Squarespace before the trial ends, so you can get everything up and running within the 14 days. And then if you’ve decided to go ahead, you can go and purchase it and finalise your Squarespace site.

So there you have it, my Squarespace tutorial. It wasn’t so bad, right? Showing you exactly how to set up your Squarespace website and store.

If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your Squarespace store, download my Social Media Checklist.

I outlined all the things that you need to do to get up and running on social media so you can start leveraging the power of social to make more sales with ease. To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description below and thanks for watching!

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