Building a Website with Squarespace: A Step-by-Step Guide

As I navigated through the interface of my website builder, I was excited to explore the features and functionality of Squarespace. The first step was to create a new page and start building from scratch. I clicked on "Create a Page" and began by adding an image. Dragging and dropping the file onto the canvas, I watched as it uploaded and processed, ready to be added to my website.

I chose to add a caption below the image, but decided against it this time. Instead, I opted for the default "Save" option, which would allow me to customize the layout later on. As I scrolled down the page, I noticed more options available, including the ability to open an image in a light box or stretch it out to full size.

Feeling confident in my decision-making process, I added a second image and repeated the same steps as before. This time, I decided to leave the caption blank, opting instead for the "Save" option again. The resulting layout was much cleaner, with ample space left over for future additions. What struck me most about this feature was the ability to move images around and rearrange them at will – simply by clicking and dragging, I could reposition any image on my page.

I decided to experiment further with Squarespace's features, opening up the "Edit" menu to customize one of my images. With just a few clicks, I transformed it into a light box, which allowed visitors to view it in full size. I was thrilled with the results and quickly saved my changes, feeling confident that this was going to be an exciting project.

To finalize my website, I needed to link it up to the homepage. I headed back to the "Pages" section of Squarespace, double-checking my settings along the way. The page title, slug, and URL were all in order, which made me feel confident about moving forward. As a finishing touch, I added thumbnails to some of my images, knowing that this would enhance their display on my website.

With my new blog content in place, it was time to integrate it into the main navigation menu. However, upon opening up the "Main Navigation" section, I realized that there wasn't an option for adding a separate block – instead, I had to create a new button from scratch. After some experimentation with the various options available under "Action," I finally came across the "Create Button" feature and decided to give it a try.

By creating a new button labeled "Blog," I was able to link directly to my newly created page. The end result was that when I visited my website, both an email subscription form and a new link to my blog appeared prominently – making it easy for visitors to discover the latest content on my site.

As I opened up a new window to view my updated website in full, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement about the possibilities offered by Squarespace. The platform was indeed powerful, with endless options available at every turn. But even for those who were new to it, don't worry – there's plenty of room to learn and grow.

If you're interested in exploring Squarespace further, I highly recommend taking advantage of their free trial period. With no credit card required, you can test out the platform's features without any financial risk. And if you do decide to commit to a paid plan, be sure to use offer code "AOP" at checkout – it'll save you 10% on your subscription!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the Art of Photography I have a little showand tell for you today I want to share this with you this is a demo magazine that I put together this last week on blurb for contrast and if you're new to the show and you don't know what contrast is this is a online magazine that I'm going to be producing alongside the video stuff that I do here and the idea uh this is partnershi with Squarespace uh they've donated the uh the the all the resources for building the website uh they're sponsor the show super cool guys and I've had this idea for a while and I'm excited to kind of be bringing this out finally and and what I want to do is produce a magazine because I think with there if we get outside of video a little bit certain types of formats make more sense like portfolios or written interviews or things like that so it'll be kind of fun and a nice creative challenge for me to work with that alongside what we already do here but anyway by far we launched the website let's see last week already had over a th000 subscribers uh to the email list just there's a notify me button that's all the biggest question that I've had by far uh to this point is will there be a print edition of the magazine and the answer is a hard maybe I will be honest this is something I really would like to do I think having a nice print version of the work that I put together in here would be very important to do um one of the things that I wanted to research was print on demand and so that's why I had this made I I did this over at blurb.com and blurb do uh print on demand if you're not familiar with what that is it's basically a way of doing printing where you can make books or magazines where you can just order one copy if you want you don't have to do an entire very much cost prohibitive print run to do it so I wanted to see what the quality was like and if this would be a possibility I want to see what the experience was like on here and what the price point was like and I have mixed feelings about it but I think on the whole um I like the quality quite a bit uh it it passed what I thought it would be um again I just experimented with making up you know titles and using placeholder text I use my own images in here just to put something together to see how you know what layout might look like and just kind of play around with this I literally threw this together in a day uh blurb is really easy to use you just basically uh if you work in in design you can upload your template and uh and post it and go ahead and order however many copies of the book you want so you can order a couple hundred if you want or you can just order one and so I just did a demo magazine and ordered one I just kind of wanted to play around and see what it would look like the print quality on here is it's it's still fairly low resolution in a lot of ways um it's you know obviously not the most expensive printing that you're going to find and so there's little things like I know this font wouldn't work definitely at this point size this is one of the things that working on a retina screen kind of spoils you too because everything looks so clean and beautiful and then you realize that you need to see it on the paper it's going to be printed on and there's a lot that goes into doing a publication like this um one thing I really like about this is I've done books with blurb before and if you've done a book and you shoot black and white you'll know what I'm talking about the images in here are actually black and white they're not purplish black and white uh which is a problem when you're doing black and white Renditions on color printing a lot of times and so some of the books that I've done with blurb in the past have that purplish effect and it's really uh frustrating I think and and unfortunate um but you know all in all I think it looks pretty good feels like a real magazine um it works the issue that I have with it is that that we're going to do a print addition of this I really want it to be nicely done and I would like it to be just a grade up in printing quality from this one of the things you have to understand is if you're going to go into doing print in addition to um you know doing an online publication of something is that the expenses associated with it are much different you need to have a run of at least 500 before you start getting a price break on it you want to print it as nice as possible obviously on the best paper you can afford and then there's a price point what would people pay for this and that's where it starts to get a little hazy and this is what was upsetting to me about blurb and if you've ordered from them before you know what I'm talking about if you go in and just order one copy of something the price point is already kind of high and if it's your book or your magazine and you set that price point up a little bit so you have a profit for your business business on it that adds to it the biggest frustration is when then when you go to check out this was the minimum shipping on this was like $6 to ship this it's not much at all right and so I just feel like print on demand for the quality that you get which is it's okay it's not outstanding but it's it's definitely impressive it's better than I thought it would be for the quality that you end up with on this versus the price point that it would be and especially if you're ordering it from the UK or something like this I think it would make it a why bother situation and I don't mean to slam on blurb I think blurb are great for what they do um if you want to do a portfolio book and you need a quick easy way to get it done and you just want one copy and you want a hard cover or an image wrap or something like that that they're great if you want to just make a magazine just to play around with as a demo like this it's great for that um where print on demand and a lot of these kind of independent publishing types of companies like blurb and there are others uh where they make their money is on the dream the people who dream of being in independent publishing or being able to do their own book or being able to sell it really easily and not have to handle fulfillment it just gets too cost prohibitive and if you go compare this with stuff that you see at the news and there's some wonderful photography magazines out there if you compare it to lens work or you compare it to um uh black and white or CA or anything that's out there it's just not on par uh especially at this price point anyway so that's where we are on this I wanted to share that with you because it is kind of cool now I did do a blog post on here and I want to update the blur or sorry I'm update blur's website I want to update the contrast website and so come on over I'm going to show you how we do that in Squarespace so come on over and let's have a look so I've written a blog post uh about my experience making the blurb demo magazine and I want to go ahead and update that and put it on the website and I need to create a blog to do that and so we're over on Squarespace right now I want to show you how this is done so once you're on the website uh in my case it's contra.gr right now what we have here is this is just kind of a one pager website and in fact um I talked to Eric over at Squarespace this week and he clarified that these are called cover pages and one thing I didn't mention in the last episode uh if you're watching that is and this is kind of cool so cover pages are not dependent on a template they work with any of the templates in Squarespace they're kind of as he called it template agnostic which is really cool because they're available to everyone they even have their own stylesheets associated with them and and you can if you switch templates you can kind of keep your cover page the same which is kind of cool so they really operate independently but what I want to do is I want to put a Blog functionality into this I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that if you go over to Pages here and I'm going click pages and basically you have your main navigation and I have not linked and it really doesn't matter typically I'll work in this not link section until something's ready to be published but it doesn't matter um those are pages that you want linked into the main navigation or not so I'll just click here what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new page what we want to do is create a blog now what this does is it creates an entire blog not just a new blog post we're going to put posts into this blog if that makes sense so what I'm going to do is change the name on this just to blog right now and that's fine and then so what we have here is blog and if I I can change my settings on the blog or what I'm going to do is click on the plus sign here to add a new blog post so um it's really kind of cool because you can keep multiple blogs on a website and so I I kind of like that actually so I've gone ahead I've already got this written it's in text editor here I'm going to go ahead and cut and paste the title and let's just paste that in and then what I'm going to do is grab my content here and let's copy that and let's do an un formate paste and let's drop that in okay and we're good to go and you can see that I mean you could write your blog post right here in the editor it's got a little bar here for formatting at the top which is really nice so it works just like a word processor or something like that and what I want to do here is make a couple changes and just make these sections bold since they're section titles um you know you format this however you want and I want to add the Link in here so I link to this wired article so let's select the link text there and it could just be text I haven't have the URL I'm going to copy that and we will go let's see up here I'm going to click on the little link icon here and so let's edit the link and you're going to get a box that pops up and we'll go ahead and paste the link in there and yeah let's open that in a new window so that's cool and uh we're good there so let's click outside there you can see the link took now I want to add two images to this and this is really kind of cool how you do this when I just hover the mouse over the copy do you see those little oh they look like little uh you know balloons that pop out to the left hand side there these are called insertion points and if I click in here I can add more content or insert it with the insertion point so I want one of my images to happen before quality so let's go ahead and click that and then you get this little popup okay now the core of how Squarespace works is it's built on this concept of what they call blocks and these are blocks so when I insert something into a page a block can be a block of text it can be marked down if you know how to code mark down it can be a quote it can be an image you know you can scroll through here and see what they are it can be an audio file it can be a grid and this is where Squarespace really gets powerful here um there's all kinds of stuff for restaurants um if you want to do an open table block you can do that uh bans in town has a block even on here anyway it's really cool all the stuff you can do on here this is really easy I just want an image block so I'm going to say image and what it's going to do is it's going to say add image and I want you to see how easy this is I'm going to pop over to the finder here and I have a folder here with two images in it I want this second image to go first I'm going to drag and drop this on top of the browser when I go back over to the browser you can see that it's uploading it's going to go ahead and process it it's done I can go ahead and add a caption below if I want I'm not going to do that um we're just going to go ahead and say save if you scroll down there are more options that you have you can do a light box or you click on it and it opens up in a light box or you can do a stretch let's go ahead and save that and uh let's add our second image oh down here before the conclusion here let's do an image here and same thing I'm going to go back over to the finder window grab the other image bring it back up here and what Al also is cool about this is at any time if I want to move these images around you're not glued anything you click and drag the image and it show you so same options on that let's just go and save it no caption so this is an image block so now I can grab this and I can move it anywhere and you can see the layout changes if I want it to kind of sit over here to the left I can do that you got tons of options in here and it's really really cool in fact why don't I do that let's do this let's click on there let's go edit and I'm I'm going to go in here and say light box on this one image let's save that so now it's a smaller image so if somebody wants to see it full size they can click and it'll do that so we're good to go so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and say save and publish and it will get it ready and we are good to go there so now what I want to do is get this linked up to the homepage um what I want to do here is let's double check the settings under just the whole blog here and so let's click on that so here's my page title the slug slug for the URL is going to be SL blog that's fine uh let's go and say save that's cool you can add thumbnails to these if you want everything's good let's go back to Pages now and you can see the blog I'm going to drag up to this main navigation now there's something that's going to be a little interesting here because now if I go to the main page here that is our website and this is that cover page there's really not a navigation block on here so I need to add the blog into the navigation all I have is a notify me here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to I believe it is branding and text no it's the action sorry go back under action create buttons links Etc I'm going to create a new button here and we are going to label this I'm going to label it blog and you can see it already put it in there click to add URL and I want to go to content and let's link to the blog so I'm going to select that we're all through so now when I go ahead and say save this let's uh I'm going to go ahead and open a new window and let's just go to the website proper here and you can see it's updated there's blog and notify me so you can sign up for the email list still or if I want to click on blog I can just go in and read the blog and there there it is that's how easy it is to build things with Squarespace also remember that second image I'm going to click on that light box baby check that out Squarespace is totally cool I I do realize that if you've never used Squarespace before you do need to spend some time learning the platform a little bit and I'll put some links in the show notes if you want to try Squarespace out for yourself they offer a free trial no credit card is required all you have to do is go over to squarespace.com if you do decide after the free trial that you want to subscribe and go ahead and launch your website I can save you some money so use offer code aop on checkout that will save you 10% on your order that is offer code aop stands for Art of Photography anyway guys that's how it all works uh this is an exciting project to be doing I'm totally into this and I'm really glad the response has been really positive so um as always leave a comment leave me your thoughts um anybody has any ideas I want to hear them and as always subscribe so you'll be up to dat on all the latest and greatest videos and once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the Art of Photography I have a little showand tell for you today I want to share this with you this is a demo magazine that I put together this last week on blurb for contrast and if you're new to the show and you don't know what contrast is this is a online magazine that I'm going to be producing alongside the video stuff that I do here and the idea uh this is partnershi with Squarespace uh they've donated the uh the the all the resources for building the website uh they're sponsor the show super cool guys and I've had this idea for a while and I'm excited to kind of be bringing this out finally and and what I want to do is produce a magazine because I think with there if we get outside of video a little bit certain types of formats make more sense like portfolios or written interviews or things like that so it'll be kind of fun and a nice creative challenge for me to work with that alongside what we already do here but anyway by far we launched the website let's see last week already had over a th000 subscribers uh to the email list just there's a notify me button that's all the biggest question that I've had by far uh to this point is will there be a print edition of the magazine and the answer is a hard maybe I will be honest this is something I really would like to do I think having a nice print version of the work that I put together in here would be very important to do um one of the things that I wanted to research was print on demand and so that's why I had this made I I did this over at blurb.com and blurb do uh print on demand if you're not familiar with what that is it's basically a way of doing printing where you can make books or magazines where you can just order one copy if you want you don't have to do an entire very much cost prohibitive print run to do it so I wanted to see what the quality was like and if this would be a possibility I want to see what the experience was like on here and what the price point was like and I have mixed feelings about it but I think on the whole um I like the quality quite a bit uh it it passed what I thought it would be um again I just experimented with making up you know titles and using placeholder text I use my own images in here just to put something together to see how you know what layout might look like and just kind of play around with this I literally threw this together in a day uh blurb is really easy to use you just basically uh if you work in in design you can upload your template and uh and post it and go ahead and order however many copies of the book you want so you can order a couple hundred if you want or you can just order one and so I just did a demo magazine and ordered one I just kind of wanted to play around and see what it would look like the print quality on here is it's it's still fairly low resolution in a lot of ways um it's you know obviously not the most expensive printing that you're going to find and so there's little things like I know this font wouldn't work definitely at this point size this is one of the things that working on a retina screen kind of spoils you too because everything looks so clean and beautiful and then you realize that you need to see it on the paper it's going to be printed on and there's a lot that goes into doing a publication like this um one thing I really like about this is I've done books with blurb before and if you've done a book and you shoot black and white you'll know what I'm talking about the images in here are actually black and white they're not purplish black and white uh which is a problem when you're doing black and white Renditions on color printing a lot of times and so some of the books that I've done with blurb in the past have that purplish effect and it's really uh frustrating I think and and unfortunate um but you know all in all I think it looks pretty good feels like a real magazine um it works the issue that I have with it is that that we're going to do a print addition of this I really want it to be nicely done and I would like it to be just a grade up in printing quality from this one of the things you have to understand is if you're going to go into doing print in addition to um you know doing an online publication of something is that the expenses associated with it are much different you need to have a run of at least 500 before you start getting a price break on it you want to print it as nice as possible obviously on the best paper you can afford and then there's a price point what would people pay for this and that's where it starts to get a little hazy and this is what was upsetting to me about blurb and if you've ordered from them before you know what I'm talking about if you go in and just order one copy of something the price point is already kind of high and if it's your book or your magazine and you set that price point up a little bit so you have a profit for your business business on it that adds to it the biggest frustration is when then when you go to check out this was the minimum shipping on this was like $6 to ship this it's not much at all right and so I just feel like print on demand for the quality that you get which is it's okay it's not outstanding but it's it's definitely impressive it's better than I thought it would be for the quality that you end up with on this versus the price point that it would be and especially if you're ordering it from the UK or something like this I think it would make it a why bother situation and I don't mean to slam on blurb I think blurb are great for what they do um if you want to do a portfolio book and you need a quick easy way to get it done and you just want one copy and you want a hard cover or an image wrap or something like that that they're great if you want to just make a magazine just to play around with as a demo like this it's great for that um where print on demand and a lot of these kind of independent publishing types of companies like blurb and there are others uh where they make their money is on the dream the people who dream of being in independent publishing or being able to do their own book or being able to sell it really easily and not have to handle fulfillment it just gets too cost prohibitive and if you go compare this with stuff that you see at the news and there's some wonderful photography magazines out there if you compare it to lens work or you compare it to um uh black and white or CA or anything that's out there it's just not on par uh especially at this price point anyway so that's where we are on this I wanted to share that with you because it is kind of cool now I did do a blog post on here and I want to update the blur or sorry I'm update blur's website I want to update the contrast website and so come on over I'm going to show you how we do that in Squarespace so come on over and let's have a look so I've written a blog post uh about my experience making the blurb demo magazine and I want to go ahead and update that and put it on the website and I need to create a blog to do that and so we're over on Squarespace right now I want to show you how this is done so once you're on the website uh in my case it's contra.gr right now what we have here is this is just kind of a one pager website and in fact um I talked to Eric over at Squarespace this week and he clarified that these are called cover pages and one thing I didn't mention in the last episode uh if you're watching that is and this is kind of cool so cover pages are not dependent on a template they work with any of the templates in Squarespace they're kind of as he called it template agnostic which is really cool because they're available to everyone they even have their own stylesheets associated with them and and you can if you switch templates you can kind of keep your cover page the same which is kind of cool so they really operate independently but what I want to do is I want to put a Blog functionality into this I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that if you go over to Pages here and I'm going click pages and basically you have your main navigation and I have not linked and it really doesn't matter typically I'll work in this not link section until something's ready to be published but it doesn't matter um those are pages that you want linked into the main navigation or not so I'll just click here what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new page what we want to do is create a blog now what this does is it creates an entire blog not just a new blog post we're going to put posts into this blog if that makes sense so what I'm going to do is change the name on this just to blog right now and that's fine and then so what we have here is blog and if I I can change my settings on the blog or what I'm going to do is click on the plus sign here to add a new blog post so um it's really kind of cool because you can keep multiple blogs on a website and so I I kind of like that actually so I've gone ahead I've already got this written it's in text editor here I'm going to go ahead and cut and paste the title and let's just paste that in and then what I'm going to do is grab my content here and let's copy that and let's do an un formate paste and let's drop that in okay and we're good to go and you can see that I mean you could write your blog post right here in the editor it's got a little bar here for formatting at the top which is really nice so it works just like a word processor or something like that and what I want to do here is make a couple changes and just make these sections bold since they're section titles um you know you format this however you want and I want to add the Link in here so I link to this wired article so let's select the link text there and it could just be text I haven't have the URL I'm going to copy that and we will go let's see up here I'm going to click on the little link icon here and so let's edit the link and you're going to get a box that pops up and we'll go ahead and paste the link in there and yeah let's open that in a new window so that's cool and uh we're good there so let's click outside there you can see the link took now I want to add two images to this and this is really kind of cool how you do this when I just hover the mouse over the copy do you see those little oh they look like little uh you know balloons that pop out to the left hand side there these are called insertion points and if I click in here I can add more content or insert it with the insertion point so I want one of my images to happen before quality so let's go ahead and click that and then you get this little popup okay now the core of how Squarespace works is it's built on this concept of what they call blocks and these are blocks so when I insert something into a page a block can be a block of text it can be marked down if you know how to code mark down it can be a quote it can be an image you know you can scroll through here and see what they are it can be an audio file it can be a grid and this is where Squarespace really gets powerful here um there's all kinds of stuff for restaurants um if you want to do an open table block you can do that uh bans in town has a block even on here anyway it's really cool all the stuff you can do on here this is really easy I just want an image block so I'm going to say image and what it's going to do is it's going to say add image and I want you to see how easy this is I'm going to pop over to the finder here and I have a folder here with two images in it I want this second image to go first I'm going to drag and drop this on top of the browser when I go back over to the browser you can see that it's uploading it's going to go ahead and process it it's done I can go ahead and add a caption below if I want I'm not going to do that um we're just going to go ahead and say save if you scroll down there are more options that you have you can do a light box or you click on it and it opens up in a light box or you can do a stretch let's go ahead and save that and uh let's add our second image oh down here before the conclusion here let's do an image here and same thing I'm going to go back over to the finder window grab the other image bring it back up here and what Al also is cool about this is at any time if I want to move these images around you're not glued anything you click and drag the image and it show you so same options on that let's just go and save it no caption so this is an image block so now I can grab this and I can move it anywhere and you can see the layout changes if I want it to kind of sit over here to the left I can do that you got tons of options in here and it's really really cool in fact why don't I do that let's do this let's click on there let's go edit and I'm I'm going to go in here and say light box on this one image let's save that so now it's a smaller image so if somebody wants to see it full size they can click and it'll do that so we're good to go so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and say save and publish and it will get it ready and we are good to go there so now what I want to do is get this linked up to the homepage um what I want to do here is let's double check the settings under just the whole blog here and so let's click on that so here's my page title the slug slug for the URL is going to be SL blog that's fine uh let's go and say save that's cool you can add thumbnails to these if you want everything's good let's go back to Pages now and you can see the blog I'm going to drag up to this main navigation now there's something that's going to be a little interesting here because now if I go to the main page here that is our website and this is that cover page there's really not a navigation block on here so I need to add the blog into the navigation all I have is a notify me here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to I believe it is branding and text no it's the action sorry go back under action create buttons links Etc I'm going to create a new button here and we are going to label this I'm going to label it blog and you can see it already put it in there click to add URL and I want to go to content and let's link to the blog so I'm going to select that we're all through so now when I go ahead and say save this let's uh I'm going to go ahead and open a new window and let's just go to the website proper here and you can see it's updated there's blog and notify me so you can sign up for the email list still or if I want to click on blog I can just go in and read the blog and there there it is that's how easy it is to build things with Squarespace also remember that second image I'm going to click on that light box baby check that out Squarespace is totally cool I I do realize that if you've never used Squarespace before you do need to spend some time learning the platform a little bit and I'll put some links in the show notes if you want to try Squarespace out for yourself they offer a free trial no credit card is required all you have to do is go over to squarespace.com if you do decide after the free trial that you want to subscribe and go ahead and launch your website I can save you some money so use offer code aop on checkout that will save you 10% on your order that is offer code aop stands for Art of Photography anyway guys that's how it all works uh this is an exciting project to be doing I'm totally into this and I'm really glad the response has been really positive so um as always leave a comment leave me your thoughts um anybody has any ideas I want to hear them and as always subscribe so you'll be up to dat on all the latest and greatest videos and once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"