Building Business Websites with Squarespace 7 - Second Edition

Discover the best way to build, design and launch professional websites with Squarespace quickly, without needing to learn any code

Key Features

• Discover time-saving tricks and best practices, and avoid common pitfalls while creating a website
• Create visually stunning Responsive Design templates for your website with Squarespace 7
• Understand how to monitor, measure, and manage your website after launching it

Book Description

Squarespace is a web-based tool that allows non-technical people to create and manage professional-looking websites quickly, without needing to write any code. It empowers business owners to take total control of their own websites, without needing to pay someone to design or maintain it.

This book covers much more than just how to use Squarespace. It covers all aspects of creating a successful business website, from developing your brand identity, to writing and structuring content to match your target audience's needs, and dozens of other other valuable tips that will help your website shine. Most importantly, you'll learn the correct steps to follow in order to ensure your project is smooth and stress-free.

The book starts by helping you plan your website project and gather all the raw materials you'll need. Next, you'll set up your account and become familiar with the terminology and tools that you'll be using. Once you've learned the basics of how the Squarespace interface, templates, and different page types operate, you will create the framework of your website, ready for you to insert content and functionality. Then, once all the core elements are in place, you'll apply the aesthetic fine-tuning needed to bring your website in line with your brand. After the aesthetics have been honed and all functions tested, you will launch your website and drive traffic to it, monitor it, and improve it.

What you will learn

• Develop an essential Website Toolkit that will act as reference and materials for your entire project, ensuring you stay on-target to meet your objectives
• Set up your Squarespace account, learn how the interface works, and select the correct template for your website's purpose and goals
• Create your website framework, fill it with content, and arrange your pages using Squarespace's easy drag-and-drop tools
• Customize your site's look and feel to match your brand, and create a stunning visual impact for your website on all types of devices, including mobiles and tablets
• Configure the core functions your business needs, whether connecting to social media, promoting events, showcasing your work, or selling goods and services online
• Learn time-saving tricks and how to avoid common pitfalls from an experienced professional with years of Squarespace experience
• Gain valuable insights about search engine optimization, communicating effectively online, and other e-marketing advice
• How to monitor, measure, and manage your website post-launch

Who this book is for:

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to learn how to use the latest version of Squarespace to create a website from scratch and take it through to go-live. You don't need any prior experience with Squarespace, HTML, or CSS, or building websites in general as everything is done using Squarespace's simple, browser-based interface.

Miko Coffey is an established digital professional who has been building websites with Squarespace since 2007, and websites in general since 1995. Having first been introduced to the internet in the mid-1990s (through cyber-art projects such as SITO's HyGrid) while studying Fine Art and Mathematics, she soon developed a taste for creating things on that new-fangled thing called the World Wide Web. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin, Miko moved to London, where she continued designing and building websites as part of her career in marketing. During these early years, she spent a lot of time trying to convince her employers that this whole ""web"" thing was really going to take off. Over time, she started to specialize in online marketing, moving beyond design into more tactical and strategic work in areas such as email marketing, search engine optimization, content strategy, and user experience. As she worked her way up to senior management positions by day, by night she continued to keep her hand in with web design, building websites and blogs for personal projects or friends and family. By 2007, having spent 2 years as the Head of Digital Media for NESTA, the UK's largest innovation organization, Miko decided it was time to use her skills and experience to work for a broader client base by doing freelance work. She also wanted to get back to her design roots. Through her previous experience of managing web teams, she'd been exposed to quite a few content management systems over the years, most of which were too complex and expensive for her smaller business clients. Having been frustrated by the cost and learning curve associated with these larger systems and the lack of finesse offered by smaller ones, she started looking for something that would be easy enough for her least-technical clients to use, flexible enough for her to apply her custom designs, and powerful but affordable. It was at this point that she discovered Squarespace, and she hasn't looked back since. Miko has spent the last 10 years using Squarespace to create websites for her clients at Using My Head, where her focus is on ""helping people do things better online."" She strives to keep her digital marketing skills as sharp as her design skills, because the combination of the two is what allows her to add the most value to client projects. She has worked with a range of sizes and types of organizations, from The Royal Society for the Arts to Channel 4 to small start-ups and nonprofits. Her passion is to enable people to communicate better online by giving people the skills and tools they need to make their work easier, their glitches smoother, and their lives better. She now specializes in Squarespace design, support, and training, and was one of the first designers to be invited to join the Squarespace Circle, Squarespace's own community of its most influential and experienced users. Half Japanese and half American, Miko currently lives in Brixton, South London, with her super-creative husband/DJ/VJ/generally awesome man, Mark, and their two cats, Kuma and Toshi. When not working online, she fills her offline time with crochet and cooking.