Why Design-Build Firms Should Use The Squarespace Website Builder

December 11, 2017 Michael Conway

Why Use The Squarespace Website Builder

Squarespace the best/right tool to build websites for design-build firms.

Here at Means-of-Production, we only use the Squarespace website builder for our clients. Since it's launch more than eleven years ago, Squarespace has been helping businesses create stunning, lead generation websites. Starting as a single-person startup, today it's grown to a team of 503 employees and serves millions of website customers in 190 countries.

We use Squarespace because it is specifically built for all kinds of creative pros and small businesses like Design-Build firms. Unlike platforms like WordPress that require advanced coding and plug-ins to be effective, Squarespace was originally geared towards non-coders making it particularly easy to use for business owners with no background in coding. Today, it is still extremely easy to update and maintain, but with the inclusion, of an advanced editing solution called Developer Platform that offers full HTML/CSS control, Squarespace website builder allows us to create incredible image forward websites for our clients.

Some of The Major Benefits of Squarespace Website Builder

As a complete website platform, Squarespace offers a number of major benefits for small businesses, especially those in creative areas like design-build, interior design, landscape design, and architecture. As more consumers are relying on cell phones for their web browsing, Squarespace offers built-in responsive design elements. This means that no matter what device a consumer is using, laptop, desktop, tablet, or cell phone, when they visit your website it will be optimized to view on that device.

Along with responsive design, Squarespace offers users a powerful blogging system that is perfect for delivering search engine optimized content to your visitors. Finally, the platform includes a solid eCommerce solution and the ability to import/export from Wordpress, Shopify, Blogger and some other platforms. That means if you have content on a different platform, it can easily be migrated to your Squarespace website. Overall, Squarespace is an extremely powerful, deep and intuitive platform that works extremely well for our design-build and other creative clients.

Major Features Offered By Squarespace

Squarespace offers users a clear, intuitive easy to understand editing platform. Website development using Squarespace is faster and much easier than working with a platform like Wordpress that requires extensive programming. While Squarespace is a flexible “drag and drop” platform, the inclusion of the Developer Platform allows users who know some code to further customize their website using HTML/CSS controls.

Here are a few of the reasons Squarespace is our go-to platform for our client's website development.

Ease of Use – Squarespace has an easy to use content editor. It's friendly, logical and intuitive. Changing text takes seconds and building a new page can be done with a one click page duplicator.
Powerful Feature Set and Flexibility – Squarespace offers a ton of really cool features including a feature-rich eCommerce platform, native blogging system, ability to add multiple contributors and flexible import/export so you can take your blog to any other platform.
Lots of Design Templates to Choose From – Squarespace provides users with hundreds of professionally designed templates to make designing your site easy. They're all memorable, engaging, easy to use and mobile-ready with responsive design elements built in. There are dozens of category-specific designs for industry categories. You can experiment, change templates at any time, and preview sites across a range of screen sizes and devices.

When I build websites for clients, we provide three design comps on three different templates. This allows me to show how project portfolios will look on each template.

Customer Support – They offer 24/7 email support, live chat support (M-F 11 am – 7 pm) and have a huge FAQ knowledge base as well as a community-driven Q&A section.
Pricing – Squarespace offers a number of competitive plans that allow you to easily expand your website as your business grows or your needs change.

Getting Started With Squarespace Website Builder

The beauty of Squarespace is that it takes less time to get a basic, functional website online than most building a site on Wordpress. Everything is based on “blocks” in terms of construction. There are image blocks, content blocks, and menu blocks that can have your website up and be functioning quickly. Most platforms automatically crop images, but Squarespace image blocks allow you to customize cropping to create the images you want to portray on your galleries and project pages.

While the basic building blocks are simple, Squarespace allows you to dig deeper with Developer to include custom HTML and CSS pages and elements for greater functionality. Every website has the ability to add blog pages, eCommerce features, forms, newsletter sign up blocks, audio and syndicated podcasts.

As your business grows you can increase the functionality of your site as needed, easily and quickly. If you're just getting started online, or are looking for a more professional presence, the ease of use, design possibilities using templates, drag and drop functionality, and ability to program deeper are all great selling points for the platform. Our design-build clients love the end result of our efforts and their Squarespace websites have worked to grow their businesses. It truly is a great platform for anyone with a small business!

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About Michael Conway

I'm the founder of Means-of-Production, marketing firm that helps home design and construction professionals. We build Squarespace websites, email marketing and write blog articles for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our marketing services attract the better and more of them using an inbound content marketing tactics. Learn more about us here.