Last year, I ventured into the wonderful world of working on squarespace. Working on squarespace allowed me to offer clients an alternative to wordpress, and a cost-effective way to get a site up without having to work with a developer. Developers are the people who take what we web designers create, and then they turn it into a working site. This takes a lot of time, back and forth communication, and generally a lot of money to make happen. When you’re a business just starting out, the most important thing is getting a site up that looks good, and resonates with your ideal clients and customers. Working with developers and wordpress right off the bat is a huge leap! Squarespace provides beautiful templates to work from, mobile-ready sites, and is a dream come true for small business owners looking to take their first step into getting their business online, without the price tag that comes with a custom designed and developed site on wordpress.

Hooray!

Here at Pinegate Road, we have been lucky to have several clients who were totally on board. You can see a few examples of the custom sites we have created through squarespace over the past year here: That’s Darlin’, Busy Mom Gets Fit, and GORGO Fitness Magazine.

As a designer, working with squarespace has been pretty easy. They have a user-friendly interface, and being used to web design jargon, it was easy enough for me to pick up. BUT, the one thing that I was having huge issues with was the ability to customize certain features. Squarespace makes it simple to have a great design…because they are hard to mess with ;) To get those design details in there, it takes a creative designer, and some intricate know-how and work-arounds to make squarespace work for you. As a designer, I love my design details. I love giving my clients unique designs that speak to their values as a business. I love taking those and turn them into design details that truly speak to their dream customers. With squarespace, it is sometimes hard to make this happen if you’re a detail-lover like me.

Anyone else have these issues? Well, drumroll please….!

Let me introduce you to the Squarespace Design Guild! Created by squarespace design genius, Meg Summerfield (and Pinegate Road designer!). Meg is a squarespace wiz who has spent months working intricately with squarespace in the backend. Like seriously — how did she figure out how to make a membership site on the squarespace platform? She can 100% show you how now. She has created this group to give designers the tools they need to customize their client’s sites in ways that they wouldn’t be able to figure out on their own — at least not without hours and hours of research and sheer determination — aka, nothing I want to spend my time if I don’t have to! Meg’s got your back. Can you believe the site below was created on squarespace? This is all due to Meg’s amazing know-how and design skills:

If you’re a designer building sites for your clients on squarespace, I would highly recommend looking to joining the squarespace design guild. You’ll get access to a private slack channel where you can talk one-on-one with Meg and others in the group to give you instant access to all this squarespace know-how. I know when I design my next site, this group will be invaluable to giving my clients a unique design experience through this very templated design option.

Have any questions? Leave them below!

Happy website making :)