3. Create Your Website Pages
You can start with just a home page for your brand or business, but depending on what you’re building, you may need additional website pages. Most people will benefit from having a contact page to share contact information with website visitors. Consider whether you need additional pages, such as a blog page, online store, or FAQ page.
Basic Website Navigation
How do you want visitors to interact with your website? What do you want them to be able to do when they land on your home page? That’s where navigation design comes into play, helping visitors move around your website.
Navigation design is the sum of all the elements that people use to navigate a website. It includes everything from your website’s navigation menu to buttons and copy, hyperlinks, and how you design your page layouts. The more user-friendly your website is, the more people will want to stick around and start building a relationship with your brand, which is why good navigation design is so important.
When done right, the Navigation UX (user experience) is intuitive. Ideally, visitors will find it so easy to find what they need that they won’t even think about the navigation design of your website. If your site has an ineffective navigation layout, it can mean people are clicking because they can’t find what they’re looking for, which will result in fewer interactions with your content, products, and offers.
Every site template Squarespace web sets you up for success with integrated navigation and streamlined UX, designed to look great on desktop, mobile, and tablets.
4. Add Content to Your Website
When you add new pages to your Squarespace website, you can choose between blank pages and pages with pre-built layouts designed for specific uses. Squarespace is powered by Fluid Engine, a code-free drag-and-drop grid editor that helps you customize where and how content appears on your site.
You can add blocks of content to a blank page to create a new layout, or manipulate the blocks within a templated layout page to create rows, columns, or even overlapping content. Using the Fluid Engine grid as your guide, you can easily resize and realign those page elements in any way that suits your creative vision. Squarespace websites are built with responsive design, which helps optimize your site for any size screen.
Responsive design and UX have implications for SEO performance, the amount of time that consumers spend on your site and how likely they are to buy from you. Take the time to truly consider your customer’s journey, from the moment they land on your site, to the second they take steps to work with you.
When they land on your home page, are you clear about what they need to do next? Is your navigation easy to understand? Are they seamlessly guided where you want them to go, like your organized and sortable product page?
The goal is to create a polished representation of your brand, so the experience shoppers have on your site web builds more trust, interest and engagement in your website.
Writing Website Copy
Writing website copy that informs and engages your audience is a crucial part of your action plan for launching or renewing your website. your small business. Once you’ve chosen a website template, website copywriting should be next on your to-do list. Before you even write your copy, set yourself up for success by deciding what to write and where to put it.
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Start with your home page and define what you offer or the purpose of your site.
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Identify key details and any other pages to include in your header, such as an About page, pages for your products or services, or a page with a contact form.
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Keep the text concise and easy to read.
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Consider which search keywords are relevant to your business and how they they can be incorporated into the text and navigation of the site.
Adding photos to your website
Photos and graphics that complement the words on your site web are an integral part of creating a website that will help you achieve your goals. The first step in choosing images for your website is to identify what types of images align with your brand. Once you determine the aesthetic that your brand represents, you can source the photos and images that will bring it to life.
Stock photos are a useful place to start, especially when you’re launching your business and may not have many of your own photos yet. Squarespace offers integrations with stock photo services to help you find high-quality, free or affordable images to use on your website.
Your other options include taking photos yourself or hiring a photographer, if It’s within your budget.Leading with photos that directly represent your brand—photos of you, your studio or storefront, your items for sale, or your team in action—can support your credibility and build trust with your audience.
In order for photos and images to load quickly and cleanly on your website, pay special attention to image formats, resolution, and size. Make sure you are working with JPEG or PNG files, with a width of 1500 to 2500 pixels. It’s also important to consider file size, which can affect how quickly pages load. Keep the total size of media files on a web page below 2 MB to optimize loading time. Once you upload your photos to your site, Squarespace makes it easy to manage all of them from one central place.
5. Make Your Website Discoverable
The more people visit your website, the more likely you are to make a sale, find a new customer, or gain a readership for your blog. Simply put, driving traffic to your website is key to achieving your goals. That’s why it’s important to understand SEO and create social media accounts for your brand.
Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
When you know how to optimize your website, you have more control over where your site appears in search engine results, how many people view your website, and who finds it online.
SEO is a marketing strategy that makes it easy for search engines to understand your website. Websites are regularly crawled and indexed by search engines, which means they “read” the content of all your web pages and rank your website based on what you offer and who might benefit from your products or information. Effective SEO practices will help search engines easily decide when to show your website to search engines and make it more likely that you will connect with the right audiences for your brand.
Technical SEO for a website includes aspects of your website’s design and structure, such as how long it takes to load or how it adapts to different screen sizes. Every Squarespace website template has built-in responsive design and technical SEO features.
You can improve your SEO through keyword research, effectively incorporating keywords into your website copy, and building authority on a topic by posting substantive content on that topic.
Connect your social accounts
Connecting your social media accounts to your Squarespace dashboard allows you to share social content on your site and display your social profiles to visitors. With connected accounts, you can enter SEO friendly descriptions and visually appealing thumbnails for individual pages and posts. This maximizes the performance of your content both on your website and when shared by your visitors on social channels.
Over time, connecting your social media accounts to your site can help increase engagement with your social media posts and foster a consistent and trusted brand narrative across all channels. Squarespace also offers an app, Unfold, that helps you create modern, professional images and videos for your social media.
This post was updated on February 1, 2023.
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