Squarespace Templates Unleashed: Rapid Professional Websites

Welcome to the first video of our series - Introduction to Squarespace Templates. Drawing from our eight-year experience and over 400 successful website projects at Pixelhaze Academy, this course aims to unveil the potential of Squarespace as the ideal platform for scaling your web design business.

At Pixelhaze Academy, we have recently created tool kits designed for designers and business owners looking to enhance their Squarespace websites. Furthermore, this course provides invaluable insights for agencies seeking to ramp up their operations by producing multiple websites within a week.

In this preliminary mini-course, we will guide you on how to exploit and control both first-party and, more importantly, third-party templates designed by providers like us. You will learn how these templates can dramatically speed up the prototyping process.

When successfully incorporated into a robust website, templates can serve as cost-effective accelerators, facilitating at least half of the project process. This means you can deliver an entire website within a mere four hours without compromising on quality. This is a strategy we actively employ at Pixelhaze Studio.

This course does not divulge all the information that our comprehensive Squarespace designer course, 'Moonshot', offers. However, we are more than willing to share some valuable tips on how you can efficiently work with Squarespace templates to maximize their potential.

There's one more bonus! By enrolling in this course, you will receive a 50% voucher for your first or next Squarespace template designed by Pixelhaze.

Dive in to discover what we're covering in this free mini-course. This comprehensive guide will teach you how to effectively work with Squarespace templates to craft stunning and functional websites for your business or as part of a web design agency.

Embark on your journey by understanding the differences between first and third-party Squarespace templates. Gain the practical skills needed to adapt the style, colours, and fonts of your chosen template. Learn how to import content, add new sections while maintaining style consistency, optimize for mobile devices, and create reusable sections using Squarespace's Favorites feature.

Before going live, we'll guide you on how to optimize your website and fix potential errors. This part includes a template for a preflight checklist for your projects. Lastly, explore live examples of websites created using Squarespace templates and see how they can streamline the web design process, reduce costs, and increase profit margins.

Mastering Squarespace Templates is a comprehensive course equipping you with the knowledge and skills to craft professional websites using Squarespace templates. Regardless of whether you're a blogger, entrepreneur, or aspiring web designer, the tools and insights offered in this course are invaluable in assisting you in creating stunning and functional websites efficiently. Let's get started!

Welcome to Chapter 2 - First or Third Party Templates?

If the introduction left you puzzled about the difference between Squarespace's first-party and third-party Squarespace templates, worry no more!

First-party templates are those in-built into Squarespace. They're readily available and free to use, as many times as you want, albeit with a hosting plan purchase on Squarespace to employ that template professionally.

On the other hand, third-party templates are often industry-specific and delve into a higher level of detail. They usually include plugins or custom code to give your website a more bespoke, individual look. Third parties design these, including Pixelhaze, and you can explore our extensive array of templates at the Pixelhaze store. Remember, you receive a 50% discount on any template of your choice!

So, let's delve into the differences between first and third-party templates.

First, we'll examine Squarespace's selection of templates, which has noticeably improved over the eight years I've worked with the platform. Then we'll move on to why we've created our own Squarespace templates at Pixelhaze.

The primary reason lies in the variety of choice. Squarespace templates are stunning, arguably the best available across any website builder platform. However, everything starts to look the same, especially true if you cater to a wide range of industry sectors like us at Pixelhaze.

Squarespace templates work well for boutique content—solopreneurs, niche online courses, wedding invites, craft-style websites, and more. But when our clients require a more corporate feel, that's where our templates come in. Let's take our Timberworks website as an example. The style, target audience, and features like border around the image or compact grid layout are all customized to our client's needs.

The main point of this course is to show you how to take these templates as a starting point, and work on them, build on them, and adapt them without starting from scratch or being an expert in Squarespace.

All our templates come with a live version preview before you commit to using it for your site. And remember, through this course, you get a 50% discount voucher off any Pixelhaze template.

We encourage you to explore and form your own opinions about our templates versus Squarespace's library. We're not undermining Squarespace's library; we've prospered from them. But having content that relates to our audience is crucial.

As Pixelhaze moves to a global market, we're seeking more variety in our templates. Hence, any Pixelhaze Academy member can request their own templates. We can either fast-track the process for an extra fee or add your request to our list if you're willing to wait.

We will take your brief, create a fictional company, and build a template based on your requested structure. You can then adapt it to your specific client's needs.

We hope this clarifies the differences between Squarespace's built-in templates and external paid templates. Recognizing when to invest a little more to get the perfect template is crucial. See you in the next chapter!

In this chapter, Elwyn utilizes templates from a real store, the Pixelhaze Store, as examples. He skillfully transforms one of these templates, originally designed for a service and support site, into an online training campus, aptly named the Pixelhaze Academy Campus. This demonstration brilliantly highlights the flexibility of these templates and how they can be tailored to suit varying needs by altering colour schemes, content, and overall branding.

By applying changes to a genuine template, Elwyn emphasizes the practicality of the tips and techniques shared in the chapter. He breaks down the processes of modifying fonts, altering styles of secondary and tertiary buttons, and adjusting site navigation font, among other changes. He uses the Chrome plugin ColorZilla to help readers pick suitable colours to form a cohesive colour pack that resonates with the desired branding.

Furthermore, the chapter does not shy away from the nitty-gritty of website customization. It includes a detailed guide on fine-tuning certain features like menu systems, adapting the CSS for specific colour updates, and ensuring that plugins are harmonized with the new colour scheme.

The chapter concludes on a note underscoring the criticality of attention to detail when aligning a website to specific branding requirements.

It underlines that the setup process may take time, but the payoff for a tailored and representative online presence is worth the investment.