Exploring and choosing a Template for your website is a fun process! It’s interesting to look for options that suit your personal style and also accommodate your business's products, services, and details you will want to add.

Functionality and feel are key! In this video, I’ll show you how to get started. Or if you’d rather, I can pick a few templates and we can look at those options together.

IN THIS LESSON

In this video I’ll show you how to get started exploring the Squarespace options for templates to use in building your website.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello. Now, we’re going to talk about templates—templates for building your website.

This is an enjoyable process. It’s creative and interesting to explore what a website can look and feel like. What you’re trying to determine is what might fit your personal style and also allow you to incorporate your products, services, and other details you want to include.

Functionality and feel are key. Remember that there are many ways to add variations or make changes within a particular template, so it won’t look exactly like the template you explore today as you’re going through the process. I’m starting on the Squarespace home page: https://www.squarespace.com/templates

0:48 For this exercise, I’m going to create a profile. I will be someone who’s just finished a somatic certification course, and I want to offer sessions for people to come to have somatic healing with me. I will start the process by clicking on the “Templates” option. This brings me to a place where I can explore the categories and narrow down the templates I might use.

1:26 I will start by going over here to the left-hand side and choosing the TYPE of website. So this person who is a coach and a healer will offer services. They probably don’t have an online store or necessarily need a portfolio or offer memberships, but I think they might want to have a blog. So, I’m going to choose templates that might provide a blog. And then, I’m going to go down to the topic area of the list, and I’m going to choose a topic to help narrow down the criteria. And I think I will choose health and beauty for this example.

2:07 The system has suggested four templates that meet my criteria. The first thing I will do is add them to my list so I can find each one again. If you go to the bottom of this list, you’ll see they are among my favorites, and I have four.

2:30 So now I can explore these templates and see what I like and don’t like. I will start with “Clove” and click on this example. You’ll see that each template shows you a variety of color combinations you can choose. The combination that’s highlighted is the one they’re showing you first, so you can see what it would look like with different color combinations. You can choose “Start with this design,” but I recommend going to the VIEW DEMO SITE.

(**If you click on “START WITH THIS DESIGN,” a 14-day free trial will automatically be started. It’s easy to cancel this anytime by going into your SS account settings.)

3:18 This will pull up an example where you can go through and take a look at how they’ve got this set up and what kinds of things they’ve added. You can look at the menu, etc. Now, I will go back to the main page I was on and then go back to the templates. Oh, I should mention that you can view these on both desktop and mobile views.

3:52 You can stay in the templates section and play around with these various combinations. I recommend that you have two or three, not more than four, templates to share and discuss when we have our first design meeting.

4:06 You can do a lot within a template, so I think these are all great options and would certainly be very workable for this example.

I hope you enjoy this process, and I’ll see you in the following video!