 Hello everyone. This is Amit Dan of amitdan.com. Today I will have another episode of Internet and Technology video and I will talk about how to set up a blog on Squarespace platform. So this is not a blog which is a part of the main website or part of the website. I am talking about a primary blog website on Squarespace. For example if you look at my site right now. So this is amitdan.com and this is a primary blog website. This blog is not part of another website or it's a blog within a main site. And if you look at the post they just you know they will appear one after another and then there's on the right the blog sidebar which is a very common feature of blog and this is what I'm going to show you today because I was looking to set up or I was looking for a tutorial on how to set up a blog on the website and there are lots of articles and videos on this but what they have in common is that they're all talking about starting or creating a blog within a site. I haven't found any YouTube video or articles about mentioning where you can set up a standalone blog or you can set up a primary blog which is not part of a site. So that's what I'm going to show you today. So I set up with Squarespace using my fake email which is right here and I'm going to just you know show you how to create your blog website which is a primary blog website but before we do that I need to talk about something else. So Squarespace allows you to have lots of templates and then you can have templates with either you know blog site bar or you can have templates with content site bar or site bar which is not content or which is just a navigation site bar. So for a blog you need to have a content site bar and all the templates they do not offer content site bar. So here is they have a list of templates which offer content site bar and you can easily find this by doing a search on Google by putting in editing site bars on Squarespace then you'll come to this page. Now if you take a look at the chart here then you will see that you know these templates offer blog pages with a site bar but if you scroll down a little bit then you're going to see that some templates offer site bar only for blog posts not for blog pages. So the different is that when you're choosing a template with blog posts then you're not going to have the site bar if you move to a different page. For example if you go to about page on my blog then you'll see that you know each page has the same site bar. So that's what we are looking for in a blog because you don't want you know one page to have a site bar another page not to have a site bar if your site is a blog main site so that's why you have to choose a template which offers site bar for all pages or for all blog pages not just you know blog posts. So here are some of the templates now if you go to the Squarespace or if you start with Squarespace then you're going to come up to a page like this and then here you can just click get started then it's going to take you to Squarespace template page which would look like this. Now here you're not going to find you know the templates they mentioned here. So I have a feeling that you know this is an old chart. I'm not sure if even these you know templates which are newer templates have the feature to have a site bar in all blog pages but definitely you can check with the Squarespace but we are going to look for the old templates which we found on the chart and you can do that by going to the bottom of the page and here looking for templates from an early version. So if you click on it then it's going to take you to a template page and then you can click on all templates and here you're going to get a listing of all templates. So the template I'm going to be showing you is let me just take a look here. Let's start with Bedford because if you take a look here you can see that Bedford offers blog pages site bar. You can have like you know slide site bar on all pages or all blog pages. So that's what I'm going to choose here and I'll click start with Bedford and then it's going to take a few seconds to you know ready the template for you and it will then take you to the navigation or site navigation menu on Squarespace. So let's just wait until this page loads. So here you're going to get an introductory welcome message. So we'll just you know hit start and then here you're looking at your configuration section or configuration menus and you can see that you know it has pages, design, commerce, marketing and everything. So we're going to click on pages and then here looks like you know by default the system created some pages but we are only interested in the pages which are we are only interested on our blog page which is going to be our main website. So for example if you look at this very carefully you're going to see that this page right here has a in front. So what it means that this is a blog page. So this blog page is where you can start but I'm going to just delete it to show you how to create a blog page from scratch. So let's delete that and I'm going to just delete you know here everything else. So delete this and delete. Okay so we are left with only one page which is the home page and you can see that home. So what is a home page is that when you go to your website for example ameddon.com the home page is the page which you look at first or the main page of your blog website. So here the home page actually is just a regular page this is not a blog page. So we'll create a blog page from here. So just click on the plus sign and you choose a blog page and then you see that you know it created a blog page. You can name this anything you want but I'll just keep the new blog and when I click on the setting button then I'm going to see an option that set this as home page. So once I click on it confirm now your blog page actually is your home page. So I can just go ahead and delete the other page and now we have a page but you will see that you know we don't have a sidebar. So depending on what type of template you're looking at some templates give you like you know sidebar right away and for some templates you have to activate the sidebar. So the way you can do it if you go back and then you can go back to design and you can go back to site styles and then here you're going to get a bunch of option to change like you know the site header site navigation and main content and everything and if you look carefully under the blog section and there you're going to see there is a sidebar option and it's telling to hide the blog sidebar. So I'm going to just you know unhide it so if you click on here then we're going to have a sidebar right here. So I'm going to just hit save and then I'd just like to mention that this name is not going to be the same for different templates. So for example this template has this name sidebar for some template it might have something different but you get the idea that you have to activate the sidebar and some templates for example five template even you know comes with the sidebar activated you don't have to actually come here to activate but you can move it to the left or right but looks like this template doesn't have that option to move it to the left or right. So most likely it's going to create a sidebar on the right side. So now we can go back to design and then again template and then again we'll go back to our pages. So now here we have our blog pages and you can see that you know there is a blog sidebar section. So basically this section is going to look like this sidebar section which I have right here and you have to add these elements one by one. So right now your sidebar is very empty so if you click edit and then if you hit this add block sign or plus sign then you're going to see that you know you're going to get a bunch of options then you have to add one by one just like I did here and then you can like you know add even line or space in between for example if you see here that I have a line in between just to differentiate them and it looks much better with a line or space. So now if you want to like you know add a text or video or you can add html code for example if you look at my google ad which is right here and amazon ad box which is right here these are just basically html codes so you have to just you know hit codes right here and you have to just insert code in here and that's going to create that part which you're looking at. So you can just you know arrange everything you want and you can drag and drop them and do like you know put it back on up or bottom or in the middle you can just rearrange them and then once you're done you can just hit save and then that's going to create a sidebar for you. So that's the way you can create a sidebar. Now let's look at the block content right here so here you're going to have to just like you know create your blog but you have the option to change different settings here you know which you can go ahead and do later on for example SEO image feed and like you know post per page 20. I usually have only five post per page so you can change this later on and then you can also like you know change the title here you can add even a banner just like the way I have it here and not all template offers you to add a banner but the Bedford I believe has the capability so you can just you know add that later on and then you can you know change the footer you can change the pre-footer content so you can do lots of things but I'm going to just show you how to create a blog so when you are on your blog page so just click on here then in order to create a blog you have to just you know hit add post and then here your title is going to be let's say test title and here is your content so I'm going to just like you know put something just to show you how it looks so I'm going to just copy this and put it here and then once you have everything is ready you can save and publish or you can just save and then here you have other options for example to set up tags categories and like you know aco share but let's just save and you can see that you know you have your blog post right here now if you click another blog post then it's just going to be under on top of this one and this one is going to be pushed underneath and still you're going to have your sidebar so basically you're going to have a website exactly like mine and which is a primary blog post and then you can just like you know keep writing blog and everything so that's how you can create a blog primary blog site on website on Squarespace which is not a part of a website rather the blog is the website so your homepage is going to be your blog page and let me just show you here something else so when you are on this main navigation page if you take a look at my site you're going to see that you know I have some more sections here for example books about disclaimer contact so these are actually separate pages and if you click on it is going to just take it to that page this is actually not a blog page but rather just a page so you can create these pages here just by clicking on main navigation and then you're going to start with a blank page and then it's going to just create a page and you can just name your page for example books and you can actually drag and change the order here so if you want to keep your like you know main page which is your new blog on top you can do that and then you can keep like you know other pages and then these are going to be like you know these are going to create pages just like I have it here now I would like to show you how we can change templates so you have to just you know go to design and then go to templates then because we already like you know activated or installed bedford is going to show up here but if you just install new template just you click on here then it's going to take you to the page which I showed you before then you have to just like you know choose another template and then once you do that then it's going to just you know bring you on the design page here and then from here you can just like you know change your template or choose any template so one thing I would like to mention that if you have many templates and if you'd like to like you don't just switch or change design of your blog your sidebar content is not going to be transferred over from template to template automatically you have to actually do that manually and you have to like you know just work on a template and just like you know create the same sidebar like your other template for example like this and then once you're ready then you can go ahead and switch the template so that's something you want to keep in mind so these are the basics how you can set up a new blog or main blog website on your on Squarespace and this is actually my first Squarespace tutorial video and if this gets lots of traffic then definitely I'll make some more Squarespace videos thank you for watching forget about subscribing to this channel forget about liking this video there'll be more videos coming up so I'll see you shortly thank you