 what's up guys in today's tutorial we're going to build a simple site together in the website builder squarespace i've had lots of requests for this people are asking me if it's any good but now we're going to find out let's go right let's jump straight in this tutorials for you maybe if you want to build a simple website or you've never had experience actually building a real website on the internet it's really good to learn some of these builders are actually getting quite fancy now and some of the things you can do they have detailed analytics in i've heard squarespace is one of the leaders in this space exactly so i'm just going to walk you through designing the website and i'll give you my opinions on whether i think it's any good or not or whether it's right for you so head on over to squarespace.com i'll leave the link in the description i've already signed up for a free account and let's just get started and see what we can do there are different types of account you can do but for this one i'm just going to use a free one i'm not going to publish to the web but i'm going to get it up to the point where i'm about to publish and show you how we get there and then if you want you can purchase that i don't think it's very expensive especially for what you get so when you're starting off building a website all of these different types of um builders you start with a base really and you don't need to design the website from scratch like you would do for a client these websites are really good if you're just building a simple website for someone like a portfolio maybe even yourself or i don't know like a small store when you want to really get into the detail design is when you design apps or you're designing websites for clients who have specific needs but a lot of these tutorials or the templates work for quite a lot of basic clients and this is certainly something i wouldn't turn my nose up at using because at the end of the day it's not about the the actual how you design the website it's about does that design solve that website solve a problem and you know eventually get business for the end clients and i guess they don't care if you design it in squarespace or whether you're sketching it out and went through a whole process the next day they really don't care they just want results and if squarespace is the easiest way to do it then i don't know don't see why not so let's take a look at some of the popular designs so for my example i'm probably just going to build a build a simple portfolio for myself so we'll have a look at portfolios so there is other things like if you're doing like a simple if you had a wedding coming up you could go to weddings like a lot of this a lot of the designs on here are actually really really nice so if i if i was getting married i probably got to make a website on squarespace like this with a simple form where you can RSVP there's launch pages as well if you have something coming up and you just want a simple contact those page you know if you've got a band looks like there's some cool little band sites a lot of just public simple facing websites so let's have numbers portfolios then go down see which one i like the look of so this is just my own style but i'm a fan of super clean functional websites i like to let the art and the work through the talking rather than the actual design of the website i'm quite a fan of this orange a lot of nice things here i think i'm gonna choose something clean like this you to get so let's just start with that and then what it does is you click on it and it builds the website for you i guess it uses you to go as an example and it puts some content in there so you will have seen this if you've got if you use where press before and you use a theme and then you launch a demo theme so welcome to your site what should we call it let's call it anthony portfolio continue then it talks about how we can edit pages right and how to create pages and then how to start pages so let's have a look so we've got our web page in the right hand side here so i've got a 14 day subscription nice i think it's really good that you get to experience it and see if you like it first i don't like these ones behind the paywall where you can't get in but so we've got our website here it's nice i like how simple it is i think the font is nice as well and see this i did a lot of research on like different grays and blacks when i was working in ipad design we tried like loads of different like blacks and dark grays and this dark grays really easy on your eye and we found out that instead of black like a really dark gray font actually it was a lot easier to read so i like people use like banding to show different sections on a website and you know what the design's good so i can edit the page so i hit edit in the top left hand corner let's see what happens so it takes over my false scream it's got my name in the top so let's have a look let's see let's start with the header so what can we do we can choose the layout of the header so we can reposition it let's have a look see what happens it's not updated on the fly oh yeah it is it just takes a little while to do it so let's go for the central line down there i have to double click it so central line header then we've got site logo so you can update your logo here extra says anthony's portfolio that's farm and what elements can we do so i could put a button if i wanted to go to let's just do this so that's to my website if you want that let's edit that that's quite easy to click out of it in a closed um not sure that was the best but there you go i've got laying more then we can have social links so you can put you can put like a car tag on there and you see it all happens in the left hand side let's go back and let's take a look at colors so i can make it transparent the header will use the color theme and i can choose the styling so i can choose whether it's full width or whether it's inset so i like full width so that's that's just the header it's nice and simple let's just click done in the top corner save changes once we've done some work on our header let's see if we can let's go back and to edit the page and let's see if we can change some of this text so yeah that's quite nice and simple so we've got all our headings here ah so it's already got styling already done for us that's nice so we haven't got to worry about font and stuff that's all chosen when we choose the actual theme i think sometimes it's it's a lot easier to have less options really because you could go into this theme it's designed with a beautiful font and if you don't really know what you're doing on the typography skins you might you might change it to something that doesn't look as good and it doesn't work with the overall theme so i like the way it's got all the stylings set up you'll probably have to change them a bit later on but i like the way it doesn't give you the option here it's just about adding the type so we can go down it says right here so we can put some information over the image i'm not a huge fan of text over image to be honest i like to keep it clean so this is all very simple we can add our recent works then here we've got it we've got links to different projects so if i click manage projects i'm going to save i like the way it doesn't give you the option to change them but it actually gives you the option to go into each one and then i guess you can edit your project so that's already all automatically set up so i imagine if i change the image on here it's going to change the image on the home page and it's all linked up and you're not really going to break the site which is nice so let's just go back to this left hand menu and have a little look so if i click pages these are our pages of the website so we've got work which is our portfolio where we'll build out where we put our things we've got about we've got our team got press and demo so then we've got a simple contact form let's go back and have a look what else we have so within design so this is where i can choose fonts and colors and all other things like that so it's going to give me the option of different fonts to use Futura is a nice font these are all so i like the way that there's not that many fonts these have all been chosen by the designer of the website so they've just chosen like Sid Dydos and Castelon these are ones i used to use a lot in magazines so they've really thought about giving you an option of fonts like they're not going to throw comic sans in here or something that might destroy the design i like the way they've kept this simple you can change colors so say we wanted a dark theme i can just click dark minimal i like the gray rather than the black and then that actually gives us a dark theme website which is so so easy to do it's swapped all the colors for us so we haven't got to go in and change the color of the text from black to white and change all the other form elements it's done it all for us automatically you know this is getting off to a good start a lot of these things like imagine if you were in adobe xd you would have to change all your styling it would take a while to do some of these things so for someone who's getting new to web design and just wants to understand the process of making a website first i think this is you know this is more than good enough to check it out and actually i kind of like the feel of it i like this left hand navigation i think it's all quite you know it's quite straightforward and simple we have things like buttons so you know if you wanted to change it to pill shape which i like there you go that's nice and simple solid outline like you know this is just as good as some design programs have a lot of people would turn their nose up using something like this but i think if you have confidence in your design then it doesn't really matter what tools you do like at the end of the day it's all about just creating something that that is going to deliver on what you want so you can change the spacing as well so i imagine if i move that in i'll add different margins to my site i can change my page width there's a lot of detailed things that you can do here so let's go down a little bit so what i love about this is there are things that sometimes you don't really consider in your design like a 404 page and these are these are pages that say one of the links broke there's an error in your page it's all created for you here so some people have funny 404 pages like they'll throw a picture of a cat in or something or i don't know you can find it's a place where you can be a bit fun because people don't really see it that much and it makes it lighthearted rather than it just being an error page but that's something where people can have a little play with so let's have a go back into pages let's have a look at work so work is where we add the projects so i guess i could have another project here it gives me different examples of projects i can do so let's just choose project one and then it gives us some information so i can put my images in here don't be messing around with these i mean if you wanted you could change it but if you're new to design just leave a setup kind of as they are as they are i like the way it's got seo built in so it's already suggested it's something for you but here is the title in the description this is where if you change stuff in here it's going to change it for google and you can change the first two lines it normally takes it automatically from some settings on the page so you don't really need to change it i like the way it's all built in but if you want you can do it and then these are the options say sometimes you want to share on social it automatically you know when you paste it into linkedin or something and it gives you an image of the website you know it's all built in here um it's great yeah so i wanted to save that i could just click save i imagine that's going to create me another project here i can go in again if i wanted to i click edit here and then go in and change some of the photos but what i want to see is i want to go back to home page and i want to see if i go down here has it added yeah there you go so that's what i was looking for and that's what i think you know if you were a designer you'd have to think okay i've created a new project i have to go in and link it manually but actually Squarespace has done that for me and i'm very impressed so what's this up here mobile preview so yeah so this is good this is i quite like this so i like full-screen menus as well see the way it's white and it's just got you know it's just it's all about the information web design i believe is all about presenting information in a simple way as possible it's like a book you know no one ever said a book was boring because it just had white and text like no one ever complained about the designer books for the whole history that they existed um yeah you get picture books and stuff but like a good book is about the content not about the design of the book and that's what my personal take on web designers so get the info get the get the design out of the way choose a few nice fonts choose nice pictures but don't go more complex than that it's all about speed as well so simple things are speedy but yeah this is responsive design so the same layout it normally stacks and it works well on mobile you know most of the people who go to your website will be on mobile now it's the way the world's working but i'm quite enjoying using this to be honest so i think it's pretty self-evident how to go and you design your website you choose your page so you choose your contact form you hit edit in the top left hand side it'll take over the screen you can go in and i imagine you can go and edit your form here so then they have this dialogue box for editing different things you know you can choose ones that you want it's gonna set you're gonna be able to connect it to your email address so when they send the tier it sends you an email or you can connect it to you know if you had mail chimp or other types of automated things and then you can go into advance and choose things like when you've submitted it the message that comes up or you can redirect them to another URL so i think it's all really nice and simple so text click in text click in social links i might be able to go in and imagine if i click that i can add my youtube and stuff like that let's go to the footer again simple footer all you want is it's usually for legal information so things like who it's made by what your address is what your phone number is a lot of these legal things that you have to have on websites now so check them out in your area depending on where you make the website there's different laws across the world so i'm going to say that that is good enough for now and i've made that i've made that website so let's have a look what else we can do so now page design's done let's fuck a commerce so one of the great things that Squarespace has built in is um i can't show this because i haven't made a you know i haven't actually made a website where i sell stuff but if you wanted to make a simply commerce site it's got all the all the product directory and there you can have products you can sell products make payments through it it's got a lot of that you know i just got designs for checkout pages designs for flows it's it's got a lot of stuff built into it that for the price that you pay in it would take a lot of design and a lot of thinking and i imagine they've put a lot of testing into this because of millions of people are using this if you're going to be able to hone the flows and get it a lot better so yeah as i did i was designing a simple sign for someone and that they just worried about the site i'd probably use something like this what i like about it is it's got you can um it's got marketing built in as well so you can if you wanted to advertise it on Pinterest or on Facebook or Instagram it's got links to it's got links to where you can do it it's it's got a lot of things built in email campaigns let's have a look what email campaigns it's got because email campaigns are something really important that as a website you need so let's have a look what we do so you can build the mail list in here then let's have a look at the plans normally it costs money to do an email plan either an active campaign i'm not going to upgrade it now but you know this looks good so you might want to send an email out every week to people who sign up or every month it looks like email campaigns they've got in and they manage your mailing list so you can spend hours on this going through let's go through and have a look what's scheduling so it's taking a little while to load i'm not sure what scheduling is so let's see um what it is online assistant ah so it looks like it helps manage your diary as well ah yeah so it's basically an online diary where say you were selling consultations with people um the user can go in sign up pay for a consultation and then they can move it around and it keeps it all up to date that's a good feature looks like that's due then analytics so if you have if you haven't made a website before you'll maybe use google analytics or something that i use it tells you how many people come to your website how long they're on therefore where they're coming from what search terms they used on google and you can't see anything here because we haven't created it yet this is only really something to look at maybe after a month after you've made the website it's certainly not something to look at every day and worry about it it takes a while for people to come to your website to use it and it takes a good chunk of data to understand what people are doing but i like the way it's got analytics installed and then let's have a look at settings so here's all the basic settings so i can go to domain it's got a built-in domain a domain is the actual name like www.blah blah blah blah blah so if i click on this domain i can rename it so i'm going to rename it ans portfolio let's rename that see if it does it because i'm only on the free trial remember so they're actually giving me a domain and it's actually done it so my website is ans portfolio.squarespace.com so i guess if i go into settings and i go into site availability here so it says private only contributors so i'm going to make a password protected i'm just going to ans portfolio upgrade to publish so i'm just going to save it so actually if i just went into another browser and type in ans portfolio.squarespace.com you can see it's actually live on the internet but it didn't know it's me so it's logged me in but if i wanted to publish this site so you know anyone can see it without a password i just need to upgrade and i think let's have a look at the payment plans 10 pound a month 15 pound a month you know it's not it's not very expensive compared to how much like hosting the website normally costs at least 10 pound a month anyway so yeah and you can choose which one you want based on based on what you want so you know what from me Squarespace gets a big thumbs up this is the first time i've actually looked at it the first time i've used it but i've been designing websites for 15 years so hopefully i know what i'm talking about when i look through these things and i certainly wouldn't be embarrassed to tell anyone to design the website in Squarespace i've had a small agency and i was taking clients and they wanted websites do you know what i think it would take you months and months to build a website just as capable of some of the ones here with you know they've got you know they've got pointer sales integrated like checkout processes gift cards coupons analytics a lot of this stuff you're just wasting like small clients be wasting your time doing it like i designed big websites for companies who need complex tools and you know big banks with billions of people that they have specific needs and you can't you can't use something like this it's it's too specific it's too big but for small agencies i honestly don't see why not that's certainly something that i'll be looking at i hope you like this tutorial let me know in the comments what you think about Squarespace am i mad thinking it's okay i know let me know guys i hope you enjoyed that lesson let me know in the comments what you thought about Squarespace is there something you're going to check out please think about subscribing to the youtube channel i'm going to be putting out lots more content like this and join the club hit the notification bell so you don't miss out when i publish new content if you haven't already check our school that antonycomboy.com i've got a free basics course on there which teach you all the essential elements of web design there's a growing community on there of designers like you where you can chat talk to them ask for advice until next time keep designing