hello guys and welcome to a studio vlog so as you can tell from the title of
this one I'm going to show you how I created my squarespace
Squarespace website I'm going to show you what it looks like behind the scenes
and how easy it is to use I absolutely love it I've had websites hosted by many
different companies before and Squarespace is my all-time favorite will say this is not an
ad a girl can dream I just really love Squarespace so yeah I
get a lot of questions about how I use it and what I use so I thought today is
the day so if you haven't seen it I will show you the website from kind of your
perspective you've ended up in my main channel setup position but I'll screen
record and I'll show you it so we can kind of walk through it together so this
is the website that you guys see so on the top it has my logo and all the menus
that I need and then this kind of banner thing that flicks between different
things ignore the little Pinterest sign that comes up here that is just
an add-on on my browser that's not always on the website and then if I
scroll down I have a few Procreate tutorials so I have like the most recent
three shown on there and then I have the same for illustrator and the same for Photoshop
I've not actually done any tutorials for a while so if you let me know what kind
of ones you'd like to see I will get on it ASAP and then at the bottom I have a
little sign up thing so you actually if you sign up you get access to a what I
like to call the creator tool kit so it's a password protected page that only
people who sign up can get on to and on there are different like assets and
files and stuff and things that can kind of help your creative career and they're
all free to download and only members get to get to them so yeah if you sign
up with your name email address I only email you twice at the beginning to give
you the password and then I email once a month with the newsletter so not much at
all and then at the bottom obviously just the basic copyright thing more
pages my logo again and then my social media so yeah this is the website
on it's basically level and then obviously there's different pages so I
have an about page all about me at the top it's got the
Instagram banner and stuff and portfolio which I'm going to work on to expand I
want to be able to click on every photo and when you click on it I want that to
bring up a page to explain what the photo is and why I did that work and
then tutorials which I guess is the page most people are the most interested in
so it has a choice to go just to the singles or a summary of all of them and
then creator toolkit which is the password protected page so I'm not going
to show you that it's logging me in obviously because I am the creator but I
don't want you guys to see that so if you want to see that please do sign up
to my to my newsletter and then finally shop which just redirects you to my soul
and fire shop page I did used to have my shop connected to Squarespace but I
chose to separate it because I wanted Alice Thorpe and Soul & Fire to be two
separate things so that's why that redirects to a different website now
alright enough babbling let's show you the behind-the-scenes of Squarespace
when I click on the admin part of my website this is what I see so I see a
smaller preview of my website it's being kind of squished this way it is
basically that and then when I hover over the different elements edit buttons
come up and I can click on different things to edit them effectively it's
drag and drop which is just a godsend so if I press edit on this page so this is
the home page and you'll see it expands and the different elements are all in
these little grey kind of boxes and they're all named and they've got their
own their own job to do so I can drag them rearrange them I can put them on
either end change the size you know like this is
just a spacer so it literally is just creating space for me and again with
this I can drag it I can move it around so if I wanted to put this I underneath
the title I can super super easy and then if I want to edit the I think they
call them modules maybe to edit the modules if you just click Edit above it
it brings up the Edit for that particular module so in here
three images all which I've kind of sized to fit how I want
them and then you can obviously upload more and then the design you're able to
decide whether you want it is a carousel which it will preview for me so
carousels kind of change themselves like slide across or a grid like that or
stacked where they're all kind of in a row but obviously for the purpose I
needed it for I wanted it for the top of my page I wanted it as a slideshow at
the top I don't want it to show thumbnails so get rid of that and five
seconds between and there's a whole different bunch of settings in here and
then just press apply when you're happy and it'll do it another box is the
summary box so in here I have programmed it to summarize things from my blog so
these individual tutorials are all blog posts so effectively it's just showing
me thumbnails of the blog posts so I've clicked blog I've just re clicked its
added the thing on it you can change the widths you can change everything
basically about it you can change how they're displayed and you can also get
rid of things you don't want and because I just wanted to show procreate things
I've got a filter in it that says just procreate tutorials if I got rid of this
you can see that it's showing more than just procreate tutorials it's showing
other things too so by adding that in it's only showing procreate and I've
applied the same thing to the other ones so this one is just showing illustrator
tutorials with that tag and the same with the Photoshop so that's super super
simple if I want to add another module that's not already in here I click this
little if I might navigate to the edge of one of the boxes
it comes up with with these weird little circular label things I click the label
these are the image blocks that I can choose from oh they call them content
blocks make sense there's the basic ones then image ones which are the ones I
use the most I think gallery ones so it's a
gallery one that I'm using at the top now this one that you can see up here
is the slideshow one summary and then you can add a calendar you can add a map
where your company is based you can have so many things you can add code so if
you've got a specific link thing that you want to add that requires like code
in you can add that in their products donations there's literally so many
Instagram all that kind of jazz so I just love that there's so much to choose
from so that's the basic drag-and-drop feature if I go into pages you'll see
sort of there's a name for this I'm gonna put the name on screen I learned
it at uni I can't think of it right now you'll see that on the screen and it has
the layout of the different page so you'll see that under main navigation
it's got all the different things and that is what is up here on top in the
navigation and again it's drag and drop so if I decide I wanted portfolio before
home I could just drag it and it's changed it up here straightaway and
same to change it back and if I don't want that in there instead of deleting
it I can just drag it out of the thing altogether
put it in here and then it's not in the banner itself but it's still there if I
need it again then there's one for secondary navigation so that's all the
stuff down here at the bottom I have adjusted this slightly in the pages so I
can edit the footer separately so it kind of just depends on how you want to
do it and then these pages at the bottom are all pages that aren't linked so
they're not publicly shown on the website but somehow people might need to
navigate to them so I have like all of my images off this website pinned on my
Pinterest board so when someone clicks on a tutorial by my Pinterest board I
want them to go to a specific page so this is where these pages came in so for
example I offer a free media kit so if you don't know a media kit is something
that kind of influencer blogger people use to put their prices on it's
basically like a price list so when people click on my Pinterest page I want
them to come to this it gives them a summary of what they are signing up for
with an image that they clicked on initially
and then at the bottom it signs them up to my creator toolkit which I won't
show you still gotta sign up guys and then you click that and it's done and I
customized them to all the different ones so I've got many different signup
pages I have the coming soon page that I initially put on this website when I
very first built it I've got links so I use this to link all my different things
on my Instagram account so if you look at the bio on my Instagram account you'll
see that the URL is Alicethorpe.co.uk/links and that is this
page this is what comes up when people click on that and then finally the blog
which I would argue is the most important thing so in here are all the
different blog posts it kind of shows you a summary but I never really look at
my blog post like this I don't really like how it looks it just has big photos
at the top the title and a little snippet but I think that's kind of hard
to navigate especially when you're on a phone so I've done it a different way
but down here on the left you can see all the different blog posts I've done
and then if you click on them it will preview them for you and if it wants to
load there we go and it kind of again is drag and drop
it's the same principle as the web pages so if I click Edit I can change the
sizes of the spaces I can change this photos if I click on it press edit get
rid of that photo and upload new one and like I've inserted a text field here
changed it to a title inserted a video a YouTube video here that's such a handy feature
and again the sign up so it is the same principle the whole way through another
thing I love I mean I love it anyway I'm doing a whole video on Squarespace
obviously I love it right so out of the pages let's go onto something else
I realized whilst editing I didn't actually show you this tab so this is
the design tab so in here i can change my logo on the page I can choose my
template so Squarespace have a bunch of pre-loaded templates that you can use or
you can obviously purchase your own and adjust them as you like and then site
styles so I can change this little icon up here
and I can change a bunch of things in there to be honest
lockscreen checkout page more behind the scenes stuff basically and
you can choose whether to have the Squarespace badge on the bottom as
well that does depend on the plan you're on but mine I don't have the badge so
yeah in here is just some more settings we have commerce so like I mentioned I
did have a shop on here so this is where this this part comes in so if you pay
for the plan that comes with the shop you'll be able to click on this and see
everything but in summary it shows you your orders how much stock you've
got the customers that you've had discounts and obviously all the setup
options underneath then we have marketing I'm toying with the idea of
using the email campaign system let me know if anyone watching this uses it on
here I've never really tried it I already had a different system so I've
just never transferred it over but they have their own email system which is
great one less thing to pay for then they sort out your SEO and then you can
add pop-ups so I have a little pop-up that encourages people to sign up to get
to the creator tool kit and you can also have an announcement bar so a
little brightly colored bar at the top of the page to maybe promote something
new that you do or tell people about free shipping anything like that and
then also you can share your products and create sponsored content for
yourself on Facebook Instagram Pinterest etc analytics kind of speaks for itself
it shows you the views and the sales and stuff on your website obviously I don't
use the shop anymore so it's got no sales on it you can see where people are
coming from when they view your site you can see how many people are viewing your
site how they found your website so I find it really interesting to see that a
lot of my website traffic comes from Pinterest alongside a bunch of other
different things that you can keep track of your most popular content I find that
super interesting from that I can see which posts are doing the best and how
to replicate that again in the future then we have the comments section which
I don't actually use I have the comments turned off for this website mainly
because I don't want to have to moderate something else
I already moderate my YouTube comments my Instagram
comments like that so I don't have it turned on but if you want comments to be
able to be added to the bottom your blog post this is where they would all show
up so you don't have to go through each blog post individually which I can
imagine is such a time-saver then there's basic settings so here you
obviously change the visibility you can change your business information so your
address your email address what social accounts are shown and change the domain
name obviously I don't use a Squarespace domain I use alicethorpe.co.uk
and then obviously the billing and all the other behind-the-scenes stuff I'm
not really gonna talk about but you can see what's on here if you are wondering
by the way I use the business plan and I pay it yearly so I pay one lump sum per
year because it works out cheaper they do monthly plans too and they start from
ten pounds a month I believe so it's a no-brainer so affordable and yeah that
is the basics of my website I absolutely love it it's just so simple I've set it
up and I don't really have to think about it too often I've never had
anything go wrong with it all the forms and stuff so when people sign up to my
newsletter all that has always worked fine the blog posts have been great I've
never had any feedback saying that anything that's glitched out or isn't
working right so I'm just all in all really happy with it I would 100%
recommend Squarespace I guess that's it for this video I've literally just sat
and bored you all to death talking through my website I've had so many
questions about it and I've just never really addressed them so hopefully this
video has answered some of your questions if I have missed something do
let me know down in the comments ask me any questions you want and I will get to
them and answer them for sure thanks so much for watching if you aren't already
subscribed to my newsletter please do that would be great and I'll see you
soon for another video bye