- Squarespace for Artists
Overall Rating
- Squarespace is a great choice for all artists who are looking for an easy-to-use platform with outstanding templates to showcase their artworks. With ample ecommerce features, Squarespace caters to artists who want to sell, or otherwise make money off their website.
Is Squarespace good for artists?
Squarespace is heavily geared towards visual creators. Digital and traditional artists, photographers, designers, and illustrators can benefit from Squarespace’s website templates to build perfect online showrooms for their works. Although Squarespace offers a rather small selection of 60+ templates, all templates are high quality and outstanding in design.
Many of the Squarespace templates have been created with art, photography and blogging in mind. They can be easily customized using Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor, without the need for learning any code. All templates are fully responsive and mobile-friendly. They are backed with strong features, and some even provide ecommerce functionality.
The idea behind Squarespace is an ‘all-in-one’ approach: you get everything out of the box – from web hosting, domain name, regular backups and security, to website builder and ecommerce store.
Squarespace Commerce – Squarespace’s new ecommerce platform
If you want to start selling physical prints or digital copies of your artworks online, then Squarespace Commerce is a fantastic option. If you’re currently selling on Etsy or another art platform, then this can be a welcome upgrade for you.
There are plenty of features available to build an online store for your art with unlimited products, lots of marketing options, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools to help you get selling.
Squarespace offers a webinar series to walk you through all its ecommerce features and an SEO guide to help you rank your website among Google’s top search results.
Is Squarespace Right for You?
Squarespace has been around for quite a while, but only recently in early 2020 did the company launch its 7.1 version. The biggest changes are the addition of sections to the website builder for more intuitive designing, and a huge upgrade to the template system.
Overall, Squarespace is a great choice for anyone who has an eye for beautiful things and wishes to create their artist website with very little effort, and little to no coding skills. With Squarespace, you’ll have access to some of the most aesthetic template themes and design options out there on the market. More than 2 million people are using Squarespace for their personal or business website.
However, Squarespace isn’t going to be right for everyone. Read up on our detailed review to find out whether Squarespace is the right choice for you!
Website Builder
Squarespace Review: The Website Builder
Is Squarespace good for artists who want to create a website intuitively?
Squarespace is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. That means you can build your website with drag-and-drop functionality and see what it’ll look like in real time while editing it. It’s a very straightforward and intuitive way of creating a website that doesn’t require you to learn any HTML or other programming code.
Squarespace pages are made up of sections and content blocks. The sections help you lay out your page quickly, without building it up from scratch. Content blocks are elements that go into the sections: text blocks, headings, buttons, images, videos.
The more complex blocks include contact forms, RSS feeds, social media icons, calendars, appointment scheduling forms, Amazon and ecommerce products, and many more.
All content blocks are super-easy to work with. To add an element to your website, you just grab it with the mouse and drop it onto the section where you want to place it.
Working with sections takes a bit of a learning curve, though. Squarespace is not as customizable and flexible as other website builders, like Wix or WordPress. You will need to get used to the fact that you cannot drag anything anywhere. The design options are somewhat limited by the template you choose.
Still, you can customize all sections to your liking, by setting a padding, assigning a custom background, image, or color. There’s also the option to add a background video to a section, which adds a cool visual effect to your website!
Image Editor
Squarespace Review: the Image Editor
Is Squarespace good for artists to showcase their art portfolio?
Squarespace is a particularly attractive option for all visual creators who want a website to showcase their portfolio. Squarespace offers the best image manipulation and presentation tools that are available on the market.
You can resize, crop and rotate images with ease. For example, if you want to display your portfolio in a grid gallery, the thumbnails will show as squares. Most website builders automatically crop around the center of the images and leave it at that.
With Squarespace, you can pick a ‘focal point’ in your images, meaning you can choose a specific part of the image that you want to display. This is a major plus for all visual artists because website visitors will always see the most enticing part of your works first!
To showcase your portfolio, Squarespace offers you a whole range of options, including grids, tiled and masonry galleries, slideshows, and carousels. All look amazing!
Templates
Squarespace Review: The Art & Photography Templates
Is Squarespace good for artists with a visual focus?
Squarespace templates are known for looking beautiful! You can choose from 60+ premade templates that cover the needs of just about every major industry.
There are 16 different topic categories to help you get up and running quickly, many of them are geared towards visual creators: Art & Design, Photography, Fashion, Weddings, … You can just pick a template and go!
All templates come with a fully responsive design. That means your artist website or online store will look great on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices!
With Squarespace 7.1, website templates got a huge upgrade. Previously, some Squarespace templates had more features than others. Now, all templates come with the same set of features and design options.
One downside to the latest version of Squarespace is that you can no longer swap between templates once you’ve selected one. But don’t worry, this is less of a big deal than it sounds. You can always tweak fonts, colors, and layout elements to get the same look and feel as another template!
what is the best squarespace template for artists?
Squarespace has plenty of nice templates that were designed with artists and photographers in mind. Therefore, it shouldn’t be hard to find one for your art portfolio. Basically, you can choose any template you like and adapt it to your personal needs!
Here are some great templates you can take a look at, if you’re planning to display artworks and start a blog on Squarespace:
- Amal (Art & Design)
- Beaumont (Photography)
- Elliott (Photography)
- Gates (Art & Design, Photography)
- Maru (Art & Design)
- Matsuya (Photography)
- Minetta (Photography)
- Nevins (Photography, Blog)
- Talva (Photography, Blog)
- Zion (Photography)
Is Squarespace good for artists who want to have full control over the look and feel of their site?
Many competing products are more flexible than Squarespace, allowing you to switch templates and providing you full control over the appearance of a template. In WordPress and Shopify, for example, you have full access to your site’s HTML and CSS files to make changes.
If you’re on Squarespace’s Personal Plan, you don’t have that flexibility. You’ll need to upgrade to the Business Plan or higher to add your own custom CSS.
For all coders, it’s noteworthy that you’ll never get access to the full CSS file on Squarespace. You’ll only be able to alter the appearance of certain website elements.
For everybody else, the lacking CSS accessibility shouldn’t be a problem. The design options are plenty and more than sufficient! The only instance where you would want CSS access is to imbed third-party apps and services on your site.
All in all, Squarespace is an ideal platform for artists thanks to its portfolio-focused templates and its easy-to-use website builder. In fact, you can find many beautiful artist websites on Squarespace, including ecommerce websites of artists who are selling their works.
FEATURES
Squarespace Review: The Squarespace Commerce thing
Is Squarespace good for artists who want to sell their works?
Squarespace’s online store functionality is one of the biggest selling points for visual creators. Its ecommerce features are best-in-class, for a website builder.
Of course, Squarespace doesn’t match up to the features you get on Shopify or Bigcommerce. Squarespace is a website builder for many different types of websites, whereas Shopify is tailored to ecommerce.
So, if you solely want to sell products online, go for Shopify. However, if you want to beautifully showcase your art portfolio, present yourself as an artist, and maybe do some blogging along the line, then go for Squarespace.
If you already have an existing store elsewhere on the web, you can easily import your products via a .CSV file.
Even though Squarespace is not first and foremost an ecommerce platform, Squarespace Commerce offers a huge range of features for your web store, including:
- Physical Products: You can sell physical products (e.g. art prints) and have them shipped to your customers. Shipping fee calculation (via Fedex and UPS for the U.S. only) and automatic tax calculation help help you find your way around the formalities.
- Digital Products and Services: You can sell digital products (e.g. downloadable image files) and get paid for services, such as online art courses and consultations.
- Product Variations: You can create multiple product variations with individual pricing.
- Subscriptions: You can sell subscription products that charge on a recurring basis.
- Customizable Email Receipts: Email receipts are sent out to customers after a purchase. You can customize these emails to make them look more like your brand, include a thank you note and related product suggestions.
- Offer Discounts and Sales: Offering products and services at a reduced price for a certain period of time is a proven method to increase sales.
- Sell Gift Cards : You can sell gift cards that customers can redeem for products in your store.
- Sell via Social Media : If you have a large social media following, creating a shoppable feed is an excellent way to drive sales.
- Create Mailing Lists : Mailing lists are super-important for staying connected with your customers and website visitors. The bigger your mailing list, the more exposure for your website and the better the chances to make sales!
- Accepted Payment Methods: Squarespace allows a variety of payment methods, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Apple Pay Integration.
The ecommerce functionality you get depends on the plan you choose.
To use Squarespace’s ecommerce features, you’ll need to be at least on the Business Plan or higher. Squarespace’s Personal Plan doesn’t allow selling products.
If you generate lots of sales from your online store, it’s a good idea to opt for the Basic Commerce or the Advanced Commerce Plan because you won’t need to pay any transaction fees. On the Business Plan, however, Squarespace will take a 3% cut of all transactions made via your store.
Squarespace Review: the Blogging platform
Is Squarespace good for artists who want to get into blogging?
Squarespace’s blogging features are well off for offering some serious competition to WordPress.
The blog module lets you save drafts, schedule posts to be published at a future date or to be reviewed by colleagues before publishing. You can add social share buttons, change fonts and colors for individual posts, and decide whether or not you want to show the author’s name and profile.
The Personal Plan allows you to have 2 contributors to your website. If you want more, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business Plan or higher, where there’s no restriction to the number of contributors that you can have.
Whereas many competing website builders allow you to only use tags, Squarespace lets you use both tags and categories for your blog posts. This means you can present your content in a more structured way and provide better filterable options for your readers.
Once you’ve created a blog post you can send it out in a newsletter to your subscribers.
As for the visual part, you have multiple options to present your posts in a stunning way, just like your portfolio. You can create a stylish blog entry overview, add post grids or carousels, and filter posts according to relevancy.
On the downside, there’s no autosave for blog posts and pages. So all you can do is make sure to hit the save button regularly while you’re writing to prevent your work from getting lost!
All in all, Squarespace’s blogging features are great for most users. However, if you want to take your blogging to the next level and become a professional blogger, then WordPress is what you need!
Squarespace Review: the SEO features
Is Squarespace good for artists who want to rank their website in Google?
Squarespace provides you with all the essential SEO options to make your blog posts rank in Google. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. These are a couple of features provided by Squarespace that benefit the ranking of your site:
- Custom URLs: You can customize the URL of your blog posts by including the page title and target keywords. So instead of having a post URL that looks something like www.yourdomain.com/post-15, you can create a URL such as www.yourdomain.com/best-drawing-tablets-for-digital-artists, which is so much better for SEO!
- Meta Titles and Descriptions: Squarespace lets you write the meta titles and descriptions that you want to display in the search results. Having your target keyword in the title is vital for SEO, and an enticing description will make people click on your page. Click rates and bounce off rates (how long visitors stay on your page) are equally important for SEO because Google considers them in its ranking system.
- Image Alt Tags: Google also looks at image tags. Squarespace lets you set alt tags on images. Adding relevant target keywords to your images can improve your ranking.
- SSL: Squarespace allows you to enable SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) at no extra cost. SSL is another factor that Google considers a ranking signal.
- Sitemap: Squarespace automatically creates an XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) for your website that you can submit to Google Webmaster Tools.
- AMP Support: Squarespace is one of the few website builders to support AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). AMP is a tool to create fast loading, mobile-friendly pages, which Google treats preferentially in mobile search results.
Apart from that, Squarespace doesn’t provide you with any built-in SEO-checking functionality.
Pricing
Squarespace Review: The Pricing Plans
Is Squarespace good for artists in terms of value for money?
Squarespace’s pricing is overall pretty much the same as competing website builders with no-ad plans. However, unlike its competitors, Squarespace doesn’t offer any free plan, but a 14-day trial period.
All in all, Squarespace offers four plans – one for personal websites, one business plan, and two plans for ecommerce:
Squarespace Pricing Plans
All Squarespace plans include free whois privacy protection. This is a very useful feature because it hides the personal details of the domain holder from the public. Other website builders, such as Weebly, charge extra for privacy protection.
On the Business Plan or higher, you can use Google’s G Suite integration to set up email addresses for your domain name (yourname@yourdomain.com).
As for the pricing of Squarespace’s two ecommerce plans, the Basic Commerce Plan is comparable to Shopify’s Basic Plan and Bigcommerce’s Standard Plan.
On the other hand, Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce Plan is significantly cheaper than the top-level plans offered by Shopify and Bigcommerce. However, one needs to keep in mind that those specialized ecommerce platform provide more functionality than Squarespace.
Squarespace Review: The Customer Support
Is Squarespace good for artists when you get stuck on a technical problem?
It’s always worthwhile to have a look at the customer support – after all, you never know what happens on the technical side of things!
Squarespace provides 24/7 email support, and a live chat from 4am to 8pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. Unfortunately, there’s no phone support.
The good thing is you can always find online support materials. Squarespace has a comprehensive collection of help guides on building websites in its knowledge base, and a question-and-answer forum for its users.
As mentioned above, there’s also a webinar series you can sign up for to get help with all things ecommerce.
Overall Rating
Squarespace review: the verdict
Is Squarespace good for artists overall?
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform with awesome premade templates to showcase your artworks, then Squarespace is a fantastic choice for you. It’s also a great platform for artists who want to sell prints and digital downloads of their creations.
All Squarespace templates are fully responsive and mobile-friendly. There are many categories aimed specifically at visual creators, including Art & Design, Photography, Fashion, Weddings, to just name a few.
Adapting a template to your personal preference doesn’t require any coding skills. Squarespace’s drag & drop website builder makes designing your website simple and intuitive.
Squarespace is an all-in-one hosted solution, so you don’t need to worry about server updates, site backups, or security plugins, which brings a lot of peace to an artist’s mind.
Overall, if you’re ready to build a site and have a solid plan to make some money off it, then go for one of Squarespace’s annual plans that will offer you the best value for money.
Whether you’ve already made up your mind to give Squarespace a try or whether you still want to get a more in-depth idea of how things are working on Squarespace, here’s a great tutorial to show you step-by-step how to set up your Squarespace site!
Why you shouldn't use Squarespace?
- Reason #1: You don’t have a plan on how to make money with your site yet. Solution: Start with a website builder that offers you a free plan, e.g. Weebly or Wix.
- Reason #2: You want to have unrestricted options to design your web pages and full control over the look of your website, including full access to your CSS stylesheet file. Solution: Go for WordPress or Wix.
- Reason #3: You want to focus on writing blogs and have advanced blogging and SEO features. Solution: This is what you’ll get with WordPress.
- Reason #4: Your main focus is selling products or services and you wish to have the best possible ecommerce functionality. Solution: Use Shopify or Bigcommerce to create your online store.
