Top Squarespace templates for your website
We often hear the first impression is the one, the very first thing that will strike your potential customer base. That’s why choosing the best Squarespace template to represent your online presence must be a thorough decision. This will be the face of your site and the first impression your potential customers will get from your brand, so take your time to choose the right one for you and your site.
If you have followed me this far, it’s because you’re either looking to use Squarespace or you’re already using it and you want to make sure you have chosen right.
If by any chance, you’re not familiar with Squarespace, you should know it’s currently considered as one of the leading website builders and seen as one of the slickest looking builders within the web. Their striking websites with white spaces, parallax scrolling and full bleed imagery has led them to climbing the charts and dominating the market.
Squarespace is a drag and drop creation platform mainly focused on the website creation marketplace. As we often hear, a picture is worth a thousand words, and for Squarespace this means a nice design is worth a thousand customers. That’s why Squarespace prioritize design on the templates they offer.
These people know the game and they’re good at it. They have spent millions on their advertising strategy to take it to another level. I mean, how many website builders do you know that pay 5 million dollars for a Super Bowl ad or hire a world-wide famous actor like Keanu Reeves to be the face of the brand? Either way, their fancy strategies have certainly paid off, as they are currently the third largest website building CMS.
What makes them so good?
Squarespace have found the way to stand out. There’s no walking past them and this happens for all the good reasons. They came to the market of website builder platforms and placed their niche here, even though everyone thought this market was already too crowded.
What’s their USP? Stunningly beautiful design. That is so, they’ve even helped businesses win awards for their websites due to the sleekness of their easily customizable templates.
And don’t you dare thinking their clients are local bakeries or bloggers enjoying the favors of such intuitive website building platform. They have a pretty cool and well-known bunch of followers, including Pixar and international celebrities like Idris Elba and Tony Hawk.
One of the greatest things about Squarespace is that they design their templates thinking carefully of the user and all possible levels of experience they might have. It’s almost impossible to create an ugly or sloppy site with Squarespace. Basically, if you have the skills, you can madly diving into customization, but if you don’t you can just stick to their original design and layout, and you will still end up with an amazing outcome.
That said, let’s see some industries in which is worth having your website available in more than one language and the best Squarespace templates you may use for each of them.
Best template for your ecommerce store
You’re so right. As well as dominating the website building market, Squarespace is also becoming a top choice when it comes to create ecommerce sites. Numbers are on their favor, as they are rated as the second most used ecommerce CMS, right at the top of the one million sites within the web.
Now, which one would be the best template for your ecommerce website? We strongly believe it has to be Brine.
Brine template offers you such a great flexibility to design your ecommerce site that it can actually end up being a time consuming template to work with. When using Brine, you can move around as you like elements like logo, navigation, social icons or the shopping cart. That’s the reason it can turn out to be time consuming, because it has such a high level of customization and it’s so easy to play around with the elements that you can lose track of time, pursuing in awe the perfect look for your site.
And here comes another of the great things about Brine. There are dozens templates within the Brine family, and they all share the same ‘DNA’, so to speak. So, what’s the difference between each of them? How to choose one over the other? Easy. Each one of them is closer to a specific final outcome you might have pictured in your mind, so it may actually save lots of time.
Now, if you’re selling online, it’s only logical you work towards having your Squarespace site available in more than one language. This is like a basic rule for ecommerce merchants because it makes them stand out from the rest, especially these days when cross-border ecommerce is becoming the norm. If you want to make the most out of your business opportunities, then you need to offer more than one language on your store.
Building up a multilingual Squarespace site is more likely to generate a more stable revenue stream by reaching out to potential new markets and increasing your conversion rates. We have a couple great tips for you if you’re looking to stand out from the competition with a Squarespace multilingual ecommerce site.
A great example of people who have achieved a tidy and beautiful site outcome using the Brine templates from Squarespace is the ecommerce store Splish, a business that sells art prints.
They made a great use of Brine’s customization options to achieve a fresh and neat front store by adding the banner image above the menu bar and also adding more than just text on the banner image, with the CTA button ‘Shop prints’.
This Danish ecommerce space knows that adding English to their site makes it appealing to more countries within the European Union. You may easily deal with this by using ConveyThis. ConveyThis is a multilingual solution that will automatically translate, display and add language switchers to your Squarespace built site without the need of duplicating menus, websites or pages.
Best template for a hotel
From our very own perspective, we consider the Artesia, from the York family of templates, to be one of the best possible choices for a hotel website. Although it seems a little bit unconventional and most people find this group of templates to be more suitable for designers and their portfolios, we know someone who has turn it around to be the perfect front store.
Miramonti is one of our own customers and we were actually very impressed by the gorgeous and neat result they achieved by using the Artesia theme.
Undoubtedly, the York templates family, and more specifically Artesia, focuses on showcasing imagery to the max. This is a template that may work really well for boutique hotels, especially for those who advocate for the saying ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’.
Typography is also a standout feature of the York templates, which combined together with the imagery, enhances perfectly the story you’re telling through all visual channels.
Miramonti has definitely done a great job. By choosing the Artesia template and doing just a bit of customization, they ended up with a stunning website that stands out from other hotel websites for its originality and aesthetic. A good contributing factor is that they used imagery mainly based on the localization of their hotel, and that’s a huge plus.
The advantages and benefits of translating an hotel website is no longer fresh news for those already deep in the ecommerce and marketing business. It’s a simple concept. If you’re looking to reach out to an international customer base and attract them to your hotel, you need to talk to them in their own language to convert them. In a scenario where ecommerce is growing by the day, translating your hotel website is the only secure way to have international visitors, stand out from the competition, improve your SEO and increase your conversion rate all together.
At Miramonti they know this and they know it well. They have decided to translate their Squarespace site using ConveyThis and their web is now available in 7 languages.
Best template for a digital agency
Flatiron is one of the oldest templates within the Squarespace library, standing its ground since the early 2012 when Squarespace 6 was launched. However, we believe this continues to be the perfect choice for a digital agency. See it for yourself.
Although website design has been changing a lot within the last 7 years, there’s no doubt Flatiron still caters for the needs and interests of those looking to display their creative work.
Compared to the Brine family, it has a couple less customization options, which is precisely the beauty and power of this template. It offers the possibility of creating at once an impactful online space with ease and little work behind the scenes.
When it comes to design concepts, this grid index homepage is just perfect to be use as a place to showcase what you do by displaying only great images and a couple subtle translucent text strings to introduce your work.
We believe it works so well for digital agencies because what you do at the heart of this industry is basically showcasing. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that you’d want to have your major successes right there on display on your homepage, talking the potential client into clicking in and converting.
Regarding multilingual inspiration within this industry, we may present you with another of ConveyThis clients, BSP Media, who has managed to come up with a neatly sleek website by using the Flatiron template and it has worked out great for them when it comes to distinguishing their brand.
Another creative touch up on their end was duplicating the grid style homepage on their ‘About us’ page, giving continuity to the site and a little extra customization. On our end, ConveyThis plugin allowed them to customize the language switcher to fit nicely with the rest of the template design.
Also, check out the placement of the language switcher. It remains visible on the right side of the footer as the visitors scroll through the site, as they also chose to customize it with a sticky footer.
Switching Squarespace templates
If you have already gone live with your Squarespace site but now, as you read this post, you feel like you could have chosen a better template, don’t you worry because Squarespace also offers you the option to switch between templates.
Once again, the developers behind this platform demonstrate they have a knack for greatness, easing up things and keeping everyone’s needs in mind, as they give you the possibility of changing templates as many times as you want to. This is not only possible, but it’s also easy. Unlike many other website building platforms where you might find some of your content is missing if you change templates, Squarespace ensures this doesn’t happen.
Even better, you can have a private preview of what your site will look like with the new template while your visitors keep seeing the old one. This incredible feature will allow you to take your time playing around with colors, layouts, etc without interfering with your visitors’ access to the site. Once you’re satisfied with the result, you just have to set it as your live template and it will automatically change.
Which is the right way?
In a nutshell, the good news here is that you have close to zero chances to go the wrong way when you choose to build your site with Squarespace. What we’ve seen before are just tips and hints on how to go down a more individual road even if you’re using the main structure of a Squarespace template.
All the templates within their library have been created intending to achieve a design enrichment, which makes it really easy for people with no developer expertise to create something that will be visually appealing to their potential customers.
If you browse up and down their template library and keep feeling that’s not what you’re looking for, Squarespace lets you go to the next level and take your customization a step further. And, of course, we’re allowed to change our mind and second guess our first choices. Well, Squarespace will let you change your mind and your template as many times as you need until you feel that your website has indeed achieved perfection.
Try ConveyThis for free on your Squarespace site to help it achieve perfection. We have a 10 day trial to show how easy things can get!
