2018 was a big year for my business and Squarespace alike. We saw a tremendous number of updates and improvements to the Squarespace platform, and in this post, I’m going to walk through the most notable and useful changes that were brought forth this year.

The growth of my business has already exceeded my expectations, but I still have a long way to go. With that said, I feel that much of my growth can be attributed to content marketing.

There are more distractions, people get busier, and attention spans get shorter every day. Keeping people’s attention has become a HUGE challenge, and many of us have failed to recognize it.

Before I started building websites for clients, I used Squarespace to build a website for my previous business. It took some time to figure out, but I ended up with a website that I could be proud of, even with my unreasonably high standards.

As I gain more experience building websites on Squarespace, I continue to notice small nuances that are sometimes neat, sometimes annoying. Regardless of what it is, I often just want to change some small thing.

In a very, very short amount of time, I've already encountered several situations during which extended family, friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances have asked for a favour in the form of free design work.

Squarespace made it easy for us website solopreneures to implement that annoying (but necessary) cookie banner on our own sites. I’ve only just turned it on on my own website, but was shocked to see this:

As a minimalist designer, I often do my layouts completely in grayscale and then consider colour options later. However, picking colours can be one of the most difficult, important and fun parts of coming up with a new design.

Everyone knows what blogging is. A blog, or "web log" is an online journal used to display information or share views on topics of interest. Content marketing is a little lesser known, but so much more important for businesses like mine who are doing everything they can to gain authority and notoriety within the online space.

Quite simply, minimalists live in white cubes and own nothing. We want for nothing, we lust for nothing and we live in void free of hangups, intention, our anything dear. Minimalists feel a tremendous amount of pain with the thought of acquiring a new object.

SEO is one of the hottest topics amongst web designers right now. Who's doing it right? Who's doing it wrong? What do search engines like Google use to measure how your website will be displayed?

Button blocks in Squarespace are a super easy and convenient way to add a good-looking and consistently stylized button to your page. The convenience of Squarespace also comes with some limitations that sometimes make ostensibly easy tasks difficult.

Think about the biggest and most successful brands you know. Are you able pick up on the vibe they're giving? Do you understand the story they're telling?

Squarespace offers a tightly curated collection of templates that allow you to be your own designer and come out looking like an industry leader with a polished website, but it's easy to simply choose a template, plug in your photos and text, and end up with a website that looks exactly like the thousands of others with the same layout and styling.

Question: Would you leave sensitive documents with tons of your personal information out on a table when you have guests over to your house?

If so, kudos to you for having a trusting, carefree spirit—you probably won't care about this topic. If not, keep reading