5 Reasons Squarespace is the Best Website Builder for Interior Designers
As a Squarespace Web Designer, I can confidently say that Squarespace is the best website builder for interior designers. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to work with 6 interior designers as part of my custom website design service, and around a dozen more on smaller projects. Throughout these projects, there have been a few recurring needs that have cropped up for all or most of these interior designer clients, proving Squarespace to be the best website builder for interior designers.
#1 Squarespace’s Gallery and Banner Image Options
Displaying your work beautifully is of the utmost importance for interior designers. There is likely no more important feature on your website. Squarespace offers a host of gallery and banner image display options.
Gallery Options
Squarespace offers two main types of gallery: grids and slideshows. These break down into three subcategories…
Simple Grid: This displays your images in a basic grid, with evenly spaced and cropped images.
Masonry Grid: This is a ‘Pinterest style’ grid. It allows images of different orientations to fit into columns together but they don’t have a ‘neat’ edge at the bottom.
Strip Grid: These grids can accommodate images of different orientations but they work horizontally. Each line won’t all be the same height, but the edges are neat.
Simple Slideshow: A slideshow that keeps the image in the centre of the page, so the whole image can be seen
Full Slideshow: A slideshow that takes up the whole screen, looks very effective but works best for landscape only images on desktop and for portrait images on phones. For clients, I create one with portrait images and one with landscape images and have the correct one show up on the correct device, using custom code.
Reel Slideshow: This is a scrolling gallery, a little like a file strip that uses arrows. It can move on it’s own, with a little custom code.
Slideshow: Reel Galley Example
Slideshow: Simple Gallery Example
Slideshow: Full Gallery Example
Grid: Simple Gallery Example
Grid: Strips Gallery Example
Grid: Masonry Gallery Example
Banner Options
You can also had a static banner image, similar to the ‘Slideshow: Full’ option above, these just have one image and you can place text, buttons or other elements over the top of them.
Video Tutorials
These two tutorials from Squarespace will help you to build your own gallery or add a banner image.
An overview of Squarespace’s gallery options for interior designers to display their project photos.
Adding banner images to Squarespace.
#2 Built-In Portfolios and Blogs
Squarespace has two built in options to share your skills and knowledge as an interior designer with the world: portfolios and blogs. Portfolio pages are used to display your projects and blogs are used to display your knowledge.
Interior Designer Portfolios on Squarespace
Squarespace has built in Portfolio pages. These allow you to display your projects as an overview gallery, where visitors can then click through to read about them in more detail.
Interior Design Blogs on Squarespace
Blogging in Squarespace has many benefits. Firstly, is is great for SEO – that means ranking in Google! Blog posts get visitors onto your website and this demonstrates to Google that you provide good quality content. Secondly, it’s a way of proving your interior design expertise. I wrote in detail about the benefits of blogging for interior designers in a previous post, along with some ideas and examples from previous clients of mine.
#3 Squarespace’s Simplicity and Ease of Use
As an interior designer, you want to focus on serving your own clients, not struggling with your website. Squarespace is built for the DIY user, it has always been a platform for business owners to build their own websites and in this regard, it’s the best around.
It’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use. Start with a template and just add in your own text and images, or create something unique to you using the library of section layouts (or start with a blank slate!).
As a professional designer, I use Squarespace to create websites for my clients. I can add extra code to Squarespace to break free of the template and make something truly bespoke to them, in a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional website build. But the greatest advantage to this method is that my clients are able to look after the website themselves once I’m done, using Squarespace’s easy drag n’ drop, point n’ click editor.
I provide full training to all my clients via a recoded screen-share Zoom call and most of them get to grips with it right away! They can then upload their own portfolio projects, switch out a little text, add a gorgeous new image or write a blog post without having to be beholden to a web designer and their hourly rates – of course, I’m always here for support and some of my interior designer clients do prefer to hand everything off to me instead.
#4 Squarespace uses Clean Design principles
‘Clean Design’ is taken to mean that the design is well thought out, with a good amount of spacing between elements and a focus on the most important information. Visuals are carefully chosen for impact and colour is used strategically. Think timeless design. Calls to action are deliberate and obvious.
As described by awwwards.com:
“A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
Now, an interior designer can certainly appreciate that adage!
For example, this could mean: limiting your navigation to only the most important pages, featuring your best work front and centre, using a colour scheme consistently throughout the site, having plenty of white/negative space between sections on a page to give your text and images room to ‘breathe’ and choosing impactful fonts that are used throughout to keep the look harmonious.
The advantage with Squarespace, is that their templates and layouts are set up to offer this from the get go. It’s pretty hard to go wrong! Once you choose your fonts and colours, Squarespace will apply them consistently throughout the site for you.
#5 Squarespace is Cost Effective
Squarespace is an incredibly cost-effective option. While website builders like Wordpress technically have a lower overhead, the additional costs of maintenance and updates add up very quickly. In addition to Wordpress hosting (around $5p/m), you’ll need to budget for a theme ($50), child theme ($50), plugins ($5-100+) and probably a professional to pull it all together for you and keep your site running smoothly ($80-150p/h).
Squarespace on the other hand, has a more expensive ‘hosting’ fee but this actually incorporates everything you could need to get your dream site online in one simple monthly or annual payment. Your monthly or annual payment to Squarespace includes your template, software updates, security updates, new features added regularly, instant customer support, a huge library of tutorials and help videos and – if you pay annually – a domain name and matching email address! And even better, if your site is built by me – or you use my affiliate link – you’ll get 20% of your chosen plan!
Squarespace has four subscription levels: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce. If you’re just getting started in your interior design business, you may like to being with the Personal plan, though the Business plan is the most popular – for good reason. You’ll need this plan to get the professional email address, plus you can customise your website to a higher level. If you’re a more established interior designer, Business is certainly the way to go. You can sell products on this level, perhaps an ebook or consultation service, but if you plan to open a large store for your interior design clients to purchase home furnishings and accessories, you may prefer to look into one of the Commerce levels. If you’d like customised help finding the right subscription level for you, we can work together.
Need a little help?
Have your interior designer website built for you. My signature service includes assistance with planning your site’s features and content as well full training to maintain the website yourself once it’s live (or if you prefer, I can do that too).
Up-level your existing Squarespace website with my undivided attention for a day or half-day.
Book a Zoom Strategy Session to get personalised advice on your DIY web design project.
