Building a Squarespace Portfolio Website
Understanding the Significance of a Squarespace Portfolio
Competition has never been stronger. Whether you are an interior designer, a general contractor, or an artist showcasing your most recent work - having a rock solid Squarespace portfolio is going to instantly gain you more credibility online. By crafting a Squarespace portfolio rich with imagery of your most recent projects, writing compelling content, and creating clear calls-to-action (CTA), you are gaining a competitive edge when someone is searching for your products or services.
A properly designed website portfolio will help your online business succeed in many ways. Let’s take a look a few:
Brand Credibility - choosing the right fonts, colors, and images to portray your brand aesthetic is crucial. It’s what separates you from your competition. Using Squarespace to display your portfolio of work online will allow you the flexibility to create bespoke designs while staying true to your brand identity. Squarespace makes it with font packs and color palettes to spark your imagination. From there, creativity knows no bounds and you can build something truly custom with tools and features right out of the box with Squarespace.
Showcasing your Expertise and Services - your Squarespace portfolio acts as a visual representation of your skills, projects, and services. Presenting your best work with beautiful templates and Squarespace portfolio features allows you to effectively communicate your capabilities and what sets you apart from your competitors.
Engagement and Conversion - If you are in a competitive market - which most business owners are - it’s imperative to craft a Squarespace portfolio that’s both engaging AND user-friendly. The good news? You can easily achieve this by uploading optimized images, writing killer content that SPEAKS to your target audience, and weaving in clear CTA’s that prompt your website visitor to take a desired action.
Getting Started: Setting Up Your Squarespace Portfolio
If you are new to Squarespace - they make it easy to choose a portfolio design from their template store. These award-winning designs are specially curated to showcase different projects and are centered on displaying your portfolio of work. Once you’ve selected a Squarespace portfolio template, you will need to replace the demo content with your own. This is where the fun begins!
To start, you will want to leverage a few different methods for displaying your images and other projects:
Portfolio Pages - build a portfolio by adding a sleek landing page that links your site visitors to sub-pages within your website to showcase your various projects. With several portfolio page layouts, you are guaranteed to find a design that speaks to who you are as a business and what you want to represent your work!
Gallery Sections - add a professional image gallery to any section of a Squarespace web page. Use the built-in tools to add a title, description, and button CTA’s. You can curate a design that’s bespoke to your brand by adding background colors, changing the shape of the images added to the gallery, choosing from multiple gallery layouts, and more!
Image Blocks - the Squarespace jack of all trades. Image blocks are an effective way to add imagery to any page, and display your work with image borders, background colors, blur and drop-shadow effects, and more. If a pre-built gallery layout doesn’t offer the customization you’re looking for, Image Blocks will come to your rescue! With endless flexibility on the grid-based drag-and-drop editor, Image Blocks are truly the master of the Squarespace kingdom when showcasing your work!
Gallery Blocks - add a grid, list, carousel, or slideshow of images to any section of your Squarespace website using Gallery Blocks. I find these useful on multiple fronts: adding a grid of images to break up a long block of text, inserting a slideshow gallery to showcase a before and after snapshot of your recent work, and so much more.
Showcase your Experience by Adding a Bio or CV
Once you’ve uploaded your best work, and showcased it using the aforementioned methods, it’s time to wow your site visitors even more by telling them why your experience sets you apart from your competitors. To do this, you can leverage Squarespace text blocks to any Squarespace Layout page to give more details about your products or services.
There are myriad ways to showcase your experience using Squarespace. Let’s take a look at a couple more:
Create an About Page - Squarespace offers pre-made page layouts you can choose from as a starting point. These are specifically geared toward giving your site visitors everything they need to know about you. This allows you to quickly test out a design and layout that fits your personality and allows you to communicate who you are in an impactful way.
Add an “About” section - while building your Squarespace portfolio, each page is built using sections. When you choose to add a new section, you can select from the “About” layouts on the left-hand navigation when choosing a new layout.
Capture Website Visitors with High Intent
After you’ve successfully lured in your website visitors with high-quality images of your work, and website copy that engages their senses, it’s time to offer them a way to take the next step. Oftentimes this comes in the form of filling out an inquiry form, clicking a button to call you directly, schedule a one-on-on call, or purchase a product or service.
I may sound like a broken record here, but Squarespace has several built-in options to capture your site visitors with high intent. Let’s take a look at a few:
Contact Forms - Squarespace recently added brand new design elements to the Form Block including the ability to add background colors, set the shape of the form input boxes, customize the fonts and colors, and more. With so much customization at your fingertips, it’s essential to build a beautiful contact form that will engage your site visitors and lead them on the proper path to get in touch with you.
Newsletter Sign-Up Forms - 90% of your site visitors aren’t quite ready to buy your product or service, or even get in touch. That means you have a huge quantity of visitors that need more information before they take the next step (get in touch, book a consultation, purchase your product or service). That’s where the Newsletter Block comes into play! Set up a newsletter sign up form anywhere on your Squarespace website to keep the party going. This will ensure that your high intent website visitors can stay engaged with your messaging while they are in their consideration phase.
Button Blocks - these are the connective tissue between a website visitors intent and the goals with which you established when designing your website. By adding clear calls to action using Squarespace button blocks, you are allowing more leads to fill your funnel. With multiple styling options and the ability to link to an internal page, external url, phone, email, or file, engaging with your high intent visitors has never been easier!
Scheduling Blocks - if you offer time-based appointments and want to display a real-time calendar of your availability, consider adding a Scheduling block to any Squarespace web page. Acuity Scheduling is a Squarespace brand and their software is fully integrated into every Squarespace website template. Give your high intent website visitors a way to instantly connect with you without jumping through any hoops!
Pop-Up Promotions - so your high intent website visitor has scrolled 75% down the page. After seeing some impressive results from your portfolio page, they are convinced that they want to take the next step to get in touch with you. Like magic…enter the promotional pop-up. You can set the pop-up to appear a certain percentage down the page as they scroll, or set on a timer after they have viewed the page for a certain amount of time. Whatever you prefer to operate from in terms of displaying your messaging, a promotional pop-up instantly grabs your site visitors attention and leads them on the path toward conversion.
Start your Success Story: Build an Impactful Squarespace Portfolio Today!
If you’ve been sitting on folders full of beautiful images of your recent projects, or testimonials from happy clients, what are you waiting for? It’s time to let Squarespace do the heavy lifting by adding your projects to pre-made template layouts that stand out from the crowd! With so much competition online for creatives who’re truly great, Squarespace has made it easy to craft a stunning portfolio that will leave a lasting impression. By utilizing the tools and tips I’ve shared today, you will be well on your way to creating a portfolio you can be truly proud of!
Your Designer
I'm Travis, an expert Squarespace web designer and 7+ year former Squarespace employee. I have worked with every type of business, building platforms for solo entrepreneurs through to multi-million dollar corporations. If you want to discuss a potential project, you can email at travis@coyotemooncreative.com or get in touch with me here. Alternatively, you can book a 30-minute consultation call here.
