“Everything you need to know about Squarespace templates and layouts (including how to get around their limitations!)
Try to see past the shag carpets: look beyond the demo site’s purpose, content and style and try to imagine your own stuff in that template.”
—Miko Coffey. UsingMyHead.com
The Squarespace Template Bible
Using My Head, Updated March, 2018
By Miko Coffey
In my Squarespace book, I say that choosing a template for your Squarespace website is the most important design decision you will make. Most people need a little help or advice when making big decisions, so I’ve written this post to demystify the process of choosing a template, shatter some misconceptions (dare I say lies?!), and provide helpful tips and tools that you can use to make your Squarespace website design work for you.
What a Squarespace template does – and doesn’t do
One of the most confusing things about Squarespace is that there are actually 3 separate things that control how any given page looks:
- one is the template,
- one is the page type, and
- one is the individual page layout.
The template controls the appearance of things at a global, site-wide level. This includes fonts, colours, positioning of the logo, positioning of the navigation, and existence/size/shape of banner images. All templates allow you to change the aesthetic appearance (different fonts or colours), and many templates also allow you to change things like positioning of elements or turning certain things on/off.