We bit the bullet and made our new website in Squarespace 7.1. Here’s what we think.
Squarespace 7.1 is a bold new move for the reigning champion of the front-end website builders. We just redesigned our whole website in 7.1, and we have some thoughts.
Squarespace is making some big changes, and they’re doing it under the deceptively mundane name “Squarespace 7.1.” Squarespace 7.1 is a from-the-ground-up reimagining of the Squarespace website building experience (still in early access at the time of this post). Google “Squarespace 7.1” and you’ll find article after article of discussion and comments – some thrilled with the changes, and others, not so much.
After looking into 7.1 ourselves and running it against a list of functions we were looking for in our website refresh, we decided to become early adopters and rebuild our whole website in Squarespace 7.1 (sadly, migration from 7.0 to 7.1 is not available). What follows is not a full-blown guide to 7.1 (you can read up on it here), but instead a few reflections from our venture into the mysterious and yet familiar world of Squarespace 7.1. Whether you’re considering building your future sites in 7.1, thinking about migrating from 7.0 to 7.1, or just trying to figure out what all the buzz is about, this should give you an idea of what’s ahead for the future of Squarespace.
And before we jump into our thoughts on Squarespace 7.1, we want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Yes, we’re a creative advertising agency that uses Squarespace for our website. While most of our clients have website needs that go beyond Squarespace capabilities, it does everything we need on our own site, and we happily recommend it to clients with more straightforward website needs. Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Squarespace is quick, easy, and painless. And it lets our team spend less time fixing and updating our own website and more time blazing new trails for our clients.
What we really liked about 7.1
No more templates – finally. One of the challenges we ran into with redesigning our site on Squarespace 7.0 was the inconsistent functions and features available through the different templates. For example, we use tags and categories to organize our portfolio of work. Some templates would only let us show tags, some only categories, some both, and some nothing at all. It was exhausting to download and preview almost every template to see if it could do what we needed.
In 7.1, Squarespace eliminates templates entirely, replacing them with one universal but customizable template. This move means that every Squarespace 7.1 site has the same functionality and that there’s no need to tediously look through every template for the magic bullet that’s going to meet all your site’s needs.
We’re big fans of the categories that are now available below posts. These allow users to filter our blog by category.
Building is easier, and it’s easier to have variety within a site. Squarespace 7.1 builds entirely in sections, which is new, and they’ve added streamlined options for section height and width, text formatting, and color options. This way of building and laying out content is so much faster and more flexible than the previous system of tacking spacers around content all the time to get it to look how you want. The streamlined building options also make it much easier to make global changes.
Squarespace 7.1 streamlined its blog layout options, and you can use several different layouts on one site. For our site, we use the Squarespace blog for both our blog and our work. Squarespace 7.1 allows us to painlessly have two totally different layouts for our blog and portfolio of work, which would have been pretty difficult to achieve in 7.0. Additionally, we didn’t have to template shop for a blog layout we liked. We looked at each of the five, chose one, and moved on. Simple as that.
Squarespace 7.1 allows for five different blog layouts. And if you have multiple blogs on your website, they can each have a different layout.
Features we’re excited to see in the future
Some love for the collection pages. Collection pages are probably the one aspect of Squarespace 7.1 where we see the most room for improvement. We would love to see the ability to enable rollovers on collection pages so that when you hover over a post thumbnail, the blog post title, categories, and tags will all appear with an overlay.
We’d also really like the ability to filter by categories or tags on a collection page without clicking on a link. It would be great for our users to be able to go to our work page (which is actually a Squarespace blog behind the scenes), click a button that says “Campaigns,” and have the collection page populate content with the “campaign” category without reloading the page.
UPDATE 07/24/20: We found a way to get rollovers for the blog collection pages, which is what we currently run our Work page on! It’s mostly custom CSS, but we used some of the code on this Squarespace forum to get started if you’re interested in implementing it on your own site.
Featured image integration. Right now, if you set a featured image on a blog post, it will show up on Squarespace collection pages. However, on the post page itself, the featured image doesn’t appear. We want to see Squarespace provide options for how to show that featured image on the blog post page, such as a full width section background for the blog post title and nav. It’s an option in 7.0, and we’re hoping it’s something they’ll make available in 7.1 as well.
UPDATE 04/10/20: You may have noticed that we now have a pretty fancy-lookin’ full-width featured image on both our blog and portfolio. It’s still not a built-in option in 7.1, but web designer and developer Will Myers found a way to do put it in manually. Hooray! Thanks, Will.
We’d love the ability to display featured images on our blog as full-page backgrounds in the blog title section.
Squarespace is making a bold move, and we’re on board
Squarespace 7.1 isn’t the Squarespace that some folks are used to. Some people aren’t thrilled about the idea of migrating sites from 7.0 to 7.1 manually, and there’s a lot of questions about the features Squarespace is planning on adding to 7.1. As early adopters, we know that things are a little clunky right now with a handful of tricky things to work around.
But we also made our decision knowing that 7.1 is only going to get better from here. As new features roll out, we’ll just jump in, tick some boxes, and boom – our site just got that much better. And honestly, we caught up with everything we had redesigned in 7.0 in just a few hours, and it looked and worked a lot better. A little custom CSS went a long way, with a lot less coding than we expected.
But regardless of how we at Bonfire Effect or the larger Squarespace community feel about 7.1, it’s a move that makes a lot of sense for the Squarespace brand. Because 7.1 is really a more “Squarespace” version of Squarespace. It’s going back to the clean limits, simplicity, and excellence that set it apart as a website builder in the first place – stripping out a lot of the bells and whistles and once again making it absolutely painless for a non-web developer to build something beautiful. If you take a look at the Squarespace brand values, you’ll realize that 7.1 is a solid reflection of what the brand was intended to be. While it seems the die-hard Squarespace community is starting to warm up to 7.1 and beginning to adopt a hopeful outlook for the future of Squarespace, some folks (especially people who make Squarespace websites for clients for a living) still aren’t on board with the idea of 7.1. But Squarespace has the grit to move forward anyway. And that’s the kind of fearless brand we can really get behind.