From an AI-powered design tool that curates your entire brand identity in seconds to a solution for fiddly SEO tasks, global website-building platform Squarespace has been busy innovating.
For more than 20 years, Squarespace has led the charge to simplify how virtually anyone can build and manage a website.
They’re famous for their user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and award-winning curated website templates – and perhaps will attract even more attention with their latest suite of tools.
Amid the new shiny things, there’s the Layout Switcher, where you can change layouts with one click. There’s an AI writer to help generate SEO-friendly copy, one of the most time-consuming tasks of website management. And there’s even an all-in-one payment integration designed to remove roadblocks to accepting payments and invoices.
Very useful for a small business or startup running lean. But how do they work in practice? We gave them a test run.
1. Design Intelligence: Make something beautiful with minimal effort
Using automation, generative AI and one-click design options, Squarespace’s Design Intelligence tools act as a design brain to guide you from idea to execution. They’re like the bumpers in a tenpin bowling alley, helping you avoid the gutters and setting you up for more strikes.
Visually, the Site Themes feature lets you view your site content through a range of curated design styles. If you select Restaurant, you’ll get a bunch of styles tailored to restaurants. If you select Local Business, you’ll get a whole lot of templates to suit the product or service you’re selling.
Select a theme and you’ll get designer-created colour palettes, font packs and button styles – you can mix and match these into 1000s of combinations or just let them do the work. We created this sample homepage:
Looks good, right?
Next, it’s Layout Switcher, which lets you rearrange your entire layout in one click. You’ll have edited your site using the drag-and-drop editor, Fluid Engine, which lets you add, remove or edit blocks on the page. So, let’s say you’ve got a special offer for new visitors to the site or have a special form you want to bump to the top of the page, it’s done in an instant.
There’s also AI Section Backgrounds, which generates design or images behind your content to match your brand vibe. A helpful tool that shows your customers you’re on top of the details not just in the foreground, but the background too.
2. Get your brand identity sorted with AI
Squarespace’s AI-driven Brand Identity service takes the raw material of your ideas and moulds them into a personalised style, with a consistent tone of voice across all of your site communications.
All you need to do is your business, your industry and your desired tone with an ‘ad lib’ – we adapted Squarespace’s AI prompt suggestion below from this:
We are ‘So Fetch’. We are a fashion house for dogs, offering high couture dog clothes and accessories. Adjectives that folks would use to describe us are chic, high end and avant garde. When we talk, we sound like Anna Wintour after coffee. A celebrity we are most similar to or could represent our brand is Julia Fox. When people interact with us, we want them to feel like they have Paris Fashion Week curled at the foot of their bed.
Here’s what we got.
3. Put the AI SEO writer to work
You can immediately tell if a website is amateur from its copy. Using a tool like Squarespace’s AI Website Copy can help elevate your website to the next level – and most importantly, get it seen by more people on search engines.
The AI writer function is probably of best use for the fiddly SEO tasks you often forget about until the very last minute – but they’re dealbreakers for discoverability online. AI Product Descriptions can bundle up all the things you know and love about your product into the powerful details that prompt customers to buy.
See AI Product Descriptions at work in this example we made:
Yes, we fully expect ‘Fur on Fur’ to be a sellout once it hits the search engines.
Also, if you’ve got videos on your website showing your mastery at work, AI Video Descriptions can summarise your videos for you so you save time and keep them consistent.
4. Clean up payments and invoicing
What if your site functionality is stopping you from winning business? Small business owners have enough to worry about, so making sure it’s as easy as possible to accept payments and invoice quickly and professionally cannot be understated.
Squarespace Payments bundles everything up in one place, which is exactly what a busy eCommerce or service provider needs. There’s a seamless, secure checkout experience that offers flexible payments and optimised checkouts with popular payment methods like Apple Pay – making it easier for customers to hand over their cash.
There’s also payment data encryption so people can feel safe doing business with you. And, on top of that, you can manage your payment workflows from a single dashboard for managing transactions. Less room for human error, more ‘just get it done’.
Squarespace Invoicing adds extra polish to your professional invoices and documents. You can generate invoices and payouts, and track them from a centralised payment dashboard – instead of via multiple platforms or, even worse, your overflowing email inbox.
So those are the latest new features we had a play with. There are other tools startups may want to explore like Courses, for anyone who’s putting together an online learning course; and Acuity Scheduling, an online booking platform for clients to book, cancel or reschedule appointments, embedded in Squarespace websites.
Overall, the Squarespace tools we’ve talked about here should take a lot of the grunt work out of building and managing your website.
SPECIAL OFFER: Want to create a better website with Squarespace? Startup Daily readers, get 10% off with this exclusive code: BIZ10. Sign up and get started here.
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with Squarespace.
Written by Adam Bub and Will McKinnon
Feature image: Squarespace.
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.