Useful Coding Resources for Squarespace Web Designers
If you are web designer that specializes in building Squarespace websites, there are plenty of online resources that can be a great benefit to your business.
As a developer that specializes in coding in the Squarespace platform, I’ve outlined a few of what I think are the most helpful coding resources that could help you in your web design business.
1. Squarespace’s “Customize with Code” Forum
Squarespace’s forum has an entire section devoted purely to customizing the platform with code, mainly CSS and JS solutions.
Every day, regular website owners and web designers/developers are asking and answering questions about customizing Squarespace 7.0 & 7.1 templates with CSS, which is a great opportunity for you as a Squarespace web designer to have your own questions about custom code answered.
If you know anything about coding yourself, you could establish yourself as an expert or at least knowledgeable in the field of custom code within the Squarespace community. As a frequent contributor to this section of the forum myself, I haven’t really seen any increase in sales or website traffic from the forum directly - at least not immediately - but it has been a great way get my name out there among other more established web designers and developers who have been interested enough to check out my content, and has even sometimes lead to getting backlinks from said designers (especially if you already have a few staple blog posts or resources available that they think could be useful to their audience).
2. Squarespace CSS Skills
If you’re a web designer, having some basic CSS skills is must.
I’m sure you’ve been in situations with clients where they ask if you can make something look a certain way, but what the are asking you to do is not a native design customization of the Squarespace platform. That’s where knowing custom CSS really comes in handy.
Whether they want to slightly tweak how the navigation behaves, change how something appears on blog posts, hide/show something only on desktop or mobile devices, or create a captivating layout not possible with Squarespace’s design panel, custom CSS can help you with that.
If you have no earthly idea where to even begin with writing CSS, check out my free 6-day CSS crash course that will teach you the basics of CSS, as well as some CSS concepts specific to the Squarespace platform that you need to know about.
If you already have a basic understanding of CSS and how to use it on the Squarespace platform, you could still benefit from my free 11-step guide to improve custom CSS, which will teach you 11 ways to improve the manageability and understandability of your custom CSS in Squarespace.
Don’t forget to check out my other code-related articles that can help you with writing custom code for Squarespace located at the bottom of this article.
3. Core UX Design Principles
According to the UX Design Institute, user experience (UX) design is the process of creating products and services that solve a specific user problem, while ensuring that the proposed solution is both easy and enjoyable to use.
In simpler terms, UX design is making sure your product, interface, and/or service is easy and enjoyable for the user.
UX principles can be applied to many different types of products, including websites. For example, ensuring that your main navigation is simple and intuitive for users makes the time they spend on your site enjoyable because they can easily figure out what pages they want to visit.
In relation to custom CSS code, we should always be writing code while keeping the user in mind to make sure our code is improving our site’s UX, and not hurting it; this means that whatever CSS we write needs to meet the core UX design principles out lined by the UX Design Institute.
4. Copy Code/Text to Clipboard Button Plugin
If you’re a web designer, you probably have a few blog posts that include different CSS, HTML, and/or JS code snippets that you have provided your site visitors. The Copy Text/Code to Clipboard Button Plugin is a great way to allow your site visitors to easily copy code snippets that you may provide on your blog posts, and it visually segments the code snippets apart from the surrounding plain text.
You can also use the plugin for plain text snippets if you’d like to.
