Need To Watch: Squarespace Design Features & Updates For Your Websites in 2023

Transcript:

Hey friends. Welcome back to the channel. In today's video, I'm going to cover new features from Squarespace that you can use on your website.

Squarespace is dropping new features left and right. And so we're going to cover some of the top ones that I've seen that I absolutely love, and give you a brief overview of how they work so you can start using them for your site.

Upload Videos Directly

So let's begin with this. I'm on the homepage of my website. I'm going to show you a feature now. First thing is this. Let me go to this section here, and let me actually go to this section. All right. So if I click this little pencil to edit the background -before - this is the first one - before, you were only able to have images and add videos. And the way you would add a video is you would add a leak to that video. But here there's a new option. You could upload, you never were able to do this before, it had to come from YouTube or Vimeo, you could upload a video directly to your site so it doesn't have to come from Vimeo or YouTube. This is amazing, it'll help with SEO and it's going to help with your site speed overall. To point this out further, as you can see here, it says up to one minute max, which makes a lot of sense. So you'll have to ensure that the video is not longer than a minute. And also there is a file size requirement, and also just be sure that the file has to be an MP4 M for V or M O V.

Art

So that is the first new feature. Next, you might've already saw it, but up here, there's this option: Art. What is art? Okay. Some of this in my opinion is a little wonky, but it's cool. Like this. I don't know if I'd ever use this. As you could see this is like a live background, it like moves around, there’s stuff happening.

I don't really know what you do with this. Like this could be cool. It just, over time that'll get played out quickly. I don't know. There's just some of them. A little bit interesting. Each one has its own setting. So this is basically a way to preview it. Where you make the magic happen is if you click the settings wheel, you could actually upload a custom image.

So you could upload a custom graphic that you want, image, tint, background, color, you could adjust all of that to scale. You could play with that. The number of images that show up. All of it gives you four options. I don't know what just happened right there, but, it gives you a lot of options. Oh, wow. This is so interesting.

Yeah. Some of this is just like really intense. It's interesting. Definitely interesting. So you can see, there are a lot of options here and then you could actually change the pattern color. So right now it's doing black. I did white, yeah, it look a little bit different and let's go back. Let's take a look at a few other ones.

First of all, let's take a look at this one. This one is interesting to me. Let's see if it loads, there we go. This one's interesting because you could actually do this thing where for motion, I believe it is, you could do follow cursor. So as you can see here, this is following my cursor as I scroll around the page, which is pretty cool.

Now this is more abstract, so it doesn't get played out as much. I'm really interested to see how people use these backgrounds over time. Again enough options in here. It's cool. They even have this randomized option. Let's see what this does. There we go. Randomize. So it has a bit of noise here. You can see what is happening.

There's a lot happening. It's almost like scifi. So yeah, I don't know if this necessarily works for this website, but it is definitely a cool feature that you can add some really cool graphics or what they call Art to your site.

Galleries

So this is the next feature I want to talk about. If you click the plus sign in the editor, I don't know if it's official, but I think it is finally official for Squarespace 7.1., they have added galleries back in. This is huge because people were trying to customize galleries or add galleries from different form factors and customizing it and all this other stuff. So - galleries have officially, I hope officially come back fully into 7.1. Recently it would show up for a few days and then disappear for a few days, but it seems like they are here to stay.

So if you click into the galleries, you'll see that this look is a little bit dated. This is the older look and feel, and you could easily make adjustments here. And as I'm looking at this, I actually am questioning it just a bit because this is the old look and feel. And I've seen the new look and feel.

So I don't know why it looks like this actually. But it did have the same option, so you can make those adjustments accordingly.

Product Updates

All right. So the next thing I want to cover is eight product updates. So let me go to products for my fake store here and let me click on All. And then I'm just going to click on one of these items here. So this is an updated look and feel. If you have not seen this before, this is updated and now they've even updated it further. I kind of like this. I kind of don't like this. It seems like there's just way too much information on this page. It's not easily organized. And also I do not like that additional information is almost hidden here. I actually wish it was an option here. I actually wish these were options. Not just like anchor links, moving me up and down. I actually wish if I hit additional info, it would open this because this is just buried. Like, do you see how deep we are? We're on our third pop-up now. Um, and if I want to make adjustments to this, it doesn't really show me what it looks like.

I never really like this feature, but this video is about new features. So I am going to get out of this for now and go up here and just show you this whole look and feel. So now you could add the title, the description right away at images in, they look really beautiful. You could even play with the metadata right on the image really nicely.

Inventory/Product Review

Inventory is here. You could even add in limited inventory and then show low inventory on products now through the commerce section on the backend of the site. And then from there, this is a new feature that has not been talked about, or I have not seen, product review. You can now add product reviews to your website, but there are a few options here. And what I think Squarespace is trying to do, if I understand this correctly is they're here to not become the product review, but to organize all your product reviews from Etsy or Facebook plugins, or all these other places that you might have reviews, to pull them into your site.

Now, I don't know if you could actually write new reviews. They don't say, and it doesn't show up on my products. So I'm not a hundred percent sure. So I don't see an option right now to actually customize review. I don't see anything that shows a place for someone to leave a review. But it looks like a way to import from say, Etsy.

So as you can see here, there are a few options that they list Etsy, discuss Facebook plugin, HTML comment box. Which you could use, but you could learn more about this from the help center. Okay. So the next new feature is this, I'm going to click edit, and then you'll see here, edit site header. And then once I go in here, you'll see a few options.

Style/Colors

Let's click on style. This is you. So first of all, there's this border feature. You can add a border around your navigation. It shows you. Top or bottom.. So it gives you a few options there. Pretty cool thickness. You could customize it. One pixel 10 pixels, whatever. So let me just remove that from now and go back.

This is interesting. So you'll see here. There are four options. Logo is solid. So if I click on that solid background and it gives you all these new options below it opacity a hundred percent, if you want to change that you can go to background color. What color do you want it to be? You could easily choose that from your brand.

Navigation color. It gives you full control where before it was kind of out of your control or just complicated to customize. There's the border option. And it actually dropped drop shadow as well.

But I'm going to remove that. All right. So let's go back. That's solid. Let's look at gradient gradients. Nice. It has a bit of a frost look, and this is just native, the way they release it. So you could come in here, change the colors as you like, whatever you want. This is cool. It's really interesting.

Theme means it goes with the theme. Now this is basically what they had before. There was no other options. It was just default, whatever the theme is for that page or that second. So if you change this around, it would adjust it according to the styles within the site styles way in the backend of the site.

Dynamic

So as of right now, I'm going to just keep it right now. Let's do just one and then let's now take a look at dynamic. Now this is interesting. I don't really know what this is. Let's see dynamic headers. We'll use the theme of the first section on each page. I see. So I was hoping that dynamic would change the logo color and it bites.

But what dynamic is really doing is it's taking the styles. Let me get out of this. It takes a style from this first section here. So if I change the color here, it's currently on dark one. But if I change this it's going to inherit new styles. And if I go here, as you can see, it's adjusting everything accordingly, which this actually matters a lot because I have this scroll feature set up on this demo site.

Let me show you the menu changes color. So you'll see this black comes up and you're like, oh, I don't like the black, well, the way you change that is you go into this section. If you're using dynamic, you go into this section and then change this accordingly. So let's just say I want to do lighters. I really don't. But let's just say, click - save, cool. When I scroll down, you'll see a changes at background color. If you want to customize that, just go into it and Colors, and then you can click on this and then you get all the options to make those adjustments. So you can start making all those adjustments here where it says menu overlay.

Cool. I'm done with that for now. So just taking a look at that overall, I would say to this, for this my preference is dynamic. If you want every page to change, that would work. If you want it to be consistent, use the theme. Any of these three basically, and theme gives you full control. So you can customize it exactly as you want.

And go from there. Dynamic requires you to customize it against all those different sites, styles, or all those different background options. There's 10 of them, so it could become a lot of work, but.

Mobile Version of Logo

And this is not the newest feature, but it is a newer feature.

If you go to site, title and logo, you'll see here that you could actually add a mobile version of a logo. So if your logo doesn't look that great on mobile, because it's just too much and you want to trim it down to just your iPhone. Something like that. Well, you could upload a separate image that will work just for mobile, customize the sizing as you like.

Cursor

Finally, one last feature I want to highlight, let's double click into the editor here. The first thing I'm going to do is go over this button. And as you can see here, my cursor has changed from pointer to this and I can actually edit the button. Which before you were not able to do that, you would have to click into it and then make the adjustment in here and then go from there and then it would save. But now at any time, go in here and update it.

Closing Remarks

So that is a whole list of new features for you to develop your site and customize it just the way you like, Hey, thank you for watching this video. If you got value from this video, hit that like button. When you hit that like button, it tells the YouTube algorithm some important information, but it also lets me know that you got value from this.

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Peace.