WEBSITE TRAINING OVERVIEW

Your website is built in Squarespace — a highly popular site builder that is loaded with features, easy to use, and quite straight forward in providing editors and users with a great experience.

What’s Your Browser?

All editing is done in a web browser and you can also download the app and edit on your mobile device.The webs browser is important. You need a fairly current version of Chrome, Safari, Edge or Fire Fox to have an easy experience. Older versions of Internet Explorer (version 9 and lower) are not recommended. You can see all supported browsers here:

The following settings must be enabled on browsers used for editing:

Cookies - Must be enabled for login access.
JavaScript - Must be enabled to access your site's editing functions.
Avoid running programs that block JavaScript, most commonly anti-virus software. Blocking JavaScript can interfere with browser functions required to manage and edit your Squarespace site.

We will go over the following:

1. Site Login

2. Site Editing/Publishing

a. Blocks

b. Updating Regular Pages

c. Updating Blog/news

d. Updating Events

3. Social Media Integration

4. Online Help + Advanced Help

SITE LOGIN

To log in, you'll need to use the email address and password connected to your account. You can either login from http://squarespace.com or directly from your site.

From Your Site

If ESC Key Login is enabled, you can press the ESC key on your keyboard while visiting your site to open the login page. If that doesn’t work, you can add /config after your domain in a web browser and hit enter. This also opens the login page access.

SITE EDITING

SquareSpace is popular because it has removed the need for HTML programming allowing you to update pages, blogs and calendar entries by using ‘blocks’. By using different combinations of blocks, you can create a custom layout of text, images, audio, forms, and more.

What Are Blocks?

Blocks are the foundation of your site. You can add, move, and combine blocks on a page to create a custom layout. Each block is designed to add different types of content to most areas of your site, including:

Regular Pages
Blog posts
Events
Footers

How to Edit an Existing Regular Page

First select the page you want to edit in the Pages panel on the far left. Once that page is selected it gets highlighted in grey. Click Edit in the menu that comes up on the top of the page.

Adding Blocks

Hover over the area where you’d like to add a block and click Edit. This will open the page editor.Inside the page editor, find an insertion point. And insertion point is the thick circular thing shown below.

If the page already has blocks, hover to the left of any existing blocks to see Insert Points. Click any Insert Point to add a new block.

Block Types

There are a wide variety of block types. These are organized into categories under Basic, Gallery, Summary, More, Filters & Lists, Commerce, Charts, and Social Blocks. You can search for the block you need at the top of the Block Selector, or click on the Block you want.

Blogging and Events

Most of you updating will be under News and Events. These sections of the website are different than regular pages. News is really Blogging so we use this term interchangeably. The news module and the Events module are run on the same engine and are structured and behave the same way. *Adding content to the site this way helps your site’s visibility in search engines. By adding content this way it tells Google that you are active in your site. In theory, this activeness put you higher in rank than sites that are not updating.

Publishing a New News or Event Post

Navigate to the page that you want to add to. Click the + icon in the panel to add a new post.

The Blog Post Editor will open. A Text Block appears automatically to get you started. To enter a title for your post, click in the Enter a post title... box. To add more content to the post like an image, gallery or video, click an Insert Point and select the appropriate block from the Block Menu.

Tags and Categories

You can use categories and tags to organize your blog by subject. In combination with the Archive Block or Tag Cloud Block you can create a layout that allows visitors to view similar posts based on their interests. To start adding categories and tags, click Click to add tags or Click to add categories. To learn more, visit Using tags and categories in a blog.

Save or Publish

All posts are initially saved as drafts. When you’re done editing a post, you can:

Click Save to save the entry and keep it as a draft.
Click Save & Publish to save the entry and publish it as a public post.
Schedule the post to self-publish in the future. To learn more, visit Scheduling blog posts.
Label it as Need Review. This is helpful if you have a senior editor who reviews multiple authors’ work.
Revert to Draft.

Events (Calendar)

Essentially Event posts work the same was as News/Blog posts with the exception that they have a start and end date.

Read More Online

Social Media Integration

Social Media is integrated in News and Events. You can ‘push’ your new News or Event item to your Facebook page or Twitter page by turning on the push feature in your item.

When you are ready to publish the item, go to the Social Tab, turn on the Social Media target that you want to push the item to. You have to do this each time – it’s not automatic.

*Don’t worry about the URL field. The post/event will be automatically pushed to whichever social media platform you chose. It may take a minute or two, but it will appear!

More Help
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543937

Online & Advanced Help

There are two ways to get help if you get stuck doing something: Online Help via SquareSpace and Advanced Help via Hök Nik.

SquareSpace

You can visit https://support.squarespace.com and self-solve most problems. The site is well organized and easy to search. There are many videos.

Hök Nik

You can contact us if you want assistance too. We have a group email account for active work – mail to web@hoknik.com. Please include your domain address in the subject heading of your email.