5 Ways That Squarespace Makes Building A Beautiful Website For Your Handmade Business Really Easy.
If you're anything like me, you’re juggling about a million different roles whilst running your handmade business. You design and create your products, you’re the customer service team and marketing department, (and let’s not forget, chief coffee-maker). One of the biggest challenges we have as handmade business owners is getting our beautiful products in front of our ideal customers without tearing our hair out over complicated tech stuff. I’d love to introduce you to Squarespace: Let me tell you why I absolutely love it and I think it’s so good for building handmade business websites.
Hi, I’m Michaela, a handmade business owner, former Etsy team captain and general small biz nerd. I built a website for my own handmade business but because I’m a nerd and a bit weird, I went down the deepest rabbit hole for 2 years learning everything I could about web design best practice customer journeys and ecommerce web design and applied it to my handmade business website. I want to share all my research and knowledge with other craft biz owners so that you can also get a beautiful and hardworking website to sell your craft products, without the nerdy research phase.
1. Squarespace is Built for Small Biz Owners To DIY Their Website.
First things first—Squarespace is perfect for those of us who are more comfortable with a glue gun than with coding. Seriously, you don’t need to be some kind of tech wizard to create a stunning website. Some website building platforms come with a steep learning curve but Squarespace is intuitive and user-friendly, which means even if your only experience with drag and drop involves knocking your bead box all over the floor, you'll be just fine.
Squarespace makes everything really simple. You can easily add pages, tweak designs, and make changes on the fly without having to consult a manual or curse under your breath. And there are no regular maintenance routines to perform to keep everything hunky dory (Wordpress, I’m looking at you)!
2. Great Design Is in Squarespace’s DNA They Make Beautiful Websites
Let’s talk aesthetics. As creative people, we really value beautiful design and we want everything that represents our business to look great. Squarespace gets this on a fundamental level. Great design is what they are known for and the team are constantly bringing out new improvements so that it’s super easy for us website DIY’ers to add an extra design touch and stand out from all the Handmade product websites out there.
In 2022 Squarespace introduced the Fluid Engine Editor, a drag and drop building experience that’s really intuitive to use and is having new features added to it all the time. Super easy and beautiful! like when your favourite pair of shoes are also really comfy. Win-win!
3. You don’t have to choose a template up front and stick with it!
With some platforms, choosing one template means losing certain features or functionality. And some website builders don’t even let you change template, you have to rebuild your whole site I mean imagine that!!
With Squarespace all of the templates have all of the functionality of Squarespace So you can add features and change things about as much as you like. And crucially, you won’t spend the first month agonising over which template to choose to get the features you want. Just pick any that you like the look of, you can literally make template number 1 look exactly the same as template number 97 if you want to. no limits on flexibilty and you don’t need to add lots of different apps to your website either to make it work.
There are some amazing plug ins that you CAN get if you want an extra special feature, If you fancy a mega menu for example with images, that isn’t natively available but there’s a super generous and knowledgeable bunch of coders who make plugins for Squarespace so you certainly can get extra special features if you’d like. Most small handmade business owners are not going to need anything above what is natively available in Squarespace.
4. A Squarespace Website Can Do So Much More Than Just Sell Your Products
Okay, brace yourself because this is where Squarespace gets even more interesting —it can do so much more than just showcasing your products and letting people buy them. So what else can it do for me Michaela? well, this….
Events Page: Let followers know about market dates or events that you’ll be attending.
Email Campaigns: Keep in touch with customers using built-in email marketing tools. Email marketing has the absolute best conversion rate of all of the marketing channels. Honestly!! (The email tools are a little limited, but it’s great to start with if you want to keep everything all together and it’s super easy to switch away later if you want)
Sell Subscriptions: Finally get that product of the month club up and running to create extra sales amongst your biggest fans.
Create a Blog: Let your customers behind the scenes of your making process and nurture their interest and loyalty to your brand. People love to be nosy and love buying from people that they feel like they know and like.
Sell Workshop Tickets: Running in person workshops? You can sell tickets directly from your site and get rid of those Eventbrite fees and keep a seamless on brand experience for your customers.
Digital Products: Add an extra revenue stream and sell tutorials and patterns for your craft. If you already run in person workshops, this is a perfect extension.
Online Courses: Take your in person craft workshops to a whole new level, you can host a fully fledged online course on Squarespace and reach a broader audience.
You can have multiple revenue streams running through your Squarespace website. Selling your handmade products is only one way to make money from your craft. Adding multiple ways of getting income in to your business is a sensible way to spread the risk. If the number of people attending your in person workshops start to dip, maybe sales of your tutorials will pick up. Or if you’re finding all the markets too tiring, having a subscription can pick up some of the slack for you while you recover.
5. Squarespace Makes Building And Managing Your Website All In One Place simple
Squarespace is like an online Swiss Army knife. If you prefer simplicity and keeping everything all in one place then Squarespace can handle it for you. You can buy your domain through Squarespace, get a years free google workspace and a domain email for your website all within your Squarespace dashboard you can easily get these services separately if you prefer but personally I like it all under one roof so I only have one company to deal with. But if you already own a domain and want to just point it to a site on Squarespace that’s no problem either.
When Squarespace Might Not Be Right To Build Your Handmade Business Website.
I’m sure it’s pretty clear that I’m a huge Squarespace fan. but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t give you the full picture. While Squarespace is amazing, it might not tick all the boxes for everyone. All website platforms have their limitations Here are the the three main reasons why you might not want to use Squarespace as a handmade business owner to build your website.
Really Large Inventory: If you’ve got an enormous product range, I’m talking hundreds of products that need updating regularly. Managing them can get clunky on Squarespace. It’s doable but may require extra patience and organisational skills. There isn’t currently a way to bulk edit listings within Squarespace itself although improvements have been made to the main product list in the back end so that things like pricing and inventory can easily be altered without going in to each product individually. You can however, bulk edit anything in your product listings using csv files so there is a work around if you need to bulk edit a lot listings at once.
Need to Sell in Different Currencies: If you want your customer to be charged in their own currency and need multi-currency support then this isn’t supported at the moment in Squarespace. Your customer will be charged in the currency that you have your shop set to. This isn’t usually a huge problem for small handmade businesses but I thought it worth mentioning.
Synced Inventory Management: If you absolutely need to have your inventory synced across all of your platforms then this also is not natively available in Squarespace. Although you will also hit up on this issue with many other website platforms. There are however, third party integrations that you can use with Squarespace. Again, I don’t think that this would be a big issue for most handmade sellers but it can be tricky especially if you sell one off pieces and have a high sales rate across all of your platforms. It would be worth checking your options.
I hope that you are beginning to share my enthusiasm for Squarespace. If you’re thinking you’d like to give it a try, you can get a free trial here
If you’re thinking about building a website for your handmade business, hit reply or email me at michaela@handmadebizclub.co.uk and let me know what you’re thinking. I’d love to hear about what features you need and any worries that you may have about building your own site.
