Top creative tips for customising your Squarespace template
If there’s one asset all small business owners need, it’s a high functioning website. Not convinced? Read this post for more.
Squarespace offers its users a simple way of creating their own good-looking, high-performing website with their easy breezy drag and drop interface and endless customisation options. At first glance this mountain of customisation options can feel a little overwhelming, so this post is going to break down the best creative choices you can make for a website that feels right for your brand.
Firstly, what is brand personality?
Brand personality refers to the humanistic traits given to brands and businesses in order to create stronger connections with our audiences. For online service providers and micro-businesses it’s likely that these traits will be your own personality - because the majority of them are one-woman (or man) shows!
Good examples of larger brands with strong personalities include Ikea (famous for their tongue-in-cheek humour and accessible approach to interiors) and Innocent Smoothies (famous for starting the ‘wackaging’ trend - wacky packaging, geddit??).
Having a strong personality for your brand is a great way to forge deep connections with your audience. For it to feel authentic though, it needs to be backed up by your visuals and tone of voice and nowhere is this more important than on your website.
Say you’ve discovered a brand photographer you’d really like to work with on Instagram. Her feed is super chic and simplistic with pared-back images and concise copy that just scream elegance. You head to her website to enquire about a booking and it’s full of bright colours, bold & colloquial language and wacky product photos. Is this the same person?! Suddenly, she doesn’t feel so right for your project and you close the tab in search of another.
Your website is where people will turn when they’re ready to get serious about working with you, if the vibe feels off you’re guaranteed to lose people. So how do you stop this from happening?
By correctly demonstrating your unique brand personality on your website! Here’s how:
Choose the right colour scheme
In order to convey the right vibe, your site needs to be the right colours (yes, really). We all have built-in associations with certain colours, but more importantly, colour schemes.
There’s no point aiming for a bright and bubbly online presence if you’re going to make your whole site grey and brown! The math won’t mathing for your customer when they hit your website expecting brightness and colours.
If you’re unsure how to put together a good colour scheme, research other brands (these don’t have to be in your industry) that are giving off the kinds of personality signals that you’d like to and see what they’re doing. You shouldn’t copy these colour schemes obvs, you need to keep yourself unique, but at least having an idea of the kinds of schemes and pairings being used should help massively.
Don’t sleep on the importance of typography
Typography refers to the font styles used on your website. These convey a huge amount of personality in themselves so worth doing your research before making a decision. This post is a great place to start if you’re totally clueless about type.
Use imagery that tells your unique story
A great way of getting these kinds of images is working with an experienced brand photographer who will get to know you and inject heaps of personality into your images.
If this isn’t an option for you at the moment, you can absolutely use free or paid stock imagery. Just make sure that you’re choosing images that convey the right vibe.
Finding stock images that naturally include your brand colours is a great way of doing this. You can also use images of people that give off the energy that matches your brand experience. Excited and happy women popping champagne or a productive business meeting? Make the right decisions based on your brand’s unique personality for a unified website.
Understand your user’s journey & act as their sherpa
This may not feel like a particularly creative tip, but understanding your user and meeting them where they are is the number one way of showing your brand’s credibility and strength of character.
It can be so easy to make your website all about you (after all, it’s your website) but we cannot stress enough how important it is that your customer be the central focus. They are the hero of your story, you are simply there to act as their guide. We strongly recommend this book ‘Building a Storybrand’ to explore this topic further - it revolutionised the way we do business!
Get to know your audience’s struggles and deepest desires and then guide them to the answers through your content. Add personality to every stage of this journey for maximum engagement and authenticity.
Customise backgrounds of key sections
A website contains a lot of information - some of it ok to scroll right past, some if it not so. If there are key pieces of info that it’s super important for your users to pay attention to, make sure you highlight them very clearly so it’s impossible to miss them.
Squarespace offers several great ways of doing this:
Our Helena Squarespace template uses lots of moody black and white image backgrounds to showcase her edgy vibe.
Bright coloured sections. Squarespace create 'colour themes’ from your chosen palette which give you a range of background & content colours without you needing to lift a finger. Mix and match these using the boldest for key sections to draw plenty of visual interest.
Animated graphic sections. If you want something a little more involved, there is a background edit within Squarespace called ‘Art’ which allows you to create animated graphical sections. Opt for cursor-chasing gradients like in our Madeline design, or animated custom graphics that dance around as your user scrolls. These sections look amazing and are created in just a few clicks.
Image backgrounds. Image backgrounds are a great way of showing off more of your unique personality while highlighting key areas of content. Take these sections one step further with animation options done for you in Squarespace.
Add eye candy to important features like forms or buttons
One of the great things about Lucky Night Squarespace templates is that a lot of the graphical legwork is done for you. All of our templates come with a page full of SVG smart-graphics that you can copy and paste anywhere on your site. These graphics will automatically update with your chosen colour scheme and will never pixelate making them a great option for customising areas around important features. Squarespace now allows simple ‘stacking’ of elements, so if you want to use a graphic behind a form or an image to add a bit more eye candy, you can do it with one simple button.
Engage your audience with animations and interactions
As well as smart-graphics for easy customising, all of our templates also come with custom button animations. We want to make sure your site is engaging your users at every step and also looking/feeling more bespoke than a run-of-the-mill template. You choose a Lucky Night Squarespace template because you understand the impact of great web design, so there’s no room for basic here!
Be crystal clear on your messaging throughout
One of our TOP tips for showing off your brand’s personality is to know with 100% certainty with every section of your webpage what problem you are solving, how you are solving it and who you’re solving it for. This gives you all-important context and allows you real creative freedom without the worry of things becoming jumbled or messy. Also, as we always say, your design choices should be for your customer and not for you. Knowing exactly who they are and where they are in their journey will make your life so much easier when it comes to creatively injecting personality into your bran and website.
If you need help with this, you can download our free interactive Niche Up! workbook. This workbook will guide you in creating a powerful brand that’s focussed around serving specific customers in a way that highlights your strongest skills & creates an unforgettable customer experience.
We hope you found this blog useful and are now armed to the teeth with ways to show off your unique style!
For more web design know-how, check out some of our other posts. You can also download exclusive resources here and shop our template range here.
Contact us for information on our bespoke web design services!
Stay creative, babe!
Naomi | Lucky Night Studio
