Slideshows, Slideshows Everywhere

YUI().use("*", function(Y) {Y.on("domready", function() {Y.startGallerySlideShow("squarespace-slideshow-params-1311256709");});});

We are pleased to introduce the newest addition to the Squarespace feature set. You can now create beautiful slideshows anywhere on your site with just a few clicks. 

Our new slideshows let you take the images from your gallery pages and showcase them in other places around your site. It works just like adding an image to a page. Simply open up your WYSIWYG editor and you'll see the new slideshow icon (shown here on the right). Click it and add a slideshow anywhere you like -- to your blog posts, HTML pages, or sidebars.

The sample slideshow in this post is just one example of what you can do. Slideshows can be styled with a variety of choices to give you the look and feel you want. You can change the animation style, speed, controls and delay; the size and aspect ratio; and also the presentation of image names and descriptions. Your slideshow will automatically size itself to the content width.

To learn how to install one (or more) slideshows on your site follow this guide or watch this helpful video. Enjoy!

New Templates for All

We're pleased to offer our customers two new templates to choose from. You may have already stumbled across the New Amsterdam template, which was released a couple of months ago. Today we added another great selection for you: Canopy.

While many V5 features have been added since the original templates were first created, New Amsterdam and Canopy offer further enhancements. "The majority of my time is spent developing in V6 and it pains me that our community has to wait for these great experiences," says Senior Designer Krystyn Heide. "So I was itching to design something in V5. These new templates are built to be ready to use right out of the box, with a little more than you might expect from our current style offerings." 

New Amsterdam was created with an eye toward small business owners and the professional websites they need. It has six color variations, each designed to give businesses a versatile color palette to showcase their own logos against.  

Canopy, on the other hand, is geared toward bloggers. With five style variations, this blog-centric template is spare in design with just a touch of color. The minimalistic approach is meant to really let bloggers showcase their content as beautifully as possible. 

If you'd like to try out one of these new templates but need a little help switching over, watch this video tutorial on template switching. 

Enjoy!

Freshen Up Your Fonts

 

The font selection within your Style Editor has been expanded. We're happy to let you know that we've added twelve new font choices in your Fonts, Colors, and Sizes tab (beyond the original eight). Some, like Copse and Pacifico, will let you add a little more flair to your site. Others, like Helvetica, are classics, and some of our most requested enhancements.

These fonts come courtesy of Google Web Fonts and are now available across all customer sites. If you'd like to try out the new options, but need a little help using your Style Editor, you can watch this tutorial video.

Happy styling.

Top Flight Support

As Squarespace has grown over the years, our commitment to providing top-notch customer support has always been our top priority. Despite opportunities to save a buck, we've focused on building a support team full of Squarespace power-users, each of whom know our platform inside out and upside down.

Today we begin a steady stream of support improvements as we start to roll out our brand new Help & Support Center. Our goal here is simple: to make finding answers to your Squarespace-related questions even easier.

In our first round of changes, visible today, we've replaced our existing Manual and FAQ pages. When you visit the new Help & Support Center, you’ll find all of the tools that you've come to rely on - our Getting Started guide, our help videos, and all our previously published support content - all in one location, searchable and browseable by topic. You will now be able to rate and flag our support content, so that our team can quickly stay on top of the needs of our customers and improve our materials on an ongoing basis.

Our new support ticketing system will be introduced shortly. The new system will allow you to submit tickets just as you do today, but improvements on the back-end will give our support specialists faster access to customer information and your support history, as well as give you the ability to interact over email and submit screenshots with tickets.    

We constantly strive to improve our industry-leading customer support here at Squarespace, and hope you find these changes to be a welcome improvement. Visit our Help & Support Center at http://help.squarespace.com.

Location, Location, Location

Today, I'm excited to announce the launch of our location widget. As the first widget of it's kind to natively display all of your checkins alongside a live map, it's a natural complement to our other social widgets to fully customize your Squarespace website. Whether you're on Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places, you can treat your visitors to a visualization of where you've been. Like all things Squarespace, no code is required and the widget is fully customizable in both style and substance. Choose whether to show your check-in messages, toggle venue icons, dates, the map and how many checkins to display.

I can imagine musical artists on Squarespace will love this for when they're on tour. Anybody who's building an online presence should go try it right now. Be sure to tell us how you plan on using the widget in the comments, and show us your version by tweeting @Squarespace with your site. Mike O'Brien, our lead programmer on the location widget project, would love your feedback to make the widget the best it can be. As always, should you come across any funky behavior, open up a support ticket and we'll take care of it for you.

Cheers,
Davin