Squarespace - The Blog

Squarespace at WPPI 2012

2012-02-16T18:57:15Z

Each year 16,000 photographers gather in Las Vegas for the Wedding & Portrait Photographers International (WPPI) convention. WPPI is an organization that serves the educational and business needs of wedding and portrait photographers and organizes some of the world's largest photography trade shows.

Squarespace will be joining the event on February 20-23rd, providing a wealth of tools and tips for photographers to complete their professional setup. Here's everything you need to know about Squarespace at WPPI 2012:

The Exhibit

Our exhibit at booth #1665 will be hard to miss, but here's the marked floor plan. Some things you can look forward to if you stop by:

Demos. Come experience the new standard in professional portfolios for yourself. Our team will be giving one-on-one demos of Squarespace 6 all day long.
Site setups. Bring a thumb drive with your photos and we'll get you started with a portfolio site.
Giveaways. T-shirts, GorillaPods, and more...

The Party

"Airplanes and Blazers 2," the biggest party of WPPI, is on Monday night, February 20th at 10PM. Pick up your wristband at our booth for an easy entrance at the party.

The Speakers

Looking for an alternative to WPPI's excellent list of speakers and classes? We will be hosting an array of intimate events in our exhibit including several dynamic speakers. Here's the full schedule:

Monday, February 20th

11AM: Anne Sage, editor-in-chief of Rue Magazine.
2PM: Jesh de Rox, founder of Beloved Collective and Business As An Art Form.
3PM: Justin Lyon and Matt Stone, "talkateers" and co-founders of Mammoth Men.

Tuesday, February 21st

11:30AM: Amina Moreau, artist at Stillmotion
2PM: Jeremy Cowart, celebrity photographer and founder of Help-Portrait.
3PM: Karen Walrond, author of Chookooloonks.

Wednesday, February 22nd

2PM: Dan O'Day, founder of You Thought You Knew You, with Samm Blake.

**Note, all times are Las Vegas time.

The Meetup

We're hosting a meetup for all of our Las Vegas customers and friends on Tuesday, February 21st at 5:30PM. RSVP here.

We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Slideshow 2.0

2012-02-06T17:25:25Z

Our popular slideshow feature has just been updated to version 2.0. Now when you add a slideshow to your site you'll find new settings to choose from, more customization options, and advanced functionality.

New Style Options

Slide indicators (dots, pagination, or textual) and new options to configure the placement of slideshow controls give you the style you want. To customize the look and feel of your slideshow further, jump into Fonts, Colors & Sizes, where you can modify background images for controls, style descriptions, and more.

Placement and Size

Slideshow 2.0 allows for repositioning of navigation and any titles or descriptions you add to your slides. You can also customize the width of the slideshow, or just set it to auto-fill the width of the content area.

Gallery Settings

We've improved the link between the slideshow and the originating galleries by enabling an automatic gallery sync. That means when you add new images to a gallery or change a single image, your slideshow will reflect those changes immediately. We've also increased the slide limit to 100 images per slideshow.

Advanced

By popular request, the new "Advanced" panel allows you to link individual slides to specific click-through URLs of your choosing. You can also set slide-specific titles, add HTML to the slide's description area, and reorder the slides without changing anything in the original gallery itself.

It's a great update. Enjoy.

Meetups Here, There, and Everywhere

2012-02-03T19:13:37Z

Squarespace Meetups are coming soon to a city near you. We're starting with our home base of New York City with a meetup on Thursday, February 9th at 7:00PM. If you're in the area, please come by our offices to meet the team, have some drinks, and show us what you're working on (and see what we're working on). RSVP here.

But don't think we're stopping there. We'll be in Las Vegas in February and Austin in March. We even have our eye set across the pond on London. Have a city you think we should visit? Let us know!

Check out our full schedule of planned events and come say hello. We’d love to meet you.

Workshops 101

2012-01-27T17:49:59Z

We're running a phenomenal program at Squarespace that you may not have even heard about yet: Workshops. This program of interactive, online seminars launched 6 months ago, born out of a desire to provide an environment where customers would be able to participate in a classroom-like setting and get the in-person guidance they wanted. Oh, and they're free.

Before joining the team, I attended my first workshop as an observer. It seemed like an effortless production. It wasn't until after I joined the ranks that I witnessed all it took to make that workshop happen. Behind each workshop are a couple of monitors, mic stands, sound panels, multiple applications running, not to mention the memorization of 45 minutes worth of content.

In addition to all of those moving parts, a workshop is a constant stream of information-sharing. While one customer care team member (usually me) actually presents the material, another team member answers questions in chat. That means anyone can ask any question at any time. We also make sure to leave a few minutes at the end of each session to talk through the questions asked during the workshop, so that everyone benefits from each other's questions.

At least 5 times each workshop, we see the lightbulb go off for a customer. For some it might be a sequence of questions and for others it might be just one. But it's the exclamatory thank you that comes afterward that gets me fired up, thinking about what this means for the customers—people are making progress and experiencing the potential of this product we all love so much. It means that another person is better able to do what they set out to do.

Since we launched Workshops, we have not only seen thousands of people attend classes, but the size of the team running the program has tripled. Several other support team members (Paulina, Gavin, Will, Alex, and Shon) have joined me and we've grown the syllabus to include 6 topics, with plenty more in the pipeline. Our vision is to have an ever growing library of workshops that address the possibilities of publishing your site with Squarespace, whether you're a beginner or have been using Squarespace for years.

For more information about the classes and a full schedule, visit our Workshops site. The classes we offer are:

Next week we're offering several sessions of Getting Started with Squarespace, and many of the other topics in the weeks to come. I look forward to seeing you in class!

How Do You Squarespace? UPPERCASE

2012-01-23T16:20:53Z

UPPERCASE founder, Janine Vangool, does it all: graphic design, blogging, magazine & book publishing, and even some party-planning. And she does all of it with an impeccable eye for beauty, style, and whimsy. Though most people know her now as a magazine publisher and blogger, Janine began her career as a graphic designer, specializing in print design for arts and culture clients. It was in 2005 that she made a few key decisions that would ultimately land her where she is today.

The first of these was moving her business out of her home and into a studio space in downtown Calgary. The studio lease came with a hitch, which Janine remembers:

At the time, the mandate of the building was to promote the arts and each tenant was required to have a space open to the public in some way. So I started UPPERCASE as a side project—it began as a gallery, bookstore, and paper goods store. I was mostly selling products made by other companies, though I quickly started making things of my own to sell as well such as notebooks and greeting cards. Folks could wander in and see a graphic designer at work.

Opening a store would have been enough of a challenge, but 2005 also marked Janine's venture into blogging. While many of us now first associate Janine with her gorgeous magazine, her blog actually predates her entry into print publishing by several years. She's the reverse of many others who begin in print and transition to web to keep up with changing trends.

It was really the combination of opening a gallery/store alongside running an active blog that eventually led Janine to consider print publishing as well. For her, print was the logical outgrowth of online publishing:

As my blog readership grew, so did the desire to develop my own products. I could see that I had a nice loyal following who loved print and paper as much as I did, and so in 2009, I launched UPPERCASE magazine. My hope was that if just a modest percentage of these people subscribed, the magazine could do alright.

Janine's gamble was a success and her readership has grown steadily in both media — she recently published issue #12 of UPPERCASE, and now has over 2000 subscribers worldwide. With growth in both arenas, she is a true believer that print and web are integral to one another. "I don't think you can have a periodically printed paper magazine or newspaper without supporting it online," she says.

Janine also believes that each type of publication fills a separate need. "Readers expect a lot," she says. "They want the immediacy of a blog to get a daily dose of inspiration but they also want the more sensual experience of holding a beautifully produced print production." By having a blog, Janine can also gauge readers' interests as she develops content for print—many issues of UPPERCASE have themes that emerged from trends she's seen online. For the next issue, she's even asking for reader contributions on a theme: the weather and how it impacts creativity.

Seeing everything she's done, we're so pleased that Squarespace has been Janine's platform since the very beginning. We're even happier the feeling is mutual. "One of the best things about Squarespace is how steady and robust it is," she told us. "My site contains an incredible amount of information from all these years, and yet Squarespace is always there... It has been great to be able to adapt the site configuration as my needs change, especially since my business has evolved so much."

We've also had the distinct pleasure of getting to know Janine personally over the last few months, after the Alt Design Summit wisely paired her up with us to plan a party at this past weekend's conference. Her work on the concept, decorations, activities, food and drinks for the party was simply phenomenal. (See for yourself in this gallery.) We're incredibly grateful, and if we've learned anything by working with her, it's how right she is when she says: "If you're making something special, there will always be people who take notice."

To find out more about Janine, read the UPPERCASE blog, subscribe to UPPERCASE magazine, or follow her on Twitter.

End Piracy, Not Liberty

2012-01-18T17:05:00Z

The celebration of creative expression sits at the very core of Squarespace’s values. For the last eight years our team has strived to build a service that gives people the ability to share their ideas, their opinions, and their imagination on the web. Congress is now set to consider new legislation that poses a serious threat to web publishing as we know it and has the potential to not only censor the web, but undermine the very structure on which it’s built.

Squarespace stands in strong opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and joins millions of other online services and individuals in protest. We encourage all members of the online community to learn more about how these two bills will impact the web and to take action immediately.

Please take a moment today to do your part by signing a petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it’s too late.

Take action.

NYC Dribbble Meetup: January 26th, 2012

2012-01-12T23:21:57Z

We love Dribbble and everything it does to connect and promote designers. So we're thrilled to be hosting another NYC Dribbble Meetup on Thursday, January 26th at 7PM.

We're especially excited that Dribbble's co-founders, Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett, will be joining us this time. So please stop by the Squarespace office for an evening of networking and refreshments. RSVP here so that we'll know how many people to expect.

And don't forget to check out our design team on Dribbble: Tyler, Stephen, Michael, Krystyn, Grant, Mikael, Billy, Eric, and Davy.

We look forward to seeing you!

The Great Style Revival

2011-11-15T17:55:21Z

Over the past several months we've made a tremendous effort to continually improve the Squarespace experience. We've released beautiful new templates, expanded our help system, and built in powerful features like slideshows that you've always wanted. Today, we're thrilled to push that effort even further and offer a colossal update to all areas related to templates in Squarespace.

13 TEMPLATE REDESIGNS, 85 NEW STYLES, 2 BRAND-NEW TEMPLATES

Our templates have served us well over the years, but the time has come to reinterpret the Squarespace classics and improve our entire collection. In this release, we redesigned every template in the system, top to bottom. We explored everything — color, fonts, button styles, key art, and the overall proportion — to ready our templates for an evolving web and far beyond. In addition to the 13 template redesigns with 85 new styles, 2 brand-new templates (Principle and Transfigure) are included in this update.

GOOGLE WEB FONTS – ALL OF THEM

You asked for Google's complete web font library, and here it is. Over 300 fonts are now fully integrated within Squarespace, giving you an unprecedented selection of fonts to choose from. There’s nothing for you to install, no Javascript to add, no CSS to write. Everything is available within the Fonts, Colors & Sizes menu. It's like magic.

DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY CSS EDITOR

As web designers and developers, we know how limiting it could be to write and edit CSS within a small window. Now you can do it all within our beautiful new editor; pop out the entire window and see everything at once. The new editing toolbar allows you to find & replace, undo & redo (even post-save), insert style variables, and format your code like a pro. 3 new color themes are also available for easy-on-the-eyes editing.

AND MUCH MORE...

Add style to your blog post elements with 8 new icon sets, available in both black and white and 4 different sizes.
Keep the background image but change the color thanks to alpha-transparent PNGs available in many of the redesigned templates.
Customize buttons in the new styles, like “search” and “submit”, right within Fonts, Colors & Sizes.

There’s a lot to explore within Style mode and you can access the full set of features right away. Enjoy!

Participating in Bpeace

2011-11-03T14:55:00Z

Last week Squarespace was privileged to serve as a host company for Bpeace, a non-profit network of business professionals who volunteer their skills to entrepreneurs in conflict-affected countries. In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, Bpeace's goal is to create one million jobs across 1000 communities, with the simple belief that more jobs mean less violence. Bpeace Fast Runners are remarkable entrepreneurs from countries like Afghanistan and Rwanda. They all share the vision that employment is the bridge to better education, less poverty, improved health, and ultimately, less violence.

We had the pleasure of hosting two Fast Runners from Afghanistan, both young entrepreneurs, in our office for two days. Reza owns a web and software development company. Farangis is a civil engineer who recently founded her own web hosting and design services provider.

Reza and Farangis spent time with many on our team, with discussions ranging from an overview of our industry, building a successful business, personnel management, strategic and financial planning, sales and marketing, IT and data center infrastructure, and PHP and JavaScript coding. In return we had the opportunity to learn about Afghani perceptions of American business, the challenges of the local business environment in Kabul, female entrepreneurship in their culture, and much more.

Squarespace is proud to have participated in Bpeace, and we look forward to continuing to help Reza and Farangis via email and Skype, and to participating again in 2012.

Squarespace 6

2011-10-21T19:48:48Z

Today, I am proud to announce the first wave of public beta invites to Squarespace 6.

Squarespace 6 is more than an evolution — it is a completely new way of managing content. Built from the ground up with the knowledge gained from seven years of creating content management systems, Squarespace 6 is the result of more than a year and a half of incredible work by our team. We have created an environment where you can rapidly create a beautiful website in a matter of minutes, managed from an interface that is like nothing else on the web.

We have spent our time optimizing the core parts of the Squarespace 6 system: blogs, galleries, the page builder, and widgets (now called blocks). The beta is initially launching with a set of portfolio templates. Portfolio templates have incredibly diverse presentation styles, and represented an excellent initial challenge for our team. The platform, of course, doesn't end there.

The Squarespace 6 beta will start with Squarespace friends and family. We will be releasing invitations daily. If you build websites for clients, apply for our developer program here, with the subject "Squarespace 6 Developer", which has been underway for months.

We are incredibly excited to share our hard work with you. We've attempted to anticipate many of your questions in our Squarespace 6 FAQ. Please note that this platform is a beginning for Squarespace — it gives us the ability to create templates with unprecedented flexibility and iterate on our product many times faster than with our previous version. On behalf of our entire team, thank you for your ongoing support. We are thrilled to share Squarespace 6 with you!

Photography in the video by Rhys Logan