Promoting My Photography Business with Squarespace

As an experienced photographer, I finally decided to take the plunge and invest in promoting my business by creating a website at the beginning of 2024.

After much deliberation, I chose Squarespace as my platform of choice, largely influenced by the enthusiastic endorsements from several photographers I follow on You Tube.

Firstly, I want to give a big shout-out to Squarespace, as I’m delighted with the site I’ve created.

However, I’d like to share my experience (as an experienced photographer) by establishing a web presence using Squarespace, aiming to provide valuable insights for others considering the same platform choice.

Despite the positive outcome, I must admit my journey could have been much smoother!

The following 6 points are intended as guidance for anyone looking to establish a Squarespace website:

Research and Planning

Whilst some YouTube thumbnails may promise the possibility to “Create a Squarespace site in 15 minutes”, I quickly learned that for anyone unfamiliar with the platform, this is totally unrealistic, particularly if the aim is to create an e-commerce website.

The creation of my website took nearly six weeks. In my case, a lack of familiarity and knowledge of the Squarespace software was one reason, as well as I made things more complicated by not carrying out prior research and planning, which is essential for getting your site up and running quickly.

Having a marketing background gave me some familiarity with web terminology but I too still encountered challenges. For those without a similar marketing background, setting up a site could be significantly more daunting.

My advice: Conduct thorough research and planning before starting the free 14 day trial offered by Squarespace.

I must say that the most helpful resources I found for assisting me to understand queries and to gain a deeper insight, was to resort to YouTube “experts”.

There are several but the ones I found most useful were Paige Brunton and David Alex both of whom offer invaluable tutorials.

Be aware though some of their and other content providers recorded videos in early 2023 but subsequently had their video Thumbnails changed to indicate “Squarespace for 2024”.

In these cases, whilst the content is very sound, Squarespace in the meantime has introduced significant amendments and updates to their menus, thus potentially creating some time-wasting and frustration.

Of course, Squarespace has in depth text based tutorials, accompanied by very short video content, which I found mainly unhelpful, hence the reason for using YouTube, as my main learning platform.

Ensure you Spend Adequate Time Choosing the Correct Template

Squarespace offers numerous predesigned templates, which can greatly simplify the setup of your website.

I quickly learned that time taken selecting the right template for your needs will save you lost time. In my case, I initially chose a template then after two or three days decided it wasn’t what I was looking for and needed to choose another template, thus losing me valuable time.

Take time to understand how the templates function and choose wisely based on the needs of your site.

Squarespace Software

Like any new software, mastering Squarespace takes time. Whilst I faced initial challenges, practice and perseverance helped me to overcome this aspect.

You will find fairly quickly working with Squarespace becomes more intuitive and therefore easier.

Importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Maximising SEO is crucial for visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.

For photographers, very likely to be needing to upload many images, will mean taking the time to meticulously describe photographs correctly, to ensure that search engine rankings are maximised.

While a time consuming necessity, neglecting this very import step will result in poor rankings and potential loss of business.

Preparing Your Images in Advance

As just mentioned, photographers are most likely to require to upload many images.

I failed to give priority to this task, which added to the overall set-up time of the site. It’s imperative to carefully select and resize your images in advance.

Correct image compression is crucial to ensuring fast download page speeds so make this task a priority before you start the trial.

Ensure you Integrate Your Site with Google Search, Google Merchant Centre and Bing WebMaster Tools

To ensure both Google and Bing have the ability to understand your site’s content, it is necessary for both engines to “site crawl” so as to enable their search engines to be able to rank your site to satisfy consumer search terms.

Additionally, GSC offers their excellent Google Analytics tools with the Google Merchant Centre providing you the opportunity to access Google Shopping Listings for free.

Both are invaluable and have already provided me some useful insights to my site’s attributes, which I would have been unaware of and missed, if I had not signed up to both.

To benefit from GMC, it is necessary to upload the contents of your shop to enjoy free shop listings.

At the time of writing, this is still an outstanding task for me, as outside the USA, it is not yet possible to integrate shop products displayed on Squarespace, through an automatic download and upload to GMC.

To overcome this issue, it appears this could involve either a time consuming product file preparation or using third party software.

Hopefully, Squarespace will offer the facility to users outside the USA in the short-term.

In Conclusion

I have found setting up a Squarespace web platform relatively straightforward, although slightly daunting in the initial phases.

No doubt prior research and planning would have made the job a lot easier in my case.

My advice is to ensure you do all the preparatory work I’ve described, use YouTube for guidance and if required use the Squarespace help-desk when required.

With dedication and effort, I’m confident Squarespace can be a powerful tool for promoting any small business on-line.