Should I Hire A Squarespace Designer? All You Need To Know
As a small business owner, you might be wondering if making your one website or hiring a Squarespace designer is the better choice. Since Squarespace has become a more and more user-friendly platform for creating stunning websites, it's tempting to believe that anyone can dive into Squarespace and design a website on their own. And it is totally doable to do that. You might need time to get to know the platform and will eventually get the hang of it.
However, there are several compelling reasons why hiring a Squarespace designer can be a game-changer for your online presence. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the pros and cons of doing it yourself versus hiring a Squarespace designer. Let’s start:
Pros and Cons of Hiring a Squarespace Designer
Pros of Hiring a Squarespace Designer
It’s a Massive Time (and Nerve!) Saver: Building a website from scratch can be time-consuming, especially if you're unfamiliar with Squarespace or web design. Learning the platform, exploring design options, and troubleshooting can take considerable time and effort. I cannot tell you how many times I was pulling my hair before I eventually decided to take several courses and finally learned CSS coding on top to navigate Squarespace websites with full control. Really getting the hang of it can take a good amount of time from weeks to months.
Design and Branding Limitations: Without design expertise, your website may lack the professional polish and cohesive branding that a designer can provide. It can be challenging to achieve the desired visual impact and create a website that effectively represents your brand.
Potential Mistakes: Ever scrolled through a website on your mobile phone and saw text overlaying, covered by another image or a button misbehaving? I did! And I can tell you this is a real point where website visitors get annoyed and get an impression that a business is unprofessional. In the absence of design expertise, you may make errors in layout, usability, or optimization that could negatively impact the user experience. Your Squarespace Designer will make sure that your website looks great - not matter if it’s on desktop and mobile phones.
SEO Principles: Great Squarespace Designers are trained to optimize your website for search engines like Google. By optimizing images, keywords and metadescriptions for the keywords you want to be found for, they ensure your Squarespace Website gets found.
Please note: Applying SEO best-practice principles does not mean that your website will automatically ranked high on Google. It’s important to keep in mind that the content on your website is also important. There are SEO Squarespace Experts who have specialised on this topic and can help you rank higher.
CONS of Hiring a Squarespace Designer
Cost Savings: Bit of an obvious one: It’s a time for money exchange - so building a Squarespace website on your own eliminates the expense of hiring a designer. Squarespace offers various pricing plans to fit different budgets, and their templates and tools make it relatively affordable to create a professional-looking website. If you don’t like any of the templates and would love to use one that fits your industry more, have a look at our Squarespace templates.
Full Control and Flexibility: Creating the website yourself allows for complete control over the design, content, and functionality. You can experiment, iterate, and make changes without relying on external parties, enabling you to shape the website exactly to your preferences.
However, most Squarespace designers offer a training or video recording to enable you to make edits and changes to your website. We always give our clients an hour Squarespace training after finalising their website design and handover the recording for future reference - zero dependence.
If this pro’s and con’s list does not quite do it for you, yet, here is the two crucial questions to ask yourself to make a decision on whether hiring a squarespace designer is a good choice:
How important is your Squarespace website for your sales and marketing?
If your Squarespace website is a major marketing tool for you and important for acquiring new clients, making bookings and building your business brand, then hiring a Squarespace website designer is a good choice to make. Especially if you are a small business, having a professional website can show potential clients: “yes, this business is legit” and help you to get a foot in the door with potential clients.
On the other hand, if you only need a website because it is something you feel you need to complete the picture, but you already have tons of clients coming your way, then making a simple Squarespace site yourself might be the way to go. You can choose any of the free website templates that Squarespace has to offer or you have a look into more sophisticated ones that suit your niche and industry.
😏 Curious about our Squarespace templates? 👉 Check them out here
Which features does your Squarespace website need?
Most website builders like Squarespace or Wix have great stable capabilities to try making your own website if you are generally a bit tech-savvy. However, integrating custom fonts, email marketing or booking systems requires a minimum level of coding. If you are happy to give it a shot - go for it. However, if this is definitely a world you don’t want to enter, then hiring a Squarespace website designer might be the better choice.
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Did you know there is more than hiring a Squarespace designer for a full custom website and making it all yourself? Here are some Options:
Instead of hiring a Squarespace website designer to design your entire Squarespace website for you, there are a few other options not many people know about, yet.
Squarespace Templates
Many Squarespace designers started created extensive Squarespace templates with website copy writing prompts, beautiful free imagery to use and all the pages your specific business might need. You can search on Google or Etsy for a Squarespace template of your specific industry and find a variety of templates to choose from. For example, if you are a therapist, you can look for “Squarespace template for therapists” and will be presented with many different options to choose from. This will speed up the process of building your own Squarespace site to much faster! Many templates even come with little tutorials on how to customize your template with your brand logos, colours and fonts and provide even website copy planners. There is an insane amount of value in some of the templates on offer. If this is something for you, then definitely have a look.
Template Reskins
If you found a Squarespace template you really like but you are actually not too tech-savvy, then there is the option of purchasing Squarespace template reskin services. This means the designer you buy the template from offers the option to customize the template to your needs. Normally, this process is much quicker and more affordable than hiring a Squarespace designer to design a full custom Squarespace website for you.
Design Intensives for A Day
A lot of Squarespace designers now offer VIP Squarespace Website Design services. This means you can start out making your own site and hire a designer only for one day to polish your website and take care of any custom coding you don’t want to do. Interested? Check out our website design VIP Day Service.
What’s next?
If you have now come to the conclusion that you like to hire a Squarespace website designer for your business - then congratulations on making this choice! Having a Squarespace website designer by your side has an immense amount of value for launching a beautiful, professional and user-friendly website that really does the selling for you.
To find the right website designer for your business, this article might by helpful for you.
Or maybe you already have found a few Squarespace designers you really like but you are unsure which one to choose? Use this article to make a decision that feels good for you and helps your business.
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I’m Brand Strategist & Squarespace Website Designer and support you in building an emotional connection to your ideal clients through your Branding and Website
