hey guys it's Charlie and in today's video I'll be showing you how to build any type of website using Squarespace now I've been using Squarespace for 14 years so probably longer than everyone else making tutorials on the subject now I'll say this it's one of the easiest and most professional looking website builders that you can get it's also really affordable and you can get a free trial by using link down below make sure you use that link and use code Charlie Chang at checkout because that will give you 10% off which is exclusive to my
audience only so yeah basically what I'm going to do in this video is teach you how to make a professional website from scratch with no previous exper experience or coding required I'll take you guys step by step including how to select a template adding elements and Designs selling things and a ton of other stuff but yeah really guys I have nothing but good things to say about Squarespace it's why I personally have paid for a subscription for the last 14 years and over that time period they have added so many new features and today it
really is one of the best all in-one platforms to build and host a website and guys the reason why I'm so passionate about building websites is because websites have helped me make a lot of money every single person watching this video needs a website I'm telling you because without a website you'll have less accountability less exposure less clients and less income so without further Ado let's get started the most important thing about this video is taking action so what I recommend you guys do is click on that link down below it's going to take you
to this exact landing page and just basically follow along in 15 minutes or less you should have a draft of your website and yeah it really is that easy all right so the first thing I'm going to do is come here and click get started and as you can see Squarespace is asking us what our website is about so if there is a very specific type of website you're trying to make you can of course select that but for this video I want to show you guys all the templates they have so I'm click skip
you can also click skip right here and for this tutorial I'll show you guys how to choose a professionally designed template that really is one of the best parts about Squarespace so we'll go and select this so here we're going to be faced with the daunting task of selecting a template and the reason why this can be a little bit daunting is because they have so many really goodlooking ones now for this tutorial I'm basically going to create something like a personal portfolio I recommend you guys look at the popular designs these are popular for
a reason you guys can see there are so many good choices to choose from and you can see they have a wide range of different types of templates so if any of these resonate with you I would just recommend clicking on that to check out templates in that specific topic for me I'm going to select personal and CV just for this video and let's say I like this one so what I'm going to do is click here I'll select preview just so we can see this full screen see what it looks like we can also
check out the tablet as well as the phone views I think that looks pretty great so what we're going to do is Click start with this design now it's going to have me create an account so I'll go ahead and continue with email let's enter in a title for our Squarespace site I'll just put my name for now click next it's going to walk us through what we can do to edit our website and we'll just click get started and yeah all these templates we selected from they have different fonts they different placements different pictures
stuff like that but the great thing is that they are all 100% customizable and we can even change themes later on if we want so if I go to the bottom left and click here what you guys can see is this is my dashboard so you guys can play around the Squarespace design different websites and then choose whichever one you want to publish it's super easy all you have to do is Click create website right here and that's going to allow you to create another website now the first thing I want to show you guys
is the site Styles so if you click on this up here on the top right you can see that we can change the fonts the colors the animations spacing buttons forms and image blocks so changing anything here is going to change it universally throughout your website so for example for the fonts we can choose from a wide variety of fonts they have I personally just recommend going with the default fonts since these are professionally made so they basically had professional designers curate these fonts and styles but of course if you want to change it you
can for now I'm not going to change them since I am pretty happy with these colors however if you do want to change it you can click edit palette we can choose from different presets that they have so these are colors that are more complimentary and a big tip I have for you guys is don't try and choose Too Many Colors try and be simple because the more colors you have the more scattered and messy your website is going to look for example let's say I want to go with a more Dark theme I can
click on this to see how that looks I think that looks pretty good actually say we want some more light colors we can do something like this and yeah I guess just for this video I'll go with this one so you guys can see how easy it is just to switch just like that and yeah feel free to play around with these I'm not going to go into it too much on this video what we're going to do is click save and then we can click close right here so now what I'm going to do
is click on edit right here and this is going to bring me into the Squarespace editor now Squarespace has made so many changes in the last decade I really really like how simple this editor is now I'll show you guys how to use it how to play around with different sections add blocks change fonts and all that stuff the first thing I do want to show you is that there is a header right here which we can easily edit and there is a footer down here which we can also easily edit the first thing I'm
going to do here is click edit site footer I can just click into here delete whatever I want so I'm going to remove this made with Squarespace text you don't need that you can also remove this change up this text as well but I'll just leave it for now if you want to change any of these links you guys can easily do that by clicking into this highlighting this you can remove the link you can change link whatever you want to do we can also change these Social Links down here and change where they go
to so yeah basically this footer and this header it's going to show up on every single page of your website so just keep that in mind now looking at the actual elements of this homeage page you guys can see that it's separated into different sections so this section right here is basically the hero section it's where we have this big hero image this is another section underneath where we have some more information some more pictures some buttons here is another section with a bunch of different logos here is a section for testimonials and yeah basically
we're free to add and remove whatever sections we don't want or want to add so for example let's say you don't want this big section right here what we'll do is just click remove it's really that easy let's say we want to add a section between the logos and the testimonials so I'll click add section right here Squarespace has a ton of pre-made templates for these sections you guys can easily just choose from these for example if you want to have a portfolio we can choose from these pre-made ones let's say we want to do
something simple like this one so we'll click on that and for any of these sections it's very easy to change the order so let's say I want to put this one underneath the testimonials so what I can do is click here this move down button and it's going to shift that down here we can can continue doing that if you want this underneath that one but I'll just leave this here for now you can also edit the section by clicking this button we can change the formatting we can change the background as well so we
can have an image we can have a video we can also change up the colors but I just recommend leaving those as is yeah it's super easy you guys can see the accordion we can click on this that's going to allow us to edit the things in this accordion we can move things around we can Trash some of them if we want we can add a description underneath each one right super easy and yeah it's very very easy just to change the fonts what we basically just do is we can change the sizing here we
can make it bold or not we can change the color we can italicize it yeah it's super super easy so let's say for me I want to change this section right here I'm going to click edit section now with Squarespace basically what we can do is we can move text wherever we want so as you guys can see we can move this text to the right or to the left and basically how it works is they use these little grids that you can see so if you want to see these grids all the time all
you have to do is click on the section click G on on your keyboard and that's going to have these grids show up we can easily expand these grids by dragging down on this you can also do that in edit section you can change how big the gaps are can change the height like this change the number of rows just like that but yeah let's say I'm happy with this what I'm going to do is drag this to where I want it to go so I do like it right here one thing I do want
to change is the background so I'll click here I'm going to click replace this image we can choose from different stock images we can choose from a file on my computer so I'm going to do that all right let's go ahead and use this image right here so I'll click open and that's going to automatically insert it what we can do is drag this little button right here to sort of reposition the image I think this is pretty good so I'm going to leave it like that we can change all these different settings of course
but let's just leave it like that I think that looks pretty good if you want to add anything to this section we can click add block let's say for example we want to add a button we'll click on button right here let's drag this to where we want it so let's put it right here we can easily change change the text right let's say we want this to be called contact me we can attach a link as well we can change the design too but I'll just leave that as is in this case I don't
want the chat with me here anymore so I'll delete that and yeah let's click G again to remove that grid so we can see what it looks like better and I think that looks pretty good now for every change you make you do want to make sure that the website looks good on mobile because a good percentage of people going to your website they'll likely be using their phone so to do that what we're going to do is come here to this mobile view click on that and you'll be able to edit specifically the mobile
view so let's say we think this text is a bit too big for the mobile view let's go ahead and change this text let's say this button seems a little bit too big we can go ahead and make that a little bit smaller we can also Center that if we want so we can put that right here so basically building website it's going to be between desktop and mobile view now when adding a block you guys can see there are tons of other things you guys can add it can be way more advanced than just
a button we can add a map we can add shapes we can add newsletter we can add video if we want we can have Integrations with things like Instagram so yeah it can be really really fun to play around with this generally for most of you guys I'd say don't mess around with the design too much like I said earlier these are all professionally designed these elements are there for a reason I know it can get pretty tempting to want to customize every little thing I definitely used to do that myself but what I learned
is simple is better don't spend too much time trying to Perfect all this sometimes leaving it the way it is is just going to be better basically what I did for this section applies to every other section on your website feel free to add different blocks change things up add different logos add different text whatever it is next what I'll do is come up here to edit site header for here we can basically change this we can click that little button add a logo so we'll select upload file here's a sample logo I have we
can change the height the size all that stuff that looks good we can change the navigation menu here by clicking that super easy we can change the order yeah again any pictures you want to switch out super easy all I have to do is Click replace upload file select this one there we go let's change the positioning a little bit we can always change the design as well we can add effects to our images so that's really cool but I'll select none for now just I like the way it looks again make sure your website
looks okay on mobile view so just go back and fourth so the image that I put earlier it does look pretty good like that so as you're building your website make sure to save quite often so I'll click save right here now let's click exit out of this editor I'll click on website on this menu right here and here you guys can see what pages you have on your website so your main navigation is what's going to show up here and not linked is going to be other Pages you want to create on your website
that aren't necessarily shown on your main menu so if I want to create a new page that shows up on the main navigation menu I can click plus right here we can start with a blank page we can use different layouts we can have different types of pages too so let's say you want to create a blog we can easily just click blog right here we can select the look we want so let's say we want to go with this one we'll name it so let's call it my blog and Bam that page is created
we can go ahead and create different blogs add new ones edit existing blogs and yeah Squarespace is just super powerful for pretty much everything you want to do now like I said earlier Squarespace is really really powerful they have a ton of other features you guys can use it for so for example if I click selling right here you guys can see this is a full-fledged e-commerce platform as well so if you do want to sell products if you do want to sell subscriptions online courses you can do all of that within Squarespace all that
stuff can be handled within the selling section here I'm not going to go into it too much in this video since it would take way too long but I just want to show you guys that that is a possible feature now if you click on marketing too you guys can see you can run whole e email campaigns using Squarespace it's really important if you have a website to try and collect emails and I encourage you guys try and build up an email list because this is extremely important if you do want to monetize here you
can see you can import existing email subscribers into Squarespace you can add a popup to your site yeah it's really really cool all your contacts that you get are going to show up here under contacts so you can easily label them under different tags that's very very helpful if you click on analytics this is a very powerful feature of Squarespace you can basically track all of your traffic your traffic sources what people are searching to find your site as well as what countries your viewers are from so last thing I'm going to do before publishing
my website is changing the faven so we're going to go to settings we're going to click on favicon right here and yeah this is the little icon that shows up in the tab to the left of your website title so right now you guys can see it's little box it's very crucial that you guys change this as it makes it look a lot more professional so what we'll do is Click add a favicon right here upload file the great thing is that you guys can actually upload a JPEG or PNG and it's instantly going to
convert it into the right format so we'll click save and now basically once we publish our website this is going to show up over here so once you're ready to publish your website you will need to pay for a plan and to do that we're going to come here to settings we're going to come here to site availability and we're going to click upgrade to publish so as you guys can see Squarespace has a bunch of different plans you guys can choose from if you are trying to sell things you will want to choose the
Commerce plan there's the basic as well as advanced Commerce plans if you're not trying to sell anything then the business or personal plan is going to be good enough you guys can basically compare all the different features that come with these two different types of plans see which one makes sense for you but just for this video I'll go with the personal plan I'll click select for most people I recommend just choosing the annual plan since you will save 30% plus you'll get another 10% off using my code you can choose the monthly plan if
you want but that 10% off is only going to apply for that first month see I'll show you guys we'll click pay annually confirm selection so now that I've entered in all my information what we're going to do is come here to promo code we're going to add in code Charlie Chang click apply as you guys can see it takes off 10% so yeah definitely do that cuz I want you guys to save as much money as you can and then click confirm payment so when you get that annual plan it actually does come with
a free domain name which I will say is crucial for any website so after purchasing it what we'll do is Click get a free domain for a year we'll click get domain we can search for whatever domain we want but as you guys can see there are some suggestions right here let's say I just want to go with Charlie ch.net I'll click on this we'll click checkout make sure all this information is correct for your registration click save and continue and over here you'll see that we're getting that $20 discount on the domain so it's
free and we'll just confirm payment $0 due and Bam let's click done so now we can go back here to site availability set it to public click save and now if we open up a new tab and go to Charlie train.net it'll go to the website that we just built and again if I want to build another website I can come down here to the bottom left click on my name click create website and we can try to build something else as you guys can see that was super super easy they have so many different
templates so whatever type of website you're trying to build you will be able to build an amazing looking website in just about 15 minutes and before we finish up the video I do have some final tips and tricks for you guys the first one is make sure you customize the favin one of my pet peeves is definitely seeing these default favin on people's websites and so as you guys saw Squarespace makes that super easy to change I also encourage you guys to create your own custom graphics use something like Photoshop or canva and it's going
to add a lot of flare and professionalism to your website another things that if you are offering some type of service definitely do have social proof on your website so this would basically be things like testimonials and reviews anytime you are selling any type of service or product these are going to greatly increase your conversion rates if you are looking for stock images Squarespace has a ton of them for free you can also use websites like pixel.com or unsplash.com and if you're paying for Squarespace make sure to take advantage of all their amazing features for
example use their email marketing tools create onepage landing pages have a membership have a Blog maybe even host a course in the future I know I've said this enough but I just think Squarespace is such a great platform there is a reason why I've had it for 14 years and so yeah I really hope this help you guys out in creating your own website it would mean so much if you guys use my affiliate link down below if you do so you'll get that free trial and that exclusive discount by using my code and it
really does help make these free videos possible so I do want to say thank you so much in advance happy website building and if you guys got any value from this video make sure to share with a friend and also like And subscribe for more content just like this I do a ton of content about entrepreneurship personal finance and investing thank you so much for your time and I'll see you in the next video [Music] peace oh
