How to Become a Freelance Squarespace Designer [Video Podcast - Part 3 of 4]

In this video, I talk through becoming a Squarespace designer, why to use Squarespace, and how to start a freelance web design career on Squarespace. Just like kids learn to speak before they can write, learning Squarespace can be a great introduction to website design.

Transcript (by

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of how to become a Squarespace designer in this episode, this is one of my favorite parts of this process. This is something that. A lot of companies do really well. And it's how they maximize profits and how they maximize growth because building or servicing one person in a unique way is a lot of work.

But if you have systems in place and you have templates and you have things started already, it makes it very easy to scale. So this episode here, episode three is ma just about major. Time savers. This episode is so good to me. I'm so excited to be sharing what we're going to be talking about. In this episode, we're going to cover four things.

A concept called deliberate 80. We're going to talk about getting websites up fast. We're going to talk about templates. We're going to talk about building an internal process, but building the internal process pro is probably the most, the hardest part, but the most helpful part. So you'll have a process with your client, but you also have your own process.

So we're going to cover all that in this episode, with that said to learn more and to get to. Connected. We are@spacebaragency.com. And if you go there space by agency.com forward slash newsletter, you can sign up for the newsletter. We send out a weekly newsletter helping you optimize your website for SEO purposes.

And so if that's, that's something you need, or you have a Squarespace website and you're looking to optimize, we do free tips and tricks. Something that at scale is very hard to do, but we do it because we know. We want to impact as many people as possible in a positive way. So with that, let's get into today's to into today's episode, episode three major time savers.

Now let's take a look at this first one. So the first one is called deliver 80. This concept for me helps combat perfectionism. So deliver 80. Is this idea that when you're working with a client that you deliver your project and you deliver your work at 80%. Not a hundred percent. The reason being this is the thinking.

So when you become a skilled designer, you could probably build a website, a solid base website in less than six hours. Let's just say in a day you can build a solid website in less than a day. But what tends to happen is to go from 80% to a hundred percent, or even say 90% to 95% that could take. Two to three days it's because at that point you start spending 10 hours customizing the footer, or you spend five hours trying to figure out the main, the navigation, or you spend five hours trying to set up a blog or something to look and feel a certain way.

And what I've learned is, especially when you're doing the first iteration, you could spend 17 hours and absolutely love the footer and be sold on it. But then this thing happens where the client says. I don't really like it. And you just spent so much time invested so much time and energy into it. And to you, it was a really important part until the client wasn't and maybe they kind of like it, but maybe they don't and you're not going to really know until you get it in front of them.

Now, there is something to be said, there is something to be said that on the other side of this, you don't want to deliver trash work. And that for sure is a big. Thing, but as you grow and you get better delivering an 80, does two things, number one, a short deadline pushes more from you. So there's a quote, something to the extent of the average of a person can be doubled.

If the situation demand it. So if the situation demands that you say I'm going to get the majority of the site done in less than a day, well, that can really push you to get things going and make decisions faster. So you're not sitting on, should it be like this or like that? Should I do this or should I do that?

Or should it be like this? It'd be like that. And all of that really helps. It just really, really helps you find a place where you can focus and get the work to where it needs to be. To start. I have a video on YouTube called deliver 80. If you watch that, I go more in depth on, on this concept and how it works and how you can do it.

But the main thing has really questioned your process and maybe audit your processing your time and take notes. As you build a site, see where you spend the majority of your time for me, I could build. A solid base, get to 80% on most websites in less than four hours. I could probably even do it into mainly because I know what I'm looking for.

And I know what I need to get started to build the website, to customize it, to get it to what they need. There's another two hours. And then to really make it their own that's where additional time comes in. But there's a certain part where you could spend a whole lot of time, custom coding. One thing that they look at and say, Yeah, we don't really want that.

Or we don't really like that, or it doesn't really fit with what we're doing. So concept number one major time-saver deliver at 80. If you can move through your process quicker, get to 80 quicker and send it to the client quicker. In that regard, again, you can't send trash. If you send trash, that will definitely negate this.

Uh, delivering an 80, is this idea that if you can speed up your process and not get caught in perfectionism and get caught in this world, I don't know how to do this, this, this, or I don't know. How to make the right decision on a, B or C. Well, now you could deposit those questions to the client and say, Hey, I'm, I'm not, I'm feeling good, little bit, stuck it up.

The footer, the blog and the homepage, everything else is built out. Now take a look at it. Let me know what you're thinking. Tell me what you'd like. Tell me what you don't like. Tell me what is interesting and what's not interesting. Tell me what direction you're feeling and what direction you're not feeling.

And that can give you tips and advice because as a web designer, as well, you're exposed to a lot more websites. I would imagine you're exposed to 10 times as many websites and design as your client. Some clients are going to be knowledgeable, but most clients are not. They're only going to see a few websites here and there that they really like often it's their competitors.

And so your, your knowledge is. In, in one category, their knowledge is in a whole nother category. And now you're trying to satisfy your category when their category is so much easier. So simple website. Simple sections navigation works on mobile homepage, scrolling pages of background, images of like entire sections with background images and beautiful font font.

That looks good together. If you get those core things down, the rest of it is K. And, and from there, you can start to customize further in the process when you get closer. To those items that people are looking for. Number two, getting websites up fast. Now this is kind of a tale of number one, but what I really want to touch on here with number two is in getting websites up fast is that when you have a website and you're in the middle of the process, when you push yourself to work quicker, not just deliver 80, but you do push yourself to work quicker.

You also have to make decisions faster. Again, so this kind of dovetails on number one, that we've already touched on deliver 80, but number two is get websites up fast, work with your client to move quickly. The reason being design is an ever-changing process. Design always can have more ideas and concepts and features.

Added to it, the way Jason fried and DHH at base camp talk about this is when they decide to create a new feature or something on their software platform, they spend one to two weeks exploring it and then putting it on paper. And then for the next four weeks after that, they just do that. If not less.

They never add to the project that they've already spent two weeks allowing it to grow. So by the time you're doing the first draft, hopefully the client's done their work and they've looked at content and you've done your work and looked at content and looked at websites and gotten a feel for where you want it to head on this project.

And so that by the time you start the project, you can continue to, you can move and you can move quickly so you can continue the process. To get the site live in a timely manner. That just helps from delays. When clients lag on content, they lag on revisions. Those are things I like. Push them on. So that projects continue to move mainly because time will only change.

Websites are going to change. If you, if you start a website last year in 2019, say November, November, December of 2019, you probably started on 7.04 Squarespace. But if you start, if you wait a few months, 7.1 would come out and it would be like, maybe we should be working on 7.1. And so those things are really a challenge that can come up where clients want to do a whole renovation, or they want to change the site completely or things like that.

And the getting websites up fast and making sure you're moving on your side in a timely manner, you can give a client a deadline two weeks, even if you know, it's going to take you two days, this isn't. I think some people might consider that. A bad thing, but it's because you have systems. Starbucks can make you a cup of coffee in less than two minutes, the exact cup you want because they have systems in place where all their drinks, you could order them the craziest combination, but they can do it quickly because they have all the equipment.

They also have all the systems in place so that things are very easy for them to move for them to, to create the drink you want. Now. That's a shorter one, but number three, let's talk about number three templates. Either you can build your own template or you could buy templates and honestly buying a template for 200 bucks, a hundred, 200, 300 bucks is so helpful.

I think the templates I have liked the most have been from ghost plugins, but those are great templates. They're beautiful. They're really easy to use. So shout out to them. They've done a great job. I haven't tried it. Many templates, but templates I've purchased have been from ghosts and they have been wonderful at the same time with templates, you could build your own templates, reason.

This could be important as you can start all your settings and all your pages the way you want. So that makes it really easy for you to get started. Squarespace has done a really good job with 7.1 of simplifying that part of the process. If you are a designer, you would have to go in. On 7.0, I would have a design page that would have all these different elements on it.

It would have heading one, heading two, heading three body text link, text, different image blocks. It would have the form because the form button had its own button. It'd have a small, medium and large bind, and it would have all of that on an overlay because it was certain color styles for an overlay for all of those items.

And then it would have all those styles on just like a regular page. And then you would have to put a bunch of stuff in the footer as well. Because those styles are a little bit different as well. And you have to have the main navigation set up with something in the primary nav and is something in the secondary.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's great. Don't even worry about it. But if you do know what I'm talking about, you know, how. There are so many things you can customize, which is great. It gives you a lot of control, but as a designer, you don't want to have to sit there and change the font for 70 items and change the color for 70 items.

You want to have something that's almost already pre-built pre-structured for you in a very simple way to get started now, 7.1. Does this really well. And so you only have to change one or two things to get everything structured the way you want. But with 7.0, building out things like this templates were so helpful, even one template I used to have on 7.0.

I'm reminiscing now. So one template I used to have was like a blog set up with three or four sample hosts. And what I would do is there's a Squarespace websites or square websites, something like this.com or.org, where they have a plugin that you can download. And it allows you to duplicate pages from one site to another.

And so what I do is I'd have the design page, which we duplicate into a new site. I'd also have this blog set up that we duplicate into a new site. And when we duplicate everything, it's a new site, it was already created. So all I had to do was very quickly go in there and start setting up the design styles as I want it.

And part of that, let me go back to number two for a moment, getting websites up fast, what I would do. And some of you, if you're watching the video, you'll see this, but I have this thing called tine timer. It was recommended in the book. Just make time by I think Justin nap and. Jason nap or something like this.

There's two authors. It's a yellow cover make time. I think it's make time. That's the name of the book? Anyway, there's this thing called time timer. And I just put it on my desk. It goes up to 120 minutes. It's a way to visualize time and you can do this on your phone, but I like having a separate visual where you just set it to a certain time and it shows like.

You could say, it's like, I have it set at like 60 minutes right now. And as I'm looking at it, it'll just start counting down 60 minutes. And at the end of 60 minutes, it will beep so anytime I did a task example, like I'm going through the design process, I would time myself because it's so easy to get lost in perfectionism and spend three hours on designing the font where I haven't even created content for the website yet.

To see how it will look. And so I'm going, I may change my mind later on in their process. And this helps eliminate that wasted time where it forces you. It forces you to operate in a clear way. So with templates I'd highly recommend, however you building sites, if you're repeating the same starting process, right.

Build the template and Squarespace has made it easier on your account page. I think it's like account.squarespace.com. You can easily duplicate a site. So if you create a sample, a template site that you love, you could easily just duplicate it. And the cool part of that as well is if you have certain code in the code injection, and you have certain code in the CSS, that's.

Native to all your websites where you can have it built in there, which is awesome, which is awesome. And as you duplicate it, you don't have to do those processes again and again and again. All right. So that's number three. Now let's talk about number four, do all of these we're kind of weaving and touching each other.

They're all touching each other, but in this one, building an internal process. So for the client, they're going to get their first draft delivered. We talked about this in the last episode, they'll get their first draft delivered, say two, four, whatever six weeks from when the project starts, when I get the content and the deposit, then they'll get a date that confirms their first draft.

But in between those two timelines in between getting all the content and the deposit and giving them their first draft, I have an internal process. And the internal process looks something like this, depending on where I'm starting. Right? If it's a template or just a brand new site, number one is I get this, I started step zero, get this.

I started step one is I do all the settings and I do that in less than 20 minutes. So I'll go in business information, company, name, company, dress, whatever I have I'll fill in. I'll do everything in the settings tab. So when I go to settings on Squarespace, So to like business information and it has like geographic time zone and like all these different things.

I just make sure all that set the built-in domain. I always update that for my clients. So it matches their business name. I set the password, every website I do, I set a password for it. And so all those things I set up and get situated 20 minutes. Don't then from there, I'll go into this site and this is step two.

Uh, work on the design. Now, if I have fonts and a logo and all those things, I'll just implement it. But if I don't have that or time myself for 30 minutes, max, it's probably actually 25 minutes. And if you're just starting out, it might be more like 40 or 50 minutes. But I'll set myself 20 to 25 minutes.

Get in there, choose a heading font, choose a body font to begin that I feel matches their brand look and style, whatever that may be. I'll get those up to start the process as soon as possible. And then from there, I'll go step three of my process. Is that I will then go in and start creating pages. I don't get caught in.

Should it be like this or should it be like that? How it should look, I just start creating all the pages. So they have a homepage. Okay. Create the homepage, make sure that. The URL slug is home. Then I create the, the services page. If there's like a general services page and then other separate ser services pages, I'll put that to create all four of those pages and I'll just create the structure of the site so that all the pages are there.

I'll get the navigation set up. That's easy, getting all those features there. If there's a call to action, make sure the button's there and it says, contact us, or book a consultation or order now or whatever that is. If they have a shop on make the shop, I'll get all the content structure built 20, 30 minutes.

So at this point you could see we're literally only an hour and a half into the process and were already structured the site structure. It has a logo. It has the main pages. It has the structure of where things are headed. Then we're going to start filling and the content. Now this could take the most time, depending on the site, the build, how big it is, all of that.

What I do here. Is, I often save the homepage for last, depending on the project, but I'll save the homepage for last because by the time I've done all the other pages, I have a good sense of where the site is. So then I know where to link different things, but I'll start working on the simplest pages.

First. The reason is it builds confidence, right? You've gotten some things done and now you're building content. So I'm going to build the contact page. How easy is that? I need an image. I need Texas as contact. I need a form. I need their address and their email. Done. It's they're good to go. Right? You could add a few other elements, but basically contact pages done.

Then I'll go to any other pages are really simple terms and conditions. If they need a privacy policy, if they need it on create all those pages out so that the content fills those pages from there, I'll go to the services pages. If they have three services that are identical. And what I mean by identical is if it's like a consultancy and they have three services, I would lay out their pages.

So they're identical. And so at the top it says management consulting and another one says HR consulting and another one says, team dynamic consulting. I don't know whatever it is. I'd set up the header the same way I'd set up the next section, the same way I set the next section the same way. So basically I'm sending up, I'm creating one page and then I'm going to get it nailed down and even, yeah, for the delivery at 80 process, I make just make one services page and tell the client.

Hey, if you really love this look and feel we'll duplicate this out for the other pages, and I may need content for this, this, this, to get filled in along the way. And so, boom, that's created one services page helps me deliver 80 rather than creating five different pages. And if I really want to, I could create two different looks.

That's actually honestly easier. Sometimes create two different looks of the same service page and show it to the client. Which one do you like more? Do you like some things about this, one more, this one, and then we can combine it then going after all those pages, then go to the homepage. And every page I work on I-Time myself.

So I'll time myself for either 20, 40, or 50 minutes for a page. It shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes to create an initial page. Again, if you're like coding and customizing all that stuff. I count that above 80. So I count that after the 80% Mark, you're now working on getting a site from 80%, 85 or 90 to 95 or something like that, unless they have a very.

Unique part of their scope that they've requested that you said yes to. So with all of that, with all of that build an internal process that keeps you in check one way that this has been taught to me or shown to me that I really like is there's as a freelancer or as a small agency, you're the boss, but you also need to be the employee.

And so for example, boss, David shows up and lands a client and says, you're going to build this site this week. But employee David comes in and does the tasks as assigned. So task one settings, you have 20 minutes to complete that task to design. You have 30 minutes to complete that task three, creating the structure content.

You have 45 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it may be in that range, where you create the base. Structure of the site. Then you go into individual pages and before you know it, you have the majority of the site built something that you can show the client again. I just want to overemphasize. If you're listening to this, and you're saying, this is a rip off, this is stealing from the client.

This is you need to put more time and energy and thought into the site. There is something to be said that when you put deadlines on yourself, a person's ability can be doubled. If the situation demanded yes. Taking longer, this. If you need to take longer on a section, take longer on this section, but don't get lost in perfectionism perfectionism with design being afraid to ship the product to a client are very much so human tendencies for all designers, even if you've studied in practice for years and years and years, these are tendencies that a lot of people run into.

Now let's imagine for a moment. You combine these four time savers you deliver at 80, you set short deadlines, so you get websites up fast, you build templates for yourself, and you also build an internal process where you know what steps you're going to be doing in what order? Well, What happens when you have all those dynamics running, you have systems in place and you're getting things.

These things done well, let's imagine that you can do two websites a week and you charge 1500, let's say $2,000 a website. Well, if you could get the first draft of a website done to have them complete every week, as long as you could land the clients. Two four, six, eight projects a month. You literally could be making 15, $16,000 a month in projects and still ha still have a life outside of it.

So it's not a crazy idea. It's not a crazy idea, especially when you build the skill at this point for me, I don't say this in a bragging way at this point for me, if I. If I need to build a site, I know I can do it and I can do it fast because I've just done it so many times. You're basically in a process of making a lot of decisions.

It's like a chess master there. They get to the point of intelligence of unconsciously competent, where they know it so well that they can do it without looking. And they could just build things and, and win a game without even really thinking about it because they've been in those scenarios so many times.

And so this process. Helps you go through the decision-making process quicker, faster, and sooner. So that way you can get some more projects and the more projects you can get to the more skill you can have. Again, there is something to be said about taking your time, thinking through things, walking away, that's theirs.

You. I often come to the best discoveries walking away from something. When I get really stuck on a customization or design process, I'll spend a good amount of time, get my head wrapped around it and try to see if I can figure it out. And if I, if I can't, I walk away and often that's when the genius comes in and that's when.

The idea sets itself in to try something new that I never thought of before. But at the same time, if you start delivering an 80 getting websites up fast, building templates and building an internal process, you are going to win. You are going to thrive. So with that, thank you for listening. The last episode is going to be an important one it's about, and there may be another episode who knows, but the next episode, episode four is about getting comfortable with.

Client relationships. How do you speak to a client in a confident way? What questions should you ask on that first call? Those are the things that we're going to cover in this next episode. So I hope you can join us again. Visit us@spacebaragencydotcomorgotospacebaragency.com forward slash newsletter.

Sign up for the newsletter and that's way you could stay up to date with everything we're doing with software, with SEO, with our products, with our services, anything we're doing with training courses, everything is sent through that email. And so if you have any questions for us, please go to the website.

You could send us questions there. We have a really easy way of getting in contact with us. Love to see you again. Next episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of this and see you guys next time. Peace.