Latest / ThinkInsideTheSquare / 30: Blog vs Portfolio - which one is the right choice for your Squarespace website?

Transcript

30: Blog vs Portfolio - which one is the right choice for your Squarespace website? · ThinkInsideTheSquare

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Square Space Blog Post.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Square Space Blog Post haven't had any major design updates in quite a while.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: We do have some creativity with content blocks, but when Square Space released portfolios of projects, a lot of designers decided to move their content to a portfolio to take advantage of the new creative design options, and a lot of them regretted it.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: In this episode of Think Inside the Square, I'm sharing the pros and cons of Blog Post compared to portfolios of projects, so you can pick the right type of page for your Square Space website.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Think Inside the Square, a podcast full of tips and tricks to help you create a Square Space website that you're proud of.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, becca Harpane, squarespace expert and creator of InsideTheSquareco.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: In this episode, we'll be talking about the similarities and differences between two types of collection pages blog posts and projects inside portfolios.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: For a transcript of this episode, along with the links to any resources mentioned, visit InsideTheSquareco forward slash podcast.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace Incorporated.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: This content is not affiliated with Squarespace Incorporated.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I've been blogging on Squarespace for years and I like the way that I can create a unique blog post style using content blocks, but when Squarespace 7.1 was released and we were able to create portfolios of projects, each one with its own unique page sections and custom URL.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: I seriously considered moving all of my blog posts over so I could get even more creative.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: But I am so glad that I didn't, because at first glance, portfolios of projects they seem like a designer's dream, but blog posts have some seriously cool features that my content needs Now.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Both blogs and portfolios are what's known as a collection page.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Stores and events those are also collection pages.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: It's one main collection of items that's displayed on this list.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Blogs are a collection of blog posts and portfolios are a collection of projects.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: All collection pages have a nested URL structure.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: To reach a blog post, you have to visit the domain.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Forward slash the blog URL.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Forward slash the post URL.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: The show notes for this podcast episode are on a blog at insidethesquareco.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Forward slash podcast.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Forward slash 30 for episode 30.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Projects inside portfolios have the same kind of nested URL setup.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: It starts with your domain.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Forward slash the portfolio.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Forward slash the project.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Another similarity between these two is the collection page itself.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: There's a portfolio that lists all of the projects inside and then you have your blog list of all of the blog posts.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: On both of these collection pages.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: We add the ability to add a custom page section above and below the list.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: That lets you get really creative.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: You can add an informative intro and follow up with other information on the bottom of the collection too.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: That's something you can do inside portfolios and inside a blog.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Now, both blog posts and projects they have a space for individualized SEO information.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: You can add an SEO specific title and a description, just like a standard page.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Before we get into the differences, there's one more similarity that I want to mention Pagination.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Pagination is the automatic navigation that Squarespace creates for you, and it'll place this at the very bottom of the blog post or the project.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: If you have a project or a post, after that one, you can see a link that will take you directly to the next one on the list.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: It'll do that for previous ones as well.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: So this automatic pagination it's set up for you for blog posts and for projects.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: You can hide it with custom CSS if you don't like it, but I really like that navigation, especially for my online courses and training series.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: I'll talk about using that particular setup for my project later on in this episode.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the differences before we get into that.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Even with so much in common, when you're deciding which one to use for your own site a blog with blog posts or a portfolio with projects there are some important differences that will influence your decision.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: The first major difference Categories and tags.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: With a Squarespace blog, you can add categories and tags to every post.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: That helps organize your content.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: These categories and tags can help people navigate to related info, but you can also use them to share links to related content using archive blocks and summary blocks in Squarespace.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: This is something I do on my own website and this is a feature I don't think I can live without.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: For my specific blog, if you visit inside the squareco forward slash mobile, you'll see a list of all of my mobile specific tutorials.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: These are all in the same blog, with all of my other tutorials on a completely different page, but I wanted to highlight the mobile specific tutorials, so I'm using a summary block that I filtered for that specific category or tag.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure which one I used, but both work for a summary block.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: This summary block lets me filter my list of tutorials, so only those that are noted as mobile will be listed on that page.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Another blog specific feature is comments.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: To be clear, you don't have to have the comments toggled on.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: You can totally turn them off for the entire blog or even an individual post at a time, but if you do want to interact with your website visitors, you can add a comment section to do that, and this is a feature only available in blog posts.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Another key difference that really influenced my decision to stick with the blog is that blog posts can also be scheduled in advance.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: You can create a blog, save it as a draft, set it to needs review or schedule it to be published at a specific date and time.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Even though it's just me here inside the square, I use all three options for my blog posts.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: I'll write out a blog post and I get an idea for a creative code.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Once that post is ready for a new video, I'll set it to needs review, so when I have time to record some fresh content, I can see what posts are ready for a video.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: After I've created the video and I've added it to the post, I'll schedule it to be published within an hour of my YouTube video going live and an hour before my email list is sent out to subscribers.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: To be honest, the time slider in Squarespace is a bit tricky and the minutes are never exact, but I settle for close enough to the hour when I need to Alright.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: The last thing that you'll find in blogs that you won't find in portfolios are author profiles.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: When you turn on an author profile, an automatic little blurb about the author gets added to the blog post.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: It can contain text and images and links.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: I'm the only author on my blog so I don't use this feature, but I did want to mention it.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: But you've got categories and tags, comments and scheduling in author profiles, so why would you want to go for a portfolio instead of a blog?
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: The design features, my friend.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: It's all about how good it can look.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: A blog post is a single static page made up of content blocks.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: These blocks stack on top of each other in a classic 12 column grid, which means you can create equal width columns of content in sets of two or three or four, but there isn't an option to add page sections.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: We can't have anything in a blog post that becomes full width.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Project pages are made up of page sections that have full, fluid engine design flexibility, even down to adjusting mobile separately.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: We're talking full width images, dividers, list sections, galleries, the auto layouts we love.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: All these design features are the major selling points of projects inside a portfolio and while you don't have a simple toggle to use author profiles on a project, if you did want to feature that, you can create a saved section that's easy to reuse on any project you want to add it to Definitely a cool feature available within projects.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: It's all about that design flexibility.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Before we move on to some use cases here in this episode, let's do a super quick recap.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Both blog posts and projects have pagination, a nested URL structure and individual SEO data.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Projects are made up of page sections, while blog posts only have one main block of content for that blog.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: You don't get to add page sections.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: That's specific for projects.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Blog posts can have categories and tags which can be used by summary blocks and archive blocks.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Those aren't available in a portfolio.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Blog posts can also be scheduled in advance and you can enable comments, something that you can't do with a project in a portfolio.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: The high level takeaway here is that if you want to have a lot more flexibility with the layout, go with projects, but if you have a lot of content and you want to organize it for your users by categories or tags or have comments to interact with them.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Go with the blog.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: But before you make your decision, let me share a few examples of Squarespaceers who decided to use a portfolio and few who decided to use a blog.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: In fact, squarespace was originally designed, when it was very first released, to help photographers showcase their work, and photographers can create a super visual portfolio.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: I would recommend a portfolio of projects to show off any of your work.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: If you're a photographer, using Squarespace, you can use stunning galleries to showcase your different photography styles, display client testimonials, highlight specific projects, even create full-width slideshows.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: The design flexibility you have inside a project is perfect for a photographer.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Now, if you're an educator, like myself, I'd recommend a blog.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: You can pre-schedule your lessons, organize them by theme with tags and categories, and you can provide updates on educational trends and answer questions in the comments section.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: A blog is a great choice.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Again, that scheduling feature and the categorizing and tags are two features that really stand out.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: For me, as an educator, I'd recommend a blog.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Now, I've seen some successful UX designers create projects on their Squarespace website and again, it's that design flexibility that makes it a great choice.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: They were able to create an interactive gallery and a feature for customized designs that really highlighted how diverse their projects were.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: I recently consulted with a small gym who used a blog.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Now, this blog was perfect for the membership area of their site because it included weekly workout routines that were scheduled, blog posts and an encouraged community engagement through comments and discussions on those weekly routines.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: One last use case for a blog would be a private event coordinator who wanted to showcase their past events with photos and descriptions.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: You might think, hey, this is Super visual, are you sure they don't need a project.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: But this particular event coordinator wanted to organize their past events by location and tags for event types and vendors that they worked with.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: This gave them a chance to use summary blocks to showcase their experience with specific event types on those services pages, which would have been really tedious to set up manually, using a project that couldn't be late to a summary block or an archive block, plus some of their vendors.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: They were able to use their own tags to link back to the events, which created some backlinks, which was good for SEO, but I'll save that concept for another episode.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: I have one more use case about using a portfolio instead of a blog, and that's my own.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: I just finished a brand new training series called Beyond the Basics Advanced CSS for Squarespace.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Now, inside this training, it's a collection of resource guides and a series of videos, and both of them are portfolios of projects.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: The content doesn't need to be categorized or scheduled or in any specific order, but I did want to have that pagination to help direct people from one to the next.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I also wanted that nested URL feature so it'd be easy to link people to the right content and when people are on the Additional Resources page, they can see all the resources in a grid with the corresponding icon.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Now here's where it gets really interesting and one of the main reasons I went for a portfolio of projects instead of a blog.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: I did want that pagination, but I wanted a unique header and footer, specific for this training series, on all of the pages, and here is how I created it.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: I created a standard header and a standard footer page section specific for this unique training series, and once I've completed those and they looked great on desktop and great on mobile I added them to my saved sections.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: So every single time I was creating a new lesson or a new resource, all I had to do was select Add Section Save Sections and click on that new header.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: And at the bottom of the page, add Section, save Sections and click on that new footer.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: I even threw a code into the new header that would hide the standard website header and footer so it looks like a completely separately designed unique website.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: How cool is that?
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Literally three clicks to create this effect on a portfolio page.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: I think I'll have to do a tutorial video about that soon.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: Not a lot of people know about that workaround and it made my training series look so good.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: If you wanna see some screenshots of that portfolio setup inside my new training series, check it out on the sales page at insidethesquareco.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Forward slash beyond and I'll link to that in the show notes.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: All right, so those are some use cases.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I kind of rambled a bit, so let me pull it back.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Blog versus portfolio Both are collection pages with nested URLs, seo metadata for those individual pages and posts, and both of them have pagination.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Blogs can be categorized and have tags.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: They can be scheduled and advanced Super great for my own business, where I share a new tutorial on Tuesday and a new podcast on Thursday.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Also worked great for that local gym that I consulted with so they can write their weekly workouts in advance and schedule them, which reminds me the comments.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Blogs can have comments and you can use those to interact with your audience.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Projects inside a portfolio they don't have comments.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: They don't have categories or tags, but they do have a lot more options when it comes to the flexibility of the design.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Projects are made up of page sections, so you can get really creative with the layouts.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Perfect for any visual portfolio, like a photographer or a UX designer.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: All right, that wraps it up for this particular episode of Think Inside the Square.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: I hope all of those examples have helped you figure out the right choice for your own unique Squarespace website.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: I wanna add a few more examples to my list, so let me know in the comments or DM me on Instagram.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Think Inside the Square.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I'm curious if you decided to have a blog or a portfolio of projects and which feature influenced your decision.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Let me know.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: I'll see you in the next one.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Bye, hey there, squarespace-er, still listening, awesome.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: I have a quick favor to ask.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: I'm still pretty new to this whole podcast thing and I've heard that the reviews and the ratings are really important to get my content in front of people who don't know me yet.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: So if you have a few seconds, could you do me a favor and leave me a review wherever you happen to be listening to this episode.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: I'd really appreciate your support.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for tuning in and, most importantly, have fun with your Squarespace website.