Are you a writer or author looking to start a brand new site or completely overhaul and rebrand your current one?
Maybe you’ve seen other sites or online portfolios of other writers, authors, and/or journalists in your niche and compared it to your amateurish, boring, or outdated one and desire to upgrade it.
The good news is that there are website builders with professional and beautiful templates that offer flexible designs to help you tailor your site to your liking.
However, your site isn’t just about good design. You’re going to need more than that to ensure that your site is attractive and appealing to your audience.
For example having a calendar for events, a writer/author bio or portfolio, an appealing spot for reader reviews, and/or pull-out quotes among other features.
You may also want to sell products like digital books and printables that can help you sell your work right from your website or integrate with popular platforms and marketplaces like Goodreads and Amazon.
All these require some inspiration from which you can model your designs after and one of the best platforms that can help you with that is Squarespace.
What Is Squarespace?
Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that’s committed to clean design so you can build a website that’s professional, easy to maintain, classy, expensive-looking, and best of all, stunning.
It’s renowned for its polished yet trendy website templates, which can help anyone, from bloggers to authors and more reflect their personality, and have a great look and feel that reflects their brand identity.
Not only that, but it also has some unique features specifically for writers and authors that allow them to organize their posts into tags or categories, enable/disable comments for specific posts, set time limits on comments, make posts load faster on mobile devices, and push content automatically to social media platforms.
Also included are beautiful customization, native tools to support creatives, bloggers, and small business owners, integrations like G Suite and PayPal, eCommerce functions, SEO tools, and easy integration with social media platforms.
You don’t need any technical or coding skills to use it, so you can showcase your work in a matter of hours regardless of your technical prowess, and while it may take a while to get used to it, it’ll be worth it in the end.
Plus, it offers high-quality visual designs and better value for money than other website builders.
How To Pick A Squarespace Template For A Writer Or Author Site
When you’re trying to narrow down the many website builders on the market, several features are more important than others. These include professionally designed templates with attractive designs, customization and branding options, ease of use, and other extras.
However, there are some other key decisions staring you down such as picking the platform itself, your main objectives, and more.
In order to stand out though, you’ll need an amazing template that not only matches your personality, but that is well designed, organized, and will hold and disseminate your unique brand.
In that case, some of the main features you want to look out for include:
- Responsive mobile design
- Clean, easy to navigate pages
- Easy to use forms
- Buttons for purchases
- Reviews, endorsements, or testimonials
- Search fields (targeted and wide)
- Integrations with mailing lists and social media
- Strong security technology like spam filter and backup system, plus fast page loads, SEO, and an easy-to-use CMS
- Maintenance system for managing updates for features and security so your site can be in tip-top shape all through
- Analytics and tracking metrics to help you increase and enhance engagement with your audience
The list is endless, but these are some of the important features that you need to check for in the Squarespace template you’ve settled on. Whichever you choose, make sure it checks all the boxes in terms of functionality, ease of use, support, and affordability.
Best Squarespace Template For Writers And Authors
The Squarespace team has developed lots of professionally designed and attractive templates that are suitable to almost every use case from bloggers to legal practitioners, photographers, and more.
Each template is fully responsive, but with the slew of template options available for you, it may be harder to pick the one that’s suitable for your writer and author site needs. We did the legwork for you and picked out 10 of the best Squarespace templates for your writer or author site.
Montauk
If you’re a writer, this is a great template for showcasing your work. It features a simple layout but beautiful design so that your readers or audience can focus more on your portfolio and not on the site itself.
It also allows you to show some highlights of your previous work, previous or current clients, your writing experience, and also publish blog posts with insights or thoughts along with any other published work.
2. Bedford
This is another great Squarespace template for writers with a classic aesthetic and headers that emphasize your featured posts. However, these can’t be customized, but you can have a varying sidebar content for each of the pages on the site.
It also allows you to show people your extensive portfolio, check out your latest blog posts, learn more about your work, mission, and accomplishments.
3. Brine
Love writing novels? Brine is the perfect Squarespace template solution for authors. It allows you to have a strong online presence that gives you the space to market your novels to many readers, and for new authors, it’s even easier to showcase your very first novel using Brine.
You can tailor your homepage to your liking using images or fonts that reflect your novels whether it’s fiction or fantasy, and visitors can learn more about the novels, their sequels, meet the author (you), and get extras that you avail to them.
In the main navigation is a Buy The Book button that gives readers more options to click to buy your novels by linking out to popular purveyors. It also has a blog you can use to boost organic SEO by publishing blog posts.
4. Mercer
Mercer is another good Squarespace template for authors but it’s also a remarkable fit for writers. You can hone the overall styling of the site, recreate the homepage design to feature your books or series of books, display the synopsis of each book, and add book covers that link to each book.
It also allows you to allow readers to read reviews, subscribe to your email lists through MailChimp, and even link out to Amazon to buy your books.
This way, you have a superior platform upon which you can promote your books and your writing work, connect and engage with your audiences or readers, and share news, blog posts, updates, and much more with them.
An Announcement Bar can be added to keep them apprised of news, events, and programs in a logical and organized manner, so you can seamlessly promote your books and services in one presentation.
5. Rally
The Squarespace Rally template allows you to weave your blog posts using beautiful banner images that streamline your images and text in an alluring way.
It features a long, scrolling homepage that engages your audience and website visitors, and you can also publish content related to your books or writing services and sell, especially if you’re looking for eCommerce functionality.
Like other writer and author templates mentioned above, you can use Rally to let your visitors learn more about you, your newest posts or books, upcoming events or where you’ll be for your next appearance.
You can also display book synopses with testimonials and even add links out for those who want to purchase your books.
If you want, you can share your tips, advice, tricks and other information with visitors, and get them to subscribe through the MailChimp integration available with this template. This way, you can engage them more and they can get your expertise delivered to their inboxes through an e-newsletter.
6. Mojave
Mojave is a great template for authors. It offers an ideal choice for you to have an online presence that conveys your work accurately in terms of its depth and scope.
You can market your books, give author background details, present your writing work across several genres, and showcase your experiences in your field.
This template allows you to add calls to action to prompt visitors to dive deeper into your site’s book section, meet you the author, and learn more about what you do. You can also feature your most recent posts on the home page if you want.
The navigation is robust, and there are several other ways they can engage with you including podcasts, columns, video clips, articles, and much more. An events page is also included to allow you to share your scheduled appearances so they can meet and connect with you in person.
7. Rover
If you love storytelling, Rover makes for the best Squarespace template as it allows your passion to shine through your site.
You can market your books, whether they’re single titles or novels in a trilogy series, and keep things simple by enabling your readers to learn more about the books and about you as an author. They can also subscribe to your e-newsletter or contact you.
The template delivers a clean and elegant site that’ll allow your books to be the center of attention, and you can build it out as reader reviews trickle in or as subsequent books in your series are availed, so you can update your site as you keep adding more stories to your repertoire.
8. Hunter
Hunter is an excellent choice for travel bloggers or writers.
It offers flexibility and has a sophisticated yet classy demeanor that allows you to feature the places you have visited across the world, your top takeaways for every location, exciting adventures, travel tips, great travel stories, and suggestions for memorable travel experiences.
It also has a photo gallery that visitors can peruse through lots of images that tell a story of your journey, and even link out to SmugMug where they can buy amazing photography.
The site can evolve with every new experience as you can update it on your own, and its intuitive nature makes it an ideal choice for you to start a blog that’ll inform, educate, and inspire many readers wherever they are in the world.
9. Impact
Impact is an ideal template for writers venturing out into blogging and as it offers everything you need from a forum for discussions to a page with updates on different aspects of whatever you share, among others.
It features a parallax home page that opens with a featured topic, and flows into the most recent posts feed, calls to action to invite your audience to meet the writers, learn about you, and also get into the action by being involved in your work or the causes you support.
Visitors can also go to the blog to read posts on various topics, updates, and even view the team behind the blog. There’s a search functionality that helps the find specific information quickly, which is broken down into categories for easier navigation and retrieval.
10. Skye
This is one of the best Squarespace templates for writers who want to publish content on their websites through a blog. It has a magazine look and feel with an experience that’s streamlined and a grid layout that’s well balanced and clean.
It also offers the option to include author profiles and next post or last post preview buttons. You can showcase your name, your photo, and author or write your bio below the post or within the sidebar. This way, your readers get to read more about you, especially those who are new to your work or your site.
Wrapping Up
Squarespace is a great website builder that’s ideal for most websites especially for writers and authors who are interested in boosting their visibility.
However, you need to pick a template that will suit your personal and/or business needs, while meeting all your marketing and content management objectives.
With these 10 Squarespace templates for writers and authors though, you’re sure to get something that’ll match your personality and brand, and deliver the ease of use, functionality, and support you need all at an affordable price.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.