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Dear Sandra,
Your site is built on a template called MONTAUK.
We are using "folders," "pages" and a "blog" page to put content onto your site. Your home page is a "page" with text and image blocks on it. There are "quote" blocks to showcase your blurbs, and both text and images are linked to deliver readers to your books' pages.
Logging In
To log in to your site, put in the address with /config at the end. You’ll be asked for your credentials. (Email address and password.)
Even with your custom domain name set up to point to your SS site, when you’re working on your site, you’ll see a different URL on the top of your browser. (Mine like https://sandra-block-md.squarespace.com instead of sandraablock.com.) Don’t worry! This is normal. When you’re building links to your pages use the pretty URL address you want readers to see. It will work, I promise.
Note: I am currently an “admin” for your site. If you look at SETTINGS=>PERMISSIONS you’ll see me in there. It is up to you whether to leave me in there or remove me. After we’re done with the design process, I’d never fiddle without your permission.
The Back End
When you’re logged into SS you’ll see a menu on the left side. OR an arrow in the upper left corner that, when clicked, gives you that left-hand menu.
The menu choice you’ll use most is the top one: PAGES. That’s where all your site’s content is edited. When you need to add or change something, 90% of the time it will be in the PAGES part of your site.
When you click on PAGES you’ll see a map of your site. At the top you’ll see MAIN NAVIGATION and below it all your main menu choices, in the order they appear on your nav bar. If you were to grab any of these and move them, you’d see (after refreshing the page) that the order of the nav bar has changed to reflect your reordering.
That + beside the words MAIN NAVIGATION? If you click it, that creates a new page. The + to make a new page also appears below the items in any folders you have. But you may still drag something into or out of a folder at any time.
Page Configuration (the "gear" menu)
Hover the mouse over one of your pages. You will see a GEAR appear. When you click on that gear, a menu appears on the right-hand side of the screen. There is some important stuff on this menu. There are three places where the name of the page appears: Navigation title, page title and a little further down URL slug. I find it helpful to keep these things the same. Your pages should be named in a way that makes it easy for you to remember them. So if you’re writing an email you can just tap out the address of the page you want to include without having to look at your website to see what the page is called.
And you will notice a check box for ENABLED. If you uncheck it, the page becomes invisible to the outside world, but not to you. It’s name will be grayed out in the menu so you’ll remember it’s not enabled.
Also on this menu is a tab labeled "media." Since we're using the MONTAUK template, any image housed here will become a big banner in the middle of your page. Since banners are so horizontal and book cover art is vertical, we are not using this feature.
Tip: if you're ever getting unpredictable images on pages, check that media thumbnail. It's probably the reason.
Also in this menu is the ability to add a password for the page. We’re not using that ability for anything right now, but if you ever wanted to create private content, that’s one way to accomplish it. You can password ANY PAGE on a squarespace site.
Most SS menus also have an ADVANCED choice. See it on the top right? If you find yourself needing to inject code on a webpage, it goes there. When would you do this? Facebook tracking pixels and conversion pixels spring to mind. Or third-party apps.
"Not Linked" Pages = Hidden Pages
Scroll down below this familiar map and find another list of pages under the heading NOT LINKED. These are also pages in your site, but they do not appear in the main nav. They are hidden!
So what’s down here? A few things:
1. Stuff that’s hidden only because it acts as a reservoir of material that we’re pulling onto other pages. IE a gallery of cover images and a product page where we’ve stored your items for sale. You can see that the gallery is denoted by a picture icon and the products with a $.
2. Stuff that's hidden because it's only meant for certain visitors--like reviewers who get ARCs, or people who are responding to a freebie offer.
3. Pages that we’re building or not ready to put into the main nav. We can drag those suckers out of the NOT LINKED menu into the main nav whenever we’re ready.
In fact, the page you're reading right now is a hidden page.
Editing Content
To edit content, navigate to the page you’d like to update. When you bring the mouse over the content, you’ll see PAGE CONTENT: EDIT | SETTINGS. Choose edit. (Settings would take us to our configuration menu, the same one we activated with the gear in our pages menu.)
Now all the content that’s part of the main portion of the page is editable. NOTE: Your site also has an editable footer where I've linked to the privacy policy. Each page ALSO has an editable footer space that we are not currently using. There are separate EDIT markers for those which appear if you hover over them.
1. You can highlight text and then edit it. You can format text that’s already there. Note: Squarespace gives us a normal text setting and a couple of heading selections. H1 is for big title text and H2 & H3 are usually medium-sized.
Note: Changing the color of these is a design function. Visit DESIGN and STYLE EDITOR to see how it works.
2. Hover your mouse around the edges of objects and text and you’ll see insertion points appear! It takes a little time to get used to these and their functions. If you click to insert something you’ll get a vast menu of choices. SS is built to accommodate restaurants, artists, musicians, etc. So some functions like OpenTable won’t be useful. The choices you’re most likely to make are: text, images, buttons, spacers and lines. And products! The products you’ve already built are available to you for insertion on a page.
3. Moving stuff around on a SS page takes some practice. Grab an object and move it around, watching all the places that SS volunteers to put it. The page will divide itself vertically into columns, sometimes with unexpected results. You can always hit CANCEL and then DISCARD to undo the mess you’ve made!
Squarespace offers you a tutorial on adding stuff (called blocks) here. If you watch any Squarespace tutorials at all, watch this one!!!
You can also add a brand new page and then edit it. Tutorial here.
Adding a New Book, Step by Step
Okay, so you wrote a new book or series.
1. First duplicate one of your existing book pages! You can do this from that book's "gear menu."
2. Give the duplicated page a name, which should be the title of your book. Then edit it to have the right title and text and links. Go to your book's Amazon page to get the Embed code for the preview widget. NOTE: before your book is published you won't have one of those. So you can use a "teardrop" insertion point to just add the cover art as an image instead.
3. Drag the page into the appropriate folder
4. Click the gear to see how that page is configured. Edit the URL slug until you’re happy with the address of the page. Save those changes.
5. You'll want a piece of 3D art for your home page or that book's page while it's in pre-order. You can ask me for the 3D image or you can get one from fiverr. (Type 3d book into fiverr and lots of vendors will pop up.)
Blogging
When you navigate to the blog page, you'll see a "+" for adding a post. After you write a couple of blog posts, all the features will become more obvious. Things to notice: DRAFT is the default, so you'll have to change that to publish.
And the editing pop-up has some choices in the top right-hand corner. Under "social" you can ask SS to publish the post to Twitter and Facebook for you!
Under "options" there is an excerpt box. If you were to pull blog posts onto another page on your site, this excerpt text would be used as the teaser.
NOTE: You can add LOTS of things to a blog post w/o using code. Add a button that says "sign up for our newsletter." Add a slate of social media icons. Add a list of events just by calling up your "events" in a summary block... There are lots of features if you poke around.
IMPORTANT: there are more choices you can make about how blogging and commenting work. They are not found here, though. You must go out to SETTINGS / BLOGGING and find menus for commenting / moderation, etc.
Thank you!
Please don’t hesitate to let me know what I’ve forgotten to tell you. I want you to feel good about using your site, experimenting with changes and occasionally making mistakes. If anything is driving you nuts, I’d love to know.