Introducing Squarespace Courses

I’ve been a fan of Squarespace for many a year now for it’s intuitive design platform and the way that form and function is so beautifully paired. I’m yet to find another web builder platform that’s so easy to use and so easy to make look stylish enough for the biggest design nerd to be happy.

Squarespace are also constantly iterating their product suite, whether it’s adding products such as Squarespace Campaigns (email marketing) or improving the commerce function or whether a complete overhaul as we saw with the introduction of Fluid Engine last year.

The announcement on Monday 21st of August though about the changes to how Member Areas will be changing are, I think, the biggest game changer for business owners since I’ve been working on the platform. There are a number of changes but the one I want to focus on here is the introduction of Squarespace Courses.

Squarespace are introducing Squarespace Courses as a way to easily integrate a course within your website, and it’s super easy to use. If you’ve had any experience of building (or attempting to build!) a course before you will know it can be very labour intensive especially when you are trying to match the branding with your existing website or other business assets. Well if you already have a Squarespace site then it’s all baked in and ready to go.

Things I’m really excited about:

• The Digital Products are already included in a Business Plan. If you’re a custom client of mine then you are most likely already on the Business Plan as I will have added custom code to your site.

• The same super easy drag and drop system applies, you can create the course and then add them to your page organisation like any other web page.

• There are bundling options! Yes I know this is really important for some of you, as you might want to offer a a few different training options with a discount….now you can.

Things that could be improved:

• Whilst the smorgasboard of product improvements are great in Squarespace, sometimes the pricing gets a little confusing. The Business Plan will include the starter Digital Products plan but with quite a high transaction fee on sales (9% currently). At time of writing you will need to scale up your Digital Products plan (separately from your website plan) if you want to benefit from reduced or zero transaction fees. I’m going to dig into this a little bit more once the product is live to everyone to see how things are likely to affect my customers.

In summary, I think this is a great addition and I’m not only excited for my customers old and new in terms of what this means for additional revenue streams for their business but I’m buzzing with ideas for my own business and how to incorporate courses into my work. It’s been something I’ve been working on for a while but this has been the perfect catalyst to really get going.

I’ll leave a link below so that you can take a look at how my course development is progressing!