Squarespace in the public sector
As you’ll see if you visit the portfolio pages on our website, we work with a diverse range of clients. From photographers, to financial institutions. From sports clients and fitness instructors to jewellers, travel sites and charities.
We like to think we can turn our hand to any industry and over the past few years we’ve found more public sector clients coming our direction.
Quite often you’ll find public sector sites to be quite information intensive with not a lot of WOW factor.
Why is that? Well, if you think about it, government sites have to try and cover hundreds of services under one overarching brand and website. So, the flexibility on making this all singing and dancing tends to be parked, in favour of a blander all-encompassing templates such as GOV.UK. We’re not knocking that – needs must.
So, we tend to get approached for more niche public sector sites, those that need to sell their services with an eye-catching design or appeal to a completely different audience.
Applying your brand to Squarespace
One example of such a website, is Inspiring Music which is the music service website for Central Bedfordshire Council.
We built this site a few years ago after being approached by the council on the basis of a Squarespace recommendation. They needed to sell their music services, primarily to parents with children interested in music. We built a Squarespace site using the Hayden Template. We were able to fit with the council brand guidelines, so it is not completely standalone in look and feel but gives it a little more edge than their corporate site.
Squarespace is easy to use
Another advantage of building the site on Squarespace for the council and many other customers, is the intuitive admin area. Some clients prefer to manage the site themselves and we offer training as part of our service as well as support packages to suit your needs. It really depends on how much time you can invest in the day to day work to keep a website operating to best fit your business needs.
Again, sticking with Central Bedfordshire Council, we also built Find Your Future (read more details about how we approached this in our portfolio section). The team behind this site needed something to appeal to young people, offering a complete careers, education and training online guide.
Not only did we build the site, we also designed the structure and assisted on the website content, taking their team on the journey from early idea for a website to fruition.
We’ve recently revisited both sites to help ensure that they meet the new accessibility guidelines; something we blogged on recently: Website Accessibility – don’t leave your customers in the dark.
Again, this site fits in with the main corporate brand, but is a lot more appealing to young people who may not favour visiting a standard council website.
Squarespace updates – another thing you don’t need to worry about
We’ve also found customers choosing us due to the technical resilience that Squarespace offers. The previous Inspiring Music website was built on the Wordpress platform which needs regular technical updates below the surface, which if not made (and not made correctly) can cause problems on a website. Squarespace automatically updates to the latest platform and you don’t see any difference – it is just a given.
Website security is a given
Squarespace sites are also automatically built with a SSL certificate. This means your website domain name will be prefixed with ‘https://’ rather than just ‘http://’. That might not mean much to you, but basically it means your site is more secure and puts your customers minds to rest that your website can be trusted. Secure sites also tend to rank higher on Google search. So again, for any site, public sector or not this is a major benefit of Squarespace.
Website uptime & what happens when things do go wrong?
Likewise, you will want your website to be up and running 24/7. Squarespace strive for 100% uptime and if there is a problem they update customers by email and on social media.
Getting help from Squarespace
We love their speed of response here too. They have an excellent live chat service and if required you can give them access to your website to fix little problems. They can also signpost you too online help articles and send videos showing how to fix small issues on the site.
Obviously, we’re a massive advocate of Squarespace. It has so much flexibility and with the security it offers, it is a no brainer for public and private sector.
4 million websites worldwide
We’ve built 100+ websites using Squarespace and according to the Built With website, which analyses website systems around the world, there are over 4 million websites using Squarespace, with over 120K in the UK alone.
If you’re using another platform for your website, we can manage a smooth transition across to Squarespace.
As always, if you’d like to have a chat with us, then get in touch by emailing info@managemywebsite.com or contact us via our online form.