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

Feb 22

Have you ever found yourself torn between using traditional blog posts or sleek portfolios for your Squarespace website? You're not alone! In this episode of Think Inside the Square, we dive deep into the classic designer debate: Blog Posts vs. Portfolios. I'll guide you through the decision-making process, sharing the similarities and differences between the two to help you make the right choice.

Squarespace blog posts haven't had any major design updates in quite a while. We do have some creativity with content blocks, but when Squarespace 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. In this episode of Think Inside the Square, I'm sharing the pros and cons of blog posts compared to portfolios of projects so you can pick the right type of page for your Squarespace website. Welcome to Think Inside the Square, a podcast full of tips and tricks to help you create a Squarespace website that you're proud of. I'm your host, Becca Harpain, Squarespace expert and creator of Insidethesquare.co. In this episode, we'll be talking about the similarities and differences between two types of collection pages, blog posts, and projects inside portfolios. For a transcript of this episode, along with the links to any resources mentioned, visit insidethesquare.co/podcast. The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace, Inc. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace, Inc. 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 seven one was released and we were able to create portfolios of projects, each one with its own unique page sections and custom URL, I seriously considered moving all of my blog posts over so I could get even more creative. 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, both blogs and portfolios are what's known as a collection page. Stores and events those are also collection pages. It's one main collection of items that's displayed on this list. Blogs are a collection of blog posts and portfolios are a collection of projects. All collection pages have a nested URL structure. To reach a blog post, you have to visit the domain/blog/post. The show notes for this podcast episode are on a blog at Insidethesquare.co/podcast/30. Insidethesquare.co/podcast/30 projects, inside portfolios have the same kind of nested URL setup. It starts with your domain/portfolio/project. Another similarity between these two is the collection page itself. There's a portfolio that lists all of the projects inside, and then you have your blog list of all of the blog posts. On both of these collection pages, we add the ability to add a custom page section above and below the list that lets you get really creative. You can add an informative intro and follow up with other information on the bottom of the collection too. That's something you can do inside portfolios and inside a blog. Now, both blog posts and projects, they have a space for individualized SEO information. You can add an SEO specific title and a description, just like a standard page. Before we get into the differences, there's one more similarity that I want to mention. Pagination 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. 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. It'll do that for previous ones as well. So this automatic pagination, it's set up for you, for blog posts and for projects. 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. I'll talk about using that particular setup for my project later on in this episode. Let's talk a little bit about the differences before we get into that. 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. The first major difference categories and tags with the Squarespace blog, you can add categories and tags to every post that helps organize your content. 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. This is something I do on my own website, and this is a feature I don't think I can live without for my specific blog. If you visit forward slash Mobile, you'll see a list of all of my mobile specific tutorials. 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. I'm not sure which one I used, but both work for a summary block. This summary block lets me filter my list of tutorials so only those that are noted as mobile will be listed on that page. Another blog specific feature is comments. To be clear, you don't have to have comments toggled on, you can turn them off. I actually turned mine off because they were getting too difficult to manage on top of everything else. But if you do want to interact with your website visitors, a project can. Another blog specific feature is comments. To be clear, you don't have to have the comments toggled on, 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. Another key difference that really influenced my decision to stick with the blog is that blog posts can also be scheduled in advance. 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. Even though it's just me here inside the square, I use all three options for my blog posts. I'll write out a blog post when I get an idea for a creative code. 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. 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. 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. All right, the last thing that you'll find in blogs that you won't find in portfolios are author profiles. When you turn on an author profile, an automatic little blurb about the author gets added to the blog post. It can contain text and images and links. I'm the only author on my blog, so I don't use this feature, but I did want to mention it. So you've got categories and tags, comments and scheduling and author profiles. So why would you want to go for a portfolio instead of a blog? The design features, my friend. It's all about how good it can look. A blog post is a single static page made up of content blocks, these blocks stacked on top of each
Beyond the Basics: Advanced CSS for Squarespace: insidethesquare.co/beyond
Episode: 21: Squarespace blogging: what makes a good blog post great: insidethesquare.co/podcast/21
Portfolio support article: support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035611791-Portfolio-pages
Blog support article: support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543727-Blogging-with-E