Squarespace Marketing Tip: Downloading Whitepapers in Exchange for an Email Address

If you want to give-away your whitepaper downloads in-exchange for your visitor's email address, you can do this in Squarespace 5 using tools that already exist.

Here, in a raw & un-rehearsed manor, I show you how to set this up on your own site.

SOPA, Squarespace and You

After a short break, our award-winning* podcast "Content, Structure & Style —an Unofficial Squarespace Podcast" is back with a new season. 

In our latest episode, we talk about Squarespace and Online Piracy, so don't miss it!.

Listen to Episode 201 over at contentstructurestyle.com

Squarespace Version 5 Updates

Like another early Christmas present, the folks at Squarespace decided to give current ("version 5") users several updates to the system. Those updates include several new templates, improved Squarespace Slideshow component (coming soon), and a shiny-new Custom CSS Editor. 

Being a guy who focuses entirely on designing custom templates, what excites me the most about the new release is this incredible CSS editor. 

I recorded a short screencast to show you some of my favorite features so-far:

Be sure to read the full post on what's included with the updates on the Squarespace Blog

Keep the Bots Out

I've seen a few Squarespace users in the forums asking why their "subdomain.squarespace.com" site is indexing on Google, and I even received a comment post on my site asking the same thing. 

You can tell your searchbots where to go, by using a Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml files. I posted this earlier [here].

On almost every site I build, my first step is to keep the searchbots out of the site. Most sites are re-designs, and primarily, I would like to keep the client's visitors from finding a site packed with dummy text (before the client adds their final content) and/or view the development in progress. 

To do this, simply log-into your Squarespace site and go to Website Management - Website Settings - Search/Indexing. Under "Search Engine Perameters" deselect "Allow External Search Engines to Index Site" and "Allow External Search Engines to Archive Site".

Just be sure that when you're ready to launch the site —to check those boxes!

click for larger view

Adapting to YouTube's new "Dark Player"

After months of design, research & experimentation, YouTube has released a new embedded player theme, and I must say, it looks great! 

However, as of August 10th, YouTube is now using the "dark player" theme on all embedded videos by default.

As many people will want to stick with a lighter theme, YouTube is also releasing other themes and a way to "desaturate" the color.

To pick an alternate theme, pass in values for the "theme" and "color" player parameters. For instance, if you’d like to keep the traditional colors, you can pass parameters such as:

<iframe width="560" height="349"
  src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Cj6ho1-G6tw?theme=light&color=red"
  frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

In the video below, I'm passing the color value of "white".

<iframe width="560" height="349"
  src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Cj6ho1-G6tw?theme=light&color=white"
  frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>