Squarespace is an excellent, user-friendly platform for photographers and visually creative businesses. Working with media and imagery is extremely easy in Squarespace, due to multiple image blocks options, gallery blocks, and summary blocks - these features allowed us to create beautiful designs in Squarespace, as well. However, there are other options to consider. In today’s article, we will review one of these tools - Narrative Publish, an intuitive and easy solution for photography blogposts.
Narrative Publish - Best Tool for Stunning Photography Blogposts on Squarespace
*Free 3 months of subscription code included at the end of this article.
Designing an impactful and unique website page is pretty easy in Squarespace. Nonetheless, you may find it hard to quickly create a similarly impactful blog article, especially if you’re trying to tell a visual story using more than 20-30 images. You know, that “image blocks on gallery blocks on image blocks” struggle we are talking about? We feel your pain and yes, we are strong believers in process optimization. And blogging, just like any other business aspect, can be optimized to save you time, while also delivering compelling visual stories to your clients, and most importantly to your potential customers.
Here are 3 reasons why you should consider using Narrative Publish for your Squarespace site:
1. It is super intuitive and easy to use
Narrative Publish is a software app that you download to your device. Its dashboard is clean and easy to navigate. Once you open the dashboard you need to select your Source folder from your device, where your gallery images are located, and it will automatically load them into Narrative Publish. If you make any changes to your Source Folder, these changes will automatically happen inside Narrative Publish.
From here, you just need to select the magic wand tool, choose the number of images you want, or select all of them, and you are done - you have a blogpost ready!
Image grab from Narrative Publish
The next step is to connect Narrative Publish to your Squarespace site, copy the HTML link generated inside the app, go to your Squarespace website, create a blogpost, add a Code block and paste the code. All of your images from Narrative Publish will now preview inside your blogpost. And when you make changes inside Narrative, all you need to do is click“Update” to sync those changes so they reflect on your website as well.
Follow this step by step video on how to publish to your Squarespace 7.0 or 7.1 site:
*At the moment Narrative Publish is only available for Mac users (if you are a Windows user, sign up here to get notified when it’s available for Windows).
2. Create unique layouts for your blogposts
The most rewarding benefit of using Narrative is the possibilities to create unique layouts and tell visual stories YOUR way. Do you want an asymmetric layout? You can easily do it in Narrative. Do you want more space around one image to make it stand out, while the rest are spaced out evenly? You can do it in Narrative. Do you want to have rows of 2 images side by side, followed by rows of 3 images, and stacked images? You can do it in Narrative. Our lovely clients from Bloomfield Photography created such unique layouts inside their blogposts - see it for yourself here.
What would otherwise take you hours to do in Photoshop or any other design tool, you can easily do in Narrative: arrange, crop, experiment with layouts, and even add text blocks.
Images by Muse & Mirror
3. Create blogposts fast, even when offline
Though we live in a highly digital world, don’t you love those moments when you are offline and fully focused on your work? Let’s say on blogging? With Narrative, you can work on your blog projects offline, carefully prepare your visual stories, and get them easily published once you’re back online. It will only take you minutes.
Extra perks:
Loading Speed
If you ever wondered how can you showcase your images without having to compromise between the number of images to showcase and your site loading speed - Narrative Publish is the solution. While the app itself can process hundreds of images at a time, once your blog is posted on your site, it loads with lightning speed. This is the ultimate visual online experience, without buffering. Just check out a blogpost built with Narrative by our friends at Chasewild to see for yourself.
Image SEO
Improving site SEO is a constant work in progress. And we have covered some of the main points in our earlier articles. While image SEO in Squarespace is still quite limited, there is a lot more than you can do with Narrative to build your SEO right inside the app’s dashboard. You can add image keywords, and meta description, keywords, and SEO title for the whole project.
Images by Chasewild
Animations, Lazy Loading, Lightbox previews
For better user experience, you can add fade-in and slide-in animations to your images, lazy loading inside your project, and Lightbox previews for more impactful views.
Are you ready to try Narrative Publish with your Squarespace website? Great, we have an exclusive offer for you! Use this code: SQUAREMUSE3 to enjoy 3 free months of subscription.
Creatively yours,
Squaremuse Team