My favourite Squarespace blocks. No 3: the summary block
Last but not least in my top 3 most useful Squarespace blocks for author websites! And this week I’m going to be talking about the Summary block. This is a REALLY useful block to make the most of if you have a Blog or Events section on your author website.
What the summary block does is allow you to pull content through from another area of your website, and display it on another page. This helps keep people on your website and increases visibility for areas that visitors might not necessarily click on.
For example, it’s great to have your Blog linked in your navigation, but it doesn’t look particularly enticing as it’s just a text link. Whereas with a summary block, you can pull through images from the posts, the titles and even a little snippet of what the post is about.
This is particularly useful on your homepage, which is pretty much always the most viewed page on your website. So it’s great to draw attention to your blog or upcoming events here, and encourage people to click on your posts or events to find out more.
We really want to encourage people to move through all the different pages of your website – the longer they stay on there the better! - rather than just clicking on your homepage and then leaving straight away.
You can add a summary block to any page of your website, and the process is the same as any other block – you just click on the insert point where you’d like to add the summary block, and select it from the block menu.
There are a few different styles of summary block, but the one I like the most is the Carousel style, which allows you to pull through a certain number of posts with little arrows to click to read more. I think this style looks the cleanest, but of course it’s totally up to you and your personal preference, so don’t be afraid to play around with all the various styling options to find which you like best!
If you want to get really advanced, you can also filter the posts that display by category or tag. This is super useful if you’ve written a few books and have different blog posts about each of your books on your blog. If you tag them with the name of the corresponding book, you can then set up a summary block on the page about that book, and set it to only pull through blog posts related to that book. Neat huh?!
As with my other recent posts about Squarespace blocks, I’ve recorded a little demo using the summary block on my own author website. Hope it’s helpful, and give me a shout if you have any comments!