How to add text effects to your Squarespace author website
As authors, we often struggle to find good images for our websites. I find many of my author clients get in touch feeling worried that they don’t have any good photography for their website. Quite often they’ll only have their headshot, and their book’s cover, and that’s it.
And that’s OK! It really is.
These days you can create a really effective and eyecatching author website without beautiful photography.
How to find photos for your author website →
Making the most of fonts and colours can have a real impact and create a stunning, on-brand, design.
And it’s even easier than ever since Squarespace introduced its new text effects.
What are text effects?
Text effects are new ways on Squarespace that you can highlight text to draw attention to it, with things like underlines, strikethroughs, circles and more.
You can also animate the text effects, so that they’re even more dynamic on the page.
For example, when a visitor scrolls down, the text is underlined before their eyes. This is a great way to draw the eye to something on the page you really don’t want to be missed.
A word of caution
Before we start, allow me a few seconds to share with you my favourite mantra: less is more.
(Notice how I used text effects there!?)
While it is tempting to get a bit carried away with these nifty new effects, and add circles and squiggles and more to every other line of text on your author website, please do try to restrain yourself.
As with anything, the more you use this kind of effect, the more diluted the impact, so try to use them sparingly - it will be much more effective that way!
How to add text effects to your Squarespace author website
It’s super easy to add these cute effects to your website!
Simply highlight the text you’d like to add the effect to, then click on the little Aa button with the squiggly line underneath it to bring up the Text Effects menu.
From here, you can choose the style of the text effect you’d like to add.
I’m a big fan of the simple underline, but there are also fun strikethrough effects, plus the highlighter option, which is really neat.
You can change the colour of your text effect by clicking on the coloured circle.
This will bring up your website’s colour palette, if you want to stick on-brand, but you can also add a custom colour if you want to really draw attention to something.
How to animate your text effects
Another nifty feature here is the ability to animate your text effects, which will bring them to focus even more.
You can change the type of animation - from appearing to be ‘drawn’ to fading in - and you can choose whether the animation starts from the left or the right too.
How to remove a text effect
If you go a bit too far and decide that actually you’d rather not have an effect on a particular piece of text, you can simply highlight it again, then click the text effect button, scrolll down and click Remove Animation to remove it.
