Why Brine is the Best Squarespace Template
The first step when designing a website on Squarespace is to select a template for your design. Squarespace offers tons of different templates, many with different functionality. They do this to make it easy for non-designers to create a good looking website with the functions they need without overwhelming them with options.
It’s a good thought, but not all templates are created equally. If you want the full range of functionality (and trust me, you do), there is one template that stand out above the rest - Brine. Designers all agree, the Brine is the only template to use for a well-designed, fully functional Squarespace website.
The Brine family of templates is a group of templates that are all built on the same base, so they all have the same functionality. The only difference when choosing your template is the initial look and the example pages that come pre-built. But no matter which Brine family template you choose, you have access to the same functions and design options.
The Brine family of templates currently includes Aria, Basil, Blend, Brine, Burke, Cacao, Clay, Ethan, Fairfield, Feed, Foster, Greenwich, Hatch, Heights, Hunter, Hyde, Impact, Jaunt, Juke, Keene, Kin, Maple, Margot, Marta, Mentor, Mercer, Miller, Mojave, Moksha, Motto, Nueva, Pedro, Polaris, Pursuit, Rally, Rover, Royce, Sofia, Sonny, Sonora, Stella, Thorne, Vow, Wav, West.
Yep, that is a lot of options when you’re trying to pick something to start your website on. The good news is that when choosing from the Brine family, you can go with the basic Brine or choose the option that best reflects your brand (so you have less to change later).
Why Brine?
So why exactly is Brine the go-to choice for Squarespace designers?
It offers the most flexibility and functionality. Plus most Squarespace custom code tutorials and plugins are written for use with Brine, so they’re easy to implement.
Page Options
As a beginning designer, I would often choose a template that I thought would work only to find out later that I couldn’t use certain types of pages (Index pages in particular) that meant either restricting my design options or changing templates partway through a project. Unlike some other templates, Brine templates offer every type of page as an option.
Albums
Blog (with advanced options)
Cover pages
Events
Galleries
Index pages
Products (with advanced options)
Menu Design
The Brine Style menu offers the most flexibility as well. You have more control over the menu layout than in any other template, including placing the website logo on the left, right, or in the center of the page.
The menu is also made of two rows, which allows a lot of flexibility when it comes to what goes where. Plus, Squarespace has built-in search, shopping cart, social icons, and member log-in options that can be turned on and off.
Mobile Design
Mobile design is made easier because you can design the mobile menu separately from the main site, including fonts, colors, and types of links.
Page Design
Squarespace designs templates with current trends in mind and one of the most popular (and that is likely to stick around) is to have a header image overlaid with text and buttons.
Using an Index page, Brine allows you to create a customized banner on every page with all the same blocks you use on a normal page. This is a huge improvement over other templates that only allow you to add an image and then add text via the Page Settings.
Index Pages also come with a built-in Scroll Indicator option so visitors know where they are on a long page filled with content. Personally, I don’t use this option in my designs, but it’s nice to have.
Blog Layout
Brine’s blog landing page is also flexible in it’s design. You can choose from a grid or on-going list layout (I usually use Grid), and set the spacing on the page.
You can also choose what information displays for each post:
Metadata
Title
Image
Excerpt
Read more link
You can also customize the blog pagination (the links leading to older and newer posts) and add sharing icons at the end of each blog post (which currently isn’t available in Squarespace 7.1).
Downsides to Brine
While Brine is by far the best template option, there are a few restrictions.
No Sidebars
There is no option to add a sidebar in the Brine family. I don’t think this is a big problem, because while they can be a useful place to add information, designers are moving away from them because it leads to too much distraction.
If you do want to include a sidebar on the Brine template, you can use the Squarespace Sidebar Plugin from SQSP Themes. It’s fairly simple to install and is fully responsive.
Missing some blog options
Brine has some great layout options for blogs, but doesn’t include everything. The main missing options are the automatic “related posts” feature, endless scroll (instead of going to an “older posts” page), and author profiles that are available in Farro and Skye family templates.
But again, there are workarounds for each of these.
If you do want to have a “related posts” section in your blog posts, you can either add them manually at the end of each post using a summary block or use this plugin from SQSP Themes to have it automatically added.
I’ve found that infinite scroll isn’t an important option, as most website visitors are used to and understand navigating to older posts through pagination.
No Sticky Nav on desktop
You can’t have your navigation “stick” to the top of your browser when scrolling in Brine, which is a popular feature on many websites now, but you can create one with code if you find it’s something that you really want. Generally, it’s not needed, so I don’t worry about this option being unavailable.
As you can see, the benefits of the Brine family of Squarespace templates far outweigh the negatives, especially since most of the missing options can be added through Custom CSS or plugins.
