Buy a design for your Squarespace website. All you do is add your content and make the design your own.

We’ve been selling templates all year, and increasingly we’re beginning to think that our users are looking for a full design rather than just a template. The term “template” feels dated: 7.1 offers a choice of designs, but they are all variations on the Fluid Engine base design, which can be adapted and customised to do pretty much anything you need. By contrast, many 7.0 templates — apart from flexible ones like Brine — can feel restrictive.

They may provide options for particular pieces of functionality, but not for everything you might want to achieve. 7.1, or “Fluid Engine,” is a design system that can be tailored to meet any layout or feature requirement, so the word template, we believe, no longer really applies. For that reason we’ve renamed our templates page “Buy a design.”

We were asked recently if we had a template that included a sidebar. Wells and Five are 7.0 templates that include sidebars, but you can easily create a sidebar on 7.1 as well with a few layout adjustments.

Design is something most of our clients need help with, so it’s much clearer to describe the offering as “Buy a design” rather than “Buy a template.”

I discovered how helpful that shift in language can be when I was presenting my business at a networking meeting recently. Apart from those who already had a Squarespace website, most people didn’t know what I meant when I talked about templates.

As soon as I explained that buying a template really meant buying a design, there was an audible “ahhh” around the room. For people who already understand templates, the concept remains the same: you choose a design you like and move your own content into it. It’s still the quickest, easiest, and most affordable way to get a new website, and if you need to update an existing site — especially if you’re on a 7.0 version — switching to a modern design is often the best option.

So from now on my blogs will refer to designs rather than templates, because that’s what they are in practice now that we’re all used to the capabilities of 7.1 and the Fluid Engine. You can browse all of my available designs and examples to see how flexible they are.