I Was Making Every Template From Scratch

I had another breakthrough about my Squarespace templates recently. I’ve been looking at shops with a lot of products and trying to understand how they manage to keep creating at that pace. One pattern keeps coming up: they productise their work.

I came across a shop with more than fifty Squarespace templates, and it became clear that they were re-skinning the same underlying template for different industries. The layout might be adjusted slightly, with different copy, colours, images, and a few changes to the structure, but the foundation remained the same.

That made me realise how much time I’ve been wasting by reinventing the wheel every time I create something new. I’ve been approaching each template as though it needs to be completely original from the beginning, with a new layout and a new way of solving the same problems. It might be more creatively satisfying, but it also makes the whole process much slower.

I’m not sure whether I’ve been a little stubborn about it, but I’ve definitely had this idea that every template needs to be built from scratch. I don’t want my products to look identical, and I still want each one to feel considered and distinct. But perhaps originality doesn’t have to mean starting with a blank page every time.

Once I finish my first 'Marea' eCommerce template, I’m going to use it as a base for other types of online shops. I can move sections around, change the layouts, switch out different elements, and give each version its own look without rebuilding the entire thing from the ground up. There can still be some zhuzhing involved. They just don’t need to be completely new products in every sense.

This should help me create more templates without lowering the quality or making everything feel like a copy. It also gives me a more realistic way to build up my shop, especially when I’ve been aiming to reach one hundred products before the end of the year...currently way off my target! So I need to get a wiggle on.

I also need to stop looking at competitors so much. At first, I told myself I was researching what other shops were doing, but it’s starting to feel more like procrastination. I keep searching for more examples, comparing my progress to theirs, and questioning whether I’m doing enough. At some point, I need to take what I’ve learned and get back to the work.

I’m also becoming more selective about the imagery I use. I’ve been relying on AI-generated images in some of my templates, but when I look back at them, they can make the designs feel a little tacky. I want the templates to feel premium but still accessible, so I’m finding that real stock images are usually a better fit. I’ll still sprinkle in a few AI-generated images when I can’t find the right stock image to convey a particular theme or mood.

The bigger shift has been learning to let go of some of my perfectionism (this is huge and it is taking some time). I’ve started reading a book about it, partly because I can see how much it affects the way I work. I spend so much time trying to make every decision from scratch that the work becomes heavier than it needs to be.

There is still room to make thoughtful, original templates without making every single one the hard way. I’m beginning to see that creating a repeatable foundation might give me more freedom, not less.