How to Build Enterprise Sites on Squarespace

Most people think Squarespace is for portfolio sites, local businesses, or small marketing websites.

But that’s only the surface.

With the right architecture, content model, and governance, Squarespace can support surprisingly complex, enterprise-level websites, especially for organizations with multiple audiences, multiple properties, and lots of moving parts.

The key is not the platform alone. It’s how you structure the information, design the experience, and give the team behind the site a system they can actually manage.

In this post, we’ll look at how to think about enterprise Squarespace projects through the lens of a real example: Explore Washington Park, a 410-acre destination in Portland, Oregon, with millions of annual visitors, multiple attractions, and an enormous amount of information to organize.

Enterprise doesn’t necessarily mean huge

When people hear “enterprise website,” they often imagine a massive corporation, a huge internal marketing department, a complex technology stack, and a six-figure digital budget.

But enterprise complexity is not really about the size of the company.

It shows up when the stakes are high, when several groups need the site to work, when information has to stay accurate across many pages, and when the organization cannot afford to rebuild the thing every two years.

Explore Washington Park is a perfect example. The organization manages transportation and visitor services for Portland’s most-visited park. The website had to serve millions of visitors, bring together information from several major attractions, surface live transit and parking data, meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, and remain manageable by a marketing team of just 1.5 people.

That is enterprise work, even if the team maintaining the site is small.

Watch the conversation

Christy Price sat down with Kristine Neil to talk through how the project came together, what made it more complex than a typical website build, and what Squarespace designers should understand before pitching work at this level.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE7m1PRBtvo

It is worth watching the full conversation. Below are the lessons that stood out to me.

What Kristine and her team built

The finished site includes:

• A live shuttle tracker with arrival estimates that refresh every 30 seconds

• Real-time parking availability across the park’s major lots

• Accessible interactive maps

• An itinerary explorer organized by time, cost, and visitor interests

• Transit-first trip planning across attraction pages

• A unified events calendar powered by Eventually

• Accessibility information treated as part of trip planning, not buried on a compliance page

The project launched on Squarespace 7.1, met WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and gave the internal team a site they could actually maintain.

Kristine’s client called the final result “better than we could have dreamed.”

1. Choose the platform around the people who have to live with it

A lot of technical decisions are made by asking what can be built.

Kristine’s team also had to ask what could be maintained.

The old WordPress site turned small updates into support tickets and invoices. A fully custom rebuild could have created the same problem in a more expensive form. The organization did not need the most technically impressive stack. It needed a strong, flexible foundation that a very small internal team could own after handoff.

That changes the platform conversation.

The best solution is not always the one with the highest theoretical ceiling. Sometimes it is the one that lets the client make ordinary updates without calling a developer while still leaving room for custom development where it genuinely matters.

2. Use native Squarespace for the ordinary and custom development for the exceptional

One of the smartest decisions in the project was not trying to force Squarespace to do everything.

Pages, imagery, events, and most day-to-day content could live in native Squarespace. The specialized features, including live transportation data, parking availability, and interactive tools, were handled as isolated custom components.

That separation matters.

The client can edit the content underneath those tools in familiar Squarespace collections without accidentally breaking the custom work. The complicated parts stay complicated behind the scenes. The everyday experience stays simple.

This is a more useful way to think about advanced Squarespace work. Squarespace does not need to be the entire solution. It can be the durable foundation that everything else sits on.

3. The real work started before the design

The most important part of a large website is often the part nobody sees.

Before the site was designed, Kristine and the Explore Washington Park team worked through the content. They mapped what visitors needed to know, standardized information across 16 attraction and amenity pages, and thought carefully about how language could make planning easier for people with different needs.

That is what lets a large site feel simple.

Every page cannot invent its own structure. Every attraction cannot describe hours, pricing, routes, accessibility, and transportation differently. The content model has to do some of the work before the design ever begins.

This is also why bigger projects are not just bigger versions of small websites. The designer is not merely arranging pages. They are helping the organization decide how information should work.

4. Accessibility has to shape the project from the beginning

Accessibility was not a checklist added during the final week.

It influenced the wireframes, content, color system, page structure, interactive maps, shuttle tracker, and keyboard behavior. An independent accessibility consultant, Nicole Nault, audited the work and ran user testing before the site was certified at WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

That level of work changes what “done” means.

It also changes who you may need on the project. A designer does not need to personally possess every specialty, but they do need to understand when the work requires deeper expertise and bring the right people in early enough to matter.

5. The lead designer becomes the one person the client can call

This may be the biggest lesson in the whole project.

Kristine was not only responsible for what the pages looked like. She coordinated the client team, a custom development partner, an accessibility consultant, multiple data providers, an events platform, organization partners, and community stakeholders.

She knew when to bring in Will Myers for engineering work. She timed the accessibility audit. She kept vendors moving. She translated between the technical work and the organization’s actual goals.

From the client’s perspective, she became the one person who could hold the whole thing.

That is a different value proposition from “I design Squarespace websites.”

As projects get bigger, clients are not only paying for design and development. They are paying for someone who can reduce uncertainty, coordinate specialists, make decisions, and carry the project across the finish line.

The bigger lesson for Squarespace designers

If you want to move into larger projects, the lesson is not that you need to abandon Squarespace or pretend to be a giant agency.

You do need to expand what you believe your job is.

The website may involve content strategy, research, accessibility, live data, custom development, stakeholder management, vendor coordination, and a handoff plan that protects the client long after launch.

You do not have to do every piece yourself. In fact, you probably should not.

But somebody has to understand the whole problem. Somebody has to assemble the right team. Somebody has to make sure all the pieces become one useful, maintainable system.

That is how an independent designer starts becoming qualified for enterprise work.

Explore the project

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE7m1PRBtvo

Read Kristine Neil’s case study: https://kristineneil.com/blog/explore-washington-park

Visit Explore Washington Park: https://www.explorewashingtonpark.org/

Learn more about Kristine Neil: https://kristineneil.com/