Malone

Malone is one of Squarespace's own free 7.1 templates, built on Fluid Engine and styled as the website of a dog rescue and adoption charity. The demo uses warm browns and neutrals, large photographs of dogs and a friendly, plain tone. The pages in the demo nav are Home, Our Mission, Team, Services, Get Involved, Blog and Donate Now. The home page leads with the line "Making new best friends since 1994", explains why adopting matters, then shows a Meet Our Pups grid with a short profile and an Inquire button for each dog. Services lists Rescue, Placement and Protection, Get Involved splits into Adopt and Volunteer, and Donate carries a Squarespace donation block with preset amounts.

Who it suits

Animal rescues and shelters first, then any small non-profit that needs to introduce a team, explain a mission, recruit volunteers and take donations on one site. Swap the dog profiles for people or projects and it works for a community charity or conservation group too. It is not a creative portfolio, whatever older listings said.

One honest caveat

Malone is a page skeleton, not a finished charity site. Most of the inner pages are placeholder text, there is no custom code, and the donation block only takes money once you have connected a payment processor and are on a plan that supports donations. The dog profiles are plain image and text blocks rather than a searchable database, so a shelter with dozens of animals will outgrow that grid.

Setting it up

Choose Malone in Squarespace's template picker when you start a new site, or open the demo and start from it. Replace the photographs and copy page by page, connect the donation block to Stripe or PayPal, and edit sections in Fluid Engine. It sits in my free Squarespace templates collection, and you can compare it with paid designs in the Squarespace templates for non-profits collection.