Website building service provider Squarespace is making its first-ever acquisition with Acuity Scheduling Inc., which sells online appointment tools.

The acquisition comes at a time when Squarespace is trying to reinvent itself by providing more professional services to help its customers better run their online businesses.

“As Squarespace has evolved as a company, we’ve moved beyond helping our customers build great websites, and on to allowing them to build and run great businesses,” Squarespace founder and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Casalena wrote in a blog post today.

Acuity’s online scheduling platform has already been integrated with Squarespace’s offerings for some years, supporting more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. It claims to have scheduled and managed “millions” of appointments since its founding in 2006.

“Acuity has succeeded in building a lean, profitable company in the face of strong competition — a story that aligns closely with our roots,” Casalena added. “By joining forces, we will now be able to deeply integrate our product lines.”

Squarespace will continue to offer Acuity as a standalone product, though. All 45 of Acuity’s employees will join its new parent company as a part of the deal.

Squarespace timed the announcement of the acquisition to coincide with a raft of updates to its native email marketing service. The updates include more editing and analytics tools, plus automatic list maintenance. Squarespace is also providing additional tools to help schedule and automate newsletters and promotional campaigns.

“Providing a complete suite of integrated tools is a huge win for small businesses who benefit from managing their brand in one place,” Casalena said.

Photo: Squarespace/Facebook