One of the biggest challenges I have with blogging in Squarespace is that it requires so much customization. If you're used to 7.0, you're used to the possibility of doing what's called a featured post. And in using Squarespace 7.1, we just don't have that option. So what I've done here is this:

Making a Featured Blog Post Banner

1. In your existing Blog Collection, add a new blank section on top.

2. In that section, add a Summary Block. Set it to pull the content from your Blog and change the Display Posts to showing 1 so that it only shows the latest post. You can additionally set a filter here to only show “Featured” posts as well.

3. Now you’ll notice that the Summary Block post and the first post in your blog collection are of course the same— we don’t want that. So, to remove the first post in your blog collection, you’ll use this code inside the Design tab —> Custom CSS:

Hit Save and that will essentially hide the first post in the Blog Collection, while maintaining your Summary Block. Voila. You’ve got a Featured Post Banner on your blog. I hope this helps until they come up with a more native solution!