Template ideas

Hi everyone, 

I'm new to the forum and to Squarespace. 

I've been asked by a friend to design a simple, clean and informative website. They are a membership organisation and their current site is incredibly hard to navigate. In short, they share information in the form of news items, blog posts, quarterly magazines (which would be uploaded to the site) and lots of text relating to professional development. Also a few bits of e-learning, which would need be on the site. 

There will be sections on the team, board of directors and partners - so ideas on image and text together would be good. The existing website is massive cluttered and done in Wordpress, you can see it here: http://probation-institute.org

I've been playing around with the Brine template, but struggling with a few of the limitations (which to be fair it's probably user error). I've attached a screenshot of the homepage, which is probably looking ok. But the attached PQ page I'm having real problems with making it look decent. I'm using spacers and widening the image and text blocks but again it seems limited. 

I'm just looking for some inspiration, ideas and ultimately whether the Brine template is the right one for my needs.

Any help would really be appreciated. 

Thank you.

Richard

Brine is a good template, most successful family of templates (and there are over forty in that family alone) that Squarespace has made. I have two of them. They are designed for super scrolling, meaning a lot of sections (a page) in an index that scrolls like one big page. Its driven by the goal to be a good site for both desktop, tablet and mobile. Its image driven, not text driven from the home page. If people are looking for further info, its best tied to an image that clicks thru to more info as opposed to putting on on the home scroll, people just will not take the time to read it unless something like a banner and a button or call to action takes them somewhere else. I have two sites that I build for a water filtration companies owner. The sites were very tab driven, lots of technical info. I got the owner of the companies to part with most of the verbage and narrowed it down to the most pertinent info. It took a bit of convincing but when you only have three seconds to make a first impression to a new viewer to your site, it has to grab them. Take a look and then lets see what we can do to help you build a site that gets your clients message across. By the way since going to these sites, my customers businesses have  gone up 35 percent even during this tough time we are in. His sites are working for him. The sites are very similar but are not copies, just pertinent information changed. 

https://atlanticcoastwater.com/

https://waterclinicfl.com/

Thanks so much for replying Derrick, really helpful advice. I'll go through the sites you've done shortly. 

I think that's the challenge for me is that the site does need a lot of information, which I'll condense down into pdfs or separate pages to click through to.