Should I change from 7.0 to 7.1 to have banners on individual posts and different layout on blog landing page?

I have a personal blog with Rally template on Squarespace 7.0 (text is in Finnish as that's where I reside). My payment plan is personal so that may restrict some of the settings (?).

Two things I'd love to change for my blog:

1. I'd like to have banners on individual blog posts (thumbnail photo appears as a banner)

2. On the blog landing page (seen on the main home page), I'd like to have the layout appear as a list as it is now, but alternating the posts with left/right side (A stacked layout where featured images display beside the post titles and other metadata on alternating sides.)

I know the banner option is available on 7.0 if I switch to the Bedford family... I guess my main issue is that it seems you cannot change the layout to alternating sides unless you upgrade to 7.1 -- can anyone confirm if this is the case? 

I suppose if I want to upgrade to 7.1 I would currently have to manually move my whole blog as Squarespace does not, to my knowledge, offer automatic migration yet? Thank you

Can you share your current website URL?

1. Banners on blogs is not a native feature, but can be added like this:
https://www.will-myers.com/articles/blog-post-banner-image-update

You may be able to change the Bedford family blog layout, I don't recall the options for that template.
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205825968-Bedford-template-family?platform=v6&websiteId=6040f6670e445b0254fd02ea#toc-blog-pages

This chrome plugin can help transfer content, but generally speaking, you'll need to check and edit every page to a greater or lesser extent:
https://www.squarewebsites.org/squarespacewebsites-tools-extension-pro

Thank you!  I'll see if I can play around with this.

My website: https://missmaruzella.com 

Rally is part of the 7.0 Brine Family and the look of 7.1 was inspired by Brine. You can make any Brine family template look like 7.1 getting there is very different than the 7.1 configuration, however. You can add a banner to a blog in Rally if not natively with code. 

https://laurentaylar.com/blog/squarespace-rally-template

Thanks very much! Turns out I would have to upgrade my account in order to add code, but I figured I will just switch my Rally template to Anya template within the Brine-family, this way I will be able to have a banner on individual blog posts.

Thanks again and enjoy your day!

Wise decision.

There is one thing you might consider before changing templates. You can add a banner to each post by adding a code block in the post header with the banner code. This would need to be done for each post. It is a workaround. 

I already changed to Anya. A bit disappointing now to discover that you cannot adjust the blog posts's width...I'm a fan of big photos and prefer the text much wider with different size pictures - now I'm stuck with a narrow text block 😄 😄 Oh well, will keep looking for yet another template as I am unable to add any code. Thanks again!

6 hours ago, missmaruzella said:

Should I change from 7.0 to 7.1 to have banners on individual posts and different layout on blog landing page? (text is in Finnish as that's where I reside).

I suppose if I want to upgrade to 7.1 I would currently have to manually move my whole blog as Squarespace does not, to my knowledge, offer automatic migration yet? 

@missmaruzella Although this doesn't answer your questions, I wanted to point out that Squarespace 7.1 supports Finnish. If you'd like to migrate your blog to 7.1 (to see what is possible) please message me and I'll see if I can help.