March 3, 2022
If you don’t know How to Build your Website but need one fast, here is a detailed guide on how to get your website from lacking to live!
I respect your hustle.
Prep for your Website
Estimated Time: 10 Hours
First things first, we need to do some preparations before building your website. Below is the list of items I highly recommend figuring our before you actually sit down to build your website.
Photos
Whether you’re shooting photos solo or booked a brand photographer, get a handful of images ready to upload to your website.
Find Inspiration & Make a Plan
We can’t just jump into this blind. Find inspiration for your website by looking at websites similar to your field and sites not similar to get an idea of what you want to do. Take note of your Navigation bar, pages you need, and your website footer.
Copy
Next, start writing your website copy. You can even frame the topic and context around what you learned from the inspiration and planning phase. Remember to keep it short, sweet, and to the point!
Choose your Platform
There are so many website platforms and hosting to choose from nowadays! Here’s a guide that breaks down some of the top platforms and which one might be best for you.
Find your Website Template or Make Mockups
Now that you have a rough plan, some ideas, and maybe a rough draft of copy, it’s time to visually choose what your website is going to look like. Depending on what platform you chose, I recommend finding a website template that does most of the design-work for you. ThemeForest, ElegantThemes, GoLive and are a few websites that you can find themes for your website.
Build your Website
Here we go! Next it’s time to get our hands dirty and build your website!
If you haven’t already, set up your platform of choice, hosting, domain, and anything else your platform prompts you to complete for getting into it.
02. Build your Home Page
Estimated Time: 3 hours
You’ll spend the most time on this page (as you should), so allocate your time wisely. Your home page is what hooks your audience in 4 seconds or less. Filling in your copy, colors, and photos should be a cinch if you did the prep work!
Estimated Time: 1.5 hours per page
This next part, can vary from one to three pages. Stick to your plan right off the bat, you can always add more pages later. The most common pages you’ll need are Contact, About, and an Informational Page (such as Services).
04. Add Contact Form
Estimated Time: 1 hour
…or a booking forms or whatever your website needs. Some common fields that I recommend you use are: Name, Email, Subject, More information.
05. Build your Site Navigation and Footer
Estimated Time: 1.5 hours
I recommend keeping your website’s navigation to 6 or less pages and use your logo as your Home page’s link. In this build you should only be creating up to 3 pages for sake of time and resources but take note of that for the future.
Launch!
Wait! Before you launch, there’s a few things to check before we go live.
Estimated Time: 1.5 hours
Confirm that your links are all properly set up by clicking on every… single… one… of… them… on… every… page. Yes, I know it’s monotonous but you’d be surprised how many times a link isn’t properly typed.
Confirm that Your Contact Form Works
Estimated Time: 0.5 hours
It would be a light horror story to find out after you’re live that your lead generation isn’t working! Send yourself a test email to confirm your email is ready for submissions.
Launch + Celebrate!
Estimated Time: 1 hour
You did it!! Pop the champagne and call it a day! Wait, just kidding, you’ve gotta post it on social media first 😉
Post-Launch
Congrats on your new website! You should feel accomplished and proud of yourself! If you want to go the extra mile for yourself and your business, do these extra steps in the next 30 days to make your site even better.
Search Engine Optimization
You want your website to be found, right? Optimize your pages for Search Engines by creating an SEO plan. Most platforms will have an SEO section in the backend to make this easier for ya.
Optimize Images and Pages
This is important if your pages are loading slow. Your images could be too big. Use this guide to resize your images and ease up the load on your website.
Add More Pages
I’m only assuming you need more pages for your website but this may not be the case for everyone. Whether it’s adding a blog, e-commerce, or media, you can start adding more pages to your website now! Again, keep your navigation to 6 items or less!
Congratulations on your website! You did it! How did you do? Are you satisfied with your results? If you aren’t, maybe you should send me an inquiry and I’ll see how I can help.
I hope this guide helped! Thanks for hanging out!
Stay Rad,
Katie
Related Articles
Hack #6 to Level Up Your Creative: Start Batching Content
4 min read Content batching is just like it sounds: creating groups of content at the same time. This is a great creativity and productivity hack that saves time on content creation. Here’s how to start batching social media content in six easy steps.Batching Content...
Hack #5 to Level Up Your Creative: Use Free Social Media Resources
4 min read Who doesn’t love free stuff–especially when it comes to social media content creation? Whether you’re feeling short on time, money, or both, you can use free social media resources to make content creation easier and more fun. Here are a handful of free...
Hack #4 to Level Up Your Creative: Create Social Posts on a Budget
4 min read Social media has become an integral part of business success. But with so much content out there, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. That's why it's essential to create engaging content that will capture attention and keep people coming back...