How To Get Started Planning Out Your Website
So, you decided to take the DIY route for designing your website? Well, congratulations on taking the first and scary step to get a website! Now, I know it can be it daunting not to know where to begin, but don’t you worry I got you! Today I will be sharing with you a few steps you can take to get you started in the right direction.
Step #1: Set some website goals
The first thing is first, you need to get clear and set some goals. You want to get clear on the WHY of your website. Why do you want a website? What will it do for your business? What is the ultimate goal of your website? These are a few questions you want to get clear on before you even begin the design process. This will help you set your website up for success. If you have a clear vision, you can design your website with those goals in mind and optimize the website for that specific goal.
Step #2: Map out your customer journey
Now that you are clear on some website goals you can start to draw out your customer journey. If your visitor had to do one thing on your website, what would that be? Now that you know that answer draw out a map for them to achieve that. When they land on your home page, you want them to take some sort of action and go down a maze throughout your website to ultimately end up where you want them. Having this in place allows you to visually see the possible routes they take and allow you to plan to have some Call to Actions (CTAs) in those areas so you can continue to guide them throughout your website.
Step # 3: Decide what pages you will have
Okay, so now you have a clear vision of what your customer journey will look like so choosing what pages to have on your website should be a no-brainer. If you are still struggling with deciding, check out my blog here where I share my recommended pages everyone should have on their website.
Step # 4: Write out your content
Now it’s where it can start getting a little hard when DIY’ing your website. You now have to write content for each of those pages you will have on your website. Writing out the content before you begin designing will actually make it easier when it comes to designing. If you want to design your website around the content, any good website designer will tell you this. I recommend not rushing this process. Pro tip: Make sure that you are speaking to your ideal client when writing your content.
Step #5: Gather your images
Your goals are set, your content is written, and now you need some visuals. Start gathering the images that you will want to have on your website. If you have your own professional images great! Now if you are starting from scratch, don’t worry there are a ton of free resources like Upslash, you can find a variety of images and be able to use them on your website. You can also purchase stock images that are more on-brand with your business which is what I recommend doing. If you still haven’t decided on your brand aesthetic, I recommend doing that before beginning with any design. Now, don’t worry this doesn’t mean you have to go get expensive branding, you can simply come up with a simple brand color palette that defines your brand. If you are struggling with this, check out my blog post where I help you with choosing your brand colors.
Step #6: The techy stuff
Now that all the prep work has been done, you can start with the techy part. This includes choosing your domain, the website building platform you will use, and buying the legal documents for your website.
Let’s start with the domain, the domain is your www.website.com. If you haven’t bought one yet, I recommend namecheap.com. They are super helpful and it’s fairly cheap to purchase your domain, $10 bucks a year. Not bad huh?
Next, you need to decide which website builder you will be using to build the website. There are a ton, Wix, WordPress, Shopify, Showit, and Squarespace to name a few. I recommend Squarespace for this, it is super user-friendly and some templates can help you get started when you begin to design your website.
Legalities, now I am NOT a lawyer, I repeat I am NOT a lawyer! But, you do need to purchase a website privacy policy and terms and conditions for your website. I won’t get into too much detail but just know that your website needs these.
Step #7: Get Inspiration and Start Designing
Yay! Finally, the moment you have been waiting for! You can now being to design your website. I would definitely recommend you start by getting some inspiration via Pinterest on different website designs. This will help your creative juices start flowing. Depending on what platform you decided to host your website will depend on how easy or hard it will be for you to design. But luckily for you, there is Google and you can search for anything if and when you get stuck of course, there is Youtube as well.
If you find yourself stuck and decide you weren’t cut out for web design, don’t worry you have options, the first option is purchasing a website template or the second option is to hire a website designer. If you decide on the second option, head on over to my contact page and we can chat about your project!
I hope you found this helpful! Please comment below if you found it helpful and if you used it to DIY your website, send me an email I would love to check out your new site!! I totally mean it! Anyway, I am sending you all the positive vibes during this process for you!
Need help launching your website. I created this FREE Website checklist just for you. Download Now!
Interested in learning how we can work together on your brand or website, schedule a call here.
Thanks for reading!
