Get Ready to Build a Website For Your Business

Full Transcript:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Quick Start Guide to Being Ready to Build a Website. I'm really excited to be offering this course. It's been in my head for absolutely years, but I've never been brave enough to actually hit record.

So, I'm a Website Designer turned Virtual Assistant. I have been running my business for eight years and counting. I'm completely self-taught when it comes to web design, tech, graphic design, all of that kind of stuff. It's kind of a little bit of an obsession of mine, figuring things out and hacking things together and making them work. I have two businesses Create & Bloom and Mantra & Moon, which was my first business that I started, back in 2012. It's an online retail shop selling my illustrations, jewelry, bits and bobs related to mindfulness self-care and things like that.

In this photo here, I was pregnant with my little girl. She is 18 months old so obviously I needed a new photograph taken for my website. I've lived in three countries and run my business from them. One of them is the UK, which is where I am right now. I'm in Cheshire in the north, I've lived in Jersey in the Channel Islands and in Gran Canaria, which was really cool but then I came back to the UK.

I have a degree in fashion design - I studied it for two years at College and then three years at University. I always think that maybe I should have taken the website design degree that I kind of looked at, but I don't know, maybe I never really needed it. So, maybe I did the right thing in the end.

I absolutely love tech, astrology, stationary, and crystals and all that kind of stuff. You can see that feeding through, into my little shop Mantra & Moon.

At the end of this course, I want you to be completely ready to build a website so that you're able to show off everything you do, have it exactly the way that you want it to look with perfect branding, and all of that kind of stuff. I want you to be totally prepared to hand all of that off to a website designer, or be ready to even build a website yourself.

And you're going to be super organized and finally have that determination to take on the mammoth task that is building a website, have confidence in your branding and products, knowing that they will be made visible to your target audience in the best possible way. You'll also gain lots of takeaways for keeping your website organized and you'll look at future proofing it too.

So, a super important reminder here: Building a website is so overwhelming and I want to make that as easy as possible so just bear in mind that it is a big job, but you're going to get it done and you're going to smash it.

This is my process. I like to call it website Wizardry. So, this started out as a planner, which ended up being, I think it's like 180 something pages long. So, I decided maybe I should move this and turn it into a course. This is the process that we're going to go through.

• We're going to define your business and branding and make sure your messaging is super duper clear on your website. You'll know how you want it to look, what your brand is going to be like across the board - throughout your pages.

• We'll map out all of your offerings and all the processes and systems for those offerings. We'll clean things up, simplify things and make it easier to get from A to B for you and your clients.

• We're going to plan out all of your marketing and how that's going to integrate into your website. So, we're talking email marketing, blogging, social media, and advertising. We'll hook everything together so that it's ready for when you want to grow. You can do it all without having to mess around in the backend of your site because it's already set. For example, you've already got everything set up so you can run Facebook ads in the future if you want to.

• We're going to nail down all of your copy for the most important pages. So, that's sales pages, different page section like your 'work with me page' or any other pages you need.

• We'll make sure your website is future-proofed and ready for anything from new services, new integrations, potentially new branding down the line. We want to make it easier to rebrand because I mean, I have rebranded so many times and it's been hard work to box it off - changing colors, changing the images and fonts and things like that. We want to make that job easy. If you decide to do that in the future you don't have to go through this whole process of building your website again.

So, obviously by the end of the course, I want you to be super-duper ready to pass this on to a designer. Or, even build it yourself.

Can you say wholeheartedly that you absolutely love your branding?

Remember your page layouts are likely to change based on your system integrations and advice from your designer but it’s a great way to get to grips with what you want your website to look like. If you prefer to hand this off to your designer, you can skip this bit.