Making this website was a fun one, and so I thought I should finally write a post about how we got it here. Below I have explained our starting points and how we cobbled everything together. I hope it helps you on your website building journey!
First steps:
Pick your goals as a company. Before you start planning all the exciting things you want the website to do, you need to know why you want it to do it. Write out your tagline and three goals that you want your company to achieve/what you want to stand for. This will make all future creative decisions easier. You can read more about company goals in my last blog here.
Collect your pictures and media together. Put them all in one drive so that they are easily accessible. This makes it feel like an easier task when jigsawing the website together later. You can also see what you’ve got and how far you have to go. If you want a logo, I would decide on this now too: it will help with colour schemes and themes of the site.
Do your research. Have a good gander at others' sites. What do you like? What don’t you like? How would you make it more user friendly, or is it doing a great job of that already? I would never suggest directly taking ideas and whole formats from another site, as you want it to be your own, but looking at sites is a great way to see what vibes you like and what things you are drawn to. For example: in this stage, we both realised that we found it harder to read on lighter coloured backgrounds, so we wanted a darker layout.
MORE RESEARCH! When snooping around, we made a list of the different types of pages that similar sites had. Like an ‘About Us’ section or a ‘Past Shows’ part. We then weighed up what types of pages would suit us and how many we wanted.
Go for it:
Create your account. We chose Wix to build our site through. It seemed the easiest and honestly, we had seen it advertised everywhere… good job Wix. Wix has a great starting page that lets you pick easy layouts and colour schemes so that you don’t stray too far from a design concept. This helped me deeply, as I am one for trying to dollop colour in every word box. It also gave me confidence, as it was easy to follow.
Figure out what everything does. I spent about a day doing this. I’m still not sure if I’ve nailed it all. Wix has a lot of functions and I really tried to look at all options before laying down a design. There are so many fun things to choose from that could completely change the layout that you originally thought of. Mess around and take your time.
Get creating. Now the fun bit. I drew everything out by hand on a page first. Little sketches of my dream website. My day of figuring out the buttons came in handy here as I knew my limits, so do get familiar with your website builder first. It took a few drafts, definitely spent longer than planned but it felt like a huge milestone (and like we were finally professionals) when completed. We were away.
All that was left to do was build the thing!
Like I said, it took longer than I thought, but it was a fun and creative process. Go wild!!
P.S. Do a soft launch, send it to friends and family and get them to give you notes. There were so many things we had missed so we were grateful for the feedback.
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