Knowledgebase

Identify your target market: Who are they? Which demographic groups do they belong to? What do they like to do? How do they see themselves? How will your business or website influence their lives?
 

Research your competitors: Do some market research to get a feel on what the competition is doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how you can carve a niche for yourself in the field.
 

Define your brand identity: If you had to describe your brand in three words, what would they be? What is the vision that motivates your brand? Think of your brand’s personality and extract from it tangible traits like brand colors, vocabulary and style.
 

Prepare consistent branding material: Now it’s time to get practical and prepare the materials that will soon be featured on your site and across your other branding assets. Make sure to create your own logo, as well as images, slogans, videos, textual content and more. These elements should all correspond to your brand identity and serve your branding strategy.

Choose a template: Using a website builder with What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software, like wordpress, you don't need any code to create your site - it's already built into the interface. The platform provides customers with customizable website templates as a solid foundation for designing their sites. There is a vast selection of professional website templates for a range of themes, styles and purposes. Whether you’re creating a personal website, online store, or any other type of site, find the template that best suits your vision. Ideally, the one you pick will already be structured according to your needs and in line with your business goals.
 

Customize your template: It’s time to turn it into your very own site by customizing and editing. Add in all your content, including text, videos, links and images. We recommends using JPEG, PNG and GIF files for images to ensure they appear their best on your site. Next, refine the design to fit your brand, playing around with color schemes, page order, shapes, font choice and more. Customization can be as basic or as elaborate as you want it to be. For inspiration created from three different templates. Notice how the original templates have been adapted to result in unique, individually-designed sites.
 

Tweak the look: There is much more to creating a website than just choosing the best fonts, colors and images. You can incorporate a variety of media features to enhance your overall aesthetic. Try adding background videos or animation to your website design for added movement, or parallax scrolling to craft a sense of depth.

Navigation flow: For optimal website navigation, make sure the site structure is clear and intuitive. Visitors should be able to easily navigate between pages and subpages using the main menu or internal links.
 

Content hierarchy: Hierarchy is one of the seven principles of design, which is why you should pay extra attention to it. Your aim is to guide visitors through your site in the order that best suits your interest. When planning your website layout, make sure that the most crucial aspects are the most prominent. Reflect this hierarchy in your design, emphasizing the most important elements through size, color and placement on the page. For example, if you want people to subscribe to your service, make sure your ‘Subscribe’ button stands out on the page. This landing page explaining how to create a blog clearly demonstrates content hierarchy done right, with large headers and eye-catching buttons.
 

Calls-to-action: CTAs are the short messages that invite site visitors to take direct action. They can encourage visitors to “Register Free,” “Get Yours Today” or “Subscribe.” In short, they tell the visitors explicitly what you want them to do and make it easy for them to trust what will happen after clicking a button.
 

Readability: Readability is a basic principle in typography. Make sure to use clear fonts and comfortable font sizes, that your text colors contrast well with the background colors, and that you have enough empty space (whitespace) around your written content.
 

Footer: The bottom part of your site is known as the website footer (the top is the header). Footers are not immediately visible to site visitors, but they can be used in a number of ways to enhance usability. Consider adding your contact information to the footer, including buttons linking to social media channels. You could also display a simplified site map that links to all your pages, as well as a brief explanation of who you are, or a site disclaimer text.

Keyword research: Put yourself in the shoes of your potential site visitor or client. Which questions or phrases might they search for on Google that could lead them to your website? The keywords within their search queries will guide your SEO strategy. Using keyword research tools, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on which keywords you should be targeting.
 

Text: Every piece of text on your website, from your menu to your FAQ page, blog, footer or bio section, should be written with SEO in mind. While there are many SEO tips to boost your website, the general idea is to find subtle and elegant ways to integrate your keywords into your site’s textual content without compromising on quality. Search engine crawlers are smart, and they could down-rank you if they think you sound too much like an ad.
 

Meta tags: Search engines like Google read your metadata. It’s up to you to control what it is that they see and how they present your site in search results. It is well worth it to take the time to add custom meta tags to your site with the goal of optimizing your content and helping search engines understand what your pages contain.

Alt text: Images also play a prominent role in your SEO efforts. Every image that you upload to your website should have alt text (short for alternative text) added to it. Alt text is a very short line that explains to search engines what the image depicts. In turn, this allows your images to be ‘found’ in search results, which is why it’s important to write SEO friendly alt text for all your images.
 

Link building: Broadly put, your ranking on search engine results is likely to improve if you have other websites linking to your site. You can start by submitting your professional website to directories, making sure that all your social media profiles link to your site, and encouraging site visitors to share your content as well.