Transcripts
1. Welcome to the class: As business owners and
creatives are websites an important part of our creative
and professional life? When we first get started, we often get something
up online really quickly and then we're
eager to move on from that. We dream about a website that
slick and that's polished, something we feel proud of
sending to potential clients, customers, or anyone we want to get from
work in front of. This dream is a worthy goal. Unlike all goals, it needs a plan in order to get us there. Before anything else, preparation is the
key for success. In this class, we're
going to create a plan for your website. This could be for
your side hustle, for your hobby or
for your business. It could be a portfolio
and online shop or blog, whatever you need
your website to be. I'm Kaitlin, a
freelance designer and business owner who
specializes in branding, web design, and
creative communication. In my own studio, I've helped others bring
their vision to life, the strategic and
beautiful design. I've designed and developed websites for Shopify,
Squarespace, and Webflow for everything
from e-commerce business to arts organizations to creatives
to online businesses. I believe that design can
help us to reach our goals. Let's get started. When beginning a
website project and all too common
mistake to make is to start with the
visual design and this can lead to a
lot of frustration. You can spend hours editing an unplanned Squarespace site only to end up with something embarrassed by or
that doesn't serve your goals and that's
why this course exists. We're going to create a roadmap. We're going to create a
plan and organize for your website before you
ever touch the design. Then when you do move on to create the design
of your website, you'll be ready to go. Here's what we'll be going
through in this course. Defining your audience, defining
your purpose and goals, mapping out your pages and
user flow, creating content. This course is for you, if you're a creative entrepreneur
or business owner will paint to create a
website that will help you to achieve your goals. You could be a writer looking to build a name for yourself in your field or an illustrator looking to sell in
your online shop. What you'll need for this class. You won't need any printouts. Instead bring a paper and pencil or your computer and
favorite note-taking app. If you have any
documents on branding or marketing or strategy
for your business, definitely bring those along. They could be
well-used documents or even just loose
pages of journaling. If you have Google
Analytics for a website you already have also do
bring those with you. At the end of the
class for the project, I'll ask you to go
away and create one of the first pages on your website using this plan that you create. We'll then be able
to share and give each other feedback
and a really honest, open and supportive space. After this class,
you'll walk away prepared to move into
the design process, whether that's working
with a designer you hire, finding a template that suits your needs or creating
a website yourself. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well and I think your website
is worth doing well. If you think so too,
let's get started.
2. Defining your audience: Defining your audience. Let's talk about your
audience, your people. Your audience are the
targeted people or groups of people that you're
trying to communicate to. It's important to narrow
down who these people are and also how
they're finding you. Let's look at an example. Let's take an author. Our author is a fiction writer for young people
based in the US. Their website has to appeal
to both potential agents in the youth literature
field and also young readers around 12-16
in the States. On the surface, literary agents and 13-year-olds seem like very different audiences with very different lifestyles,
and that's true. But what's important here is
finding the common ground, the shared interest, the reason these audiences
are coming to you. In this case, it's a shared
passion for youth fiction, and most likely,
the curiosity and desire to learn more
about the author. Who is your audience
or audiences? Why do they care about you? If you're new to your business
or creative endeavor, you may have to do
some guessing here. Think about who you want
to be your audience, and that's who you're
going to focus on throughout this project. It's actually really exciting
to specifically target the people you want your audience to be
from the beginning. When we're talking
about websites, we call our audience "users"
because our audience of the ones using our
website. Simple, right? We want to think about how our users are
finding our website. Are they hearing it
board, through a friend? Are they Google
searching for it? Are they coming over
from somewhere else on the Internet like a
social media platform? How are your audience or website users finding
your website? If you already have a website, take a look at your
Google Analytics here. You'll be able to
learn a lot from that. If you're new, again, you'll have to make
some educated guesses. But think about who
your audiences are, where they're spending time, and what would bring them
over to your website. Once you've narrowed down
your audiences, who they are, and how they're finding you, it's time to move on
to the next section.
3. Defining your purpose & goals: A website should
be a tool that you use to reach your goals. It's important to
be really clear on what the purposes in your work, and what your overall goals are. If you haven't already
done that work, I'd recommend going away
and doing that now. There's lots of great free
resources and tools on the Internet about finding
the purpose in your work. Do that and then come back. If you're ready to move on, let's think about how
we're going to use our website for you
to reach those goals. Looking at an example, let's think about my studio. In my design studio, my purpose is to empower women to create the
life they want to live. My two main goals are
to help them reach their own financial and
personal goals through strategic and beautiful
branding and websites, and also to help them
to understand how to use design in
their businesses. These are very specific
to my business, and took me quite a lot
of time to distill down. What is the purpose of your
business or creative pursuit? How do you think a website
will help you to achieve that? Now that you've started
to think about how your website is going to help
you to reach your goals, let's get really specific on the main goal of your website. Is your website's main goal
to sell more of your artwork? Is it to get people to sign
up for your newsletter or to book more
potential client calls? You want to be really honest about what the goal
of your website is. Say you're a new artist. In the beginning, your goal may be to get newsletter sign-ups, and then later down the line, it may be to get people
to purchase from you. Those are two really
specifically different goals. They require our
users to complete different actions and
different user journeys, which we'll talk about soon, in order to get there. Be specific and be honest about what your
goal is right now. Remember, a website is
not a static thing. You may need to go back and look at it on a yearly basis or even quarterly basis and see if it's achieving
your goals. If not, you may need to shift your plan a little bit and
see how it goes from there. Earlier in the course, I said a well-designed
website is one designed for our users to use. It's now time to think
about our users' goals. We've all been on
a website before, and we've gone to do
something and it's been a slog to do it. Maybe we're trying to find the contact details of
shops opening time, or maybe we even love an artist, we want to find their
newsletter sign-up and we just can't
on the website. We need to really
be clear about what our users' goals are so that we can design our
website in order for them to reach their goals too. It's also useful to know our users' goals
early so that we can find a bridge between
their goals and our goals. Let's look at an example. Say we have a yoga instructor, and her goal is to get people
to sign up to yoga classes. She gets a lot of
audience members coming over to learn more, to get more educated about
how yoga can help them and how they can live a
healthy and simple life. Lots of those people are coming from Instagram and Pinterest to specific blog
posts she's marketed. Their goals are to
gain that education, to learn more about that. The yoga instructor's
job then is to bridge her goal of
getting people to sign up for classes to the user's goals of learning more and getting more education on the topics. The earlier we know these
goals in the planning process, the more we can plan our website to reach
both those goals. What are your users'
goals or goals? Once you're clear on your
purpose and your goals, it's time to start
thinking about the structure of your website. Before you move on,
why not pop down to the class project and write down your purpose and
some of your goals.
4. Mapping out your pages & user Flow: Now that we know our
purpose and goals, it's time to map out how
we're going to reach those. We want to think about
the pages our website needs in order to
reach our goals. If you're an online business, you may need a service
page so that you can reach the goal of booking
more client calls. If you're an illustrator
looking to sell your artwork, your shop page is going
to be very important. If you're a mission
focus business, your mission page or your about page will be really important so
that your audience can learn more about you and make sure that you're
a company they feel really comfortable
buying from or engaging with. It may be a useful exercise
at this point to look at some others in our industry
and what pages they have. We can learn a lot from
good examples of websites, but we always need
to keep in mind our own goals and our own
needs for our website. What's important here
is that we're making sure we get the most
important pages we need, not too many and not too few. A one-page portfolio website
may look really cool, but will it serve our needs? Will it serve our goals?Always keep those questions in
the front of your mind. Based on your goal
and your user goals, what pages do you think
your website needs? Once we've created a page list, we need to think about how our users flow
through our website, how they get from page to page to reach their
goals and ours. This is a space where knowing
how our audience came to our website can
be really useful. Let's take a look at an example. Here our goal is to get our audience to sign
up for a newsletter. Here, our user is
entering through Pinterest to a blog post
where they're learning more. Then as they scan
through that blog post, they see more blog posts
on the bottom of the page, things that peak their
interest so they click through some more and
are scanning those as well. Then they keep seeing on the bottom of these blog
posts page a resource, a free resource that
looks really good to them but you have to put
in your e-mail address. After reading through
some of those blog posts, they see the value, so they put in their
email address and sign up to the newsletter in order
to get that free resource. That helps us and them to reach the goal of
newsletter sign-up. How will your users flow through your website to
reach their goals? Create your own flow. [NOISE]
5. Creating content: With all these building blocks
we've put in place so far, it's time to start thinking
about our content. What do I mean by content? I mean our written copy
or photography and our visual brand assets that will be a part
of our website. In the beginning, the
most important thing to think about is our messaging. We want our messaging to seep out of everything that we do. What is the main
message you want across your website for
your audience to know? If you're really serious, you can go page by page and ask yourself on each
page of your website, what's the main message you want your audience to take away? Now that you know who
you're speaking to, what you want to say, your message, let's look at
how we're going to say it. Let's create an
outline for each page. You want to go page by
page and think about the specific functions and
the content that you'll need on that page in order to best achieve your
message and your goals. Functions like newsletter
signups, Instagram feeds, anything like that, as
well as what visuals you want on there and
what copy you want there. Let's look at an example. This isn't about page for
an independent coffee shop. We think we need paragraph
about the business, a photograph of the team, a paragraph about how
the shop was started, a photograph of the founder, our mission statement, probably an illustrated pattern, testimonials from
our regular patrons and a newsletter sign-up. The key here is to remember
on each page what you need to reach your goal
and achieve your message. Now our instincts here can sometimes take us
the wrong direction. You may see an
Instagram feed on lots of businesses
homepage and think, I'll put one of those on there. But will that help you
to achieve your goal? Anything we put on the
page is going to take our audience's attention
in one direction. If it's not the direction
we want it to go, we're taking them the wrong way, and then we're not going
to achieve our goals. Continually ask yourself why
you're putting something on the page and make sure that it ties directly back
to your goals. Create a content outline
for the website, going page by page, keeping goals in mind. You may want to
create the outline then step away a few days, come back and edit it. Now it's time to write. I always start with
writing so that the visuals can support that. I would always advise a
classic approach of write, then edit, then repeat. Please do not put
the first draft that you write of your
content on your website. Your website deserves
so much more than that. In your first draft, you're going to want to
just get down your ideas, take your outline and
make sense of it. With each edit that
you do of the draft, you get closer and closer
to your final copy. Take time, write
your first draft, go away for a few hours, even a few days, and
then come back to with fresh eyes and
a fresh perspective. You may want to
get a second pair of eyes on your written content. But do be weary
of having someone look at it who maybe
doesn't understand your goals or your audience. You're writing those
things in mind. Maybe have someone take a look at it who
understands that, or who's just doing a pass for grammar or things that
look out of place. Keep going through
the editing process until you are happy with
the copy that you have. Once your copy is in hand, it's time to start
gathering visuals. For visuals, I mean
your photography and even your visual brand assets like logos, patterns,
illustrations. You'll also want to
have your visual style guide to hand, so that has your typography, color, and layout choices in it. If you haven't worked
with a designer yet or you don't have a
visual style guide, I would definitely
recommend thinking about that if you have
the budget for it. A designer who specializes in branding will
understand how to use visuals to communicate to your specific audience you're messaging to help you
reach your goals. Once you have all
these things together, it's time to organize it. As with everything in life, keeping things
organized is going to make your life easier. Create a Dropbox folder, a Google Drive folder, something on your desktop and organized both your coffee
and your visual content. Make sure you know exactly where your final files
are so that when you're ready to go in
the design process, everything is at
your fingertips. Trust me, it will save you
a lot of time in the end. Gather and organize
all visual content.
6. Wrap up & moving forward: Now that you have
everything together, you're ready to get going. You can now jump into
a Squarespace design, a template that's been specifically made
for your industry, or go off and work
with a designer, feeling confident that
you're going to create a website that will
reach your goals. Thank you so much for
taking this class. I hope this class
helps you to achieve the amazing website
you've been dreaming of, the one that's going to support and help you to
reach your personal, professional, and
financial goals. Once you've gone off and created the first page on your website, leave it below down
the class project and share it along with your
purpose and website goal. It will be great to
see how we each use those things to
influence our website. If you have any questions, just drop them below as well. Thanks very much and
I'll see you later.
Kaitlyn Badger, Design & Creative Communication
