What You Need to Know Before Starting a Website Project 👩‍💻
In this video, I will guide you through the essential things you need to have ready for a website project. As a website designer with experience in designing over 200 websites, there are some things I see over and over again that hold people back in regards to website creation. And I want to make sure that doesn’t happen to you!
From logos and fonts to photos and colors, I will provide insights and recommendations to help you create a professional and cohesive website. I’ll also discuss the importance of a clear call to action and what it means to be prepared with product details.
I always joke that my potential client calls average out to be between 9 and 12 minutes… so I think it’s funny that this video of me basically going through what I tell everyone on that call comes in at right under 11 minutes. If you're thinking about taking the next steps in building your website, definitely watch this video and then book a call with me to chat specifically about your website project to get started!
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:27 Importance of Knowing Your Identity and Offerings
01:11 Logo and Fonts
02:09 Branded Fonts
02:56 Font Pairings
03:21 The Power of Professional Photos
04:20 Color Palette
06:04 Main Call to Action
06:48 Email List Sign-Up
08:25 Preparing Products and Services
09:47 Securing a Domain Name
10:25 Conclusion
Prefer to read? Here’s a video transcript…
Although I will say - this is a pretty visual video, so I do recommend you watch if you can!
Introduction
Websites are all encompassing. If you don't know who you are and what you have to offer, then putting that onto a website is gonna be really hard for not only you but also a website designer. So in this video I'm going to go through what you need to have ready for a website project.
Importance of Knowing Your Identity and Offerings
A lot of people come to me and they say, oh, I'm a visual person, like I'll know it when I see it. But there are some essential things that you have to give me. Before I can just give you something to see. I can't create something out of nothing if I don't know what you're trying to accomplish, right? So this is my basic list and after designing over 200 websites I've seen a lot of these things trip people up and keep people from making moves on creating. I want to make this video to make sure you're not getting stuck and hung up in the website creation process. You can see my quick list over here. I'm actually going to use Taylor Swift as a case study here for this video. To show you this can be pretty simple. I will show you why, using her as an example.
Logo and Fonts
First things first is a logo. A lot of people, I think they think that they have to have this extravagant logo and in my opinion, you just don't. That's not the end all be all anymore. Let's just jump right over to her website if. I'll just come back to the top of her site, this is her logo. It's about as basic of a font as it gets. Just her name, nothing else. If we come over to here, to her store page, she does have her name in a script font. But again, just her name, no other type of design. Just her name in a script font. Which I believe is gonna be the Speak Now font. That's it. You don't have to go crazy.
Branded Fonts
With that, brings me to my next thing is fonts. If you don't have a logo, that's fine. But you do need to have fonts. Fonts will make you stand out and be recognizable if you pick fonts and you stick with them. Like I said, she's got this Speak Now font that is gonna be recognizable to her fans through just repetitiveness, right? So what fonts are you gonna use for your brand that are gonna make you recognizable?
I use two fonts on my website. I recommend you have two. Maybe three. Maybe you add in a decorative font just to spice things up a little bit here and there. But anything more than that is gonna start getting messy. It's gonna get hard to read. And it's not gonna be recognizable anymore. So two or three fonts. I do have a font pairing menu. So if you want to work with me, I will have some font pairings that you can choose from to get started or at least use some inspiration… to say “I like this, I don't like that,” whatever. But you at least need to have some branded fonts that you use.
Like I just said, this is her Speak Now font. And she's got the Taylor's Version font and this basic font up here at the top. Which maybe is her Midnight's font. Those three fonts are used pretty consistently across this whole page. So three fonts, pretty basic, that's it.
The Power of Professional Photos
Okay, photos. The thing I tell everybody, if anything on this list, it's the one thing you have, let it be photos and professional photos. Photos can make or break a website. So definitely invest in photos. And when you do that, think about where you're taking these photos, what you're wearing in these photos. These photos are very visually recognizable.
Color Palette
Again, let's look at Taylor. She's got all of these purples and blues and those are coming, as you can see, directly from her imagery. So what I do, if you have photos but not a color palette, which brings us to the next thing on our list, I will take the photo that we're going to use at the very top of your homepage and I will pull a color palette or a couple color palette options for you to use choose from using that photo. That way your photos and your colors across the whole website are consistent and cohesive and give you that branded professional look.
I personally choose five colors, maybe sometimes six, depending. Some people do come to me with like brand boards that have like 20 different colors. And just like the fonts, that it's way too many, that it's confusing, you can't create a good design with 20 colors. So again, simplify. It doesn't have to be hard. I'll use five colors. And even for myself, that's a monochromatic scheme. So I have black, white, and then a couple shades of this teal or aqua. Whatever it's called. That's it. Very basic.
Taylor has all of her purples over here. Again, like I said in the beginning, these are things that you need to know before you come to a designer. I work with a lot of artists, so this is a good example, but whether you're an event, or maybe you are an author, you have a book… I will take elements from your album cover, your book cover, your event poster. I will take the fonts that you've already selected from those. I will take the colors and the pictures, and I will put them into a website design.
Website design is not the time that you're like, “Well, what fonts should I use on my album cover?” The website design process happens after you've already decided, “this is my album, or this is my book, and now I need to put it online.” That’s why I say these things need to be defined and decided before you create the website.
Main Call to Action
Call to action. Obviously you can take lots of actions on any website, but I always say you need to pick one main call to action. Let's just go to Taylor's. Her's is obviously her Speak Now album. Right now she is currently still on her Eras to her. And honestly my guess right before I came to her site was that was gonna be her main thing. But it's not, this album is her main thing. You have to pick, “what is gonna move the needle the most in my business?” and pick that as your main call to action and feature that. Make it so obvious for your viewers to take that action on your website. So you need to know what is and make it your main call to action and let your designer know so they can communicate that through the design that they create.
Again, if you don't know what you are trying to communicate or accomplish through your business then it's gonna be really hard to have a website be successful and actually work for you.
Email List Sign-Up
Next up, email list. We'll go over here to her website again. She has her newsletter up here in the main navigation. She has this link here to click to sign up for the email list. And if I click on newsletter, it just drops me down slowly on the homepage to this bottom section to sign up for the email list. So it is very prominent and easy thing to do to sign up for her newsletter on her website.
If you don't already have an email list, that is okay. I do have a video where I compare three different email platforms, email marketing platforms. I'll link that for you here. And you can see which one you think is the better fit for you. But basically the benefits of an email list are to get people's names and emails while they're on your website. So when they leave, you can bring them back and you can stay in touch with them.
Even if you're just getting started and you have nobody on that email list, if you can at least provide a website designer with the platform, the setup of your email list so you can start collecting them through your website, that would be perfect.
Preparing Products and Services
Okay, products. This is going to sound really obvious, but I'm going to say it because more times than not, when I build a website, people are not prepared with their products and services… meaning, they don't have titles for them, they don't have descriptions, or they don't know pricing. You need to have these things clearly defined before I can help you sell them on a website.
Again, let's go to Taylor's site, she has this whole section right here, her second section is a collection of her merch images, and then obviously her merch store, she's got a photo of each, she has the title, the pricing, if I click into it there's a description, these are things that you need to have. I just want you to think, imagine if Taylor would have gone to a website designer and said, “I need a merch store,” and they said, “okay, well send me your products,” and she said, “well I don't really, I don't have products yet, I just want a merch store, but I don't have the products.”
Securing a Domain Name
Last but not least, if you don’t already own your domain name, you’ll need one! If you don't know how to check if that's available you can literally just type it in and it will either pop up a website or say there's no website here and that will let you know. And then a website designer can help you figure out where you want to secure the domain name and how to link it up to your website design but you at least need to either have one ready. Or, know what you want that to be and know to ask to take those next steps. Clearly, Taylor's domain name is TaylorSwift.com.
Conclusion
And that is my list for you. Hopefully this cleared up a few questions, made things simpler, maybe hopefully less stressful for you. If you have anything else to add to my list or any questions for me about what I just went over, drop those for me in the comments. If you have most or some of these things ready and you're interested in a new website, you can go to designtherow.com/services and book a call and we can chat specifically about these things for you and your project and see if we might be a good fit to work together. And until then, I will see you in the next video.
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