Make Your Own Business Website

Maybe you don’t have a large budget or you’re just starting a project/business. Maybe you have some design acumen or minor website building experience. Here are my tips for the DIY business website builder!

01

CHOOSE A WEBSITE BUILDER

Save yourself a lot of headaches and choose a website builder that (1) has built-in templates and (2) is aligned with your business needs.

Squarespace has great templates and an easy to learn interface. It’s very intuitive to use, and there are tons of tutorials out there. Would highly recommend for anyone with a business that revolves around scheduling, as you can easily add on Acuity Scheduling.

Shopify is not intuitive in terms of design and can actually be kind of frustrating, but if you’re selling physical products I have personally found it to be a small but mighty platform. Small annoyances are not being able to delete tags or have images only show up when the color variation is clicked on, but for a starter business, Shopify is totally fine.

If you’re looking simply for slick designs, and aren’t selling anything (especially physical goods), Cargo has some beautiful templates.

02

FILL IN THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION

To make sure you don’t miss it, fill out important business information such as your address and e-mail. You may need to connect your domain if you purchased one. If you are selling things, this part will be a bit more time-intensive, as you will need to set up currency, approved payment methods, and shipping.

03

START DESIGNING

Working with a template can be nice in that you just replace a ready-made design with your own elements, like a logo, brand colors, and typefaces. You replace the links along the top and the information on the homepage with things that will benefit and describe your business.

04

GETTING INTO THE NITTY GRITTY

If you are looking for something a little more out-of-the-box, you might find yourself creating graphics, choosing custom typefaces, or even tinkering with the code. Here are some tools I use and recommend if you are going that route:

CANVA: For simple graphics and a plethora of ready made designs.

GOOGLE DOCS: Keep a record of all changes you make to your code, and keep a copy of the original code as well.

NOTION: Great productivity app for planning and business management.

TYPEWOLF: Great resource for finding typefaces and inspiration for beautiful website design.