How to Make a Business Website in 2021
hey what is up everyone patrick here again and today i'm going to show you how to build a professional website for your business now if you've got a small business or you're just a small brand starting out creating a digital presence online is almost a requirement in today's day and age even if you've got a traditional brick and mortar establishment now you could be a family restaurant that's looking to go online and take online orders or you could just be a brand that's now expanding into merchandising whatever the reason having a professional website as a one-stop shop for your digital presence online will make all the difference in converting people that are just passer buys online into actual customers and there are so many different ways you could go about creating this website for your business which is exactly where we're going to be today using wix.com now if you don't know what wix.com is you should buy now but it is a professional website building platform that allows you to take templates that they provide you and use their editor to easily drag and drop components to quickly create a professional website for your business now i will include a link down in the description so you can follow that to wix.com and follow along step by step as i show you exactly how to build a website for your business or if you'd rather you can wait until the end of the video and use the link after you've learned the knowledge that i give you today so let's jump in and create a website for your business okay so first things first we'll head over to wix.com you can use that link i dropped down in the description and if you don't already have a wix account you can hit the get started button or the sign in button up here and this will just take you to the login or create an account page where i already have a wix account so i'm just going to log in using my existing credentials but like i said if this is your first time you'll go ahead and click sign up and then enter an email password and then hit sign up but let me just log in really quick and when i'm ready i'll hit login now it will log me into my wix sites dashboard so this is a full list of all of the websites i already have through my wix account of course if you've just created a wix account you'll be taken to the create a new site page immediately if you already have an account you'll click on the create new site button up here at the top right now i'll be creating a website for my business today specifically for my marketing agency business so we'll start off by clicking on the business tab and then from here we'll choose a template we don't want to use the wix adi instead we'll pick from a series of different templates to find something that best resembles the kind of look we're going for and as you can see by default it starts off with just a general list of templates for different kinds of businesses now over here on the left side you can see subcategories under business now let's find advertising and marketing and we'll click on that and now we'll get relevant templates based off of advertising and marketing and like i said i'll be creating something for a marketing agency and honestly i do prefer more simple sites but you can always take a preview look at it by clicking on the view button this will grab that template and open it up in a new page so you can get a better idea for the form and functionality of that site so this is the home page as you can see a nice big hero image fades in nicely we do planning so this is definitely for more of a consulting marketing and branding so i'm not actually going to use this one i want something that's more project oriented as opposed to consulting oriented so i'll just go back into the template selection and from here i'll go through and find something that fits what i'm looking for i do like this go mobile one let's see what's on page two of marketing agencies and this one honestly looks good so let's let's take a peek at it and click view and this will open it up and of course there is the desktop button and the mobile button at the top left be sure to click on both of those to see what it would look like in mobile view i am liking this like i said this is more project oriented that's kind of what i was going for on this specific business website i wanted to be able to show off the work that my business has done in the past in order to create a feeling that we are an authority in what we do that way potential clients will feel more comfortable reaching out to us so we've got work an about page just a simple breakdown of exactly who we are and what we do and then a contact page i love this because it keeps it straight and to the point it's not too flashy but it shows you exactly what you want to see and it gets down to business quickly you can see the work we've done see what we're about and then contact us directly so i'm going to go ahead and hit edit this site and that will grab the template and convert it into the wix editor so i can start making it my very own and making it fit my businesses not just theming but copy and imagery okay so now we are inside the wix editor and if you're unfamiliar with this it's simply where we'll be doing all of the editing of our website now to the right you'll see this bar over here that you can grab and drag wherever you'd like on the website and this is simply your formatting tools is how you adjust the formatting of your website and the elements on page where the navbar to your left contains everything you'll need to customize your website and change the elements as far as images text and any other interactive elements you have on your website to make it your own and then at the top you've got your settings bar and this is where you can dive in and actually adjust your site settings like domain email and other things like that you can click on any element and then a line will appear around it and that border simply represents that specific element and it'll tell you at the top left what kind it is this is a text element just a little bit of copy that breaks down what our website's work is about and then at the top left you'll see the nav bar now if i grab and drag anything you'll see a series of pink lines and these are just formatting lines to help you arrange things a little more cleanly so i'll move this over here and clicking on the edit text button or double clicking inside of a text box will allow me to edit the text within it so instead of the name they already have in there now i'm going to call this patrick's agency and then click off whenever you're happy with that i'll go ahead and change this out too and when i'm happy with that i can go ahead and start changing some of the other things on the website now this template is a little more straightforward and that there aren't too many text elements you need to go ahead and change but be sure you always check all the way down on the bottom because you've got that footer bar too and you want to make sure that obviously it links to the appropriate things so we'll go ahead and change this out as you can see this is a strip that contains different text elements that are just named after the social media element so clicking on the edit text button will allow us to actually see that it is in fact linked and clicking on that will allow us to change what that's linked to as you can see it's linked to the instagram.com
for wix itself we would change this to patrick's agency or whatever your url for social media would be and make sure to go through and do that to every single one so it's actually linking to the appropriate thing you don't want to just grab a template and have people visit the site only to try and reach out or contact you or see your social media to accidentally be redirected to the templates website so for example wix.com it would bring them there when in actuality you want them to check out the things you're making not what wix is making and so scrolling back up to the top we can start changing out some of these elements in the strip so clicking on it and again you'll see at the top here it says wix pro gallery hidden right behind the nav bar and we can click the manage media button to start changing out some of these images this will open up our media storage specifically for this website which will contain all the images videos and other files that we've already uploaded to the site at this point in time now keep in mind you might have separate wix websites under one account and they don't transfer data between the two of them that way it doesn't get confusing and you end up with images that are just irrelevant to whatever site you're actually on so from here you can see which media has been added and in which order clicking and dragging on it will allow you to change that order and then you can see down here you can adjust the image quality or remove the image from the gallery altogether and if you want to add some new media you would click the add media button up here now this is where you can choose to add image video or text i'll go ahead and add some text and let's just say hello and welcome and always make sure that your text is the right color as you can see it just went to white and you want to make it pop you want it to be able to be red so once you're happy with that we'll go ahead and hit add to gallery and this will add that media to the gallery and then from there it's treated as another element that we can then click and drag around so we'll drop that into second place and before we go ahead and hit done you can see right here you can change the title of things so we'll go ahead and click on this and from here we can add a link and link to a web page a web address a document whatever we want we can link it directly through here so in fact we'll link the contact page and then we'll hit done and now this element is going to link directly to the contact page when clicked on so we'll hit done again and we'll see our changes have been made now before we jump over into anything else let's click on the page button at the top left this is how you can switch between your different pages and you can see that there aren't just the three pages that you see but in fact there are separate web pages for each project we worked on which is a nice touch because then that way it can keep things a little more consolidated and together so let's go ahead and jump over to the about page and change out some of that information real quick and i would just again like i did on the home page change out that text make it my own rebrand everything and of course an about page is a great place to put information about your company your staff and your mission and if we wanted to add any more elements to this page we can go over to the nav bar and hover over the add button and clicking on that will show us all of the available things we can add to it so i wanted to go ahead and add a button that would take us to the contact page even though there is one at the top i just want to give you a demonstration of how the drag and drop editor works so you can grab a button and literally click and hold and drag it onto your website and now you've got a button it's as simple as that and then arranging it you can see those pink lines again those are to help you format and grabbing one of the corners allows you to resize it and it will file your mouse as you see fit so let's get something i'm comfortable with let's right there and then scoot that over right there awesome and in order to change what this is linked to you can click on the link button right up here above it and just like we did on the other page we're going to go ahead and hit page and then from here we're going to link to contact and then done and then one last thing to change the text from just button you can click on this button and we'll just say contact us and then we can choose the icon that we would like to use and whenever you're happy with that you can close out and click off and you're good to go so now whenever you click on that button it will take you directly to the contact page which we're going to jump over and change out real quick and from here this is all your basic information this is simply your contact email for your company and then your company's address you would change this to fit whatever obviously is your information if that's something you want to share because i would be a digital marketing agency i would maybe want my phone number and website but i wouldn't need my address so clicking on any element within the wix editor you can see that there is a border now around it which shows you it's selected and then hitting delete will simply delete that item now if you didn't mean to delete that holding down control z will undo that last action and bring it back now to duplicate something you can click on that item again and then make sure that border appears around it and hit ctrl c and that will copy it to your clipboard and store it as your next thing to be pasted and in order to paste any element you can click off you don't even have to click off if you don't want to but i recommend it makes it a little easier and hit control v now this will paste whatever last item was on your clipboard and then you can click and drag that element wherever you'd like just like we did with the button on the last page you can use the drag and drop function to rearrange everything you see on your website so if i'm not happy with this form i could grab it and maybe make it a little more center on my website but like i said not trying to have an address because we would be a remote agency and i'll delete both of those and now looking at the wix form itself clicking on it you'll see that says it's a wix form right here and we'll click on form settings just to see how this is linked and what to as you can see it gives the potential client some basic information about first last name email phone number and then the content of their message so clicking on the wix form settings will hit settings again and from here we can change what is the name of this form specifically and then what it does does it do email notifications submission tables autofill so on so forth and we can control what is shown to the person using the form whenever they submit a message by choosing whether it's a pop-up and then how it pops up so you can show a success message open a link to an external url if you're trying to let's say open it up to a product page or something like that or show off a particular piece of work after somebody submits something or you can link payment contacts and email marketing efforts all through this form so i'm going to leave it as is because this is actually going to be linked directly to my contact for my website so we're going to head to the very first project page that i saw which was kitu cosmetics which we're just going to change this first one out so that when we click on that link it will link us to this project that we've customized i just want to give you a clear understanding of how to use these tools and not necessarily create the most beautiful website for you right now just keep in mind the more time and effort you put into making it look better and professional will really go a long way in the long term because sure it's a investment of time and effort up front but that website's going to be there for a long time just waiting there as people come and visit and it's the first thing that people looking for your company will be greeted by online especially if it's your only online presence so now from the catoo cosmetics page you can see that this is a very straightforward project page it just gives you a few different images from whatever it would be in this instance this marketing campaign and then a little bit of copy about it what i like at the top up here is it breaks it down really really nicely based off of service client and year so you would just change these out so we would say marketing just whatever that specific project would be and then change out all of the copy and you would go through and change all these images out by clicking on them and then you can hit manage column which will allow you to change the formatting on the columns themselves and in order to change the elements within you would go over to change column background and simply choose one from the existing media on your website or from a series of wix folders which of course this is your own business's website so you're trying to highlight your own work and not use templated or stock imagery because it takes away from the professionalism and at this point it would just be lying because it's not actually a project image related to the work you're trying to highlight here now whenever you're happy with all this we can head back over to the work page which functions as our home page and you can see everything we've added so far and if you scroll down even further you can see all the different projects which i'm actually going to get rid of a few of these rows here so clicking on any one of them again you'll see that wix pro gallery at the top left that just means that i have that highlighted and i'll hit delete and get rid of all that and i'll do it with this one as well and scrolling back to the top one last thing we'll want to change is that theme so going over to theme manager you can see the color scheme for the entire website as you can tell it's pretty straightforward black and white and gray nothing crazy but we'll change this pink to a more relevant purple because let's say that's my company's color and you can open up this rgb slider and it makes it nice and fun to pick the color that you're trying to use and really straightforward if you've got rgb or hex decimals that you can just plug them in directly when you're happy with that you can click off and it is now applied and finally you want to post this live to the internet so everybody can visit it you'll go to publish up here at the top right and click on that and that will grab your website as it is now and post it live to the internet using a semi-random wix domain name that you can alter yourself or you can add your own custom domain in fact i have a video on how to create a custom domain name for your website that i'll link down in the description below as well and now our website is live on the internet and like i said it is a semi random website name it uses your username and then wixsite.com and then whatever that sub name of the site is and if you want to check it out you can go ahead and click view site at any point and that will take this website and open it up in a new window but there is one last feature i wanted to show you that as a business might be beneficial and that is booking so if you're somebody who needs to book meetings or schedule digital conferences this is a great way to do it so over here on the nav bar we'll go ahead and click on the bookings button and as you can see there hasn't been any added to the website so i'll hit add now now this will take our website and add a wix bookings which is an intuitive step-by-step manager that allows potential clients to book meetings with us to talk about potential or future projects not only that but it gives us the power to manage all of our client contacts and other information that otherwise might end up in several different platforms and a little bit all over the place and just like that we've created a bookings manager and from here we'll go ahead and click manage services to grab the pre-existing template ones and get rid of those and create a meeting for ourselves now i'll go ahead and choose one on one because this is going to be a meeting and not necessarily an online class or workshop and we'll go ahead and change the name to meeting and give it a service subtitle and you can always add an image if you like that is optional and then we can choose service type down below so you can select appointment class or course of course they are self-explanatory so i'll go ahead and stick with appointment and down here you can go ahead and change the session duration so i'll say it's a 30 minute meeting but we'll give it a 5 minute buffer time on either side so just below that you can choose which staff member will provide this service and this is where you can go ahead and manage the staff members that will be interacting with your site especially if you have a larger team that's working in specific areas if you have an audio person that has a meeting you can schedule through your website you might want to have them as a separate staff member than somebody who's your video editor or director so i'll go ahead and click rename and we'll just make it my name so instead of staff member number one it will be patrick and then we'll hit save and we're good to go so just below that you can see a price so if you want you can actually charge for these meetings you can set a fixed price or a custom price depending on the client and the type of meeting or you can just simply set no fee so we'll go ahead and select no fee and then type of location so this is where we can select where the meeting will take place we can choose business address a physical location client's place again another physical location but we're going to meet our client or a custom location so i'll say custom location and we'll simply say online session because it's happening online it will be remote and we'll just keep it that way always and you can choose to add video conferencing so from here this is where you can add a zoom integration or whatever your preferred video conferencing software is and then down here you've got membership packages so if you're giving the option to your clients to sign up for membership packages you can give them exclusive access to different content like blog or video articles and then down here there is an additional settings tab this just allows us to customize how we accept our online bookings and then our booking form so we can choose the default booking form or we can create our own custom one and then we'll hit save and continue and this will open up the editor to allow us to change how our form will look so we can make it more in line with our branding and so when we're happy with this we can go ahead and hit save and this will save our new meeting that we've added to our bookings so we can choose to add more and more services by clicking add a new service up here but we'll go ahead and close out now keep in mind this is a premium feature so you will need to upgrade your account if you haven't already and when i'm happy with all of this and want to post it live to the internet i'll click the publish button at the top right and this will grab our website and publish it live to the internet using a semi random wix url which is right here now it's based roughly off your username and the name of that specific site and if we want to take a look we'll hit view site and this will open it up in a new tab for us to interact with it as it's live on the internet this is exactly how our website is going to act and our site is loaded so we can see that we've got our different projects here hovering over them gives them a little bit of an action and then we can click on hello and welcome and this will open up the contact page as we linked it and then clicking on the about page will take us to our about page with that contact us button that i added so clicking on that and we can see that it's linked appropriately it took us right over to our contact page where we can then fill out our information and then submit a message going back to the home page or our work portfolio page and scrolling down and clicking on this k2 cosmetics one will actually open up our project in a new page and as you can tell this is the one that we change this is the marketing campaign one that i added and made my own and then from here you can go through and scroll and see all the content of that specific project and hit the arrow to go back and just like that you now have a professional website for your business your business now has a professional digital presence of course you can go in and customize this more and more and i always recommend keeping it an iterative process meaning come back and forth on it and make tweaks here and there don't just try to do it all in one go sometimes taking a step back getting a breath of fresh air and looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference in designing your website so you should now have a starting point for your business's website from here there are so many different components that you can use within wix to customize and further develop what your website can do and give it more interactivity to further develop that online presence none of this would be possible of course without wix.com being the platform that provides us the tools to do this so i've provided that link down in the description if you haven't already be sure to use it to head over to wix.com and if you found this video helpful please be sure to give it a like and subscribe to the channel to check out other videos just like this one and hit that bell for notifications and until next time as always thanks for watching
2021-03-06 19:21
