-Setting up a website can be a daunting task, but it really doesn’t need to be. Often when people set up a website, they lack planning. It is important to strategically set up a website to reflect not only what you do, but to engage your visitors and establish firm relationships. Trust is vital to a growing business and website visitors need to feel they are not only getting answers to their all important problems, but they are dealing with a trusted source.

Create a mood board on how you see your website

Creating a style guide is the fun part and is also one of the the things that make or break a brand. Decide on your colour palette, choose your fonts and sizes and get your logo designed in terms of your brand colours and fonts. Consistency is key to create a cohesive brand image.

Remember to use a primary font (for headings), an accent font for bylines and buttons and the all important text font. Try and use a maximum of 3 fonts, so that your loading time is not impacted.

Decide on what pages to have and what to include in the navigation bar.

There is no set rule on what pages to include on a website, so start planning the pages and what pages you need to include in the navigation. Navigation is important to website visitors, as people want to get to the relevant content as quickly and possible to answer their burning questions.

Most pages included on a new websites will usually be, but you can expand on these:

• Home Page
• About Page
• Services Page
• Blog Page
• Contact Page

Your home page is really a summary of what your site has to offer and reflects what you do and/or what services you sell. Remember grabbing the attention of your website visitor is what your website is all about, so plan clear ‘call to actions’, particularly on the home page, so that people can move through your website and gather the information that they need.

Include beautiful images and optimise these before you upload images to your website

Nobody wants to land on a website and see just plain text and they also don’t want to land on a website and it takes forever to load, so compress those images first – your website visitors will thank you and Google will love you in terms of website loading speed.

Get your content ready

It is always good to have your content ready, especially when uploading to a new website enriched with your relevant keywords that you want to rank on the search engines for. Content will include what is going to be included on the pages and also some blog post content, to start your blog off with a bang. If you are working with a web designer, this is what will be requested from you as soon as the site is designed and in order for your website to go live (the sooner the better), then have this content ready before you settle on a design or a child theme if you are going the DIY route.

Confession time – I’m a designer and for years, I have concentrated on building Divi Child Themes (my absolute happy place) and quite honestly, I have neglected my blog, which in turn has made my site not as relevant as it really should be. My knowledge of the Divi theme is excellent and I can implement most functionality on a website, but (this is the caveat), I haven’t ever written about my skills, which I really should be doing. So there, you have it.

Decide on what social media platforms you are going to use.

Running a business and managing a website has so many turning wheels – remember not to over extend yourself on too many social media accounts, because you are expected to how up and shmooz your fans. To ensure you deliver to your audience, select the social media accounts that your customer target base hangs out on and which accounts you would like to concentrate on.