Creating Your First Website: Where To Start

March 30, 2021

Creating your first website can be a daunting task. Maybe you’ve procrastinated by scrolling through templates for hours on end, without finding one that felt right. Or you went for it and started with a basic squarespace site, only to push off actually doing anything with it.

In both of these situations you’re setting yourself up for failure. The process will be so much easier if you take it step by step, starting at the beginning.

01 Understand Your Brand’s Mission & Audience

Before you tackle any of your website content you have to understand your brand first.

What do you want to be known for? Why are you starting this business? Keep asking yourself why to move beyond the initial surface level answers and into your brand’s mission.

Who is your target audience? I’ve talked multiple times about establishing a niche. Once you know who you’re talking to you’ll be able to make informed content decisions.

02 Build Your Brand Foundation

Once you’ve built the foundation of what your brand is and who it’s for, you can begin to understand what kinds of visuals would appeal to them. What style of fonts feel right? What color palette creates the right tone for your brand? If you’re unsure, I always recommend keeping everything more minimal. Stick to one or two main colors and it will create consistency across your site.

03 Pick Your Template

If you’re working from a template, picking a template now will help give you a guide for what copy you need to write. We won’t actually start customizing it though until the rest of the content is created.

To pick a template, the most important thing to look for is that it has all the features you might need. Think of it like buying a house. You can easily change the paint color and furniture, but it’s a lot harder to raise the ceiling or add a bedroom. When people say a house has good bones, we want to have the same thought when picking a template. Determine what pages and content you’ll need and find a website that has most, if not all, of those things already laid out.

04 Write Your Website Copy

You should have a good idea by now of the pages and sections that you’ll need on the site. Now it’s time to fill that outline in with your actual copy. You should NOT be writing your website copy in your website template. Start in a google doc so you can focus on just the copy and nothing else.

Think back to the initial step when you determined your brand’s mission and audience. That should help you immensely when you’re trying to figure out what to write. When you know what problems you’re trying to solve it’s a lot easier to talk about them.

05 Gather Your High-Quality Photos or Schedule a Photoshoot

Photography can completely make or break your website. It’s a large piece of the overall visual impression so you want to make sure the photos are high quality. This is a good chance to schedule a brand photoshoot if you haven’t done one already. I wrote a whole post about photography tips for a dynamic website so check that out when picking your photographer or going into your shoot.

06 Add Your Content

This step is going to feel so easy once you’ve finished the steps above. Simply plug and play!

This summer, doors open for my Fit-Pro Launch Lab, a design training (+ website template) to help you launch your brand and website. It will include more in depth insights about how to tackle the steps above as well as video tutorials walking you through how to customize your template, create an on-demand membership, and get your business officially out into the world! Get on the waitlist to get first access to the course (and early-bird bonuses!).