 And happy small business week too. Okay, just maybe another 30 seconds. So I will get started Neil if you happen to see people enter if you don't mind letting them in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, thank you. Okay. All right, again, welcome to how to create your own business website. And this is the last program that the library is hosting for San Francisco small business week and I'm really happy that you're all here. Thanks for joining us for this. I'm super excited. So anyway, happy small business me. All right, so my name is Kirsty I'm the small business center librarian. Our department's located on the fourth floor of the main library. Please come visit us we're open every single day. You can also email us at this site tech at SFPL.org. And then you can also call us directly at our reference desk 415-557-4488. You can also put out a monthly newsletter, you can sign up for it here, hit Lee slash SFPL newsletter. I list all the programs related to small business jobs and careers, personal finance and investing. Any kind of special partnerships we have going with other agencies so it's worth looking at ice, you know, spend a lot of time on that. Okay, so I want to just recap this week so the first program we had was email marking for beginners and that was on Tuesday with a small business development center. If any of you attended that let us know in the chat how you liked it. And then later that day, we hosted the office of small business and Martha yen yes, I did a fabulous overview of how to start a business in San Francisco. And then the next day, we had the amazing Eddie Tang from the SF LGBT LGBT Center present on an introduction to business plans. Yesterday we hosted Renaissance Women's Business Center for kickstart your business, and easily I talked about the pros and cons about entrepreneurship, and also how to access their services because they're an amazing organization as well. And then finally today, yay, how to create your own business website with Neil to our field. So just a small disclaimer that the information presented today is intended for educational purposes and does not constitute professional financial or legal advice. And then finally, please remain muted during the presentation, you can type your questions in the chat, and then we have enabled auto transcription, if you need closed captioning on your screen. And that I will stop sharing my screen and introduce you to Neil. Neil to our field is a member of the LGBT community, first generation Filipino American and native San Francisco to our field. Sorry, Neil is the founder of summer a digital creative studio on a mission to support the vision of social impact organizations. Through digital storytelling, they focus on furthering social justice, equity and inclusion through virtual event streaming digital strategy and online experiences. Prior to starting his own creative firm, he was an experienced designer researcher and has consulted as a digital strategist for social entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia and East Africa. To cross tech creative agency social impact and vehicle autonomy, including Uber DreamWorks, Samsung Oracle City and County of San Francisco SF Department of Health, Epsilon and Apple. Please help me welcome Neil to our field. Thank you so much Christie really appreciate that hi everybody. What was it yesterday was synced to Maya so I hope y'all are didn't drink too much. And you're coming to this webinar with full focus and yes happy Friday, I hope y'all had a really great week. And my work right in the middle of spring. So, I'm hoping you are just about as ready for the weekend as I am so thank you for that introduction, Christie. And let me go ahead and start off here by sharing my screen as well. We usually very prepared realize I didn't have any slides for this I literally just put these slides together in the first minute of this webinar so here we go. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and open my chat window just in case let me see if I there any specific. Okay, here. I'm going to ask well, welcome everybody. My name is again is Neil Torfield. I founded a creative studio called summer we're based out here in San Francisco, and summer specifically focuses on and supports or social impact organizations around digital experience. We do a digital strategy, and we do that through creating digital applications, supporting live streams and doing video production so there's a lot we do in the creative space to be able to support these, these organizations and, and most most importantly, the need is great. And with that, my background comes from graphic design, what just called for graphic design a lot of graphic design through the early 2000s culminated into web design, and through that became user experience design so my core career has been built around graphic design and with that, you know we have mobile we have mobile applications and of course the topic of today is creating our small business website. So this is very very bare bones basic website we're going to utilize templates and in order to do so we have to use a platform to be able to do that. So for the entire webinar I'll be using Squarespace and there were a variety of different platforms you can utilize wix.com being one of them. WordPress.com is another one as well. You can also work with developers if you want to do something a lot more custom but again for the purposes of this webinar we're going to create a really basic website. Plug in some e commerce and be able to actually create a store, we can do that in the span of this 30 minutes. It's like a cooking show, you know, I have something that I'm making right in front of y'all, but I also have something prepared on the side just in case. So go ahead and first and just ask everybody, how many have you, and just please type it into chat. How many of you have any experience at all, working within websites. And you can some, I'm the app you can some and maybe not at all, or you know, make some of your expert level, which is probably some of that. Okay, great. Good, getting some really good responses here. Years ago. Yeah. Well, and everything tech is where it just evolved at the speed of light so yeah, but a lot of that you know that the concepts still are retained. Okay, good. Next question here is, what do you want to get out of this. You can just quickly type something in the chat and I'll just scan through it just to make sure that what I do have in my agenda if there's any meanderings or lefts or rights in my agenda that I need to take to be able to deepen work and more deeper and I can do that. Okay, are you doing it right. Okay. I think it falls to work for great concrete steps which is going to be part of this agenda as well common mistakes ideas and tools that's a huge part of this. Okay, cool. wording and language. Great. Okay. I won't actually touch on copy specifically and copy strategy if that's telling that's what you're hoping to get through this but happy to be able to, you know, Kirsty, I'm sure you're going to share something after this and if not, I'm more than welcome to be able to share my email address so anybody who has any lingering questions that I mean to have covered on this webinar please feel free to email me directly. And Thomas says he just took a or you just took a WordPress class recently so that's good so you have some sort of sense around utilizing these type of platforms and these editors. Cool. Alright, so let's go ahead and get started. Here's our agenda. So we just did an introduction, we're going to walk through a best in class audit. So a lot of what design and design engineers and web web designers and designers in the application space, usually do in the first stages is to do a ton of research, which we don't know more. And but one of those frameworks we use is called a best in class audit so we'll go through that really quickly. Then we'll dive in right into the platform itself so given what we understand about specific websites in our audit. We'll go ahead and apply that into some templates. We'll talk about logo will be able to store really quickly again and then we'll go ahead and create a domain names again really basic concepts here and within the realm of Squarespace. So if you haven't already. Let me go ahead and stop sharing here and I'm going to switch over. So you haven't already Squarespace is a wonderful website again there are a variety of different ones out there that you can use wix.com is huge competitor of an alternative to Squarespace, but what's great about these platforms or what we used to call whizzy wig, which literally is an acronym for what you see is what you get is there are a variety of different templates you can already use. And with that you have a bunch of plugins you can use already so a lot of these organizations already work with e commerce organizations, search engine optimization organizations, they already have a lot of stuff built in so you don't really have to start from scratch. And get a lot of the stuff is ready built in right so a Squarespace is great it's in terms of what you can utilize and get something up and quickly going. So, I definitely would recommend Squarespace course wix.com is a huge one as well if you are may not be familiar with that wordpress.com. So WordPress is, they actually have an org, and WordPress started as a, an actual kind of a piece of software, I guess is the best way to say it's a piece of software they can, you can install into your domain or your web domain, and you can run it. It's essentially integrated into your web server. And what they've done is they've also created a self hosted, what we say self hosted meaning that they created a solution that is very similar in the vein for wix.com and also Squarespace. I guess we're looking at a website here. Let me see if I can quickly. Well, you're looking at the innards and the developer version or the, the back end of everything that's on my wordpress.com site here. See if I can quickly log out. There you go okay so that's WordPress.com. So again, another really interesting competitor here within that space and again they have templates you can utilize and plugins you can pull into to be able to help support a variety of different functions you need to be able to create on the website. Okay. But again, for the purpose of this will go ahead and just use Squarespace we'll dive into that real quick but before we get there. Let's do a best in class audit. So what is that. So best in class audit is a great way for us, and you know I'm sure all of us are digital folks we were on our Facebook and our instagrams we browse through the internet. We do that for hours at end if not days on Android. So we have I feel a sensibility that we have built around what is good web design and what is bad web design. So essentially a best in class audit is, let's look at some really great websites that we either idealize, or that we think have really good design. And not only identify what is good design and what are the good components of the good design, but what are the bad components of that right. And a lot of this really culminates to user experience. When we think about bad design it just, it doesn't work well, or maybe the font or the text is too small, or the positioning of the navigation the buttons aren't really working when it should so a lot of that is within the realm of experiences. And so let's take a quick look. Again, so fictitiously what we're going to create here is a pizza restaurant. So we're going to go ahead I'm going to dive in and we're going to create a pizza restaurant or a pizza website that sells pizzas online. So, first and foremost let's take a look at some really good websites, and I think a couple of these would be really familiar to you. So let's let's pull up and we can just quickly Google some pizza websites pizza hut been big corporate. It's good to kind of take a good slice of a variety of different websites ones that are either corporate websites, maybe some about our local, and maybe some that are really jazzy and snazzy. We won't really go on that last end but here's you know a few really good websites that I've been able to pull up. So again corporate. They have a lot of funding. They have a huge probably design team behind this if not they've been able to employ an actual agency to be able to build these things for them. So I definitely would recommend take a look at some corporate websites and see how their websites look like. Especially when you think about positioning yourself and your brand and your business in the larger context of the competitive environment, it's really good to look at websites and see what they're doing. What are they doing right and what doing to God wrong but most importantly, what can you copy. Yes, because in in the design world. Everything is actually being created. Everything is either being reinterpreted, or essentially copied and so Picasso says it's really great right good artists copy, but great artists steal. So, the good point here point to be made is to take a look at these websites and look at what they're doing really well and essentially steal those concepts, I wouldn't say steal the actual imagery you don't want to do that. You don't steal the actual text itself but look at the different components that pull together that make a really good website. So website, so I'll just quickly call these out and there's a framework I'll show you in just a second to help actually form what this starts to look like. So with pizza hut, we have navigation at the top you can see there's a logo again, I'm sure everybody on this call has browsed through a million websites and there's a typical framework you have navigation on the top. You usually have some really big image that attracts the eye and that we call that a hero image. And for that purpose, it is that it's a piece of hero content so it's the first thing that your eye lands on when you're looking at a website. And Pizza Hut does something really interesting here there's a sign in on the top right corner you have a cart on the top, on the top right as well. Big hero image, something promotional, you can order now you can see that button really highlighted here. You have a store near you you have some featured stuff in this case you have some featured food, maybe it's characteristics of their actual products, you can see more. I'm also getting really hungry. It's almost lunchtime, and I haven't eaten yet so don't mind me if I'm kind of salivating here as I'm going through this. We have food, popular pizzas rounds it out to the bottom we have something about loyalty right we have like hot rewards and then they also have a call to action for trying to hire specific folks or something around careers and and then finally at the very bottom we call this the mega footer and every single this used to be and still is a trend in web design where you just have a huge amount of content on the bottom which basically is navigation. You have social. And if they happen to have a mobile app you can download it right here. This is like we call this a mega footer in opposed to a mini footer which some websites have which is just a strip. You have all components or iterations of this specific design, but you know, let's, that's pizza hot. And of course we can go into the menu and look at a variety of different pages that they build here but again, in the interest of time we only have time. Let's just take a look at homepage around table. They've just recently I think in the past year or two did a redesign. So you can see that they have a redesigned logo. And then there's some similarities with pizza hut. There's something about a menu or specials that they can also elevate their locations they have a bunch of stores. Again, there's login and a way to be able to access your order or your card. So, in terms of frameworks, there's a very similar kind of framework or there's a there's a very similar sense as to how they're designing this top navigation bar. It's been very, very similar. You have a hero image, super huge. This is full bleed. So it goes from one end to the next. You have an order now, which again catches the eye and you can really see how they're utilizing the color red here. So hero image, we scroll down a little bit further. You have something about loyalty program. You can download their app. Interestingly, they also have merch. So if you're really into round table, you can buy a T shirt or a cap. You can also see that they have similar colors that they're using for what we call as a CTA or a call to action is essentially a button. And it's parts of a website that you want to be able to call attention to your consumer to be able to click on. So a bunch of CTAs here they're all the same color. Order now. You can see that the actual text in the button is all caps. So it kind of just yells at you right grabs your attention. So you can order pizza with royalty so you can order now scrolling a little bit further so that they actually kind of make use of a not necessarily a mega footer here but it's kind of a medium footer I would call this is not a mega it's not necessarily a mini footer but it's something in between. That's a quick kind of scroll through that go hill pizzas one of my favorites and patrol hill. They have three locations and you know what's interesting here is they also have a logo on the top left navigation on top right and their locations in that footer right so pretty simple and in terms of their page they push you out directly to store itself. So slightly different in terms of concept. But essentially the the pieces are very similar here right it just goes right into a what we call an order flow or a sale flow. And then finally again one of my favorite pizza places here in San Francisco and I started eating pizzas when they were still in the food trucks and now they have their own location which I'm really excited for Del Pablo page up here you go okay so full bleed image hero image as we call it you know just really entices you makes you celebrate as I am right now scroll a little further down, and we can see that that's it. Really what they're trying to do here is just to pull you in to show you rather than taking action and selling things are really more invoking the beauty of pizza making right which is a lot of what they do. So you can see that their navigation here is kind of encapsulated into this navigation item here so you would have to click in it. I, you know, this is pretty typical of mobile websites, whether it's on a tablet or on your mobile device. I would say it's not good practice to do this on a regular desktop website, because you want to be able to have your menu items, and your navigation items right there and then. Unless there's some specific point or design point you're trying to make here. In terms of Del Pablo, I, you know they're saying hey, we're making these really beautiful pizzas, maybe in terms of their company philosophy or their business philosophy they're thinking through about more the experience of the pizza rather than let's just get people to purchase right so that could be a reason why they're putting the navigation element in hidden within this. We call this a burger menu, because you have the top and you have the bottom you have the middle here which is typically for three lines it looks like a burger. So we call it a burger or hamburger menu. You know, typically I think when you're working with your design your website. There are a variety of different stop points. You have a website just designed for a desktop you have a website that's designed for tablet, and then you have a website that's also designed for mobile is like three different stop points. So if you're working with a square space or wix calm, or a variety of different other website creation platforms. Typically you does a design for one and they'll adjust that automatically for you which is good. But if you are going to do it manually and again actually hire hire a developer to do that for you. That's something they'll have to develop develop specific to those. So you can call it you have a viewport for desktop you have a viewport for tablet and you have a viewport for mobile. Ideally, you design for one and it's what we say fluid. So the design is just fluid across all different viewport so that's probably a little more information that's needed for this webinar but a little tidbit there. So let's see, check on time. Okay, good 1125. And I think Chrissy we're going to do about 15 minutes of Q&A at the end is that right, right before the end of the hour. If it's okay with you. Okay, perfect. Yeah, let's do that. I'm going to go ahead and just so so folks please hold your questions until the end. I do see some folks kind of raising their hands. And I'm not currently reviewing through the questions so I'm just going to keep on going and then feel free to just raise your hand toward the end and we'll chat a little bit more. So if you have a question, you know, we'll share my, my email address to y'all and we can definitely connect offline. Okay, one more part of this is the best in class audit actually is going through and auditing the website itself. So, let's hear. Okay, cool. I'm going to do this in a design, you know, in a canva or a design application or do it in a notebook. But you know essentially what you want to be able to do is take a look at that website and you can see this is a little more fancier I've been able to get a screenshot of it, and identify the different parts that pull together that specific page. So, you know, just as I mentioned, you have navigation and top left, you have a login, you can be able to order or access the cart you have this huge image hero image here, you got this big order now button here it's also important to be able to to note down where the buttons lie. So we have an over to now for instance here. We also have duplicate that. Yeah, we might have here in terms of the loyalty program you can learn more. You just get the, the essential the skeleton of the website. You have a buy now here. Right. And we can just go on and on. And it's really important to kind of just get the overall concept of that webpage, so that you can have a much more judicial eye as to how these components are starting to feel come together. And once you have this basis in this foundation, that's what's going to allow you now go into a template and identify in those template what are the various parts of that template that is congruent to the type of product, or the service you're selling, but also keeping in mind the competitive landscape and see what other folks are doing right kind of pull all that together. And you can see in this specific best in class audit, I've looked at a couple websites and this is actually for summer's website so now I'm taking a look at different parts of it we have a real and introduction and description. How, what's the change engine and the process different parts of media you know you can just go through and outline all these different areas and then compare in contrast. So here's website, here's another website and here's another website, and then you can try to see okay, maybe I do need a hero mentioned the top, maybe I do need an approach summary, something that probably talks about our strategy as a company, maybe some imagery about the products that we're creating and so forth and so forth. And that's going to feed us now into our template. Cool. So I'm going to go ahead and walk you through some really quick resources that I've used here. Let's create a website and, you know, one thing I really love about Squarespace is they have a ton of templates you can use I'm just going to create this one food one. And, you know, you can see they're right a different designs we can use, but they all have access to the same components, and we'll see that in just a second here so just going to advance I think it's pretty cool so let's go ahead and start with Vance and get this setup by the way. Not that this is a plug for Squarespace, I do not work for them nor am I getting paid by Squarespace. But they are running a promotion at the moment for me, I think it's 20% off right so you might want to consider that if that's if Squarespace is an ideal solution for you. So our business is called Picasso Pizza. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and click here a couple introductions on how to be able to utilize their editor, but it's super easy you can see you have a little assistant here so if you have any questions and you can start with an intro video and a variety of different. Yep, instructions on how to change your site logo and add and delete pages. It's pretty comprehensive they did a really good job here. So with this specific template, you can see that it's already pre made. We can add additional pages to this, you can see that stores going to be one of those and I'll get to that in a second. But with this specific template we already have an hour story we have a menu photos you can make a reservation. So for example one of those plugins so they're you know they're working with our friends over at open table and you can utilize open table as a reservation platform, and you can integrate that right in. So they have a bunch of, again partners that they utilize and to be able to create some of these blocks and integrations into the website design. So just starting out at home. Okay, so the first thing is what we've done is pick the template. I'm just going to quickly go through and go and design. You can also go to site styles, if you want to change the font, you have right in different funds you can use and you can get as deep as you want to be able to customize headings and so forth and like for instance we can change this let's say we want to have a different emotion for the type of font that we're using here maybe Donis is one of them that has a sure okay that's a good Sarah font. And we're going to go ahead and save that you change the colors if you'd like to. But actually for our next step here let's go ahead and quickly create a logo. As a person as a designer. I don't necessarily promote any of these from these, these ways to quickly generate a logo although they're there their resources out there to be able to help you do that. You can also see that Christie was using canva for her slides and canva.com also has a logo maker. So you know here's one I just quickly created but it's exactly the same concept for Squarespace is you start off with some templates and you can just go in and edit and choose a variety of different elements that you'd like to be able to add in to be able to make whatever you're trying to make. You know, whether it's a logo or you're trying to create slides, or, you know, even printable material you can use canva.com for Squarespace actually has a logo maker. And we can just quickly create this and I'll walk you through that and say it's Picasso pizza. It's pretty nice and minimalist if you're into that that's all about Squarespace, and you'll see that through their logo maker it's pretty plain and minimalist design lots of white space, but you know the the concept is still very similar. I think you're going to love this tag in here Picasso pizza. Good pizzas copied great pizza is a steal. Okay. We can quickly look for some pizza slices. Let's use this one. There you go. And maybe you want to position in a certain way. Yeah, they give you a preview of what that could look like for instance, on your business cards and your potential website. If you're going to create some merchandise that might be looking what it looked like. You can save it, you can literally just download it immediately so again there's a lot of good ways you can quickly create these things. Canva of course is the same as well you can share, you're able to export that right out and download that into a variety of different formats that's available to you. Canva is free right out right at the door but if you want to be able to access more of their images. You can see that there's a pro tag here so it'll cost I believe about 1413 99 or $14 a month to be able to access that in a variety of different other features. And beyond that but I know the logo maker and just the baseline features for Canva is free out of that so it's pretty cool. So just returning back to our website here. So open that up. Right and this is really quick and easy, we can, let's say, go edit. Oh, so you can actually see this is the one I've already created where's the one area. Let's go back to our pages and go back to her home. You have this portion here on the right side, which is the preview of the website and you have the left, which is the administrative view that allows you to able to access and navigate through a variety of features within your website. So for instance a different types of pages as I mentioned you can add here. On this page I can click edit. I'm going to edit the site header. And I'm going to show you how we can quickly just add in a logo that we've created so I've done this previous to this already and I've already created this logo so I can just quickly add it in. I'm going to take a look at how that plots right in. You can see I can also adjust the height of this logo. As I mentioned there are different viewports that we typically have to keep in mind when we're designing for mobile this one of those viewports so we can actually change and look at what this looks like here on a mobile device and you can quickly do that. Through just this button on the top right corner, you can see that it's uploaded our beautiful minimalist logo for Picasso pizza and let's say I just want to make that a little bigger. And voila, there you go. Save that out. Cool. We have a couple more minutes here before we start to wrap up so I'm going to try to fly through this as quickly as I can. Let's actually dive into. Yeah the e commerce portion because we actually want to sell things right it's a business website. So maybe it's not just describing our services but maybe there's a specific product in this case pizza that we want to sell. So I'm going to quickly create a store. And again, you know, this function exists across all of their templates and I'm just going to pick one of these stores here. It's going to load in as a template for me. We're just going to call that pizzas and there you go you can see that it automatically adds it into the navigation. And because it is a template it already has some stuff that's pre loaded. I can go in here and delete some of these that I don't need. So we delete all that. Actually, you know, even better. I'm going to delete all them out. Right now let's just go ahead and create a product. So this is a physical product. Let's just go back there just like y'all can also see the variety of different things. Is this a physical product. Is it a service, are we creating a membership, are we trying to schedule something creating gift cards digital downloads for digital products, you know, pretty comprehensive in terms of what you can sell in Squarespace. In this case it is a product. It's a food for this we'll call let's say Market Street margarita. I love margarita pizzas. I'm a vegetarian so I can eat. I'm an Ovo vegetarian so I can eat. I do love eggs, but beyond that I'm a vegetarian I can go ahead and add in image. So I'll have a lot of these stuff already preset right so have a beautiful image of a margarita pizza. So let me actually drop a really cool website if you aren't don't know about this this is called unsplash.com. They are they provide a lot of high resolution images which is really important in website design you don't want something that's all low quality or low resolution you definitely want to have some really really great imagery and all this is free, widely free and free license so good resource to be able to use. If you are definitely selling images are selling product you want to create you actually want to take photographs of your actual product itself and definitely don't just download it. That's super key. But yeah so let's just create this product here real quick, have an image for it. You know there are different variants for this in terms of size we have small medium. Large. Let's have an Excel as well. Create that. I'm going to edit those all and San Francisco prices right so how much is small say $14 1824 I'm sure it's more than this now but I really haven't purchased any pizzas out there anytime soon but maybe in Excel is about $30 give or take. Under inventory this is how we can select and create a variety of different variants of our product. We can track that as well we there's an inventory manager with Squarespace you can definitely do all that in the back end. So you're really concerned about SEO and SEM. They, it's again built into the template and into the code itself, and you can track metrics within Squarespace again so kind of just really a one, one solution that does it all. So we can say that I'm going to start to see what that looks like when it's showing up. It's probably taking its time there but just to be able to quickly show you here. This other site that I created right before. Right so we can add in this is exactly what I did in that step is to create this in my inventory, and we can create and add in specific products. You can see the different sizes that we can select here and it'll adjust the price that's given that and I can go ahead and add to cart. You can also see here, with the actual homepage itself. So just to come back to here, our homepage. Let me just show you what the template looks like so there's an image we have some navigation elements at the top hero image, something about what this specific company or this business does a little history scrolling a little down. Here's where we start to approach the footer we have some information about the actual location itself. There's a newsletter, you can actually delete these things. And we can go in here. And for instance, we don't want this literally just delete this out. So there's a lot of flexibility with these type of templates. And then finally we have the mini footer at the very bottom. So let me show you what that actually starts to look at like going in here. Yeah, so you can see that I've just basically swapped a lot of this information that's in here. For instance, if this is a section that I don't need I can just delete out really quickly. Bell peppers are the typical company meant to great pizzas. Sorry for all for any of you who don't like bell peppers. Here's a little address and some hours and finally her. I see if there's anything actually here else to really point out as we start to wrap up domain name, very important. Yes. So let me just go back up to Squarespace. What's great. Again, typically when you're building a manual website, you have to think about a domain registrar. And you have a go daddy.com Google domains as a variety of different domain registrars with Squarespace you can do it right here, which makes so much more easier. You can see I can go into domains, get a domain. And I can start to type exactly what that is. And for instance, this is called Picasso pizza. What's really cool and when the last decade or decade and a half is the registrars have been able to really increase amount of suffixes that we can use, rather than just calm, you know, you can have. .biz. The ones that we're familiar with .org. .com obviously. And now we have like .pizza. And if I were to add that in you can see that that's ready then purchase so by just quickly changing the domain name here we can quickly customize and make something that's probably much more appropriate for the type of business you're trying to create. .biz. You can see that it's unavailable and there's a variety of different ones that can utilize that are being suggested here. Food and drink, drink domains for all of you who are running food businesses dot beer dot farm dot kitchen dot pizza there you go dot fish so a lot of really creative prefixes or suffixes that we can use now, which is really fun dot wine. .biz. This goes on and on and on. And then if you're going to create or purchase this domain through Squarespace. It is locked to Squarespace, and you can migrate your domains from one registrar to another so whether if you're going through Google domains or go daddy or dream host, a variety of different registrars you can use to actually register domain you can transfer them. You can also go into the service that is actually hosting your website so in this case Squarespace is hosting our website. Just keep it really easy for yourself, register your domain on Squarespace as well. I think that's the easiest way to be able to get into that. So I've named a couple of those registrars just in case you do want to do some shopping. We set up our online store Picasso pizza. Let me see if I actually want to want to make sure that I actually walk you all through that. Yeah, last point here is about the e-commerce. So we talked about creating the actual products and creating inventory so you can track your inventory. Here. Right. Again, super easy. I've created these products really quickly you can add a product. Is it a physical product you can choose what type of product isn't added in. You can see that I've already done so and I've assigned a price to it you can actually can track track amount of stock that you have and you have skew numbers associated with that. What's really cool about Squarespace as well is your ability to be able to here's our orders so if you have any orders coming in you can track it here. The other part is the actual store page itself. Let's go back to pizza. Right. Choose one of your products. Let's just test this out. I'm really hungry so let's say we're going to get an Excel we can add this to cart. And this is the sale flow or the buy flow that we're going through the variety of different steps in order to get your customer to actually purchase something. Let's open this up here. Here we go. Here's your little cart. I actually added that cart and we can quickly just check out I believe they're using stripe. So again a lot of this stripe is their order processor. And so you're able to if this looks familiar, you know that this is a website that's using Squarespace so again, you know you can do this really quickly and there are some fees associated with that they do have a fee schedule Squarespace does. They're using a stripe to do a lot of these transactions so it's really important to go through these websites and review through what their fee schedules are so that. Yeah, you're, you're trying to net as much as you can in terms of your products. Cool. So that's how to quickly pull together a business website. We've been able to create products. We've done a best in class analysis of some really great websites out there that ran the gamut gamut of corporate websites to local websites or local businesses. And then identify exactly what components you want to be able to steal or coffee into your website design. We also, you know, we spent a lot of time in Squarespace to then identify the type of template you want to be able to utilize how easy it is to take your template and to customize it and change it to be able to focus directly on what you're trying to achieve with your business. We also took quickly took a look at domains. And then we also took a look at selling so what does the cart look like the by flow look like and also trying to track inventory. So quite a lot there in 40 at 50 minutes, we have about 11 minutes left on the call. And I think we'll go ahead and go into Q&A. That was great. I thought it was super helpful to review like how websites are are organized and like getting the framework down. All the elements of a good website. I wanted to mention that every month we host the San Francisco Small Business Development Center for a website audit. So I think that would be a compliment nice complimentary workshop to what they'll just covered because Dennis you reviews how to increase engagement and will tell you also like what to do to your website to to do that so the next one is on Wednesday, May 18 at two o'clock, and it's a recurring program so if you missed this Wednesday the 18th you can come in June, and we do it every month so just know that that's available to you. So I'm going to, I saw a question in the chat. So this one has to do with Google, a Google site URL. So she's asking, can a Google site URL be customized where the URL address doesn't start with sites.google, or is that not changeable. That's right really good question so the way that Google sites work is unfortunately you cannot, unless you are registering an actual domain through Google, Google registrar as it as a domain so when Google sites. The difference between Google sites and an actual like hosting your own website is Google sites, it has their own servers. And they have assigned specific URLs or domains to to Google sites. So basically your website is contained within the ecosystem of Google sites. You're unable to change a URL. Now what you might be able to do and I haven't I don't have a lot of experience with Google sites you might be able to export your site out somehow. So you may want to look into ways you can export either the metadata or the entire site itself it's a little tricky you might have to work with a developer to be able to do this but try to see if you can export it out. You can pull it into, let's say, a Squarespace or maybe a WordPress, or any of these other types of websites if if it's really important for you to have a custom URL. Thank you. Someone in the chat asked, and if we can't answer this here, we can, I can email them later, but the question is, if you have a trademark do you also need a domain. Good, good question. If you have a trademark, do you also need a domain. These are entirely different concepts. I'm not a trade trademark attorney so I can't really speak to the legal ease or any of the legal ramifications around getting a trademark and then trying to find a morale that sounds like that trademark. But these are mutually exclusive right you can definitely create a website and register a specific domain domains are not trademarked. You can go out there and find a domain, think about the next Google or the Facebook purchase that domain and hold on to that domain for 10 years hoping, hoping that someone or some company that's going to blow up to a trillion dollars going to need that domain and they will pay you for that domain there's an entire, there's an entire marketplace for for that and unfortunately, that does exist, fortunately and maybe unfortunately so now again these are two definitely separate things but ideally yes to your point if you are trying to create a business, you want your business name, or I guess in this to this point your trademark may need to be as closely related to the actual domain itself. Thank you. Okay, another question is, is it possible to insert a plug in like Google translate on Squarespace. Really good question, let me look into that. And I guess. Another question here was what, how would you want to utilize Google translate. I'm sorry I'm thinking about captions so Google translate. Okay, so I have seen a couple websites that allow you to translate on the fly of your website I know Chrome does this. Chrome can translate foreign languages into English or back. And there are plugins for the actual browser itself but really good question I'll follow up on that offline. If there's an actual plugin. Alright, there's another question here. Oh, how much does it cost in total to build a website and then host it in a domain. Really great question, it really ranges. If it's any evident with this webinar, you can probably get a website. If you're going to use your own blood sweat and tears to invest into building a website. You can definitely get a website out in less than $500. And that's with the actual domain cost, hosting the website for let's say a year, I believe for Squarespace it's for a business plan it's about $14 a month and then the annual is I think around $120 with some business functionality. And then you do want to also invest let's say you have products to sell you want to invest in a photographer to take those photos for you for these products if you're not going to do it yourself. You know it can range anywhere again from about $500 to get that right out the door if you're going to invest into yourself or if going to pay someone a developer if you have a much more deeper need to develop by flows. Maybe you want to create a much more manual website or it's an online service of some sort that I can go into the tens of tens of thousands. Yeah. Thank you. Someone was asking about scrolling versus separate pages. What is your pick on that. Really good one. I think I really feel as within the digital domain, we're all used to the endless scroll for good or for worse. We all know the the endless scroll that is Instagram and Facebook and Friday different social media platforms. And I would definitely say, think more strategically about the content that you want to be able to surface to your audience. If it make if if it also depends on the breadth of information or content that you're trying to create. There's a lot of content. I definitely would say that for a majority of folks scrolling through a deep website is totally fine. I think if any of y'all own Apple products, you know that their their detail pages on their specific products are long and less scrolls. You can also incorporate a lot of interactive elements into that as well like these, you know, the phone just blows up in your face and then it just all of these animations and things like that. But if the intent is to create something that's much more concise, and you want to be able to communicate and create copy that is much more concise, then you might also consider something that's page by page. You can utilize carousels, right, left and right to be able to shift the viewer or to shift the content one at a time so there's a variety of different techniques that could be used in both ways. But again, it really does really depends on the type of content that you want to be able to put on the website. I think we have time for one more question and that I saw one in the chat. Someone is wondering, how do you add an option to change the page language for example from Spanish to English English to Spanish. Right, so this probably also is related to the previous question about installing or integrating like a Google translate into the website itself. I'm aware of ways that you can. The way I've approached this in the past, and this is more of a custom website and you can probably do this actually can get away with it with a square site website is creating navigation element the top right corner because we do see this and I just got back from a European trip. And so you know you can toggle from Italian to English to Spanish to German. And those are essentially just different web different web web pages within a site and the way that most companies, especially corporate companies approach this is you literally have a copy of an entire website that's been translated. It's important not to use an auto translator because the auto translator doesn't capture nuances and language. And so for instance you're having something in English and then you're going to auto translate this this is also to the same point about integrating Google translate. There are nuances in it in the language that just doesn't translate correctly and that's off putting to a lot of native speaking folks who speak those languages so if you are considering translating content for your website, and I'm thinking about probably translating all the content your website to be able to help target a specific language or a specific country. It's important to do so holistically and to also hire a translator to be able to do that for you and native native speaking translator. In terms of like the larger context of the website, you would have created let's say your website has 10 web pages, all that is going to be in English, you hit French, and all that is going to be in French so you have another 10 pages that's translated to French you have another 10 pages that's translated to English, or to German for instance. So you have you have in set in this case 30 pages that is just within the context of this one website. So hopefully that answers your question. I think what's key here again is to leverage and hire an actual linguist or a translator to be able to do that for you. Well, I just want to thank you so much for your presentation. I think we all learned a lot and I'm kind of amazed to how easy it is to actually start your own website pretty easily using some of the tools that you demonstrated. Thank you for your time and sharing your expertise with us. Did you want to let people know how they can contact you or would you like them to email me and then I can forward their questions to you. Absolutely I'm going to go ahead and drop in my email address to the chat. You can reach me right here, Neil at that's actually going straight to Shannon. So you can email me at Neil at summer design dot co. Again that's dot co. So I'll just drop that down you can please yeah definitely email me directly and I'll do my best to get back to y'all. I feel like I'm going to get a flood of emails so leave patient with me. Thank you. Yes, so I recorded this so everyone who attended will get a copy of the recording so you can review I know there was a lot covered and it's helpful to see it again so for sure at the end maybe an hour or two I'll send an email with the recording link. But I just want to say thank you again Neil. I enjoyed your presentation I feel like creating a business website right now. So thank you again for celebrating San Francisco small business week with us. And I'm just really happy it was such a great week and I thought this was a perfect ending and I really enjoyed this so thank you Neil, and thank you everyone for coming to our program. Thanks everybody excited to see y'all create your own websites. Hey, bye now. Bye everyone. Thanks Neil.