 What's up everyone? Today we're covering WordPress design tips for beginners here on the journey. He knew to WordPress. Where do I start? So overwhelmed. It is super overwhelming and I think a lot of people do when they start to build their very first site is they just go gung-ho and just start trying everything and they go in without a plan. So my first tip for you is to really have a plan for your website, right? So when someone comes to visit your website, what are some things that you want them to do? For me, the most important thing is they need to find all of our fresh new content on the home page. So we have a lot of content coming out daily, whether it's interviews or news articles. So I want them build to find that and easily find the thing that's most relevant to them. Right. So just kind of go down the rabbit hole of all your content, getting the freshest first and then possibly find, oh cool, here's a related article and then here's another article. So that's super important. You have a plan for your visitors. So same thing with you. When you want someone to visit your site, is it just to get information about you? Is it to call you? Is it to contact you? Is it to buy your product? Whatever it is, you want to have an idea of what that is going forward so that way when you develop your website, like that is priority number one with whether you're designing the site or you have someone designing it for you. Okay. So I have a home page but other than that, what other pages are important to have? So a home page, definitely important. If you don't have a home page, you don't really have a website. So that's kind of important. But other than that, you want an about us page, you want to talk about yourself and really talk about how you help the visitor, the consumer, the customer, right? The about us usually in typical fashion, like here's the company's history. A lot of people may not care about that. With your about page, have it really about how you help them a little bit of your history, but more important, how you help them, have a products and services page to really showcase what you do, have a contact page because that's super important for people to contact you. And then lastly, testimonials page, people love that social proof. You can pull reviews from like Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook, wherever you've gotten a review, plug it on the website and really show people that you are who you say you are. Yeah. And with those pages, people are either finding you through social or just going to Google and finding you that way. And so these are the pages that they want to do when they're doing their due diligence. They want to know who you are, why you're an expert, what other people say about you, what products and services you offer. So yeah, having those main ones are perfect. All right. So now another thing to really keep in mind with designing your website is you want to keep it simple. Now what I see a lot of first time people do is they'll go and they have like paragraphs and paragraphs of their content. They want to have everything there. Literally everything. So they throw everything on their website and it's just a giant block of text that's super hard to read. And I know us millennials don't really like to read. We like to skim. So it's really tight, tough to understand where to go. Don't be afraid of that white space, that negative space that basically has nothing. It helps people just see better. It helps our eyes breathe and relax because we're not straining. Yeah. Right. What are some of the things to really keep in mind with the website? I think once you start putting ads on your site to limit the number of ads, obviously you want to monetize your website. But if it's just bombarding you with ads, it's a really poor user experience. I know that I'll find a recipe on Pinterest. I'll click on it and just bombard it with ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, where I just say forget it. I don't want to make this casserole anymore. Those clickbait type articles, right? You're on social media. You click on it. Then it gives you like a paragraph and go on a page too and there's a bunch of ads and it's like 17 pages for what could have been like half a page. Yeah. Going back to the purpose of your website, the reason you have a website is because you're hoping to turn these users into clients or paid customers. So if you have too many conflicting messages, they're just going to go away and you're leaving customers, sending them away because you have too much going on. Absolutely. And I think as a beginner designer or whatever you're doing, I would shod away from using ads in the first place until you're established, right? Like you said, it's about the user experience. And if the first thing they see is just a bunch of ads, they're not going to trust you and they're not loyal to you yet to understand like, okay, cool, they have ads. I already love their content. Love them. Let me help them out. Maybe I'll look at these ads. But if you're not there yet, shy away from them. And now with the website too, you also don't want to have like just super random conflicting colors. It stresses out the eyes like a yellow tax on white background just doesn't work. You really want to stick to kind of your brand colors. There's a lot of cool little like complimentary color wheel calculators out there online. Just do a quick Google search and it'll show you cool plug in your your primary color and it'll give you some complimentary colors that look good. That that's not going to be too overwhelming for the end user on your site because if you frustrate them and stress out their eyes, they're never coming back. Now I know with your website, you have a ton of content. So lots of experience there. What are some best practices when it comes to content with designing your website? First off, you want content that is relevant to you and your business and your audience. If you are a dog groomer and you are writing about plumbing, then people come in your website are not going to find that helpful and they're going to go away. So make sure that whatever your audience is coming to you for your writing content that you like and you can use Google Analytics or just ask your audience what they want to hear from you and you can start writing more content about that. So it's more in line with what they're looking for. But then also you want to make sure that it's consumable. You can't just have this giant block of text because you want to put everything in there. No one's going to read it. So it's as simple as trimming it down to the core message. But if that content is really important then just hit that return bar and add some spaces so that way it's nice and easy on the eyes. Right. It's not an essay when you're in a high school. You want to break it up even if the paragraph is not in the perfect form. Make it easy for the visitor to read. Have nice bulleted headlines or bullet points or quote boxes. Break up that content. Yeah. Make your English teacher mad. Okay. Just make it nice and pretty. Yes. We're going to get some angry, angry emails. But with the website itself too, you really want to think about the structure of the content as well, especially on the main pages. The blog posts and things like that definitely have to have structure. But so does you like say your homepage. Yeah. Now you don't want that block of text in your hero. So the hero of a website is basically that that first little banner header area that you see usually has some type of texting. Here's how I help you. A call to action and a nice image in the background usually images with your website. They have to match your brand. You can't just throw out if your dog groomers some plumbing stuff because it doesn't make sense. It's weird. What about corny photos? Like corny stock photos? I mean, if you don't have any photos, I would say that corny photos are maybe better than a blurry photo from your phone. It's true. But maybe it's time to invest in a photo shoot so you can get really nice high quality content and images that really show and display what your brand and your products and services are. Absolutely. Professional photographer will definitely elevate you, especially if you're a brick and mortar, having someone coming to your place and take super quality photos that way anyone can actually see it is great. Worth the investment. And now if you have to use stock photos, you don't always have to use the super corny ones. There are some free resources that I like to use when I'm designing websites for clients. So pexels.com is probably my favorite one. And then unsplash.com is also a solid option. Basically photographers are going on there uploading some of their best work to get exposure and they're giving away for free, which is super awesome and helpful. You can donate to them if you really like their stuff, but it really elevates your website. So it has some beautiful imagery, especially when it's on brand. Okay, this is awesome. But what else do I need for my website? Right. So with your website, you really want that purpose of it, right? And we talked about what is the goal of the website. Part of that goal is having a call to action and not just one call to action up in the hero. You want multiple call to actions throughout. So a call to action is a usually a button or a link of some sort that says, learn more, get now, buy this product or subscribe to my email list. Yes, something basically telling a user to take action. So again, you want to have in the hero image, but you also want to have it throughout the website itself at the end of blog posts. I really like to have it up at the top of the navigation bar on the upper right, just because of the way that people's eyes kind of travel around the website. It's usually in a Z formation. So let's start at the top left, which is your logo. They'll move over to have the navigation, but then have a call to action right there. And then they'll kind of scroll down. They'll see other content and to the right, they'll kind of finish off. And especially if that menu bar kind of scrolls down, that call to action is always there for them to see and use and take that action. Nice. Neely pro tip guys. Take notes. All right. So now another aspect of your website when designing is truly have some sort of social share. If you could say that five times fast, social share, social share, social share, social share, social share. Whoa, got it. I'm impressed. Pretty good. She's kind of the best. So now with the social share, I know what you're thinking, right? Like that's not design, but design is every single part of your website. You really need to be designing with purpose. So how is social share? I can only say it one time. How has that really changed your website? Well, for our website, we want people to, we do a lot of blog posts, news articles, we want to share our interviews. And so having those buttons at the end of every article is crucial because we will have articles that will go viral. And that's really the goal. If you're writing content that is a blog post or whatnot, you want as many people to see it as possible. So having that option that at the end of the article, they can just click and share it to their favorite favorite social network is key. If you don't have it, you're missing out on potential new viewers and new users who can find you in your business and your content. With social shares, it could be on like the left sidebar of like your blog page. You're going to have it in the widget area on your right sidebar. You can have it at the bottom of a blog post. Usually people have it in either the header or the footer. The more places you can add it to your website without it being overwhelming, the better. You want to make this as easy as possible for someone to really love your content, want to share it with the world. Now, another aspect that you really want to keep in mind a lot of, again, a lot of people don't think this as designing the website is planning for SEO. SEO is all about the website design and what you put into it. What are some things to keep in mind when really designing for SEO? Yeah. So you have this website, you want it to be found, and there are certain things that you have to do when building and designing your website. So that way Google and other search engines can actually find and read your website. So the first one is your source code. There's certain ways that you need to structure your website so that way the crawlers can find it. An example are the image alt tags. Google is not a human. It doesn't really know what your images are about. It's a robot, right? And so you have to go in and put text to describe, hey, this is a picture of a dog being groomed. So that way Google knows that this picture, this website is relevant for those search terms. So again, one of them, this all goes around, you have to structure your website in a way that Google wants, but then also your content, you have to have your keywords in there that's relevant to you and your business. So where you're located, what your products and services are, your business name, make sure all of that is found in the content of your website because that all helps with your SEO. And if you want even more of a deep dive about SEO, click this video right here and we can go into it even more. Now super important when designing your website is to make sure that it is mobile friendly. Everyone has a mobile phone gone in the days, the early 2000s when literally everyone's on their desktop. Yeah. Now not only does everyone have a mobile phone or a tablet that they're using to look at your website, but all the different phones have different dimensions. So all the screens are different sizes and there's just a lot. So having a mobile responsive site solves for that. And most WordPress themes have some sort of responsiveness that'll make it look good no matter what device you're using. Almost all website builders do as well. So you want to make sure that you keep that in mind because over half of searches on search engines aren't coming through mobile. If your site is not mobile optimized, you make me zoom. I am never coming to your website or doing business with you ever. And lastly, you want to make sure it works no matter what browser people are on. I know some browsers have some funky different settings, right? So what might look good in Chrome may not look good in Internet Explorer if you're still using Internet Explorer. Edge. Edge now. Or if you're using Internet Explorer, upgrade to Edge, Firefox, make sure just test it out. Just download the browsers really quick. Go to the website. Go to different pages. You want to QA these things to make sure that you're not putting someone else's experience down because they happen to have a favorite browser. So these are all really great tips. But where do I go to find what's new and modern and to see what other people in my industry are doing with their websites? Do you have any tips or ideas? Yeah, I have lots of suggestions here. I know designing website, especially when it's not your forte or something you do every day, it's hard to really get that design. Those design juices flowing. So sometimes it's good to see just inspiration. Check out other websites. You can go online and start searching random websites if you want. But I have two recommendations that these sites really just highlight the kind of the best of the best. The first one is awards.com. And the second one is behance.com. Now both have all sorts of just graphical design type aspects, but they do have website just examples and basically sites of the day that you can kind of check out and start picking apart like, cool, I really love this feature. I really like how this looks and mold it into your own site. Kind of take the best of everything and make your own. All right, Neely, thank you so much. Those were fantastic tips on how to get started with WordPress. I think if you follow those, you're going to have a killer website. Yeah, absolutely. And you helped out a lot, which helped me so I don't have to come up with as much content. But let us know your favorite tip in the comments below. While you're there, smash that like button and subscribe to this channel so you get all these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.