 In this video, I shared with you a very valuable resource. It is a document that will walk you through how to create a website, whether you're doing it by yourself or you're working with a website designer. This is sort of a master document that helps you to organize, plan the content and the steps to doing it. I wish I had this document when I was first creating my website. And now, whenever I revamp my website once every one to three years, I come back to this document and I follow the steps myself. So I hope that this document will save you a lot of time and money. This is a combination of my seven years of experience with online marketing, advising hundreds of clients on these kinds of issues. So let's get going. When you come into this document, you want to click File here and then click Make a Copy and that will allow you to make a private copy for your own use. Now the first section of this document is a timeline. The timeline is basically a step by step sort of walking you through how to create or revamp your website. If you do well with due dates and deadlines, then please do fill out the dates wherever you see these lines. So for example, by August 1st, I will do a template, I will walk this template and do a quick draft of it myself. By September 1st, I will have conducted blah, blah, blah. So if you don't do well with due dates and deadlines, you can still use the timeline as a step by step way to really use this document. So let me show you a few quick things. You will see blue underlined hyperlinks in this document and whenever you see it, you can click on this and then click on the link underneath the blue underline to see what the additional resource is. So for example, here I give you a blog post about how to conduct a website user interview. What is that? That's basically getting outside of your own head into the mindset of your audience to think about your whole website from their perspective, not just from your own perspective because guess who the website, guess who your website is for? Your website is not for your own, I'm so proud of this and I love my website so much. If you are just doing a hobby, that's fine, but if you're running a business, you're creating a business and you're trying to reach people, then your website really should be speaking to your ideal audience which is why I really begin with doing a couple of website user interviews, not on your own website if you don't have one yet, but just talking with others that would be your part of your ideal client type of person and seeing what they think of other websites and kind of getting their mindset about it, okay? Now the step three is to choose a theme from one of these website building platforms, Weebly, Wix, Squarespace or YOLA. Really you probably should just choose one of, well you probably should just choose the one that I recommend the most often, which is Weebly. I have been using Weebly for my own websites and many of my clients have used this for theirs for seven years, they have been so reliable, it's so simple to use, far less problems than using WordPress. Yes, I know that WordPress is the gold standard for website software, but as you can imagine I've seriously considered it myself several times. Some of my peers use WordPress, many of my peers use WordPress. I started with Weebly and after considering WordPress again and again, I have stayed with Weebly so that should say something to you, Weebly again is so simple to use, it never gives me problems just about almost never, truly. I could pretty much say it never gives me problems. It's so reliable and it never has incompatible plug-ins and viruses that WordPress constantly has and you always have to do updates and maintenance on WordPress websites, just keep it simple. I have built a full-time business with Weebly and again, with my Weebly website, one year I made $370,000 that year, it's fine, it really is fine. So I really encourage you to highly consider it. So anyway, I'm going to have you read through this template timeline yourself. It should be pretty self-explanatory. If you have any questions about any of this timeline stuff, please do comment on this video and ask me your question. Let me know specifically what you're confused about and I'll do my best to answer it. Remember again, you can click on any of these links and then click on these links to get to the resources that I listed here. But let me actually walk you through parts of this document that I think are particularly important. The most of this document is written in a way that I think you should be able to understand and use, but I'll just kind of walk you through it briefly. Again, the first thing to do in this document when you're doing your own draft is to focus again on your ideal audience. Your website is not just for your own pride and happiness, yes, your website should not disgust you, but most importantly, your website is for your audience so you should create a website from their perspective rather than just from yours. And I would say mostly from their perspective. That's why really here in the first part of the document, I ask you to think about the website from their mindset, okay? Now, important thing is in this document, I don't give you a lot of space underneath each section, but you can please feel free to write as much as you want. You know, I just didn't give a lot of space just because I wanted to keep the document relatively concise, but you know, you can create as much space as you want. Now the next section is to do your overall vision for your website. Now in this section, I have two subsections, the minimum published version of your website as well as your final version. Now why do I separate these two? Well, it's because creating a website is one of the greatest dangers and temptations is perfectionism. You're going to think, well, I want my website to look like so-and-so's website. I want it to do this. I want it to have all these different sections. And what's going to happen if you go with your perfectionistic vision is it will take you a long time and many, many thousands of dollars possibly to create your website. I will tell you to let me please be one to encourage you to please publish and announce a minimum version first. And then over time, you can add on to your website, make it better as you continue to grow your business instead of starting with an amazing website. I have, before I was a business coach, I was in a company that sold website development services. That's what we did. And we sold clients on websites that were tens of thousands of dollars, many clients like this. And I will tell you that many, many people, not just the clients in my previous company, but just these past seven years of being a business coach, I have seen so many people spend thousands or tens of thousands on their websites. And it has very little correlation to how many sales they get on their website afterwards. It's really about the business, the market, the marketability of the product or service has more to do with how many sales, how much sales you get, not how well the website is designed and how full-featured it is and everything. So please spend the least amount of money you can, the least amount of time you can to create, publish and announce your first version of your website. And then over the years, over the months and the years as you work more with clients and with your ideal audience, you can then add on to your website to make it better and better. I will tell you, after seven years of earning a full-time income in my business, I still have my minimum published version of my website. Now, of course, seven years later, my minimum published version is probably better than most people's minimum published versions, because I'm a marketing coach number one and I've been doing this for seven years. Your first minimum published version will be so simple, but it's just doable. So for example, I've given you a couple of, if you just launch your website with four web pages, that's enough to get you started. It's more important to focus on the marketability of your services and products in terms of making money than making your website great. Okay, I have seen many websites that are so simple, but are so incredibly profitable and you wouldn't know it because you can't, you don't know how profitable a business is from their websites. Some websites look so bad, but they're making millions of dollars and other websites look amazing and they're making almost nothing. So start with the minimum published version, announce that, publish it, announce it, share it, and then build it over time with more feedback as you get in real time from your audience. All right, tagline is important because you want your website, when people come to it, to immediately know why they're, whether they're in the right place. And so your tagline is very important. Okay, copywriting tip. Now, writing your website may feel daunting to you sometimes, but I want to give you a tip which is, try writing as if you're writing an email. So you can actually try this. Open up your email software and start a new message to an ideal client of yours, somebody who you love working with, if you don't have any clients yet, imagine who your ideal client would be. And then just start writing your website, start writing an email as for them, describe how much you care about their growth. Describe what you believe their dreams are, what you believe the problems that they're frustrated and wish to solve are through your services. Describe your story and the thing, parts of your story that you believe are relevant for them. So just write an email, okay? And then don't send the email to anybody, you don't have to. Just save the draft and then sleep on it. And then the next day, come back and edit the email. And then that's basically can be the beginnings of your website copy. Maybe that is your website copy. This email writing tip is not just for websites. People have written entire books on this. Have you ever heard of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss? One of the best-selling business books of all time. And that was basically, he had written the book first, the first version of the book, he had just written it as if he was writing a book. And then he read it and he really didn't like it. And he just threw that copy away. And then next, what he did was he wrote an email like to one of his ideal audience members just to just writing an email, sharing all of his tips and life advice, business advice. And then he also had a series of conversations with other people answering their questions. And then he put that together into The 4-Hour Workweek best-selling book for years and years and years, right? So this tip is useful for a lot of different things. Okay, so let's see, mission and values. Hopefully this is pretty clear from what I've written here. The relevant parts of your story. Now, don't spill your entire life story on your website. It's about what parts of the story are going to resonate with your ideal audience in terms of what parts of it they care about, in terms of when they're thinking about you and your services or your products. What parts of your story matter to them, okay? So you can, of course, click on my own, you can go through and look at how I write my own about page for some inspiration. Okay, so your services page, of course, is really important to describe what you sell. And here I give you a blog post I wrote that walks you through how to write a sales page or basically your services page where you describe what services and programs that you sell. And you can basically just walk through this blog post that gives you what sections of the website or the sales page or services page, et cetera. So just walk through this and write your own sales page. And then you can, of course, see mine and how I write mine as well. Actually, this particular link goes to my services page, which is really just a directory to my full, so this is really my sales page, is my one-on-one coaching page right here, okay? Your resources page is basically where you list some things that you think your ideal audience would find helpful. Your contact page, how to contact you. I basically have a Google Voice number. Google Voice is a free resource at this time, free tool at this time. Great for just making a new phone number, a new voicemail box, whenever you get a voicemail there, you'll automatically be emailed about it. It's very convenient. And let's see your homepage, okay? I've given you some tips here. This is basically a Google search that I found helpful. I did actually find some of these articles helpful, so I gave you the link to that right there. All right, your blog, okay? So the self-explanatory there. Your credibility indicators, this is a part of, this is not actually going to be literally on your website, but if you do this exercise that's in this blog post here, it will be helpful to, it'll be helpful for you to add to various parts of your website, so that's why this resource is there. Okay, your ideal website visitor journey, what do I mean by that? I want you to imagine the ideal audience or ideal client member who is discovering you and finding your website. What do you want, what do you imagine that they do when they come to your homepage? What do you want them to experience on your homepage? What do you want them to understand very quickly? And then what do you want them to do next from your homepage? Okay, so I'll just give you an example. On my homepage, they immediately become clear about my energy. I want to come across as generous, warm, spiritual, resourceful, even humble, and then I want them to understand immediately who my help, and then I want them to immediately go and click through to my content, to read my articles, even before they join my email list. I want them to read my articles because I want them to benefit as soon as possible. And then there's also a search that they'll find on my homepage that they can search to find articles they're interested in. They'll see my services, et cetera. So kind of think through the journey that your ideal visitor takes on your own website, okay? The look and feel, so things like your logo. I don't even have a logo, by the way. So for your minimum published version, seven years into running a full-time business, I still don't have a logo. So if you don't want to worry about it, you really, really don't have to, okay? But for those of you who really care about that, then it's basically some kind of symbol that represent your overall brand. By the way, there is a resource that you might find useful, wordmark.it, okay? If you go there, this is a website that gives you all kinds of font types. So a simple logo could simply be your name if you're creating a website based on your name, okay? So if I type in my name, George Cowan, and I press Enter on the keyboard, it will start loading dozens of font types. Isn't this cool? And it'll tell you what font type it is, and you can basically Google that font type, and maybe you have to buy the font type. Or you can basically, if you're happy enough with this, you can zoom in by doing Command plus or Control plus on your keyboard. You can zoom in on this, and you can literally just do a screenshot and keep that as your logo, you know? It's not the most professional thing to have a white background necessarily. Or you can work with a logo designer and tell them what font type you want based on what you find from this website, okay? All right, graphics. Whenever you're putting graphics on your site, be sure to reduce the file size so that your webpage loads faster. And this wonderful tool, compressor.io, it's a free tool at this time to allow you to easily reduce the file size of your graphics. And right now it's not loading for some strange reason. Typically it loads just fine. I'll let you go and look at it yourself. I also have a link here if you want to do a Google search for other tools to reduce file size. Okay, I'm gonna keep going here. Another interesting resource, 23 lessons from iTrackingStudies, be sure to take a look at that if you'd like. Okay, tip, make your web pages easy to read with less width per line. All right, so one of my clients, he had a website that was really just long and like the text kept going on and on and on. And it was kind of hard to read, in my opinion. I think for most people, now I told him to make it more width, shorter, more narrow, or now it's easy to read. So you can actually see the latest version of his website there. I also really recommend that you look at medium.com. Medium.com is a wonderful website that if you look at how their articles are formatted, narrow width, relatively large font size, they really know how to format articles and web pages to make it look easy to read. So be sure to look at medium.com as well. Another resource, medium.com, okay. All right, calls to action, wireframe. Okay, very dangerous section here. A wireframe is basically, the reason why I say it's dangerous and I'm still talking about it is because I feel like I'd be irresponsible if I didn't tell you about wireframes. Most website designers work with wireframes. I actually really don't even, I really don't love it because it makes you really perfectionist. I want my website to look like this or look like that. So I had wireframes from my website and I said, oh, I want it to look like this, look at that, but then I couldn't make it look that way in Weebly. So I got frustrated until I kind of really let it go and say, you know what, I'm just gonna work with what I could in Weebly and I ended up being happy with it. So I really recommend ignoring wireframes and going with whatever themes you can get from Weebly or Wix or whatever it is. Okay, navigation is basically, you know, at the top, there's always, often there's a menu. This is a navigation menu and these are subnavigation when you have these kinds of things here. Okay, I'm running out of time on this video, but footer is basically at the very bottom of your site, there is a footer. One more thing I want to say before I go is what does above the fold mean? Above the fold means that when people load your website, okay, I'm gonna shrink this a little bit. When people load your website, what they see before they scroll down is called above the fold. So this would be above the fold and the scrolling down would be below the fold. So that's all for now. You can use the rest of this document to, you know, should be self-explanatory and I wish you the best in designing your website or revamping your website and any questions you have, comment on this video.