What Makes a Good Website Designed for Your Brand?

Discussions Include:

• Should you build your own website or hire someone else?
• Common website builders
• The importance of designing your website to fit your brand
• How to choose the right website builder
• Tips for creating the right content for a website
• Inspiration for website creation

The Hangout:

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You can skip ahead to the information this is important to you using the video's table of contents (TOC) in the "About" section of the video in YouTube!

View the Video's TOC Here!

Table of Contents: 
00:00 - Introduction
00:20 - Greetings & introduction
04:21 - What's in this show?
04:58 - Where do you start?
08:18 - The importance of designing your website to fit your brand. 
11:23 - Lirone's tips on the importance of using your website to build connections.
12:35 - Zef's tips on choosing the right website builder for your business.
15:53 - Evaluate your business needs when deciding on which website builder to use.
16:48 - Inspiration: Weebly as your website builder.
21:01 - Important not to get lost in the technical details.
24:19 - Kenya's tips on creating content for your website.
26:49 - Where to watch CCC and let's get connected!

The Conversation:

ZEF: Lirone, do you hire someone to build your website for you? If no, what website builder do you use and why?

LIRONE: As a business owner, I love to be involved and learn about fields and skills with which I am not so familiar, such as programming. I did have to learn a little HTML and chose a WordPress theme. The I handed the work over to a designer and a site developer with specific instructions to make sure the outcome will be as I want it to be. My site is chaging every now and again as my business evolves and changes and this is why I chose WordPress as my site's platform, since it's easy to change and play with it, even for a basic techie person such as myself!

ZEF: What about you, Kenya? Do you build your own website or do you hire someone to build it for you? 

KENYA: I hire people here and there to do certain things that I can't or don't want to do by myself.

ZEF:  What website builder do you use and why?

KENYA: I use WordPress because of its:

• Flexibility
• Ability to grow with you
• Pug-ins that extend its power

You can really create a powerful marketing machine with the right 
plug-ins.

ZEF: Do you feel that designing your website to fit your brand is important? How so?

LIRONE: Yes! My site's design follows me in all of my materials - business cards, online e-books and courses, resource pages, presentations, etc. Colors have subconscious meanings and this is why I chose light blue, as it shows professionalism, and pink, which is more of a warm, loving color. These colors describe the world of business networking, which is about business and personal relationships.

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Meet Zef Here!

LIRONE GLIKMAN
www.LironeGlikman.com

"Lirone Glikman is an energetic business networking coach, blogger and international speaker. She shares her networking knowledge and philosophy in order to help others take control of their lives, reach their goals, succeed, and most importantly, enjoy doing it! She is based in Tel Aviv, Israel and works with audience worldwide."

KENYA HALLIBURTON
www.KenyaHalliburton.com

"Kenya Halliburton is an online business manager, specializing in digital content creation, content marketing, and social media marketing. She is a creative, innovative, outside the box, forward-thinking web choreographer always looking for new opportunities to position her clients for success"

Tips & Solutions:

ZEF'S TIPS ON HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT WEBSITE BUILDER

Choosing the right website builder for you all depends on two things:

1. How skilled you are in developing or building it - this usually is the question that addresses if you should build it yourself or hire someone else
2. What is your web strategy?

In our case - I wanted a platform that fulfills the following three most important categories:

1. Most important for me - choose a website platform that does not require any HTML or coding skills, so that I can build my own. I looked for templates with the ability to upgrade to a customized website if needed.
2. Choice and flexibility of design - Ease of use but powerful enough to build an engaging website and can address my web strategy. This is important because I need to have a platform that allows me to easily teach a team member how to use it, especially if I need to pass on some responsibilities.
3. Cost effective - must be affordable! - Either has low monthly web hosting fees or great annual fees, which may include a domain name also.

Example of What Website Builder I Use:

Favorite Features of Weebly:

1. Drag and Drop Editors - addresses ease of use. You have control of your page layouts and content.
2. Allows other integrations with apps, widgets, and plug-ins - Example: Allows integration with PayPal, widgets for photos, music, call to action buttons.
3. Mobile features - allows to build a mobile version of your website easily
4. E-commerce - important to consider this if you sell things online - Ability to create storefront pages with payment buttons, track inventory, set up shipping method 

This resource is a product review conducted by Website Tool Tester, a company that helps individuals and small businesses create websites. They keep things simple for anyone who wants to build their own website.

It lists Weebly as the number one website builder for "most well-established and easy-to-use site builders from around the world - no technical skills required."


A link to the testing results is available here.

LIRONE'S TIPS ON HOW TO BRAND YOUR WEBSITE BETTER

• Integrate the design of your website into the aesthetics of the rest or your business materials, i.e. business cards, resources pages, presentations, etc.
• Engage with the audience of your website and build relationships with them by posting interesting articles or call to actions, such as calling people to comment or "get your free gift" or book, and build the relationships from that very moment where you provided some value on your site.

KENYA'S TIPS FOR CREATING THE RIGHT CONTENT FOR A WEBSITE

1. Know your audience, their needs,desires, and problems, intimately
2. Listen to what your prospects and customers are saying
3. What are your competitors saying? Is it helpful?
4. What is it your audience wants to know the most? What do they need to know that is keeping them from the progress they seek?