Launching a new website is exciting and you may feel impatient to see it go live, but it's crucial not to rush the process. As the face of your business online, your website has a large influence on the way your brand is perceived and you only get one chance to make a good first impression. With the right groundwork, you’ll ensure your website has a solid strategy, makes the right impression, and meets your business goals.
From our experience building and launching strategic websites, here’s what you need to do before diving into the design process:
1. Define Your Brand and Target Audience
You’ll need to identify your target audience early in your branding process so that you can tailor your website's content and design to resonate with their specific needs and preferences. A deep understanding of your audience is necessary in order to make a deep connection. It allows you to communicate your value clearly as a brand or product that aligns with their values and offers a solution for their unique need.
2. Develop a Strong Brand Identity
Branding is more than just your business visuals. While it’s true that a visual identity that includes your logo, typography, and color palette are part of your branding, a clear and identifiable brand voice and messaging are also crucial parts of a brand identity.
Your website is just one of many touch-points your target audience will have with your brand and business. A consistent brand identity is crucial for building trust and recognition at every touch-point.
3. Set Clear Goals for Your Website
Set specific, quantifiable objectives for your website. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Increase sales? Clear goals will guide your website's structure, content, and functionality. They will be addressed in the design to work as tools that help meet your business goals.
4. Conduct Thorough Market Research
Analyze competitor websites to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to differentiate your business. Pay attention to their design, content, and user experience. What are they doing well? What could you do better than them? How can you stand out? Place yourself in the shoes of a potential customer contemplating a purchase.
5. Allocate Sufficient Budget
Working with professionals brings expertise, experience, and a fresh perspective to your project. They will ensure your website is optimized for performance, user experience, and provide ongoing support. When planning your website budget, it's important to consider not only the initial design and development costs, but also ongoing expenses such as hosting, maintenance, and updates.
By investing in a well-designed website, you'll create a valuable asset that supports your business strategy and drives meaningful results.
Accessibility - Image Alt Text
Accessibility - Video Transcript
Introduction
The Add Elements panel gives us quick,
visual access to the various elements we can add right to our project.
And the panel is divided into simple categories like Typography,
which contains all our elements related to text.
And Forms, which contains all the building blocks we need to create a form.
There are four ways to add elements from the Add Elements panel to the page we’re on:
Click to add in place. Drag onto the Canvas. Drag straight into the Navigator and finally,
you can use quick find to add elements onto the canvas without opening the Add Elements panel.
Click to add in place
Let’s start with the first one. We can select an existing element on the page,
and simply go to add. And click on the element we want to add.
Since we selected the heading there, the paragraph was added right underneath the
heading. Want a button right under that? We can go to Add,
and click the button. Same idea here. Let’s delete those for now.
Another thing to mention: we saw that when our heading was selected,
by clicking to add the paragraph element,
the paragraph was added right underneath. It was added right underneath the heading.
If you select a parent element, like a div block or a section, and you click to
add a new element? That element will be placed inside the parent element right at the bottom.
Drag onto the canvas
So. Clicking an element from the Add Elements panel. That's...the first option.
Number 2 — the second way to add elements from the Add Elements panel,
is by dragging and dropping right onto the Canvas.
And as we're dragging in this paragraph, the blue indicator tells us where we're placing it:
which is right inside the wrapper. And our new element — its position is also indicated in blue.
We can also see its position in the Navigator. So we can see exactly where we’re dropping that. We
can always move this later. We can move it around. But that’s dragging and dropping onto the Canvas.
Drag into Navigator
The third way is exceptionally accurate. And that’s using the Navigator.
And since we have our full hierarchy — our visual outline here, with precision
we can drag and drop right from the Add Elements panel into the Navigator.
Finally, and my personal favorite. We can use quick find to add elements to our canvas,
Add using quick find
without opening the Add Elements panel. We’re just clicking Command + E or Command + K on
Mac or Control + E or Control + K on Windows. And adding the elements we want.
Recap
So! From the Add Elements panel, we can click right on the element we want, or we can drag
an element onto the Canvas, or we can drag an element right into the Navigator and lastly,
we can add an element to our page with quick find without opening the Add Elements panel at all.
That's using the Add Elements panel in Webflow.