Lesson 4: Develop and Launch an Engaging Website

Transcription

1 Chapter 1, Video 1: "Welcome to Lesson 4" Welcome to Lesson number 4. This is a lesson in which the old proverbial the rubber meets the road. To this point, you've created a strategy. You've got your business digital-ready. You have created a product or service to sell, but you have not yet created and launched a website. That's the purpose of this lesson, Lesson 4 of Start Your Own Online Business. In this lesson, we're going to look at creating a strategy for your website, a strategy that aligns with your VBS, your overarching business strategy. And then I'll show you how to outline your website, the individual pages, and show you how to create compelling content and quickly and easily do that writing some, but also finding and using other sources of content online. After that, I'll show you how to launch and get your website out onto the Internet without knowing anything about how to build it or how to host it. And finally, we'll wrap up in showing you exactly how to host it. And that means how to get other people to see your website online. So let's jump right in without further ado, and then I'll see you in some future videos.

2 Chapter 3, Video 1: "The Competitive Benchmark Process" The purpose of this video is to review the website benchmark process, following the template that I've created for you. First, however, I'd like you to remember that the main reason for conducting competitive benchmarking is to learn what your competitors are doing, and to, in a way, steal the best things that they're doing to incorporate into your own website. As you take a look at the template here, the first thing you need to do is to come up with a list of those competitive websites. The URLs or the Web addresses, you want to enter them into Column B. And then across the top you'll see different categories, different things that I suggest you should rank your competitive websites on. And at the bottom of the template, I've provided some instruction for how to do those rankings. So for each of the competitive URLs, go ahead and fill in the information from left to right, and then the total score will be aggregated. What you want to do is you want to look at each independent category, as well as the overall total score to find those competitive websites that are the most competitive to you, but, again, also to find the areas of those websites that you can take good information from to improve your overall website competitiveness.

3 Chapter 3, Video 2: "Creating a Visual Website Outline" The goal with any visual website outline is simply to get your head around the number and types of pages that you are going to require for your website. Now, here's a very elementary example of AbCraze.com where I show the Homepage where on that Homepage I'm going to offer a free report a Thank You Page where the visitor is going to be redirected to after he or she enters her name and address to receive the free report a Download Page to download the free report, and then other pages such as a Contact Us page, a Support Page, and a Frequently Asked Questions Page. Now, in the end, I'm sure that my AbCraze.com website will have more pages than this. And as I add those pages, or at least if I think about those pages and want to add them in the future, what I should be doing is expanding this diagram, using it as a living document, and it will grow as my website grows. So don't get stressed out about whether you have enough pages on here or not. Just jot down what you can, show them in any format that you'd like, and then update it as your business and your website grow in the future.

4 Chapter 3, Video 3: "Creating a Wireframe" Let's take a brief look at the wireframe for AbCraze.com. This is a very simple process that takes a little bit of practice, but basically you're using rectangles, squares, rounded rectangles, text, and a few other things to outline the placement of elements on a page. You'll give this to a website designer or graphics designer to turn into a website. Now, this is the one that you see in your lesson, but let me go ahead and back out of this. I created this right here in Google Drawings. So I used Google Drawings. I'll click over. You can see here that all these elements I can click on, I can change texts, I can do whatever I need to simply by selecting different shapes, right here, and putting them on a page in Google Drawings. It's absolutely free, so you can do this exact same thing and build a wireframe for your Web page and all of the Web pages on your website.

5 Chapter 3, Video 4: "Common Elements of a Web Page" In this video, I'd like to take a brief look at a wireframe for your Web page, specifically with the common elements that are typically on it. First, you have your overall page. You have a header on your page that includes, typically, a logo and a navigation menu. Now, this navigation menu may not be here at the top. It may be on the left, or it may be on the right, but somewhere to navigate the site and take you through different pages. You then have a content area. And within that content area you have the area that is above the fold, so that's the area that you don't have to scroll down to see when you visit a Web page. You see here that I'm using videos. I also have a subscription box. Now, this subscription box is something you want to have above the fold so that somebody, when they visit your website, they see it right away. But you typically have somewhere that where a person can enter their name, address, maybe their mobile number, and a button to subscribe. You're going to want to use different images and imagery on the site, and then you typically have a page footer. And in the bottom of the footer you have copyright and links to other pages and so forth. So if you want to learn a little bit more about what elements to put on your wireframe, just browse the Web a little bit. Look at some of your most favorite and popular sites, and from that you'll come up with some really good ideas of elements beyond these that you might want to include on your wireframe for your Web page.

6 Chapter 4, Video 1: "WordPress Overview" You're taking a look at the inside of a WordPress installation. This is the Dashboard of the administrative area for WordPress. Now, there's lots of help out there. You can search on YouTube, or just on Google, and obtain all the help that you need for implementing and using WordPress for your website. But I wanted to show you just a few things, and that is from your Dashboard here, almost everything you need is located on the left-hand side, this left-hand menu. And from a post perspective, you see Posts here. You can go ahead and add a new post or look at all posts just by hovering over that. So let's go ahead and look at all posts, and let's say that you have a post on your WordPress, on your site, and you can see here that I have 203 pending posts here on this installation with only a couple published. But let's say you wanted to just make a change to something. All you have to do is find the post that you want to do and go ahead and click Edit. You'll come into that particular post, and you'll see everything right here. And you can go ahead and click and make all the changes that you'd like, and then click Update right here, this little Update button on the right-hand side. So I know that's very, very simplified, but as you can see, everything that you need, it's completely manageable once you get the hang of it, even if you do not know much about websites or graphics designing or anything like that. So you'll be fine, good luck, and definitely consider WordPress as the backbone for your website.

7 Chapter 5, Video 1: "Lesson 4 Wrap-up" We've now come to the final chapter of Lesson 4 of Start Your Own Online Business. And I want to just send my kudos to you for all of the hard work and effort that you're putting in. You've gotten to this point only because you continue to take the actions that are necessary to complete chapter after chapter, and lesson after lesson. And what's exciting is that you're well on your way to producing a profitable online business. So in this lesson, we focused on creating and launching your own website. And now that your website's up, it's time that we need to figure out how to take your products and services and combine them with your website through a sales process, so that you're able to sell things online to generate that revenue. So we're going to come back in the next lesson and move from the website in this one to the selling process in Lesson number 5. I'll see you back in just a few minutes.