- Hey everybody,
David and David here from PayItForward.com
and UpPhone.com.
And in this video,
we're going to show you how to create a website using Wix.
- And before you begin, just keep one simple thing in mind.
What is the goal of your website?
If you own a business,
it's probably tied to the way that you make money.
For instance, a doctor's office
might want to book appointments through their website,
and Wix has that feature built in.
- Yeah. So we'd like to thank Wix for sponsoring this video
so we can show you how to build your website step by step.
Click the link in the description section of this video
to follow along and let's get started.
Let's begin by clicking "create new site"
in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
What kind of website do you want to create?
Well, we are making a website for a graphic designer,
So "designer" is the way to go.
And we'll create our website
using the Wix editor, "Choose a template".
Picking a template is super important.
You want to find one
that has all the fundamental features
that you will need for your website.
And if you can pick the right template from the start,
you can save yourself a lot of time down the road.
Let's click on "Art and Illustration".
We did find one that we liked,
and it is this illustrator portfolio.
- And then to preview a template
before you actually choose it,
you can just click "view", "view full demo".
When you find a template that you like,
click "edit this site"
in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
- So let's get a little bit familiar
with the Wix editor real quick.
At the top of the screen, you've got this bar.
This is how you navigate
from different pages that you want to edit.
So right now we're on the homepage,
you can't just come over here in the menu, click about,
that's not going to work.
You have to do it up here,
upper left hand corner of the screen.
You would just click "about".
And that's how you get there.
If you want to see what your site looks like
on mobile, as you're editing it,
again, just click this little
"switch to mobile phone" button,
Looking good.
Let's go back to "desktop" and back to the homepage.
On the left, you have your editor tools.
There's a whole bunch of things
you can do using these tools.
Pretty much everything you're going to add to your website
is going to be right here.
And then over on the right,
we have our toolbar.
we haven't really used this all that much.
So we're just going to close out of it for now.
The first thing we're going to do is edit this text
at the top of the screen.
Our person's name is not "Odom Loran".
It is "Arthur Bly, The Art Guy".
So I'm just going to click on this box
and edit the text.
Right off the bat,
I'm not a big fan of this font.
Now you could edit the font right here in the text settings.
However, this will only edit the font
for this text box specifically.
We think it's better
to go through the theme manager
and just universally set your fonts
and your font color.
So I'm going to click "theme manager" on the left,
click on "Text"
and here's that font I'm not a big fan of.
So let's click on that
and just find a font that works for you.
I like it.
And if you want to make that font
consistent across the website,
you can come into each of these texts themes
and just do the same thing.
Find your font,
and then click apply.
The next thing we're going to do
is swap out these default Wix images
with some original images.
It's good for SEO,
You don't want to have duplicate images
all across your website.
So let's click on this Wix pro gallery
and click "manage media".
So we don't actually want
any of these images on our website.
So I'm moving to click "select all",
and then I'm going to click "delete".
Get rid of all of them,
And now we're going to upload our images to the website.
So click "add media here",
"image",
"upload media",
"upload from computer",
and I've got some files ready to go.
Select all of these,
"open".
Our images have been uploaded,
now I'm going to select them all,
and add them to our gallery.
You can easily do this
by pressing and holding on your cursor
and dragging across all of the images.
And then click "Add To Page"
in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
Now these images are in our gallery.
- Next we're going to update the titles
for each of these images.
By default when somebody clicks on the image
on your website,
they'll see the file name,
which isn't ideal.
Let's click on "Title"
and give it a short name that's more user-friendly.
That's capitalized, and is going to look good.
- It's also a good idea
to stick a description in with your image.
This is alt-text is good for SEO,
helps search engines like Google interpret your image.
And a lot of the time
you can actually just make the description
the same as the title.
That's what we do for a lot of our images on our websites.
So I'm just gonna go ahead
and copy this and paste it in.
I'm going to do that for all of our images.
Finally click "Done"
in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
And now we have our images and our gallery.
You can add more than four images if you want.
The next thing I want to do too,
is just update this heading.
Next, let's flesh out this homepage a little bit more
and add an about me section.
We're going to do this with a strip.
So if you come over to your editor tools on the left
and click "Add",
here you'll have strips.
These are long horizontal bars
that go across the full width of your website.
Fortunately, the first one is "About",
there's also a "contact", "welcome", "services team",
but we're doing an about,
so let's stick with that.
So I'm going to drag this strip over to the top,
because I want it above my portfolio.
Excellent.
Let's swap out this image with an image of Arthur Bly.
So I'm going to click on the photo
and then click "change column background".
Right now it's this image of a girl.
Lets click "image" again.
Wix does have a lot of media you can choose from,
We're going to upload our own unique image.
We recommend that you try to use unique images
as often as you can.
It's better for SEO.
So I'm going to click "upload media"
in the upper left hand corner of the screen,
upload the photo from my computer,
and then click "Change Background".
Great.
So I kind of want this yellow box to be a black box
to sort of match the background of this images.
Have it be a one nice black strip across,
but before I do that,
I want to change the font text to white because we don't
want black text on a black background.
You can't read it.
So,
coming to these text boxes, double click,
click on the "A" with a paint drop, it's color,
and then select white.
Do that for all of the text boxes.
And then finally, just like we did,
click into column two,
click "Change Column Background",
click "color",
and then I'm going to select black.
We've got this nice bold black strip across,
really stands out.
So I'll quickly add
some about me content to this section.
Right now there's not a lot of space
between our big black strip at the top,
and this graphic design portfolio heading right below it.
We want to add a little bit of white space
just to make it easier to read
for people visiting your website.
You can do that by clicking on
the "zoom out" and "reorder" tool
at the top of the screen,
and then see this little horizontal bar,
just drag that down ever so slightly,
a little bit of white space.
And now we'll exit zoom out,
and there it is.
- One last thing we want to do the homepage
is come down here,
We're going to add another strip for services.
One of our goals is to
try to find new clients for art.
So let's stick some
"services" information on the homepage.
and click "Add" in the Wix editor tools,
"strip", and then "services".
I'm going to come down here,
and I'm going to select this one.
Drag and drop below
our graphic design portfolio.
And again, there's a little bit of a spacing issue,
but you can just drag this strip and pull it down
just a little bit and add some white space.
We want to set up this strip to only have three boxes,
and it's actually pretty intuitive.
You can just click on the one that you want to get rid of
and tap backspace on your PC
or delete on your Mac.
One thing I love about Wix is how intuitive it is to use.
When I want to delete one part of this strip,
it didn't break the entire strip.
Sometimes other website builders
when you delete one element, the entire thing breaks.
That's not the case with Wix.
So quickly, I will just update this section of the website.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- And while I'm setting this up,
I just want to interject real quick
and say that you can change these vector art elements.
And Wix has a great portfolio
of vector art elements.
So you can click "change basic shape",
And since this is a city mural,
I'm just going to tap in "city"
and see what comes up.
I like that one!
Click it and click "add to page".
And you can also change the color
of the vector art by clicking "design".
And we are going to make this black.
- Okay, we've got our "services" set up nicely,
and then just come down to the footer here.
And we're just going to update this text real quickly
to reflect what year it is.
These social media buttons is called "the social bar".
You can also change the size of these social icons
or remove the accounts that you don't have.
Just come over here and click "Layout"
Bump up the icon size a little bit.
And then if you want to remove any of these buttons,
just click "set social links",
let's get rid of this one.
You can also click "add icons"
if there are any other accounts
that you want to add to your website.
- Click "Done" when you've got all your icons in there,
- And we can just drag it
and make sure it is centered with the page.
Next we'll navigate quickly to our "About" page
and just make this more personalized for Arthur.
- Next lets go to the contact page.
- So, I want to swap out this image at the top,
it's the stock image.
Maybe we want to make it a little bit different.
Click on the image, click "Change Image",
and I will just search Wix for.
- Now this image on its own, it doesn't really pop,
but we're going to add a frame to it.
So you can do that by highlighting the image
and clicking "Design".
And you've got all sorts of frames to pick from,
let's choose that one.
And lets just drag to make this image slightly larger,
update this text field to say "Contact Arthur",
enter email address, and telephone number,
and then scroll down here to the contact form.
Now by default, this contact form is pretty solid.
We like the layout, but there are a few things you can do.
So if you click on the form and click "Add New Field",
one of the things that we recommend doing
is adding a reCAPTCHA field..
This will just help you filter out bots and spammers.
So if you click on the plus next to reCAPTCHA,
And I'm just going to center this a little bit.
If you're not a fan of the default form
that your website comes with,
you can just click on "Design"
and there are a whole bunch of
contact form designs to choose from.
We like this one within this is set up pretty well.
We've got the fundamentals in place for this website.
The next thing we're going to do
is show you how to add a blog to your website.
It's a great way to get organic traffic
through search engines to your website,
potentially attract new customers.
So to do this, come over to your editor tools,
and click "Start Blogging".
"Start A Blog",
"Add Now",
choose the type of blog that's right for you.
We don't have a members area for this website.
If you have some sort of subscription service
as part of your business,
maybe that's a better fit for you.
We're just going to choose "Wix Blog" for now.
As you can see, a couple of posts got made for us.
These are dummy posts.
We don't want these on our websites.
So, we're going to click "Manage Posts".
"Select All".
And lets move these to trash.
Now let's create some blog posts of our own,
click "Create New Posts"
in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
All you need to do is add a title,
add some texts,
then hit publish.
I've written some blog posts ahead of time,
I'm going to copy and past those over now.
Here's my first blog post.
If you come over here on the left
there's a few options you have
click on settings.
Here you can add a display cover image.
We recommend getting that image up there.
Right now it's just a wall of text.
It's good to get some images in.
It's also unique content.
Good for SEO, let's add an image.
Then click "add to page",
"Publish Now",
author is me.
Then guys, come down here to SEO.
Post URL slug.
If you're at an SEO blog post,
you want your keyword to appear in the slug.
Title on search engines,
this is your SEO title.
Usually can just be the same as the blog post
and then post description,
This is your meta description.
Usually about 150 characters is a good fit.
Right now it's, it's much longer than that.
So we're going to shorten it up,
and you get this nice little preview on Google
to see what somebody would find.
If they saw your post in the search results.
- Wix makes the post URL slug
from the title of your blog post.
So you probably won't have to change it.
- You can also set categories and tags for your blog posts.
If you want to organize it that way,
Let's click on "Publish".
There we go. We have our first blog post.
I'm going to set up a second blog post real quick
(upbeat instrumental music)
We've got our blog posts,
I'm going to click the "X"
in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
You can change the layout of how your posts appear
if you click on "Settings",
"Layout",
Theme to editorial,
tiled.
First one, we liked the first one.
We're going to stick with that for now.
You can also resize the images,
change the ratio.
Last thing we're going to touch on here is the blog menu.
That's the all posts,
the search and little log-in guy there.
Click on "Settings" and then click on "Display".
Come down here to blog menu.
I think that all posts is kind of dull
and it's hard to read,
so I'm going to turn that one off.
And we don't really need
the log in or sign up button for our blog.
Let's turn that off as well.
So we just got the search bar.
So let's close out of that.
Our blog is looking pretty good.
One last thing we want to add to this website
is a bookings page.
We know that Arthur has services
that he wants people to sign up for through the website
and you can actually have
people book those services through Wix.
So let's come over here to "Bookings", click on that.
Start taking bookings online, click "Add Now".
(upbeat instrumental music)
- First thing we'll do is manage the services
and add some of Arthur's services to the website.
So click "Manage Services"
one-on-one or multiple participants,
this going to be one-on-one.
- To add an image for the service click "Image"
and upload a picture.
And it's going to make the description
make a lot more sense.
Then click "Add To Page".
So what kind of service is it?
Is it an appointment, is it a class, is it a course?
It's an appointment,
you're booking an appointment with Arthur
to get yourself turned into a cartoon.
Service details,
you can set how long the session is going to be,
staff who can provide the service right now,
so staff member number one,
let's go ahead and rename that.
So you do a fixed price, a constant price, or no fee.
Let's say it's a fixed price of $250.
Clients pay the entire amount online.
You can change that if you wish to entire amount in-person,
online or in person, or online deposit
and the rest of the person.
Let's just do entire amount online for now.
Video conferencing.
If you want to be able to set up a zoom call
right from your Wix website,
you can do that by adding video conferencing,
save and continue.
And then you just connect your zoom account and login
type of location.
- Is it going to be at a business address,
client's place, or a custom location?
So for example, if it's a virtual session.
Pricing plans, let clients book this service
with a plan if you want,
when you're all set, click save.
In order to accept payments online
and start taking bookings online,
you do need a Wix premium plan.
So go ahead and click upgrade.
Wix has different plans at different price points,
whether you're a beginner or more experienced website owner.
And all of them includes secure online payments
and allow you to do online booking.
So we're just going to start with the basic plan for now.
Now that we upgraded our plan,
they'll say, "upgrade your site?"
So your premium experience,
go ahead and refresh this page.
Now I'm just gonna add another service real quick.
One thing I want to point out real quick
is that when you select no fee
the price doesn't get displayed at all on the service.
That's why we recommend selecting custom price
and then free if it's a free service.
We've added a couple of services to our website.
Let's close out of the dashboard,
click the "X" in the right hand corner of the screen.
And here we are,
you can change the services page layout,
make it look a little bit nicer.
I'm going to click on the services
and then click "Settings",
come down here to "Layouts".
So shape I'm going to pick square
images already look better.
- I'm going to set it to fit.
Don't like that as much.
We'll do a crop.
Lets align the text to the center.
And right now our services are a little bit off center,
but you can change that.
So we have two services
we set it to two cards per row.
There we go.
I also want to make sure that people come to this page
get a little bit more information
about the services being offered.
So you can come over here to display
and check the box next to service subtitle.
Now that we have our services,
we're going to go back to the homepage
and update a couple of links.
Scroll down to our services strip.
So for example, "City Murals",
we have the mural consultation service,
click "read more" and then click on this link
click "page", which page.
Lets send them right to the book online page.
Done.
We can do that for all of our services in this strip.
Let's save our progress so far.
Whenever you make a lot of website updates,
it's a good idea to make sure
it looks good on both desktop and mobile.
You can do that on Wix, by clicking on the phone in the
tool bar at the top of the screen.
And here is what our website looks like on mobile.
Not bad.
So I switched back to desktop
and I'm going to click save.
We've got the fundamentals of our website set up
and you can always come back here and tinker a little bit
and make it look exactly how you want it to.
We're going to go back to the dashboard
and set up the domain that came with our one-year plan.
Domains are included with
one year, two year, and three year Wix premium plans.
So go up to "Settings" at the top of the screen
and then go down to "My Dashboard"
and let's set up your site.
Let's click "Connect A Domain".
get a domain,
click "Buy A New Domain"
and your voucher will get applied when you check out.
- Usually when you pick a domain name,
you want it to be the name of your business.
But since this is for a person,
let's just search for Arthur Bly.
You don't have to know
exactly what your domain name is going to be
before you do it.
- Wow. Arthur bly.com is available.
- Okay? If that happens?
Get it.
When you see this, get a personalized mailbox offer,
it actually is a really good deal
because it is a G suite email account, which is by Google.
If you're familiar with Gmail,
this is exactly the same thing,
except it is branded with your domain name.
So click buy a mailbox if that's something you wanna do.
- We have our domain,
last thing we need to do
is actually publish the website and get it out there.
So let's go to the site editor when you're ready,
click publish in the upper right hand corner of the screen
to make your site go live.
Congratulations,
your Wix website is complete.
- One of the things that I love about Wix
is that you don't have to use your computer
every time you want to update your website.
Instead, you can download the Wix app
for your iPhone or Android smartphone
and update your website on the go.
Check back soon to watch our video that's all about
Wix SEO and how they've leapfrogged the competition
in recent years.
- And thanks for watching this video, give it a thumbs up.
if you enjoyed.
Leave a comment down below with any other questions,
and don't forget to subscribe to this channel for more great
videos about Wix.