Hello my Socratica Friends!
We’re here to help you be a Great Student.
Today we’re happy to announce a brand new SOCRATICA STUDY TIPS Website.
That’s right, we’re busting out of the library here and going online.
So why did we build a website - why does anyone want a website?
To find everything in one place so you don’t have to go hunting around.
Do you know we’re up to TWENTY of these Study Tips videos?
And we have so many more planned.
We’ve really been putting our heart and soul into making these videos for you, and
we want you to be able to easily find them and share them with your friends.
This also makes it easier for Teachers to share this resource with their students.
It may surprise you that we went with Wix for our website.
We make programming videos here at Socratica, so some of our viewers may be asking why don’t
you just make your own website.
Well, we did.
When we first got started on our channel, we built our own website (socratica.com),
and it took us a REALLY long time.
We had to design it, come up with colour schemes, code it, test it...it took us MONTHS, because
we were trying to keep up with our other work at the same time.
And guess what - We haven’t updated it in like 4 years.
We just don’t have the time to design, code, and fix bugs when we’re also trying to research
and write scripts, film, and edit videos for our YouTube channel.
Besides, not everyone who watches Socratica is a programmer.
There are also people training to be scientists, engineers, all kinds of things.
They need websites too.
If you run a lab, you should have a lab website - that’s very important for Science Communication.
If you’re a writer, you should have a website to show off your books and articles.
Maybe you make scientific art like a lot of our colleagues.
Almost everyone needs an online presence to share their work.
So we thought some of you would find this helpful if we shared our experience setting
up this website.
If you are interested in having your own website, this is one way you can do it.
Our friends at Wix sponsored this video.
So we got a free website - but actually, everyone gets a free website.
You get a website, and you get a website, and you get a website!
There are more advanced options at Wix that have a small monthly fee, but we went for
the cheap and simple option.
When you set it up, to personalize it, you can go through a questionnaire, or you can
look through templates to find one that matches your needs.
This one looks good - “Indie production company” - We’re kind of an indie educational production company.
We picked this template, because we wanted basically a gallery for all of our Study Tips videos.
We wanted it to be easy for you to scroll through to the tip you were interested in,
pick it, and then watch the video or see more details.
This has all the movie posters ...
if you hover over, there’s a description ...
this is what it looks like if you click on one. - this looks perfect.
Before you jump right in to make your website, there are a few design principles you’ll
want to keep in mind.
First - Simple is better.
When were planning this website, we immediately started spinning ideas out of control, throwing
in more and more functions we thought it should have, and then when we had a look at the templates
we realized that we were trying to make this one little website do too much.
Less is more.
Along those same lines, you don’t want a riot of different colours and fonts.
It should look harmonious.
So where do you get started?
Take one of your favourite paintings and look at its colour scheme.
Or pick an ad that you love and look at the mix of fonts they use.
You don’t have to be a professional artist to know what you like.
We read this great book called “Steal Like an Artist” that explained how even professional
artists are all inspired by someone, and they take what they like and build up from there
and make it their own.
That’s what we’re doing here.
We already have some artwork that we use in our videos and on our YouTube channel, and
we wanted the colour scheme and the imagery to be consistent.
So here you can see we assembled these things all together in one folder before we started
work on our website.
That made it really easy to start with the template, but still give it a custom look.
So you can recognize this site as Socratica Study Tips.
Here you can see the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor on Wix.
You can drag and drop pictures, embed videos, write text...
Here we changed the font to the font we usually use, and notice how you can use the built-in
guides to line everything up.
If it’s a little off, you can give it a little nudge.
It’s a good idea to write out what you want to say ahead of time, so you can just copy & paste.
Play with the sizes until you like how it looks.
This is a little hard to read, so we’re going to try a panel of colour behind it.
Here’s a box -
we can resize it,
change opacity,
change colour...
ooh look, colour palettes! That will be fun to play with.
Don’t feel like it has to be perfect - you can always edit it.
Remember to save your work.
Pick a free domain name from Wix -
we’re going with socratica.wixsite.com/studytips.
Or you can use a domain name that you bought, if you’d like.
Now we’re going to bring in our videos.
Each one of these images in the gallery links to its own page,
so let’s go to the first page and edit it for our first study tips video.
You can either upload videos directly, or you can embed them from YouTube.
That’s what we’re going to do.
Again, remember less is more.
We don’t have to write out the whole transcript here - you’re here for the videos.
So we might just feature a few key phrases from each Study Tip.
Now back on the home page, we need to change the gallery image to match our new page.
Here’s where we upload images.
Let’s make a page for our book recommendations!
Because there are so many options, you might get a little lost building your own site.
Remember that DONE IS GOOD.
Build a really simple, functional site, and launch it.
You can always add more later!
The other thing we had to do when we coded our own site was that we had to account for
different screen sizes.
About a quarter of our audience watches our videos on mobile devices.
Here we were able to see what our page will look like on a phone.
Again, simplicity here is really key!
People are scrolling around on their phone, and you
need your design to be clear, even when you are flipping through it really fast.
We can make changes here, and these changes only affect the mobile design, not desktop.
Here’s a link to our Patreon page - thank you Patrons!!
Time to clean up a little. Remove everything from the template that you don’t need for your own site.
We don’t need this button - Delete.
We don’t need this logo -
there’s a lot going on on this page already,
and we want to keep it simple. So...delete.
Over here, we can clean up the menu.
We don’t need this stream/ buy option. Delete.
We’re DONE.
In just a few hours!
In the future, we can always add more functionality
- we can pick from all these widgets...
If we decide we want to gather a contact list, we can do that here, or if we want to sell
something, like our Socratica sweatshirts, we can do that here.
Or let’s say a miracle occurs and we suddenly have a ton of free time on our hands.
If we really want to, we can dig in and edit the code directly.
Personally, I’d rather make another video.
There are links to our new Study Tips website and Wix in the description box below.
We hope you found this helpful.
If you’re interested in making your own webpage, visit Wix.com/go/socratica and have
a look at Wix and see if it’s a good choice for you.
We’re really happy that we could get this set up in an afternoon and get right back
to our work, making more videos for you.
Making smart use of your time - it’s all part of being a Great Student.
Wix.com/go/socratica