From the course: Planning Your No-Code Website

Storytelling tips for websites - Squarespace Tutorial

From the course: Planning Your No-Code Website

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Storytelling tips for websites

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- [Instructor] I'd like to build a custom house. I want blue paint and hardwood floors. How much will that cost? Well, I'm sure you have some questions for me at this point. How many bedrooms and bathrooms? On what kind of land are we building the house? A basement or a crawl space? Square footage? Some questions are driven by how I'll use the house. How many people will live there? Will anyone work from home? Are there specific hobbies that require extra space? Yet we start our discussions about websites in a similar way. I want a website and I want it blue. How much will that cost? We think about designs and features before we think about website goals or target audience. Content is often an afterthought entirely, something that we'll just whip up and throw in to get the site launched. As much fun as it is thinking about the colors and the layouts in website platforms, figuring out the goal of your website, the audience it serves, and outlining great content and features will get you much further to a final product. You'll find that the question about the right platform simply resolves itself. The fight about whether or not we should have an image carousel is resolved by understanding why users are coming to the site and what they needed to accomplish while visiting. So for this chapter, let's think about our goals for this website. Why are we building it in the first place? Who are we serving? If it's a website redesign, what should we preserve from the existing site and what should we throw out? How do we call people to do something that might make us money, gain us a following, grow our email list, or benefit us in some other way? Let's tackle the first problem of goals before we do anything else.

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