This post was sponsored by Squarespace, which makes it easy for anyone to build a personal brand online. Use the code CONTESSA for 10% off of your site.
Have you ever seen a website that completely took your breath away?
This website is clean, with neatly-written copy, beautiful high-resolution photos, and an overall je ne sais quoi. You might think to yourself, “I would love for my website to look exactly like this.” followed closely by the thought, “This must have cost an incredible amount of money to create.”
One of these two things is true.
You can build a beautiful website on your own. And you don't have to spend an exorbitant amount of money to do so. Creating a website, whether personal or professional, can be pared down to three elements:
- The overall site map
- Visual imagery
- Written copy
While hiring a designer and writer to create an entire mood for your website can be costly, there are other avenues you can explore– and get beautiful, breathtaking results. With Squarespace’s partnership with free stock photography darling, Unsplash, creating your own special environment on the world-wide-web has never been more achievable.
Let’s dive into our three-step process to creating your own website—on your own budget.
Developing A Site Map
In layman’s terms, the sitemap of a website will dictate how someone navigates your site. This will include any portfolio you host, your about me, your contact information, your e-commerce pages, and more.
If you're not a seasoned web developer, creating a sitemap from scratch might be a bit of a challenge. Squarespace’s templates ensure that your sitemap is already in place—and that it’s easily navigable from page to page.
With Squarespace, there are plenty of pre-designed templates for every kind of website. This makes it easier to set out with an idea of what you want your website to look like. For example, if you are building a wedding website, you might use Sonny, with its scrolling imagery and text.
If you want to promote your side hustle as an accountant, you might use a template like Ready, with its bold pops of color and scrolling elements to promote all of your services. Maybe you are finally setting up your e-commerce site to sell those candles you have been making for years. For this, a template like Brine, with its large bold imagery coupled with its simplicity, would work well to showcase (and sell!) your beautiful products.
If you wanted to create a website, from scratch, with a dedicated developer, you're looking at spending anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000. This doesn’t include dealing with one-off revisions, updates, and corrections to the website, which would likely be billed at an hourly rate. Starting from a template makes things much easier. While "easier" usually translates to "more expensive," this is not the case with Squarespace templates.
With an all-encompassing set of tools like Squarespace offers, you can be in control of the entire process. Start out with a base template, put your own personal touch—and be in control of any changes without keeping a costly developer.
Sourcing Beautiful Photography
We don’t all have degrees in Photography and digital SLRs hanging around our necks.
Websites are a visual medium, which means you need to impress your potential visitors within seconds of them arriving at your website. That means you need visuals—and lots of them. You might even underestimate how many visuals you will need. Aside from your cover image, you will also need block images, thumbnail images, and banner images.
When we find that we need photographs to set the mood for our websites, we usually find that hiring a photographer to take custom shots is very expensive. From there, we look to stock photography, which– spoiler alert!—is also expensive. Aside from being expensive, stock photography has a reputation of being cheesy, ugly, overlit, and sometimes downright weird.
Unsplash offers beautiful (really) free images from a generous community of photographers around the world. Here, at Career Contessa, we often might find ourselves looking for a photograph that shows a “woman at work.” This is one of the free images I found on Unsplash. Here is a woman working under dappled light with a powerful statement necklace.
Credit: Unsplash @rawpixel
This works perfectly for us. Search for the same “woman at work” over at Getty Images? I’m not going to lie, you will also find beautiful images there, but a medium version of that photo will set you back $375.00. If you, like us, need at least five images per week, all of a sudden, you are looking at a $1,875 price tag.
What’s also awesome is that Unsplash is integrated within Squarespace. Anywhere you need a photo on your website, including image blocks, gallery blocks, cover pages, and banner images‚ Unsplash and Squarespace have you covered—all without having to scour the internet.
Written Copy
While Squarespace has your sitemap and image sourcing covered, you have to do your own copyediting. Sorry, but it’s true.
Even so, you are still not alone. By using a template, you're already a few steps ahead. Since the templates come “pre-designed”, you have a good idea of how much copy fits in a particular area. Generally, these templates will show the ideal number of words to put in a particular section. For example, if you want to screen text over a cover image, you will see, within the template, how that might look. This also feeds into other design aspects, like font size, font type, and color.
Squarespace also has a ton of tools and webinars to help fuel your search engine marketing, optimizing and formatting your imagery, and best e-commerce tactics. While these elements may seem far and away, they really aren’t.
Once you have taken the costly headaches out of creating your website, you'll find yourself at ease with learning and implementing SEO, marketing, and email campaigns to spread the word.
This post was sponsored by Squarespace, which makes it easy for anyone to build a personal brand online. Use the code CONTESSA for 10% off of your site.
