You need a website like you need a coat rack
A coat rack is a central location in your house where all the coats, hats, and scarves are kept. It's a meeting place for all of that outdoor apparel. And although it holds a lot of different kinds of clothing, if you need to go outside on a cold day, that's where you'll find what you need.
A website is like a coat rack that organizes all the marketing apparel for your business: your About Me information, your Services descriptions, testimonials, photo galleries, product pages, blog posts, a contact form, and links to social media accounts.
The purpose of a website is to establish your professional presence and garner enough trust and interest to bring in paying customers. A website should provide potential customers with enough information to take the next step toward becoming a paying customer. You want them to visit your website and then call you for an appointment, make a reservation, buy a product, sign up for your mailing list, or ask you questions before they make a purchase.
"But," you say, "I have a Facebook page and I post there all the time. Isn't that good enough?" In my opinion, a website is the magnet that all your social media efforts should lead people to. Expecting a business Facebook page, your clever tweets, and a LinkedIn profile to do the same thing as a website is like leaving a hat on the sofa, a coat crumpled on the closet floor, and a scarf on the refrigerator door handle. Apparel scattered in multiple places assumes people will take the time to go hunting in the places where you've scattered all the pieces until they have the whole outfit.
A website organizes all of the information that someone needs in one place. Your website tells a potential customer what you do and what you have to offer. If what the person is looking for matches what you have to offer, you'll have a new customer. Although much of a website's information stays the same over time, updates in the form of blog posts, promotions, and news ensure that it is interesting to existing customers too, so they will hire you again or recommend you to others.
So what are you waiting for? Get that long-postponed website designed and launched. After all, your home (page) is where you hang your hat.
Adding links to your website gives people a convenient way to learn more about a subject that interests them. Links can be built into text, buttons, or images. Learn more about the guidelines I go by when deciding which type of link to use.
Whether your website is new or has been around a while, decluttering the content to encourage visitors to browse is always a good idea.
Whether you design your website on Squarespace or some other platform, you’ll be making color choices that are unified and compatible across your website, from the text to the buttons to the colors in the images. Designers call these color choices a color palette. Here’s how I simplify color selections for my clients.
Like the receptionist and reception area in an office, the Home page is the greeting area that needs to contain enough cues to reassure visitors that they're in the right place and give them guidance about how to find what they need and what to do now that they're there.
I recommend starting your business with a Google Workspace Business account so your business email address includes your domain name. But a personal Google account can be useful for many everyday tasks. In this blog post, I cover how the two types of accounts differ.
Squarespace assigns every new website a built-in domain, a Site ID, that ends with “squarespace.com.” I recommend changing the random ID Squarespace assigns to be something you’ll remember.
The clickable image that shows up on social media posts is called a link preview image. In Squarespace and other website editors, you can designate a specific image to show up when you share a website page on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter/X.
Understanding in advance how your website will support your business will inform your website's design and content.
The aspect ratio of an image is its width relative to its height. Understanding aspect ratio helps you design your pages with images that look attractive and well-matched. Aspect ratio choices can also help with planning and choosing images you’d like to use on your website.
As a Squarespace Circle Member, I bring lots of benefits to my clients’ projects through the supportive professional community I belong to. As my client, you also get direct benefits I pass on to you, like an extended 6-month trial period and 20% off your first annual purchase.
Being able to preview your website live without logging out of Squarespace is a convenience for testing and proofreading before you launch.
You can add a Social Sharing image to Squarespace to be shown as a link preview for your website when you share a URL on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The size of 1200x628 pixels works best for those platforms. You can also set custom images for specific website pages or blog posts to draw extra attention to them.
Squarespace lets you promote your blog post automatically on your connected social media accounts through the Share settings for the post.
Squarespace and Square are two different companies. They both support online stores, so it can be confusing when you are doing research about getting your business online. Squarespace is my favorite website builder, so this blog post will explain how it’s different from the company called Square.
Taking the time to add a note to your invitation to connect to someone on LinkedIn improves the chances of the invitation being accepted. Adding information about how you know the person or mutual connections you have builds trust.
A footer is the last section of information at the bottom of a website page. Use this valuable area to show contact information, add links to website pages, and ask visitors to take action on their way to becoming loyal customers.
Use the Facebook Like Button Configurator to generate code to add a Facebook Follow button on your website.
Kerry A. Thompson
You don’t need a big agency to get your website done. You just need the one right person. I offer Squarespace website design and content development services for creatives, coaches, and healers. Learn more in a free 30-minute consultation.