Product Spotlight: Drag and Drop Website Builder
If you’ve made it this far, you can build a website. Really, it’s true – if you can turn on a computer or a tablet device, open a browser, navigate to the iPage blog, and select this article, you can create a website. You have all the skills required and now need to be pointed in the right direction. That direction is the iPage drag and drop website builder: weebly.
Have you made a new dish in the kitchen direct from a recipe before? Using the website builder is a bit like this. To make a dish from a recipe you need to know how to measure ingredients, turn on your appliances, and follow the instructions. But you do not need to understand why you use one spoonful of curry powder instead of two, or why simmering for 20 minutes is better than simmering for 15. You just have to follow the instructions and the result will be a beautifully cooked meal.
Of course you can go into more detail with your cooking if you want, and you can do that with the free weebly website builder included with your hosting plan too. But you can also stick to the basics to create a functional, effective and great looking site without any technical knowledge whatsoever.
Step 1 – Choose a Template
The first step to creating your website using weebly is choosing a template. Templates determine things like the layout, font, backgrounds and colors of your website. This gives you a good starting point so you can add content.
Templates are changed by clicking on the Design tab.
Step 2 – Create Pages
The next step to building a great website is to get out a pen and piece of paper and write down the pages that you want. At the minimum you should have a homepage and a contact page, but you might also want to add an About Us page, pages for your products and services, or a blog.
Make sure you include enough pages to tell users what your website is about, but remember you have to fill these pages with content – text, images and video. So don’t add too many pages.
Pages are created by clicking the Pages tab and selecting Add Page.
Step 3 – Add Content
Weebly is a drag and drop website builder. This means you simply drag elements from the toolbar at the top of the screen to wherever you want them to appear on your page.
One of the first things you should do is change the title of the page. This is usually the text that is above the menu. You can either change the text or you can upload an image, like your company logo.
Then on the page you can add images, edit images that are already there, add text and edit text. To add an element, drag it from the toolbar onto the page and then click on it to edit. Including images on your website will make the pages more attractive to users, but make sure they are relevant to your content. In terms of your text, make the writing as concise as possible and use different paragraph structures to break up the text and make it easier to read – with headings, lists, and bullet points.
Multimedia elements can also make your site look more professional. This includes things like photo galleries, videos and slideshows. These are added to pages by clicking on the Elements tab and then going to Multimedia. You can upload images from your computer, while the easiest way to add videos is via Youtube.
Finally you should add a contact page. You can put basic contact details on the page using the text editor – things like your telephone number and address are always helpful. But you can also add a contact form to make getting in touch even easier for your users, and you can add a map from the Multimedia section.
Step 4 – Optimize
There is a lot more that you can do with the website builder, but the most important is to use the SEO tools included with weebly. When you are on the Pages tab there is an option for Advanced Settings. In this option you can set page meta titles and meta descriptions. You should do this for each page.
Step 5 – Publish
And that is it – your website should now be ready to publish.
Weebly lets you concentrate on the content elements of your website by making the technical job of creating it as easy as possible. If you have the content ready before you start, your website will be published and ready for people to visit in no time.