Your Website
You Need a Website
If you don’t have a website for your studio, this is the week you’re going to create one.
The reason I’m asking this of you, no matter where you live, is that everyone needs a homebase in our digital age. It’s part of being a professional and taking yourself seriously.
I know you might not consider yourself technical, but I promise you can do this.
Personally, I recommend you set up your website using WordPress with Siteground as your host. The tutorial below will help you do that.
I encourage you to give WordPress a go even if it seems a little daunting at first. The steep uphill climb only lasts for a short time and you will soon get used to the system and how things work.
If you prefer to use a different website builder or if you already have a website using a different platform that’s totally OK. We can work with what you have – just make sure you have something before you continue.
Setting Up a Style Guide
Let’s face it: You’re probably not going to hire a designer to put together a full style guide and brand concept for your studio. You might be able to hire out certain aspects as they come up, but you’re probably stuck with yourself as the (amateur) lead designer.
Here’s the most important rule to digest in this new role: Simple is always better.
A pro might be able to use 50 different fonts and 7 colours on one poster and make it look slick, modern and beautiful. You can’t. And even if you could, figuring out that balance is not the best use of your precious time.
The best thing you can do as an amateur lead designer for your studio is to pick a simple colour palette and two fonts (one main body font that is super readable and one heading font that can be a little more decorative) and then stick to it.
Simplicity and consistency go hand in hand.
Coolors and Color Hunt are both good websites for exploring colour palettes. Give yourself a limited time to browse through before making a decision (don’t get sucked into a void for 3 hours!) and pay attention to how each colour palette makes you feel and how this relates to your unique superpower.
When it comes to fonts, I feel I need to restate our rule: Simple is always better. Having too much fun with fonts is one of the most common mistakes I see on small business websites, so please:
- Choose a plain (and probably sans serif unless you have a superpower-related reason for wanting serifs) font for your main body font.
- Don’t use handwriting or script fonts. Ever. Just, don’t.
Yes, sometimes cursive fonts look lovely but they need a lot of time and care or they will be an unreadable and annoying mess.
To explore font options that work well on screen I suggest going to Google Fonts. You can look at the common pairings at the bottom of each font page for ideas on heading/body combinations.
Once you’ve decided on your colours and fonts write them down somewhere where it’s easy to refer back to them. (Use hex codes for the colours so that they’re exactly the same every time.) A Google Doc, Evernote or some other cross-device app is best so that you can refer to them any time, any place and truly be consistent.
3 Fresh Glances
One of the most challenging parts of being the lead designer, chief copywriter, CEO and office admin of your business is that you can go a bit cross-eyed looking at a particular website page and not have anyone else to pass it off to.
When you’re working on a webpage for the first time or doing a major revamp, use this “3 glance” system as your quality control process once you think you might be done:
- Close it for about a day and come back with fresh eyes. Look at the page for about 10 seconds and then close your eyes and say the first words that come to mind. Do they accurately reflect your superpower? If not, work on the page a little more based on your observations.
- Get another person (as close to your perfect piano parent as possible) to look at the page for 20 seconds and then ask the magic question “What about this page would make you not want to enquire about lessons with me?” (By asking the question this way you’re more likely to get real feedback.) Edit again, if necessary, based on their comments.
- Don’t touch the page for a week. Come back in 7 days, pretend you’ve never seen the page before and give yourself 30 seconds to look at it. Turn away from the screen and write down a one sentence summary of what you would expect this teacher to be like based only on the page you just saw. Do a final edit based on how well this does or doesn’t reflect the impression you want to give.
After this 3 glance system is complete, mark a date in your diary 6 months from now to revisit this page and don’t touch it until then!
More to Explore
If you do want to look into premium theme options two good sources are Theme Forest and Studiopress. Consider this a more advanced step and only upgrade to a premium theme after you’ve had your site for at least a year or more.
If you want to dive deeper into the idea of branding then this short clip is a great (high level!) discussion of what it truly means.
While I’ve cautioned you not to spend too long on becoming a design guru, some of you may be interested to learn a little more. This post from Canva is a good basic set of rules to follow and start to investigate further.