How to Build a Website Fast (8 HOURS!!!)

So blew up my website and realized that I needed one bad. This is exactly how I built one in 8 hours. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Dan from millennialmotivator.ca, helping you learn how to create, engage, and inspire. If you're new to the channel, go ahead and click that subscribe button down there, the little bell next to it. You'll get notified when my next video goes live. Right now, putting out videos once a week, helping you guys learn how to grow your business, how to build it from the ground up. Today, what we're talking about is me being a bonehead. That's where we're going to start anyway. So essentially what happened was I decided I got this artistic bug, this creative feeling. I want to revamp the website. So of course what I did was I went and installed WordPress over the existing template and completely deleted my site from the face of the earth. Bonehead move, right? Right? Not a problem though. Thankfully, I was able to take that new fresh template of a website and build it up from scratch to an existing website in 8 hours, give or take. So stick around, I'm gonna give you everything that I used and how I made that happen. Hopefully that helps you guys out there that are just getting your business off and running and considering how you can build a website fast, easy, and free. Okay, so first and foremost, what we are talking about is building a website. We're not talking about the hosting. I'm not going to get into all that. There's tons of great resources out there. Feel free to go ahead and YouTube for those, how to find a great hosting site and get started. I use HostGator. I love them. Uh, they're quick, they're easy to get going, and it makes it easy to install WordPress, which is where my problem started. It was almost a little too easy. But that being said, I am not a website designer by trade. That's not what I do. I'm a digital marketing consultant. I speak publicly to groups, workshops, and businesses. I am not a hands-on designer kind of guy. So, For me, I was overwhelmed from the get-go, which is, I think, a reasonable place to be when you consider where so many startups and entrepreneurs begin their journey online. It's very, very difficult for them to actually dive in headfirst because it seems so overwhelming. So the first thing that I did instead of sitting there wrestling and pulling my hair out was actually to ask my community online how to go about doing this. So before you've done anything, if you're out there trying to build a website quickly, Take the time and ask online. What do you do to design a website? How are you doing it? What tools are you using? And it's amazing to see the flood of people that will show up and start giving you answers. That's the number one key that I've got to give you guys to get the ball rolling on this one. Take the time and ask. Now, I only— this only took about an hour as far as actually getting the ask out there and getting some responses back. So it doesn't take as much time as you think, but it's a great place to get started because you can learn from other people's mistakes and save yourself a ton of headaches. So to get it started, make sure that what you're doing is asking out into your social network, I am looking to build a website, or I'm looking to build a new website. What tools do you recommend? And start making a list. So now that you've got your community and they've dropped this massive list of tools on you, the next thing you need to do is really start to narrow it down. Okay, what tools are going to be most effective for me? For me, it's always the ones that are plug and play and very simple to use. I'm not looking to dedicate hours to fine-tuning and coding. That's not who I am. That's not what I'm about. The tools that I use have to be user-friendly, and we're talking super user-friendly, because I need them to work quick. So for me, I'm gonna let you guys know down below, you can find the links to these tools that I use. But for me, these are the tools that I use and I found to be super easy, and the interface allowed me to get the website up very quickly. So starting off, WordPress is what I use. Why WordPress? The cost was a big one for me here. In the past, I've used different designers, different design sites, different design tools, and all of them came with a cost attached. My issue with that is often when there's a cost attached, there's a back and forth. There's a discussion and a dialogue where I want this. They get back to me and say, well, this is how we would do that. And then you got to negotiate cost. Takes too much time. I needed a website up. So instead, WordPress provides you the ability to quickly upload a template and start working within the framework of that. Now, There's all kinds of great frameworks out there for you to choose from, but I highly recommend that you use something that has Elementor in its overlay. It's an amazing tool. It allows you to just grab blocks, throw them into your website, and bam, you're off and running. It's very, very easy. It's very user-friendly, and it's almost intuitive into knowing what you want it to look like and what you want it to do. Even further, it does an excellent job optimizing your website for tablet, mobile, desktop. So those are great perks that come with that, and it's a great place to get started. So WordPress, use the templates that exist and make sure that you've got something from Elementor there so you can quickly just plug and play, put the blocks in that you need to have. Okay, so that's the first step. Start with WordPress, keep it simple, have that there. Next up, what you want to do is have a very clear understanding in your head of what you want on the site. Too often people get bogged down with whatever comes with the template and And there's 15 pages of stuff there. And oh, I need an about page and a contact page and a services page and a product page and my cat pictures page and my social. You don't need all that. What you need to do is stay simple and focused. When people land on a website, if they're going to come to your website at all, they want to get down to the meat and bones of it. They're not looking for a random tour. They want to get down to the point. Where am I going? Where's the thing that I need? So make sure that your website is very clearly drawn out. Even just grab yourself a pen, grab yourself a notebook, and draw it out. Here's what I need to have on here: who I am, what I do, contact me. That's all I need. Great. Once you've got that simple bare bones down, it really speeds up the process. You can eliminate some of those pages that you don't need and really focus on the guts of what you want to accomplish. Once you've got that framework, now you can really start to craft out, okay, what do I want on each of these pages? What do I want my homepage to look like? What do I want my about page to look like? What do I want my contact page to look like? Whatever you've decided on, now you get to start into that design process. Right now we're at hour probably 3 of my design. Now this is where a lot of people get bogged down is in the actual creation of the pages themselves. So often we're looking for that perfect feel, that perfect vibe. So what I like to do is actually go out on the web and find people that are in my niche, in my industry, and take a look at their websites. Just be analytic and write down, okay, what happened here? What did I like about this page? What did I not like about this page? What colors did I like? What, what different layouts did I like? And I start to make a list of those things. And I'll work on each page one at a time. I'll go, okay, homepages. What do I want my homepage to look like? And go search a bunch of different people in my industry, take a look at their homepages, and essentially piecemeal what I really liked out of all of those and have a list. Then I just go and dive in headfirst and tackle that. Now, homepages tend to be fairly easy, because you're just putting kind of a billboard up for everybody to see. Where this gets a little more challenging is on your further pages, as you go deeper into the site with a lot more content. The process though is still the same. You save a lot of time by going out and finding similar pages. So for me, there's a public speaking page and there was a digital marketing consultancy page. And so what I did was I went out and found people that I knew were leaders in the industry and took a look at their sites. What kind of copy did they have? What kind of information was there? Did they use images? Did they use videos? How do you make it all come together? And using those, I essentially just piecemealed this framework together. Frankenstein website together. The beauty of this process is it limits the amount of creative and keeps the selections very narrow, which if you're on a time constraint and you want to pump something out quickly is a huge advantage for you. That narrowed focus allows you to accomplish a whole lot in a very little amount of time. Now, large warning here, I am not advocating that you copy paste, cut and paste anything from anybody else's website. What I am advocating is this, please take the time to appreciate those who have built phenomenal websites and do your best to learn from them and then adapt those concepts for your own site. Next up comes the extensions and tools that I recommend that you put in there. Okay. And there's a few here that I highly recommend that you grab. They make the process so much easier. Okay. One is SiteLock, and this is almost a demanded requirement at this point. People want to know that when they use their website, They are going to be safe from malware, from intrusions, from spam, from hacking. They need to have that assurance. And SiteLock is a quick and cost-effective way of doing that. It allows you to just very quickly say, bam, here it is. It's safe. You got the little lock up on your site. You're ready to roll. That being said, you've got SiteLock out of the way. Your website's looking safe. The next thing you want to do is make sure that search engines can track you down and find your site easily. A great tool to walk you through this process is Yoast. I'll put the link down below. The link— the logo for the brand looks like this. Go check it out. If you don't have this installed in your WordPress site, you need to get it. It's going to give a complete overview of your site and any potential hindrances that may be there that are stopping any search algorithm from properly indexing your site. And that's a lot of jargon, but essentially what it means is if a search engine can't look through your website quickly and properly, neither can the people that want to find it. So what you want to do is make sure you've got this installed and clear all the errors that pop up on it. It will also make it very easy and seamless for you to attach your Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. Those are all there as options on it. And the added bonus, if you have blogs of any kind that you're going to put on there, long-form written content, it does a phenomenal job of making sure that you're keeping track of the type of language you're using, repeat words, keyword analysis, all of that comes with this tool. For free. It's an absolute must. I highly recommend you check it out. Yoast is a great tool. But for me, as somebody who's a consultant, and for most of the people out there that create a website, you want to capture your community and you want to understand who they are, how they're using the site and where they're going. So I already mentioned Google Analytics. And that's a massive tool for you. I highly recommend you use it. The next 2 tools that I recommend are also there for you to get a long email list growing. And it's going to enable you to do some pretty cool things as far as reaching back out to your community. Okay? So Constant Contact for me, I reached out onto the web and said, who's the mailing CRM that you want to use? And right away the Constant Contact company reached out back on social and said, it's us, try us, give us a shot. They're going to be there that quickly to sell it to you. That means that they'll also be there that quickly to help you when you come to understand their tool. Massive. Pair Constant Contact with Ninja Forms and you are off and running. Ninja Forms is a phenomenal tool, makes it very easy for you to capture emails, newsletters. If you're doing sales, if you're doing consultancy like I am, you want people to offer those questions to you, and you want to capture those emails in a list that you can engage with them down the road. Ninja Forms makes that easy. When you pair Ninja Forms with Constant Contact, you have a powerhouse machine app. The last app that I would highly recommend you take a look at, and this is for those of you that are comfortable getting on video. Is Bonjoro. Now Bonjoro is an app that allows you to have video interaction with your community as people come into the brand. And what that looks like is I get a notification whenever somebody signs up for more information, they want to join the email, they want to join a newsletter. Great, I get their email. I also get a notice from Bonjoro saying you need to send this person a personalized video message. You can do it right from your mobile phone. Bam, done, sent it off. That is it though, guys. That was essentially the whole process of first ask, ask the experts out there, save yourself that time and make sure that you understand the tools that they're using and why. Next step is lay out the framework, make sure that you've, you've cut the fat, you've trimmed out all the nonsense and you know exactly the pages you need and why. Then start looking, head out there and find the leaders in your industry, see what they're doing well and try to adopt those practices into your website, but not cut and paste. Make it your own. Last but not least, plug in some great tools to help you better understand how your website is working, whether or not other people think that it's working for them, and have some way to connect with your community through either newsletter or social shares. It's a massive way to go. You'll build a great business platform and you'll be able to engage your community in real time. That is it though, guys. That's how I build a website from scratch, 8 hours start to finish, give or take. And it's up and running. So if you guys want to check out what it looks like, link is down there in the comments below. If you want to have any other questions— how did you do this? How did you go about doing that?— not a problem. I'm happy to answer any questions that you ask down below as well. If you guys have any tips or tricks, different plugins that I may want to add to my WordPress site, let me know that as well. I will catch you guys next week with another great video. Thanks for watching.