Building a Business Website

Build your website in a few hours and as a bonus… leave knowing how to manage it yourself!

In this class, students will come to the class as an absolute novice and will walk out with a fully functioning website AND the knowledge of how to maintain the site on their own. This class does not cover eCommerce capabilities focusing instead on building an information only site. Bo Grist will lead the students through signing up for an affordable Umso account (account costs $7 per month) which is an exceptionally easy to use tool for building, maintaining and hosting your site for a very small investment. You do not have to write any code ever!

At the end of the class, students will have a fully branded site that has the following features:

• Functional Site that shows details about their products and services. To see some example sites built on the Umso platform, you can go to this link.
• An “About Us” section that features photos and background on the company
• A “Hero” section with photo(s) and details on how your product / service is differentiated from competitors
• A Blog and 2 functioning Blog posts + all the skills to post 1,000 more
• An FAQ section
• A functioning contact form that will email you when you have a submission
• A “Features” section
• A “Testimonial” section
• A footer with links to social media accounts
• Your own URL configured to work with the new site. All of the technical difficulty of getting the custom URL working will be solved in the class.
• Implement Google Analytics on your new site (free). This will allow you to see a great deal of detail about who is coming to your site and how they are finding you.
• A good understanding of how to use the Umso platform and how to make changes, test them and then publish the changes to the live URL.

Prerequisites:

1.  A credit card you can use to setup an Umso account for 1 year ($82).
           

2.  A credit card you can use to buy a custom domain for a year.  If you select a .com URL this will cost $12.  Other domains can be more expensive (.ai costs $199 per year).  A list of prices by domain type can be found here. We encourage you to use the .com extension.  You can check to see if a domain is available here.  Please come to the class with your choice of domain decided.  We will purchase the domain in real time in the class…just make your decision on the desired URL in advance of the class.
           

3.  A photo of you (and your team) and several photos that represent your business or your products.
           

4.  If you have a logo…please bring a digital copy.  If not…we can create a placeholder
           

5.  A laptop or tablet…a phone will not work well.  If you need to borrow a laptop, we can accommodate a small number of attendees.
           

6.  A free Gmail account.
           

Nice to Have:

1.  Two ideas for blog posts, supporting photos are a bonus and 200 words for each post is even more of a bonus!
           

2.  Some text for “About Us”
           

3.  A list of product / service features and some supporting text for each
           

4.  A list of FAQs …. Supporting text is a bonus!
           

Due to the hands-on and interactive nature of this workshop, this class is only being offered in person - there will be no virtual option at this time.