Getting started  - Planning your website

Into video

We've created this intro video to help you get started. In the page below we have gone into more detail.

Getting started checklist

• What type of website will you be making
• What will you be adding. Most sites are text, images, videos, forms
• Get all your assets organised and ready to go
• Design inspiration
  1. Spacing
  2. Image placement
  3. Fonts
  4. Colours
  5. Look at our themes to find something you think will suit you
• Choosing your template
• Choose your domain name
• Additionally you can get an expert to help you build your site on Limecube. Sometimes people feel they lack the design skills or don't have the time to do it for themselves.

Click here to find a designer.

Step 1 - What type of website will you be making

You very likely know exactly what your business idea is, but are you at a stage where you understand what will go into your website?

What will you be adding to the site? Most sites are a mix of text, images, videos and forms.

Getting these things together and ready will make it much easier to start your building your website.

Step 2 - Research

Even the best designers don’t start from scratch - your instinct may be to do something completely different to what everyone else is doing, but you should understand why some things are being used, so you can decide whether it will help you or hurt you to do something different.

So the best place to start is by doing research on websites that are similar to yours, be it direct competitors, or sites offering something similar. You want to see what others have done, so you can:

1. Get design inspiration. Learn from these sites to see what kind of things you should have on your website
   1. Page structure & content
   2. Image placement
   3. Fonts
   4. Colours
   5. Spacing
2. See what kind of things you should avoid (you want to avoid having the same colours, the same images, the same page layout), basically you have to familiarise yourself with the competition.

But bear in mind, unless you have direct insights into how your competitor is really doing, you don’t always know if the ideas you are getting from competitor research are always the best ones.

It’s also good to get design inspiration from non-competitors that have leading edge design examples. This can help give you a more modern design than your competitors. Here are 4 of our favourites:

1. https://www.awwwards.com/
2. https://dribbble.com/shots/popular/web-design
3. https://abduzeedo.com/
4. https://www.behance.net/

Once you have gone through this research phase, look at our themes to find something you think will suit you as a starting point. Choosing the right theme from the start can save you quite a lot of time.

Step 3 - Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of web pages and their hierarchy. It is simply a page title, and nothing else.

While new pages can be added very easily at any time, knowing the main pages you want on your website will give you an idea of:

1. What you need to plan for in terms of content, imagery etc.,
2. What your overall main content structure will look like, and
3. is very useful for getting your home page and main navigation right. Your home page is typically an overall summary of the main parts of your site, and where most people and the search engines start from.

One of the simplest ways to create a sitemap is to use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to lay this structure out.

Step 4 - Content

Once you have your sitemap sorted, it is time to start planning and writing your content. How much or how little content that goes into a page will play a significant part in site design, and finding what images or videos need to go into each page that will match that content.

Learn more about planning your content here.

Step 6 - Organising your assets

Get all of the assets you prepared from the steps above and organised, ready to go into one folder on your computer. If you have a cloud based server for your files even better, store these there under a folder called ‘brand’ or ‘website’. Not only will this setup be useful for when you’re building the website, it will be great for the future reference point for other website design or marketing work. Strong brands are ones that use a consistent look and feel from their website through to all their marketing activities.

Step 7 - Choosing your theme

If you have not already done so, now is the time to choose your Limecube website theme. Try and find a theme that suits the structure or style that you have already defined above.

Once you have signed up with this theme, you are ready to start building your site on Limecube.

Starting over

If you are not happy with the result of your site after starting and want a fresh start, here's what to do:

1. Return to the home page of Limecube and start either from the AI Builder, or from a theme, and go through the signup process again.
2. When you get to the signup page, look for the 'Already have an account? To create a new website Login here.' text, and use the original login details you used to sign up with.
3. This will associate each site to the same account.
4. If you no longer want any of the sites, you can delete the site you don't want by following the instructions found here.