Good evening everybody and welcome to Lesson 7 of the Start Building Your Website Here Tutorial Series. This is the part of the series related to creating a professional website using the Genesis theme. In Lesson 7, we’re going to talk about how you organize a professional services site and we’ll get the first part of it set up.
Creating a Site for Service Professionals
The very first thing we need to understand is the kind of site that we are creating. We’re creating a website with the Genesis theme that is suitable for service professionals that looks good on mobile devices. We’re talking about people like Architects, Engineers, Design Professionals, Coaches, Consultants, maybe Real Estate Agents, Contractors, Sub Contractors.
Anybody who wants to put a description of their services, examples of their previous work and wants to establish certain amount of authority or credibility for people who are coming to the site.
Site that is Responsive to Mobile Devices
There are lots of other kinds of potential websites that you could build with the Genesis theme. One of the things to talk about is who it’s for but also a critical part of this part of the series is that the website needs to be responsive to mobile devices as well.
What responsive means is that it adjusts for the screen size and it has controls that can be operated on a mobile device. If we come back over here and take a look at our site, this site looks the same way in a normal browser window but as soon as you get down to an iPad size you can see the header switches, the menu drops down and the slider re-sizes. You have this constantly changing system for differently sized devices.
Responsinator.com – View Sites In Various Devices
If we take a look at this site in responsinator.com, you’ll see what it looks like in an iPhone sitting upright in the portrait position, what it looks like in the iPhone in a landscape position and what it looks like on the Android Portrait Device.
The same thing is true with the landscape, on the bigger Androids, on an iPad in the portrait view and in a horizontal view, and in Kendall and various versions of that kind of mobile phones.There’s a whole bunch of different devices that this displays simulates.
You can see what the site is going to look like and that’s the critical part of what we’re doing here tonight and for the next several weeks, it’s creating a website that responds to these devices so it’s easily used in all of those different devices. The link to the demonstration site that we’re building can be found on the lesson site itself.
Site Intended for a Specific Business Purpose
Here in Lesson 7 is the link to our demonstration site so you can just click on that and take off and see what is it we’re building. This website has a specific business purpose. It’s not intended to sell things and it’s not intended to store lots of information. It’s not a membership site, it has a specific business purpose and that’s to help prospective customers find you when they happen to be searching for your services online.
The consequence of that is it needs to present your services, it needs to establish your credibility and it needs to reflect your uniqueness by having a unique style. That is entirely different than if you’re trying to sell products on the site, if you got an ecommerce site, if you’ve got a blog or if you’re developing a membership site.
The architecture for those sites are entirely different than the architecture for a professional services site. When we talk about the site organization, you need to keep that in mind. If you want to develop a blog using Genesis and Agency, the architecture is going to be completely different.
Creating the Site in Two Phases
In terms of understanding the architecture of this site, it’s important to say that this is primarily a static site. What we’re doing is creating the site in two phases.
Static Site Phase
The first phase is the static site phase which means that the site is comprised of entirely static pages and it doesn’t have any blog component. Once we understand and master that concept and develop those pages, then we can move on to the next phase.
Blog Phase
If you are interested in adding some type of content management system functionality like a blog to that site, then we’re going to talk about that in phase two but the primary architecture that we’re going to talk about is a static architecture.
Tools We’ll be Using
We’re going to do this with a predetermined set of tools, that is we’re using WordPress, the Genesis Theme, the Agency Child Theme and we’re going to use a couple of plugins that I’ve designed.
We’re going to use the NextGEN Gallery plugin, the Genesis Responsive Slider Plugin, the Contact Form 7 Plugin and a bunch of Google products. Those are the tools that we’re going to be learning to use in the next several weeks.
Tools that Work Well Together
The reason why we’re using those tools is because first, I have tested them and I know they all work well together which is no mean feat because the world of WordPress is so large and because the possibility of things not being compatible is so great.
It can be easy to stumble upon a combination of tools that might work fine by themselves but don’t work well together. These tools I’ve had a chance to test and I’m confident that they work well together.
Tools that Don’t Require Coding Knowledge
Secondly, they can be used without learning any CSS or PHP. I love CSS and PHP and I enjoy teaching it but most small business owners, when they decide they’re going to build or configure their own website, they are not imagining that they want to become a CSS or PHP coder.
It is a skill set that takes some time to develop and I want you to be able to create an effective web presence without actually having to learn code. That’s the other reason for using those tools.