🎨 Design What You Want

The internet is a magical place! You can build any kind of website, app, or design you can imagine... but should you?

Unless you are focused on building your expertise as a web developer, the vast majority of code-based design choices you can make will be a poor use of your time and talents.

Where’s Your Expertise Mastery?

Whatever your niche, the content you create is the core of your offer, but how you present that content is key to creating the experience for your audience. With that in mind, your website needs to be both visually pleasing in a way that highlights your content and conversion-focused in a way that drives results for your business. So, how do you build a website that checks all the boxes, without getting a degree in website development and graphic design?

Option #1: Use a WYSIWYG Editor

Website builders like Squarespace and WordPress's Gutenberg blocks are attractive options for the non-coding website builder because they have so many options. You can drag-and-drop content to put it literally wherever you want it to go! Only. . . is that a good thing?

Full-time website designers spend countless hours learning best practices, current trends, and studying data on how users interact with websites. More often than not a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor leaves users making creative-yet-complicated designs for their website that actually distract and turn away visitors.

Option #2: Commission a Custom Design

There are many incredible designers today with the skill to create a beautiful website that portrays your brand well while also highlighting your content and conversion opportunities.

The only problem is, the cost for a custom design typically starts at $3,000 and can run as high as $20,000 or $100,000 depending on the complexity of the website, branding, and custom requests. Also, custom designs inevitably require some amount of custom upkeep as industry trends or underlying software change, so the fees to maintain a custom design add up over time.

Option #3: Use a Plug-n-Play Theme

The third option for building your website (and the one I almost always recommend) is to purchase a plug-n-play theme. A theme acts like a fill-in-the-blank website design where you can easily customize your brand colors, logo, and tagline—but the vast majority of the design choices have already been made for you before you hit install.

That can be incredibly helpful, as long as the theme you're using has been designed by an experienced designer/developer with your specific needs, and your industry in mind. That's why I partnered with Thomas McGee to create NotablePress, a professional theme built for content creators. Thomas has been a professional designer and web developer for a decade, creating custom websites for Michael Hyatt, Ray Edwards, and many other industry leaders.

He is a high-caliber, experienced designer—the only problem is, he is not cheap! I wanted every creator to have access to the best practice design strategies that custom projects get, without having to pay thousands of dollars to build or maintain each one. That's why we worked together to create NotablePress, so you get the best practices (and ongoing updates) that give you the best of both worlds.