The concept of "design follows content" is very important for creating effective marketing messages.

The idea behind this principle is that the design of a marketing message should be based on and reflect the content of that message. In other words, the design should support the message and help to convey its meaning and purpose.

PROBLEM
If the design is not well-matched to the content of the message, it can be confusing or misleading for the audience. For example, if a serious message is presented in a playful or cartoonish design, it may not be taken seriously by the target audience.

SOLUTION
On the other hand, if the design is aligned with the message, it can help to emphasize key points, create an emotional connection with the audience, and make the message more memorable.

I am sometimes asked, "What makes a good design?" Good design starts with good content. In the simplest of terms, content is defined by words + pics.

WRITTEN CONTENT
Well-written words that easily identify your services the problem your services are attempting to solve with equally matched benefits from your services.

QUALITY PHOTOS/ILLUSTRATIONS
High-quality photos or illustrations that accompany and highlight your content.

As a graphic designer, I design websites in WIX, an online platform. I chose WIX specifically because it offers many design options and integrated tools for my clients.

Web design has similarities to building a house; it's unique to each individual depending on design and function. Just like houses, websites have utilities. WIX is a monthly utility cost for my clients to have and maintain a website.

Marina Lotaif from Yes To Tech offers excellent tutorials for some of the basics of WIX. I'm offering a few to get you started, and it may be fun to subscribe to her YouTube channel to learn more.

Everyone can have a free WIX account. But you must have a paid plan to connect your domain. Marina walks us through how to pick the best plan for you.

Your domain (web address) is also one of the utility costs associated with having a website. You can purchase your domain through WIX or connect a domain you already own. Marina walks us through how to add your domain to your WIX account.

Subscribe to Marina's YouTube channel to learn more about WIX and marketing.

If you have a Weebly website, you're one of the millions who have enjoyed the ease of their simple website builder. Every website I've designed in the past 15 years has been a Weebly website for the ease offered to my clients in updating their websites.

Change is in the Wind
As with all things, change is in the wind. Weebly was acquired by Square in May 2018 and will no longer offer support for websites built with Weebly by July 2025. That's effectively three years from now and should give everyone enough time to prepare for the transition. I have a few Q&As below to help provide some tips on preparing for the change.

The essential goal of landing pages is to convert visitors into customers. Marketers, designers, and copywriters work closely together to achieve leads and conversions. The difference between a website’s homepage and a landing page is the information they gather and its purpose. Where homepages share general information about the business, landing pages seek an intention from the visitor. It can be to offer a new subscription plan, download a freebie, or to sign up for a newsletter.

Whatever it is the purpose of your landing page, make sure it sticks to just one. One of the most common mistakes is to ask visitors to do many things at the same time.

Below we tell you how you offer your visitors the right information they were looking for and convert them to customers.

Purpose
Determine the purpose of your landing page. What do you want users to do at it? Are you offering a new subscription plan? Are you launching a campaign to obtain new users? Or do you just release new functionality and want people to discover? After answering these questions, you’ll get the main purpose of your landing page and you’ll be able to adjust it seamlessly.

Tip: Landing pages can only serve a single purpose. Don’t try to fill your page for two different things. The more you try to sell the fewer chances of getting leads.


Copy
Creative and original copywriting is a must. Write a compelling headline and subheading to attract readers to your product. Keep it simple and use no more than 10 words to achieve a great performance to avoid confusion on your visitors. Apart from a creative headline, there are other relevant aspects related to copy that will determine the success of your landing.

One of them is the Unique Value Proposition. The UVP is what you offer and it’s also what sets you apart from the competitors. And it should be seen throughout the texts of your landing page. Outline the benefits of your service and reduce it to the minimum, just a few powerful words will have more impact on your users. Another aspect you have to bear in mind is SEO and keywords. This will determine the success of your landing page, do research of the most-used keywords related to your business and competitors, and make sure to include them. Finally, regarding text and copy, grammatical errors or typos cannot happen. Would you trust a company that contains spelling mistakes in the first sentence you read from them? It’s a simple and easy thing to do, just spell-check your landing page before it’s too late.

Visual content
The visual content is one of the key aspects when designing landing pages. An eye-catching image or video of your product or service that perfectly matches the copy will help you drive conversions. The images must relate to the copy to have a greater impact, and should go with the brand’s personality.

Check out freepik resources, whether you opt for photographs or illustrations, we get you covered! Browse collections to refine what you are looking for and make your landing page visuals stand out! 

Use of color
The first thing that visitors will see is colors. First impressions matter, so make sure the color palette you choose matches the overall purpose of the landing page and is nicely picked. From the images or illustrations, you’ll use the background color or the CTA button. This aspect has to be carefully picked in order to achieve harmony throughout the site. Make the most of colors and its psychology, depending on your product or service, the emotion you’ll want to evoke, or the brand’s personality.

CTA
A Call-to-action is needed to convert our visitors into leads. Subscribe,  sign up, apply now, free trial, these are some of the most used CTA actions businesses use to convert visitors. They should always appear above the fold and the size, color or form are aspects to have in mind. They should be bold and striking, they are action-oriented so they need to stand out from the rest of the text. The button color should be in line with the whole site but the ones that report better results are orange and green.
Responsive design

Today, more than ever, we interact with phones and tablets more than with the computer itself, so thinking the mobile UX design first is not a crazy idea. Make sure your landing page looks good in all devices, as most users navigate the internet while on their smartphones, so it would be a mistake to not include them in your strategic plan. From filling a form to signing up for a new service, you should make visitors’ life easy, or you will lose all chances of converting them into customers.

Benefits
This is your chance to list all of your features and benefits. Keep your benefits in bullet points in order to make it more visual and appealing.

Tip: Some businesses offer a freebie in exchange for the email information. Think of what your visitors would really want, is it a free guide, a checklist, make this an opportunity to get some information about your users!

Testimonials
Providing testimonials from happy customers can improve the chances of getting newcomers. And it can be reassuring for the ones who are doubting. That testimonial can come in a video format, tweet, or quotes. With “What our users say” section you’ll be more likely to trust. Potential customers are always checking reviews, so don’t hesitate to include it in your own landing page. They won’t have to leave the site to check it.

Keep it simple
Most of the time, less is more. And for landing pages, it surely applies. Remove the navigation menu and any other unnecessary distraction from the site. You’ll get more chances to drive conversions.

On a landing page, we should keep everything we can above the fold. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the web content we see when a site loads, if we need to scroll, that would be below the fold. For that reason, the information should be clear and direct.

A/B Testing
This is the final step for your landing page. After doing the hard work you may find your landing page not working how you expect it to. Why? Well, customers may not find it attractive or trustworthy enough to complete the journey. A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of the same landing page, change the headline or subheadline, or the color of the CTA, and get the results of which performed better.

Resources
We hope these steps works for you and your landing page,  and if you’re in the need of some beautiful assets for your landing page, here’s a bunch of them:

• Free landing pages templates for your online shopping business
• Collection of high-quality colorful illustrations for your page
• Landing pages templates with nature vibes
• Responsive landing pages templates
• Landing page ideas for any business

Victoria Martinez
Vicky is a Spanish translator and content creator for Freepik Company. Her love for languages and adventures took her to a French island in the middle of the Pacific to teach Spanish. Now back in Spain, she has dived into a new world of possibilities thanks to Graphic Design. In her free time, though, this language geek loves planning scuba diving trips that will happen eventually.

Whether it’s sharing your words and ideas or selling your products, one thing is pretty apparent. If you want to effectively reach your audience, online is where you need to be. Moreover, what better way to establish your presence online than to building an outstanding Weebly business site or Weebly online store or blog?

Now, we know what you’re thinking. You don’t have programming, coding, or any website-building knowledge. How are you going to come up with a website, let alone a brilliant one? Well, that’s where this Weebly tutorial comes in.

Inspiration arrives in mere split-second glances, a flash—from a collection of carefully crafted words by another; a magazine at the dentist office, the book a friend loaned and said, "You should read this." Something rings solidly true—something to hold onto.

I'm inspired when I read quotes by Brené Brown. She's doing the hard work in sharing the big thoughts in her books and trainings. I'm inspired enough to want to share, make her quotes beautiful put them out into the world for others. Thank you Brené Brown for your bravery and good work.

BY JAMIE
MAKE A WEBSITE HUB

“The 2020 Social Media Image Sizes Guide” below explains to you what the best image sizes are for each social network and the image types to use. Every major social media platform is listed on here so you’re up-to-date with social media platform optimization.

This year I’ve added in two new platforms to the list. With the growing popularity of  Chinese social media networks, it’s only right that I include WeChat and Weibo.

I’ve also added in Ello social media image sizes as well, as I know a few of you guys are starting to use that platform more and more.

Also this graphic displays specific dimensions and we have also added some very quick tips and insights to help you make your mind up on what photo to use on what social media platform.

I hope you find this graphic as useful as the last few I did in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019

DOWNLOAD THE NEW 2020 PRINT READY PDF

COLLECTED LOVE POEMS
by Tyler Henshaw

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might feel like a confusing game with too many rules to rank highly for any search terms you consider important to your business. And there are tons of websites all claiming they contain the best secrets to guarantee increased traffic and search rankings. But as with most things in life, SEO is best tackled one step at a time.

The first step? Putting Weebly's many simple and powerful SEO features to use.

Page Titles & Descriptions
Page titles and descriptions appear directly in search results when someone finds your site on a search engine, giving you a great opportunity to influence searchers to visit your site. These also provide you with the ability to use search phrases you'd like to rank for. For example, let’s say you own a business in Oakland called Rockridge Bakery that has been around since 1972.

Page title: About Rockridge Bakery: Serving Oakland since 1972

Page description: Rockridge Bakery is a family-owned bakery and cafe that has been part of the North Oakland community since 1972.

The option to add Titles and Descriptions can be found in the same place as the permalinks discussed next.

Page Permalinks
Every page on your site has a name that you provide (separate from the title noted above), and this name is used by default to both generate your navigation and to create links for each individual page. You'll generally want to keep these names short and to the point for navigation purposes: Contact, About, Store, etc. And when you do this it also means that you end up with very short links: mysite.com/about, mysite.com/contact, etc.

The thing about using these short names for your links is that you're missing a valuable opportunity to use those links to highlight how you'd want them to be found via a search, since search engines take those names into consideration when ranking your site.

So for your About page, you could be more descriptive for your permalink (about-the-rockridge-bakery-team).

To change your permalinks go to Pages and click the page you'd like to change. Then choose the SEO Settings options for that page and enter a Page Permalink in the provided box. You'll need to Publish your site for the change to take effect.

And don't go overboard. Still try to keep your permalinks to five or six words.

The Header & Footer Code
The header and footer code are for HTML or JavaScript code. A very important SEO step you can take that involves the Header Code is submitting and verifying your site with Google Search Console. See Weebly's detailed guide on how to do just that.

301 Redirects
If you're moving a site from another host to Weebly, ideally you don't want to lose all the search engine history and optimization you gained from your time with that site. And, thankfully, there's a way to redirect both traffic and search engines from your old pages to your new ones within Weebly using the 301 Redirects feature.

This option is found under Settings > SEO in the editor, at the very bottom of that page. All you need do here is enter the page permalink from the old site and select which new page that should point to in the new one. Then Save.

That's it. Once you Publish your site, all those old pages will redirect to the new ones so that you continue to get value from them. But note that this is only works if you're using the same domain with Weebly as you were using at your previous host. Weebly's article and video explain this in detail.

Once you get these basic Search Engine Optimizations in place, you'll be well on your way to seeing your site ranking much higher in search results. Next up, read a more advanced SEO guide like Are the Right People Searching for You? or How to Create a Perfectly Optimized Page.