🌐 How to Build a Good-Looking Website Yourself...

One of the most valuable concept validation techniques is to get a website up that markets your products and services, and then send some traffic there.

Best-case scenario, it leads to a few customers. Worst case, you get market feedback. But if building your site takes a long time, costs a lot of money or doesn’t look great, this experiment quickly becomes too costly.

We’re really trying, Bob…

That’s why I use Webflow.

Webflow makes it easy (for even non-coders) to build visually appealing websites in a visual interface. You pretty much design the website (or start from a library of over 1k+ templates) and Webflow writes the HTML, Javascript, etc. in the background.

After building many sites, including The Open Letter and our latest venture, Stream’s site on Webflow, we think it’s good enough to give you a quickfire guide on using it to get a new website up in a jiffy.

1. Set up your Webflow account

Head on over to Webflow and create a free account — it gives you dashboard access and lets you explore the features before you fully commit. The free plan allows you to build a site with 2 pages, 50 content items and 1’000 visitors per month before having to pay. Enough for you to get a feel for how it works.

2. Browse for a template you love

They have over 1’000 templates, catering to various industries and purposes. Whether you just need something basic to test an MVP and messaging or want to, later on, go full-blown e-commerce (check out WigWag’s plugin to enable E-commerce in SA), you likely don’t need a designer to get a really slick-looking website.

3. Start editing

The best part is how easily you can just change up the template to suit your brand needs — it’s basically an intelligent drag-and-drop editor. And if you get stuck, they have like a thousand video tutorials on how to do virtually everything you can imagine on there.

4. Find a site plan (hosting) & connect your domain

Webflow has hosting plans built into it all, making it super easy for you to connect your domain and publish your work of art to the world!

5. Click publish

It’s basically done and live as soon as you’re happy with it. And then you can just use the Webflow editor to make changes and republish… no developers or designers needed (just yet).

If you want to get started with Webflow, please use our affiliate link which will help us earn revenue.

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