HOW WE BUILT OUR AGENCY WEBSITE

Today's issue is being brought to you by JuGo Graphic Design. Julien Gomez, graphic designer, will create your logos, graphic identity, visuals, and all the marketing and communication material you need to build remarkable branding. Contact him directly: jugographicdesign@gmail.com.

As an entrepreneur, you will be interested in how we built our own agency website in order to either build your own or have it done by professionals. In addition, we want to remind you of the objective of a website, which is to drive conversion, and of the marketing strategy in which your website is only a component of your sales funnels.

Side note: We would be happy to build your online sales funnels and website for you.

OBJECTIVE OF THE WEBSITE?

The first element to take into consideration is to define the objective of the website. Our website is part of a series of sales funnels that drive the potential client through a series of steps, transforming the lead into a prospect, into a client, into a fan, and eventually into a partner.

For that purpose, the site will embed specific features such as a store selling digital products and services, customer accounts, a portfolio, email marketing capabilities, etc. In addition, the site requires integrations with third-party systems that are more specialized than those of the CMS.

Pro tip: Define your sales funnels, and the website objectives, architecture, features, and integrations upfront.

CUSTOM CODE OR CMS?

Building a website with custom code is the best method to create a personalized website. T his being said, every feature or integration with third-party APIs will need custom development. Read "lots of time and money". For a website that will be updated often to publish content, a custom website is generally not the most viable option, even for us, acknowledging we have the coding skills internally.

As a result, we opted for the use of a CMS, a Content Management System, in order to quicken and soften the amount of work to be done. The main advantage is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Most useful tools to build a responsive eCommerce website are already integrated. The main inconvenience is that we have to host the content on a paid platform, with a recurrent monthly fee. There is no perfect solution.

Pro tip: If you don't know or if you are starting out, in 99.9% of the cases you will need a CMS and not a custom code site.

WHICH CMS?

The CMS we chose is Squarespace. I will not get into the details of why we choose it, just to let you know that the most famous CMS apart from Squarespace are Webflow, Wix, Shopify, and WordPress. Note that there are tens, if not hundreds, of CMS on the market, and new ones are created all the time, such as the recent Flazio. Based on our objectives, Squarespace made the most sense.

Pro tip: Certain CMS lack major features. For instance, Wix lacks an LMS, a Learning Management System, so choosing Wix will force you to use a third-party LMS system. Choose carefully.

WHICH FEATURES?

We needed the following features:

Portfolio
Questionnaire: Integration with JotForm to be contacted for projects. We did not want a contact form to avoid spam.
Email marketing: Integration with MailerLite to send email campaigns.
Newsletter: Integration with MailerLite for the subscription form. The newsletter is also our blog.
eCommerce store: Actually, we hid the store and built pages dedicated to specific categories of products such as Guides, the newsletter, the sponsorship, and Notion Templates.
Digital products: To offer lead magnets such as guides and templates.
Digital services: To offer newsletter sponsorship.
Customer accounts: To make customers' life easier.
Third-party integrations: Ideally native, but eventually with a connexion system like Zapier.

We also desired to have the option of building and selling online courses with an LMS.

WHICH FUNNELS?

There are three key funnels we decided to start with. More will be added over time, and we will write in more details about those.

TWITTER LEAD FUNNEL

My Twitter bio links to the website.
My Twitter giveaway on Thursdays links to the website.
My Sunday Twitter thread has a tweet that links to the newsletter on the website.

NEWSLETTER PROSPECT FUNNEL

1. The Newsletter has a link to the related blog article on the website.

2. When applicable, it links to any related products on the website.

3. It includes a link to the website.

4. It links to my T witter account to funnel back eventually.

SEO FUNNEL

1. Each weekly newsletter/blog article builds the website's SEO.

2. All the pages, products, and images have been optimized for SEO. It includes titles, descriptions, alternative texts, slugs, file names, etc.

3. The site itself has been optimized for SEO: structure, settings, etc.

WHICH PRODUCTS AND SERVICES?

We defined specifically the products and services we wanted to offer right now:

Guides: Mainly lead magnets on digital marketing, web development, and entrepreneurship.
Community: A simple link to Gumroad for now. T his will be subject to change in the future, but it works for now.
Newsletter: It is also the blog.
Newsletter sponsorship: To offer advertising opportunities to businesses targeting entrepreneurs.
Freebies: Mainly lead magnets for now, but more complete "OS" are coming.
Agency: Questionnaire to contact us for funnels and website projects.

... as well as the services we anticipated to offer at some point:

Online courses
Online appointments
Group coaching programs

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this article about how we built our agency website should give you an overview and a better understanding of the key criteria you should look for when thinking of building your own website.

Of course, there are many additional elements that come into building a website, from the infrastructure, including a domain name and a web hosting service, to the user experience and user interface design, and more. On top of these technical elements, you should also work on your sales funnels and analytics to ensure your website serves the original purpose.

If you need additional info about building your own funnels, websites & systems, let me know and I'll be happy to assist you. Let's get in touch!