How to Start Your Business: Part Five (Design and the Website)

My brother’s the master here, but I can at least let you in on my experience when it comes to the website and design.

First things first, we got very lucky in the fact that both Corey and I have a very similar design aesthetic: clean, simple, and white (which you may have been able to sense when we talked about logos). Had we not had the same overall sense of design style, this process could’ve been far more complicated (and frustrating) than it ended up being.

After reviewing a number of beautiful WordPress themes out there, we both decided that the Kipoo theme design suited most of our needs. Corey took what he liked and didn’t like from the initial idea of the theme in order to create a beautiful, clean site.

My brother didn’t show me anything until everything was done. And boy, was I pleasantly surprised! I thought he did an excellent job and there were plenty of cool surprises that I hadn’t expected.

There are always things that will need to be edited after the initial site is shown. For those of you not in the web space, make sure you prepare for this. Edits are easy and will need to be made; it’s just a fact of life.

Corey was great during this time; he made all the changes I requested as tried to whip out the content as quickly as I could.

After about a week of being live to only us, the site was finally ready to have a “soft launch”. In other words, we released it to our friends and family to see if there was anything else we needed to tweak or change that we’d completely missed. It’s a nice way to get out of your own way (especially when you’re developing in-house) to see how a potential audience would feel coming to your site for the first time.

Step 6 (the design and site), check.

Next? It’s time to talk about the business card and networking.