What to think about when creating a website

This week’s Feel Good Sundays newsletter is sponsored by Durable! The easiest AI-powered website builder. Thanks for fueling my writing and keeping the Feel Good Sundays newsletter running!

Hey love!

Recently I’ve been thinking about the projects that I’ve worked on over the years as I’m (finally) building out my own portfolio. By far, one of the most common projects I worked on was designing and building websites. I honestly don’t even know how that became such a big focus in my career but since I had the skills to do so, it just became my most requested service.

I recently worked on a few small website design changes for a client and it got the gears in my brain moving again. So if you have also been working on your own website, here are some tips and tricks I picked up over the years.

1. Site speed matters: Site speed has always been a big part of what Google looks at when they are ranking your site and this has become more and more important over the years. Google Console is a great tool that’ll tell you exactly what you need to fix. I always had Screaming Frog on my computer as well to do a deeper crawl for my websites.
2. Consider your technical SEO: Most people have a basic understanding of their on-page SEO (labeling your heading hierarchy, filling in meta-descriptions and alt-texts, etc.) and know the importance of off-page SEO (backlinks anyone?) But keeping in mind your technical SEO is a must as well. Create your XML sitemaps, optimize your robots.txt, and ensure that your URL structure is organized!
3. Function matters too: We all love a beautiful site design but make sure your website is user-friendly as well! Keep in mind that your website should have an objective. Is it to convert users? Provide information? Sell goods? Design your website to prioritize those goals and always simplify when you can!

Two more things

The easiest AI-powered website builder. If you just need a site done quick, Durable might be the website builder for you. It’s definitely one of the easiest builders I’ve used. Just answer their questionnaire about what you need a site for and within 30 seconds, their AI has an entire site built out for you. It’s also a great option if you don’t want to worry about purchasing a custom domain widgets, and stock images separately because their $12/month plan includes all of that and more.

They were super kind to offer a 30% off discount for my newsletter fam so if you want to build a site on any of their paid plans, you’ll get 30% off your first 3 months with code ANGEL30.

An app that’ll turn any document into an audio book. I learned about Speechify a while back on Ali Abdaal’s podcast but only recently started using it more. I realized I had a bunch of e-books that I purchased a while back that I never read so I uploaded them all to Speechify and voila! They’re all audio books now. Love being able to do this because it means I can tandem read OR just listen to the book while I’m driving my long commutes. You also have some really fun reading voice choices like Gwenyth Paltrow or Snoop Dogg.