Building a great site is good for your business. Below are some common tips and tricks.

Colors

We’ve chosen color themes that we know work well together and for light and dark mode. You can view your currently selected Theme by clicking the Theme button at the top-middle of your website from the Designer (editor) view.

That said, you can still recolor specific sections by selecting a different background color. Text and button colors will update automatically based on the background color selection.

Font pairs

Heading fonts with unique visual styles, and paragraph fonts are optimized for legibility. After selecting a font pair, there are still several simple customization options you can further make.

Heading size

Control the scale of all headings with the slider. Short headings can have more emphasis at a larger size, while longer headings may be more legible when shown smaller.

Heading weight

Thicker weights command attention, while thinner weights convey simplicity or precision. Not all heading fonts support this feature.

Paragraph text editing

Most instances of paragraph text have a rich text editor with bold, italic, link, and bullet options. Some these best practices:

• Break text into another paragraph
• Add links to direct customers to your scheduling tool, external blogs or articles, etc.
• Emphasize links or pricing info by making the text bold
• Condense ideas into a bullet list (keep text left aligned if using bullets)

Make a good impression

• The first few sections, Header, Intro, and Services are the first ones your customer will see, and are your best chance to make a good impression.
• Add links, social icons, to the header, but not too many as it’ll look crowded. These links provide social validation for your business and can also be a way to connect them to other portfolios or posts of your work
• The initial website tries to create a strong foundation for headings and descriptive text but please edit and make it authentic to your voice and brand
• Try to keep the text in the Services section about the same size for each service

Logo/Company name

Solo websites display your company name in the header and footer. You can edit this from Settings which you can click from the top-middle of your page from the Designer (editor) view.

If you have a custom logo, you can upload it for use in the header and footer sections. A PNG file with a transparent background is recommended so that the logo can appear on different background colors. Choose a background color that plays well with your logo color for the best effect.

Photos

• Initially generated sites feature stock photos as a foundation to get you started, but consider uploading your own. Having your own pics can create a more authentic feeling and result in more business.
• Select between a gallery and a carousel layout. Both layouts work depending on the type of business.
• Crop photos where it makes sense
• If you use background images with transparency, consider lighter colors but if using darker colors, select brighter text
• Use the Photo Banner section to break up a website, reposition if it needed
• If you upload a custom image, use higher resolution images

Contact Form

Make sure to add your email address so if your customers submit into your contact form, you get the email of their message

Custom Domain

Websites with a custom domain simply get more traffic. Custom domains display your brand, are more memorable and index better by Google. If you haven’t set this up, instructions to get started here.

SEO

To access SEO settings, click the Settings button at the top-middle of your page in the Designer (editor) view for your website.

Within Settings, you will see that Solo has generated a page title for you. If you edit this title, use words that your customer might use when searching for your website.

In the keywords section, you can further edit or add words or phrases that a customer might use to search for your site. Use words or phrases that your customer might use but don’t add to many, just focus on the most common ones.

Finally, Search Indexing is turned-on by default but if it’s not on, toggle this on to make sure your website is included in the Solo sitemap which Google and other search engines may use to make your site discoverable from search.

Summary

Above are a range of common tips to make a beautiful site for your business. We sometimes feature sites in our upcoming newsletters and/or on our website. If you’d like to be considered for inclusion, please send an email to support@soloist.ai and let us know.