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If you’re a gold level student, Melissa will help you each step of the way, providing feedback on design, copy, and overall website planning, in addition to general questions. This is the next best thing to having a professional do it for you!
If you’re a silver level student, you can ask general questions — and, in addition to general questions, you can get Melissa’s help and feedback on two assignments or her help problem-solving any two issues.
And if you are a bronze level student, you will have access to all of the information that you need to build a website, plus, by following along with your classmates, you will be able to problem solve and develop your creativity to get you where you need to go for an extremely attractive price!
For more details, refund policies, and answers to commonly asked questions see our FAQ page.
Course Details
NOTE: There are additional costs associated with this class. Please read the full description for details.
A website is often the first impression your future customers will have of you and what you do! This class will help you build a first-in-class website for your dog business — good for trainers, breeders, or any other dog business.
A professional will charge you thousands of dollars to design your website, but with a bit of help from Melissa, you can have the same outcome for just a fraction of the cost.
Whether you’re looking to replace your existing Wordpress site or build a new one from scratch, this class can help! We’ll walk through the entire process of building a website, starting with purchasing the pieces you’ll need. Tutorial videos will show you every step of the process and lectures will help explain what each piece does and how they work together.
Students who follow along will walk away after 6 weeks with a completed site ready to release to the world! We’ll be using Wordpress and the Wordpress Theme Divi, from Elegant Themes, to create a site that’s unique and styled just the way you like it.
Why Wordpress and why Divi? This combo is the best combination I’ve found for an incredibly user-friendly experience with an incredibly professional looking final product. It’s flexible enough that no two sites should come out looking the same while being simple enough that you won’t need to learn code or be extremely technical to design something you love. Want to dig a little deeper? You can learn a little more about Divi here.
How the levels work for this class:
If you’re a gold level student, Melissa will help you each step of the way, providing feedback on design, copy, and overall website planning, in addition to general questions. This is the next best thing to having a professional do it for you!
If you’re a silver level student, you can ask general questions — and, in addition to general questions, you can get Melissa’s help and feedback on two assignments or her help problem-solving any two issues.
And if you are a bronze level student, you will have access to all of the information that you need to build a website, plus, by following along with your classmates, you will be able to problem solve and develop your creativity to get you where you need to go for an extremely attractive price!
To participate in this class you will NEEDto purchase the Divi theme and either purchase hosting through Siteground (the hosting company featured in the class tutorial videos) or ensure your hosting company offers WordPress and work with their support to set that up. You will also need to purchase a domain name.
COSTS (see prerequisite tab for links):
Divi - $89/year or a one time fee of $249
Hosting with Siteground - $12-20/mo after the first year. ($4-6/mo for the first year)
Domain Name - Starting at $15.95/yr
These costs are in addition to the cost of the class.
Either before or during the first week of class you will need to purchase the Divi theme from Elegant themes, hosting (Melissa is recommending Siteground; class videos will be done with Siteground), and your domain name.
It's also recommended that you get together photos you'd like to use on your site — at least 8-10 images, though based on the final design you choose you may wish to have more.
The first 2 links below are Affiliate links. An affiliate link is a link that is traceable, so the company you are purchasing the product from knows that I referred you to them. They then compensate me for having made the referral - but you pay the same price.
Hosting from Siteground (choose shared hosting - Startup if you only have 1 site; Growbig or GoGeek if you will have several)
Domain name via Siteground (Note: You should be able to purchase your domain name during the process of signing up for hosting. Also, you may be able to find these cheaper elsewhere, but then will need to set up your Domain Name Servers appropriately, which may require you to contact support at the company where you purchase your domain)
Remember in my last lecture how I mentioned image size as something you want to consider?
Well, in this lecture we’re going to talk about WHY image size is important, how you can figure out what image size you have, and how you can resize images if they’re too large.
First things first…
How Big Are Your Images?
Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, there is a pretty easy way to look at an image file and figure out what it’s dimensions are.
On a PC if you hover over the image, it shows you the “dimensions” in pixels.
You can also right click on the image, and then choose “Properties” and go to the “Details” tab.
On a Macbook, you can see your image size using your finder window. If you choose to show items in columns, and then click on an image, it displays the dimensions under the preview for that image.
When we’re working with Divi for our website, here is a cheat sheet with the image sizes we’ll need — don’t worry too much about the column size information right now (you’ll understand this more once we start working in Divi). The most important pieces to remember are that background images will likely need to be 1080 wide, usually by about 810 tall. If you aim to have at least a few images that are at least that big that also meet the criteria discussed in the last lecture, you should be okay.
Why Image Size is INCREDIBLY Important Online
Making sure we have the right images at the right size is incredibly important when you’re building a website. It’s tempting to just make all of your images 1080 x 810 and call it done — but if you only need an image half that size, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
When working with images on a website we always want our image to be just big enough and no bigger — that’s because images have a serious impact on the amount of time it takes a webpage to load. And if a website doesn’t load quickly, then users go elsewhere.
However, we do want to ensure our images are big enough; different people will be visiting our website on different screen sizes, and we want our images to appear crisp and attractive no matter what the screen size.
So: take the time to resize your images as you go along, so that you always have the right size image for where you plan to use it.
How to Resize Images
Personally, I use photoshop when I’m working on websites, but since Photoshop is expensive and I have it because I do a lot of other things using it too, I wanted to find something that was free that you guys could use for the purpose of this class.
This site will let you resize any images you’re using for your website totally free. I put together a short video to show you how it works.
Please note - you do not HAVE to use photopea. If you have a preferred program and know how to use it to resize your images, feel free to use any program you’d like!
To begin, go to Photopea.com and click file then open. Locate the file you want to work on, where ever you saved it on your computer.
Once your image opens, go back to file and choose “new” from the menu. Create a new project in the size dimensions that we want to create.
In this case, I am going to create an image 1080 x 810 and 72 dpi.
Then click “Create.”
This will leave us with 2 image tabs at the top of the screen — one will have our original image and one will be our new project, with a blank white square.
Now we want to move our image into our new project — so click on the tab for our original image. Then click on the image and, holding down your mouse button, click and drag the image to the new project tab.
This will drop your original image into your new project, but the image will be too large for the frame. That’s okay — we’re going to resize it. Click the box to turn on “transform controls.”
This will turn on the settings so you can resize your image. Once you check the box, you’ll want to press and hold SHIFT down, and then use your mouse to click and drag the corner bounding box in; this will resize the image proportionally, making it smaller.
Let go of your mouse button and then let go of shift — then you can click with your mouse and drag the image to the center again. Repeat this until the image fits within your project square.
When done, it should look something like this.
Now we need to export the image and save it to our computer. Go to File then Export. If we’re resizing a photo, export it as a jpg. If you’re resizing a logo or something that needs a clear background, export it as a png file.
Name the file something that will be useful for future reference.
HOMEWORK: Choose one of your images and resize it to 1080x810 to practice.
