How to Build a Conversion Focused Coaching Website - Step by Step

hey there in this tutorial I'm gonna show you exactly step by step how I build a coaching website how I would do it for myself how I would do it for friends or if I would be taking on clients how I would do this for clients and because I'm gonna show you every single step on the way this is something that you will be able to do for yourself or for your clients so let's get started first of all let's have a look at the assets that we need in order to actually make a good looking website so the first thing is we will need a logo for the website and for that I suggest to do something really really simple which is a text logo and we can use combo for that so go into custom dimensions and make 250 on 40 pixel width and create a new design then at the same time let's go to font store google calm and here type in the name of your business so in this case I'm making a website for Esther Phillips this is an invented name but I'm gonna show you exactly how I will do this if she was a real coach and from here I know that I want a script type of writing and then I can see what is nice here and I like this koushin script so that's the one that I will use for the logo now in order to do that to actually make the logo we're going to come ba and then put the text on the page so let's just add a heading make that a whole bunch smaller and type in our name and so we want this to fit and put in our script so the advantage of combi is that they have the Google scripts already in there so you can simply use it and then what I want you to do is have one dark color and one light logo so you will want to have one white logo for example and then one darker logo now depending on the color of your site this can be really like dark grey or even black your logo just to keep it simple or if the logo that or if your website has like a dark color like a dark blue or something then you can use that as the color for your logo so in this case I already know that the website that I want to use has this this hex code to a three one six six which is like this dark purple that's the color that I will use for everything on my website so I can also use this for my logo so in this case I would make the logo bigger because I really want it to to fit this this is pretty good so I want to save this as my logo what I need to do here is in publish I want to download it and what's very important is I want to download it as a transparent background this is a premium feature of conv so it means that you would have to get the premium version but they have a 14-day free trial so you can sign up for the premium save your logo and then if you don't use it anymore you can cancel it again so from here that's very important let's download this with a transparent backgrounds all right now the next thing I want to do is have a white version of this so simply put it in white and then do the same make sure that I downloaded with a transparent back and now I have my dark version and my light version of the logo this will allow me to have my logo standing out if I have a dark header for example or if I want a light Heather I can use the dark logo so it's just really easy to have both versions at the same time now the next thing I want to do is I want to go back into home and I want to pick a new custom dimension and here we have to do 40 pixel by 40 pixel this is this square image and this will be for our foe become so the favicon is this little image that you see next to the tab and we want to make sure that we have that on our website too because it looks nice and professional alright let's add the text make this a different color now let's make this bit smaller so in our case we just want to take the initials of the website so ap and make it in the same font as our logo that was caution scripts alright and now again we want to make sure that it covers as much of our square as possible [Music] and then we can put it in our color our brand color okay and I already selected a color that I want for to stand out so for the elements of my website that I want to stand out and I'm actually gonna use that color for the second letter because it just looks good so in this case I picked a dark pink to go with the dark violet and this is gonna be my father come so let's publish this and again download with a transparent background and in this case let's actually take it aside half the size so do it 20 times 20 pixels all right so now we have our logo both light and dark we have a favicon we need some pictures now for the website that we that we want to build and we will need two background images which are like yeah just more of showing what your surface is actually doing and then we will need also an about the authoritive picture now what you can do if you don't of course I I would suggest having pictures that you took yourself and that are really related to your business but if you don't have that you can go to a website like unsplash and from there you can download background images so in our case this is for public speaking coach so let's see what's in there public speaking and I would want to have something with an audience so it shows like a public speaking you're in front of an audience so maybe something related like this conference seem to be a good word for that so something like that it's pretty good this one is pretty nice also this one is actually really nice so because it shows really well like okay this is big crowd so I would download this one and I also like this one because it shows like the person in front of the screen that's really good so we only need for the website up we're making me only need two of these and then we will need an about the about the author image so in this case it would be an image of Esther our coach so yeah those are the assets that we need before we can start building our website so our logo some colors in this case so I had a dark violet a dark pink I would suggest to keep something like really simple a nice tone down color that goes well with your services so blue tones are always good or some dark orange or something depending on of course what you're doing but you only need one color with the milder because then it will actually take that color and it will nicely make it in lighter colors and like shades and so on so one color is sufficient and then you might want to pick one color that's like your accent color so for everything that's more like call to action buttons and so on you may want to have that one color too let's get started I have here a fresh WordPress install and what we want to do is we're gonna set up some basic WordPress settings we're gonna install some basic plugins and then from there we're gonna start making our actual website so yeah first of all let's go into our settings and then in reading here you can see that it says the scores search engines from Earth and the index in this site you definitely do not want that you can do this once your website is finished or you can immediately change it now and then we also want to go into permalinks so from here the best structure is just to take the post name so rather than having something with like the date or even worse like this number you will actually have the name of your post as your URL structure and that is good for SEO purposes because you can actually have the title of your blog post in the URL or of your page in the URL but it's also just good like it looks good for people and it's easier to share those type of links now if you know what you're doing SEO wise you can decide to have category before the post name but that is only if you're really sure about what the structure of your website will be so for now I would suggest for most people just using post name be the best option here then what we want to do so let's save these changes now let's have a look at the essential plugins that you will want to install on every new website so let's go into plugins and new and the first one let's install anti-spam B this is an anti-spam plug-in and it works really well to avoid getting tons of them common spams then the next one that we want to install is either Yoast SEO or SEO press so that's an SEO plugin and it will allow to add things like titles on your on your pages and so on really easily and then what we want to do is install drive product manager so one year in your members account any member dashboard you can download the drive product manager and then you can upload it so on your website go to add new and then upload the plug-in from here to the file and then you can choose to upload this thrive product manager and activate the plugin so from here you'll see now that you have this product manager in your sidebar that's the thrive product manager so you'll have to log into your account to connect your website and then you can simply install the products that you need now for now I want to show you what happens if you install only the theme builders so if you install shapeshift which is the theme and then drive team builder comes with it so let's install this one and select product and then in further in the tutorial I'll show you what happens when you add other drive products and what they actually add to your website all right let's go to the team builder dashboard as you can see here we have the setup wizard that will guide us through the whole setup so let's get started first of all our logo so that's the one we just created you can just pick the dark logo for the moment and now we can set up our header so we have a lot of different designs for the header and you can see them all when you open this menu so you can choose the one that you like and as you can see there are dark headers light headers headers with a gradient effect and so on so now the one thing that you want to do is you want to imagine what are the things that you want in your website header and I suggest that you keep it really simple so that's why this nice one with just the logo and then a menu and a call to action I like this square type of button immediately we have our logo that's log that's made there and then our navigation so this will have to adapt and then we have a call to action button now let's take this one next step is a footer because this is a pretty simple website I don't need so many links in the footer so I would go for a fairly simple footer something with just the copyright probably and leave it at that and now for our homepage shapeshift comes with pre-designed home pages so that's really nice you don't have to make them yourself and you can decide to use that or you could just show your blog as a home page now we never suggest that you use your blog as a home page because you want to make sure that on your home page you convey what the website is about so go to the choose for ready-made home pages and here you can see that we have different home pages and this is actually the one that I want to use because this is for a service business it's made for a service business but when you click here you can see that we have other types of home pages so you can have a look if some of these fits your purpose better like the personal branding could also be one for a coaching website that could be really nice if you want to make sure that it's your personality that shines rather than your services but for this one I'll go with the service business focus one now don't worry about colors at the moment and text and so on because everything we will be able to change it afterwards after we don't with the wizard now this is for our single blog post so this is how our blog post will look like again you can see the standard one here but you can have a look and see that there are a lot of different layouts that you can use some will have the featured image with a text overlay some will have like a featured image on a full top section so you can choose whatever you think fits best if your website if you know that you have liked a lot of images for your blog post and probably one of the full-width featured images is a good idea whereas if maybe your featured image you know that you will have to use stock photos or something else then maybe just this title banner with the image underneath it is a better idea so let's go for this one again we will be able to change all of the details on this later on now our blog lists so what do we want people to see when they arrive on the blog page so you can see that we have this grid layout maybe a list layout a masonry layout so masonry layout think about like the Pinterest type of layout now I like this featured layout because it shows like the featured article is like the first article that you wrote like really stands out and then the rest of the articles are in it's grid layout now of course we don't have any articles on this new website yet so it doesn't look good but in general I think this is a pretty cool layout and this is for the single page which is just like a simple page layout which I like that's the one I'll go with again if you want others you can either use these arrows to show different ones or you can go in here and pick a different one and then we could choose a menu but in this case we haven't set up our menu yet and I'm actually going to use the custom menu from thrive team builder which is way more versed on my easier to use than the WordPress menu so I'm not actually going to use this so continue and that's it we can now actually go visit the website I want to show you what it looks like right now so we really have our header here we then have our home page that's already set up and now we can start yet changing this and actually linking up our menu and our buttons and so on but this already looks like a pretty decent website so let's go in and first of all go through branding value might notice our home page at the moment has all these blue colors and remember how I told you that I actually wanted to use this dark purple so that's what I'm gonna change so in theme colors and you have different options here but you can also just go in and put in your own color so in my case and apply this and then our logo remember how we had a dark version and a light version so I'm actually gonna load the light version in here too all right and then here is also where we can upload our fabric um that we created so that changes and then we have our favicon also in typography you could change the typography here you can go in and then you can change like the typography for all the headings or for the text or so on now if you're not font nerd or if you don't have a really good aesthetics for phones then I suggest that you just leave it with the fonts that our designers picked they are very readable and everything is done so that you will have a good looking website right off the bat so you don't have to change this if you want to you can change like all headings and so on and you can also here see what it will look like on tablets and on mobile so as you can see these are already adapted you don't have to do anything there so for the moment I suggest we just do not touch this and then we have our template so that's where it becomes really really fun because then we can start changing everything now I do want to show you I realize that I actually didn't show you what happened with our theme colors right but have a look at our home page now that's reloaded and now as you can see everything that was blue changed to our dark purple and it just immediately looks exactly the way we want it like it has our color on there so that's pretty cool but just one click the whole website has changed because if now we go to our blog homepage for example you can see that here also it has the purple overlay here our testimonials now have the purple our opt-in form has the purple so everything got changed with these smart colors so that's pretty nice now the next thing that we have to set up before we actually go into tweaking our templates and going into our homepage and changing all of that is I want to go to thrive dashboard and from here let's scroll down and we want to go to our API connections because we want to make sure that we set up a lead generation email marketing connection we integrate with a ton of services so if you already have an account then just go ahead it's probably there you can just connect with it but if you don't have an account yet a completely free option is converted they recently changes it planned for free another one is MailChimp and then the one that we use and suggest if you have if you know that you will get a lot of leads and you're ready to invest from the get-go then I would say active campaign now let me quickly show you how you would connect this with convertkit but we have tutorials on all of these connections so here you would go into your account and then in account settings you can see your API key and that's the only thing you need so you just want to add a new connection select convertkit and then type in your API key and that's it your email provider is now connected and so when somebody signs up if it's connected to this then they will automatically go into your convertkit account so that's how easy this was and now let's go back to our dashboard and from here the other thing that we want to do is go to smart sites and global fields so in the global fields you can see that we have the company name the address the phone number and so on and these elements if you picked a footer where maybe the phone number or the address of the company was already pre-selected or already pre entered then here is where you want to put the company information same with the legal and same with the social icons so the the social icons that are in shaped are connected with these global fields so you want to make sure that you fill this out with your own information so that the website is connected so fill out all the global fields that you need then let's go back to our dashboard and go into our analytics and scripts so this is where you'll put in things like your Google tracking code for example so your Google Analytics this is where you put this if you have a general Facebook script this is where you put it so any analytics that you have you can put in here so for the Google Analytics for example they tell you to put it before the head so we can just add the new script and then say that we want this before head and as you can see it gets recognized as a Google Analytics script so now with this added it is installed on our complete website and we don't have to do anything about that anymore all right those were the three very important settings to get right now we can actually start having some fun and playing around with our templates so let's go to the similar to our template now at this point if you want to you can change the name of the seam to actually give it like your own name because you're customizing it in that case you can here change the name so you could rename it I'll call this the ellipse seam for example so that you know that this is the website that you're working on and then we can go into our home page let's do that for it's the most important page on the website so let's do that first so one thing that I want to do is for this header I wanted to take a content size of the layout so that it only goes the size of the layout and let's start with our navigation menu right so this is the same header everywhere on the website if we make changes to this header on the homepage it will automatically happen on all the pages so let's click on our header and then go to edit header from here this is a custom menu so always think about the breadcrumbs it's really easy to select stuff with the breadcrumbs so go to your custom menu and then you can see here the menu items or you can just change them here like click on them and change them so the first thing could be probably our blog next we want our services we don't have some menus so now we have our menu set up now I didn't link it yet because we haven't created the pages yet that's something that we could have done before starting working on this homepage or something that we can do right now so for the blog it automatically created already so you'll see if you go into your pages we already have a blog page set up so that is the page where our posts will be shown so when you do this this gives us the links to this page so in our home page we can either here search for blog and it will make this show up or we could paste the URL in there then we want to create a page for our services so just a new all the services and we can either publish this directly or we can save it as a draft it doesn't really matter so if we publish it then we will actually have the right URL here so that would be easier now if you don't want to publish pages without content then you can save it as a draft and then copy this URL and then just make sure that you don't change it or that you change it over when needed but I'm just actually gonna publish this and then we can put this in our services right here now let's do the same with an about page copy the link and add it in here our contact page and finally our this is our lead generation page that we want to build so let's also create a new page with that one so now we have our menu set up and it's linked to the correct pages if we want to change for example the color of this button we can do that too simply click on it and as you can see this is actually a menu item that is unlinked from the other menu items so we can change it and for example here we have our borders and corners so we could change that maybe say like oh I actually want this to be like the same color as this one and if you want to change the hover color that's in state go to hover and then you can change the hover color there now I actually really like this so I'm not going to change it but of course you can't do that if you want to so this is dumb this was our heading now what we want to do is we want to change this homepage and we want to make sure that it fit our needs now remember how we downloaded to background images right so that was the one that we will put here on top and then there's work another one that we want here on the page so what's important to understand when you upload images to your website is that you want to make sure that you upload them in the right size for your website so in this case this is a background image so it is a pretty big image but we still want to make sure that we don't upload just like a 3 megabyte big image and for that I suggest that you go to a website called crack the i/o and from here you can upload any of the images and you can this this will compress them so it will make them a whole lot smaller which will help with the loading speed of your website but you also want to make sure that you upload them on the right size so let's see the images that we downloaded right before so I can see when I go into the details of this image that this is actually 4000 pixels wide so that's way too wide for what we need on our website for a background image you can just use a thousand nine hundred white pixel that's that's more than enough so that's actually half the size of this image so we want to make sure that we don't upload this super big image but that we actually already make it smaller now it's actually really easy you can just do this with paint on your computer if you have a PC if you have a Mac I'm sure there's a very similar version of this so just right-click go on edit and then here you can go to resize choose pixels and then on horizontal that's two thousand nine hundred okay let's now save this we can call it and then let's do the same with this other image now that we have these images on the right size we still want to make sure to optimize those images so we're in kraken dot io and we can just drag the images here and as you can see this went from 700 to 500 and this one went from 600 to 400 so both of them were had savings of over 20% and online this can make a huge difference in loading times so let's save this image and this one and now let's go back to our homepage so from here the first background section we want to click on it and then go into our background style and as you can see here this is one of the things that I really love with Drive architect is that we have these two layers on the background image and this means that you don't have to use Photoshop you don't have to do anything special to the image as you saw I just went to do a stock photo website and I downloaded a photo I didn't open Photoshop or any sophisticated tools then I can go here and choose the image that I just Krakens and insert this one and then I can still position it if I want to but as you can see even though this was a very dark image because of the linear gradient because of this second layer that's already on the image it still really looks good so the only thing now that I have to do is change my headline next up we have these three different options for services so here I would say for example for a coach it would be like one-on-one sessions and then group sessions and then online sessions for example so that's a really good way to show of your services and these are simply icons so when you click on them and the main options you can see the icons and then you can select from one of the many many icons that are available in thrive architect you can find an icon that fits your service again here we have another background image so in our background style let's upload our second background image here and this again this works because of the overlay that we have here and then we have testimonials so this is where you can very easily use things that people said about you and then here we have a post list now this at the moment we don't have blog post set up yet so this is empty but the way you can use this on a home page is you can select the post list and I'm actually going to show you how to set this up so let's go into posts and new and say that we helped John John Doe during his TEDx talk right and just publish this blog post now of course we want to make sure that we have a featured image and so on but now what I want to show you is if we have four of these posts so I created four blog posts and these are blog posts that we want to use as case studies so for that we want to make sure that we put them in the category case study and then from here in categories add a new one call it case study and update now we can do that for all the posts that we want to show in the case studies on our homepage in our case study list what we want to do is go in filter posts and then here add a new rule and we want to show categories and then we want to show only the case study category and that's they'd publish this ending okay for that works so now we know that on our home page the only post that will show are the posts that we add to the category case study so if we have a new case study we can add it to that category and automatically this will get updated on the home page and then here we have a contact form so simply click on it and you can email and after submit setup so that is how you would have your email set up here so in this case you would just send it to contact ad as their Philips comm or whatever your website is and that's how simple you have a contact form set up all right one more thing here is our button what we would do is we link it to our public master public speaking master class so from here and our find out our target URL so we can link this button to our page and now when somebody clicks on it they will also go to our lead generation landing page that we will set up in a second so so far we already have our header set up we have our home page set up of course you would have to do some more writing and some more content on there but that is super easy just click on it and change the text you can follow the template here because it's really made for a surface so that you can make sure that everything is optimized one thing that you can do is you can link these content boxes so when you click on it you can add a link to the content box and then in this case I would link this to the service page so if this is your one on one then you can click on this complete content box and then link it and add a link to this now the reason I will link this whole continent box is of course you can just link only this arrow but it will be much easier for people to click on it when you link the whole content box so that's one thing that I would definitely do on this home page here and our about us to learn more would be attached to your about Us page so our about page let's take that link and here and our about now if you want to change anything like the text on this button anything you can simply do that but yeah this is already our home page now let's see how we would set up the other pages on this website shall we now let's go to our about page so as you can see here we have our background section we have our title on our background section then we have this bottom section with a call-to-action button now these are elements that our theme builder related so when you see edit with thrive architect or edit with the actual templates when you want to edit anything in here so in the top section or in the bottom section you would need to use the same builder if you want to put content on the page then you use thrive architect now as you know I didn't activate drive architect yet that's because team builder comes with driver kit light so you will be able to edit your content visually already on the pages even if you don't have the full architect installed but you won't have access to certain elements such as landing page templates and a whole bunch of templates so that's why having architect and team builder together is really a winning combination now let's have a look at how I would set up our about page so because I'm in thrive architect it means that I can only add elements here in the post content of this page this is the title I can't change it from here this is the bottom section I can't actually change it from here I would have to be in the template because this bottom section is the same for all the pages now if I'm on a specific page and I don't want to have this bottom section I can go into our visibility settings and I could say to for example not show this bottom section so I can just say to hide this and then it's just not showing so I don't have to change the template if I actually want this on most of my pages but not on this one I can just hide it on a page level so that's always an option right you can always say like oh this top section like with the title whatever I don't actually want it I'm just gonna hide it and yeah so that's something that you can always do now I could start building this page and just very simply be like okay I won't text on this page and I wanna have an image and I'm gonna drag that next to this and whatever but I want to show you something that's even easier to make sure that you have a really nicely designed website and that is using the page blocks that we have available in theme builder so for that we're actually gonna overwrite this page template and we're gonna use the page blocks let's go into our landing pages and change this page a landing page here you have you can see that we have all these landing pages available if you have Drive architect available now because you don't have drive architect installed yet you only have access to the shape shift team and then from here we can pick the blank page that's available now the very first thing that I want to do because this is the about page is I actually want to show the header and I want to show the footer and I want this to be the exact header that's on the page right so we'll pick the default header and we'll also pick the default footer so now we have our header and our footer as we're used to I'm just gonna make sure that this inherits the size of the content so the footer and same on the header so now we have the exact same layout as we used to and we can start adding page blocks so this is where it has become super powerful because our designers did all the heart lifting for you let's see what I mean as you can see all of these blocks are available for you to use on your site and you can build your pages with this so for example this is one that I like for an about page because it has like this image and then a title and we can very easily replace this image with our other image and this is now if you want to know exactly how to build a good about page we have a full course on that so I'm not gonna go into the details in this video because the video is already getting really long but you can simply do that you can go watch that video and then you'll learn more about it one of the things so with the page blocks it's very easy you can simply add more page blocks to it so for example maybe the next thing that we want is some testimonials about people that worked with Esther and then from here we can have some text so let's go into our text we have a normal text block and maybe we use one of these benefits of working with me and you can see that we can very easily build a site that matches our home page and we can also from here use our colors that are on our site already so we could use one of our accent colors and this is a very easy way to have everything match the colors on your site because as you can see this automatically changed to use your theme colors so this fits your theme colors already and all of these blocks are also made to be mobile optimized so you know that if you're using one of the blocks that you don't have to worry about how this looks on mobile it will always look good so let's save this and now let's see where we are on our websites right from here we have already a professional-looking homepage we have our case studies we still have to fill out those blog posts but we have our case studies on our home page and then when we click on this it would go to our landing page that we still have to make our blog page is now yet has has our case study blog post that we created and our about page is now also already starting to look like something that looks like a real about page so now let's go into our templates and tweak this a little bit right because these may be you don't want this these things in the sidebar maybe you don't want a sidebar at all maybe you want to make sure that this is linked up not maybe you want to make sure that this is linked up with your email provider and so on so those are things that we'll do from the template now what's really easy is you can just go to the page on your site and then you see here edit this template with similar so when you see like the t and means that you're editing and theme builder and now from here we can still change just about anything we want so if you want a different top section you can just replace this top section with something different so maybe on the top of our blog we also want one of these call to actions for our public speaking mastery so here this would be and let's link this up with our public speaking mastery page so now on the top of our blog we have this call to action and then we have our blog post we can still decide whether maybe if you don't post very regularly you don't really want to show the date for example so in that case you can just go into edit design and from here maybe the leads delete the date and then these comments so maybe this is not something that you want here if you want to say something else and read more we can just go in and say continue reading for example and as you can see automatically because this is a list it will update every instance of that list so when you're like this you can just save it now this is the featured image because we have an added feature to image to our blog post yet this doesn't look good yet but that's okay here you can change the testimonials this is a list and here again we can just make sure that we show only our case studies on the side so in that case filter add a new rule categories our case study category and then here in order to connect this opt-in form we can simply click on it add a connection and because we already connected our convertkit with our API connection in the drive dashboard this is just a one click thing so then you can just select your list and get this set up these follow buttons followers buttons are linked to our global fields so these are already linked up we don't have to do anything here and then we can decide whether we want this bottom section on our blog maybe the most important call to action here is just our opt-in form so maybe yeah we don't want to have a contact form here so we can just hide this bottom section on our blog template now this looks ok let's go back to our website and refresh this and now as you can see this is our new blog list so we have our our nice call to action here yeah and this is really how you can set out and make page by page on your website you've seen this is super easy especially if we use the page blocks it is super easy and if you don't want to use the page blocks you can still let's say that in for the contact form for the contact page for example let's say that this is not something that you want to use blogs for because the only thing that you need is contact form then you can simply go into drive architect and here go into contact form drag a contact form on the page and let's make this a bit smaller maybe like 300 pixels 500 and next to this maybe you want to have your picture so let's put an image next to this image a bit smaller that's why we have blocks because it's really hard to design things on your own but you can see you can still add any element that you want on your page and simply create your pages from scratch keeping the the template that you decided and then if you want to change this template so let's say that now we want to make sure that this bottom section is linked up which is not the case yet if you click on this bottom now nothing happens and it still says yeah it still has the dummy text in there so for that let's go into our template and let's say I need to star and this would also go to our mastery all right and probably this background image with the computer is not really the right style so I think probably one of the images that we had here will do now again as you can see because we have the solid color overlay here it looks good it fits our theme we can add any image to this bottom section and it will just look good so now any page that we add will have this on the bottom section we'll have this on the top section so this is the title and then we can simply when you go here you can see that it's telling you that this is the content that you can change with thrive architect now what if you want a sidebar in the end if you decide like oh I actually do want to have a sidebar on my my pages in that case you can go into content and here when you hover over it you can see show sidebar so now you can just show the sidebar and this will be available and then from there we can still replace this pick one of the other side bars that's available maybe you want to have like this service page sidebar so that's the one with the testimonials and so on so here you can then change your elements in your sidebar again the way I showed you before or we can just hide it again but that's how you would add a sidebar to your page template now last but not least we haven't looked at our blog template yet so one word so let's go to one of our blog templates and as you can see here we have this grey background with the title the comments on there then we have the author and the date the featured image to share and then here is where the content would be and we have an author box and we also have here the sidebar with the different with the different elements now all of this you can still change it if we go in here change the theme templates now let's go to our top section so we can either change this top section or we can replace it altogether so maybe in the end you decided that you did want to have your featured image on top for example or you can just click on it and then maybe change the background style maybe we want this more lilac color to fit the rest of the website and then here so the content this is what is shown in thrive architect your author description comes from your WordPress author users so if you're here and users your profile anything that you put here and the biographical information is what will be shown here and about the author box so you can decide whether you want that or not in your templates and then this is the comment section and here we have this ebook section on the bottom of our blog post in our case this might be not something we want or we might want to replace this again with maybe a simple call to action there is something like this and that's like this popping up now I don't actually want a sidebar on my blog post so I would hide this sidebar and now if we want to add content to our blog post we can switch to thrive architect and here is where we would give more information so we would start with putting text in there probably heading to first and then some more text then probably some image and so on right like you can really just create your blog post the way you used to in thrive architect or if you're not used to it yet this is a really really easy and fun way to create your blog post but you will only be able to edit everything that is within a Content section now one more thing is also for posts you have posts visibility settings and if there's anything that you don't want on this post let's say that you actually do not want comments on this post because this is more of a case study then you can just take it out for this specific all right now it's time to go add to our drive product manager and to actually activate some other thrive plugins product manager and I'm gonna install thrive leads I will install thrive ovations try to architect and thrive comments all right first of all the reason why I installed this product is because thrive comments is really cool it adds like uploading and downloading possibility for users and it's just way more flexible than the original comments function so that's something that I definitely want to activate in our drive dashboard now we have Drive Commons that's available here so here we have some general settings so you can choose whether you want to show the date for example or not and for our accent color I'm gonna make sure to use our theme color and here the voting badges that's one of the really fun things that you can do with Drive comments - it means that people when they commented a number of times for example they get a badge being like a good contributor and so on so here you can also decide like I said for voting so you can say only like upward and downward on the upload or no voting so I like the uploading and then we can give people badges so for that you can see here we have these badges available so let's say top commenter if the get a number of approved comments so maybe somebody is like an top helper when he replies to other people or featured comments is when you actually like pin a comment to the top because it's a really good comment and adds something to the conversation or upvotes if somebody got a lot of up words so a top comment or maybe if they have 10 approved comments you can give them one of these nice badges like something like this being like oh this is a top commenter so yeah this is this is just a few really cool things that you can do I wouldn't give the moderators patches though a few really cool things that you can do with Drive comments so you can just activate that and you'll see that this automatically activated Drive comments rather than the standard WordPress comments the next one that I installed was drive architect like I said team builder has stripe architect light installed but there are a couple of things that you won't have access to and those are for example templates and landing pages so and one thing that we want to do with our pages here is we want to make sure so first of all this front page it's called generated home page so I would make sure to edit this call it home and then also our slug and for SEO we want to make sure that we also give this another title and meta description and then we wanted to have our public speaking mastery page as a landing page so let's edit this with a drive architect as you can see here we have a normal page layout and we could add a lead generation form on this but honestly if you want a high converting landing page a way better way to do it is to go to our landing pages here and to select one of the available landing pages maybe like this from the bright smart set and you can have the lead generation one and this gives us this really nice landing page that is made for people to convert them into these so as you notice we don't have a header anymore we don't have a footer anymore and that's exactly what we want on these pages because we want to make sure that the only thing that people can do is click on the button and sign up for our list so the first thing that we can do here is we can go change our accents to match our colors of our theme actually we could probably go for this one and then I would change the main accent to match my color all right so now this has the same color as the rest of our websites and you can very simple so everything here is a try for architect element so this means that you can just type in here you don't need Photoshop you don't need to change this you can simply do this and then one thing here is because this is a 2-step opt-in form we need to change the lead the lightbox so from here you can see that this button is in animations and actions is related to a lightbox so let's edit this and edit this lightbox so here we can change the text of course and then we can change this for color to match our brand colors but the most important thing is that we connect this lead generation form so we can add a connection and then choose our convertkit connection and I haven't have any mailing list setup so I would need to go into my convert kit and setup a mailing list for this to work but that's how easy you can connect your lead generation form and now we can simply apply this color and this matches our the rest of our website oh I see that this still has a border so important sign corners we can also apply our own color so save this and let's preview this so now we have this landing page when some of the clicks they will see this lightbox show up and and this means that when somebody is on our homepage and they click either on this button or on this button so here they will go to our landing page when they are on our what was it on our contact page I think we also have here this also goes to our landing page now as you can see this is a really good way to collect leads on your coaching website and then I also installed thrive leads the reason why I installed tribal leads is because this allows you to have any opt-in form on your website that you want so for example you can have a lightbox you can have a slide end you can have a ribbon on your website so all of these are done through through drive leads so you can simply add in your lead group and then you add a new type of opt-in form so like I said you can have a whole bunch of different opt-in forms that are available so let's say we want a screen filler so that's one of those full-forward forms now the advantage of thrive leads is also that you can very easily do a/b testing on the forms so if you care about lead generation and getting more leads on your website which I hope you do because you're trying to make a conversion focused coaching website then drive leads will really help you to do that so we have a whole bunch of templates that you can choose from or you can start from scratch if you want to so maybe we go for a multiple-choice opt-in form here let's cover what you need to master public speaking our element our background style we would have our website color and then this image we can use Esther as our image and maybe this is one of the coaching images now in this case we could have our yes please go to another state so this means that people would see an opt-in form when they go to that state and our no not yet we could make that close our form for example so in this case the yes please let's see it's connected to our switch state and you can see here it would go to state 1 so state 1 you would adapt this to what you want and then make this to add your connection your convertkit connection by the way this is how you would see what people would actually see on your side so you can hide the sidebar to have to fool with and then if we go back to our default state we can say that this one our button instead of switch state we could actually say that it closes the form so here close the form ok apply and then we don't need to stay to anymore so we can delete that we could just leave it - it doesn't make any difference and then our buttons or main options so let's change our color on this button and maybe this one we want to make it like light gray to make it less appealing so as you can see you can really change everything on this opt-in form right and this is what people would see in our case on our blog post so let's save this and let's go back to thrive leads here actually I forgot to show you something here you have your triggers to display immediately on page load or after certain time how often you want to show it to the same people if they come back and the animation you want to have so you can very easily change this to be after certain first period of time or whatever so this is very flexible and this is also something that you could test if you want to a be test and then what we have to do is we still have to set up our targeting so in our case we would set this to all posts on our site which now means that we can display this on desktop and maybe we don't want to have this full overlay on mobile so I wouldn't show it on mobile so make sure to switch this on on desktop and now when we go to a blog posts we get this full overlay on our sites and that is something well that you can do with thrive leads that you wouldn't be able to do with any of the other tools so again if you want a ribbon if you want slide in everyone a lightbox or one of these full screen overlays that's how you would add them with thrive leads and then the last plugin that I installed was thrive ovations now drive ovations allows you to collect testimonials and what I would do on a website that I set up for a coach is I would actually add a page I would call its collect testimonials and I would make this page no index because this is a page that I do not want search engines to find this is something that I would use internally for my own marketing in order to collect testimonials from my users so we do not need this to be in in the search engines right we do not want people to actually find this page in Google so that's why with the SEO press plugin that we installed we can very easily say not to index nests and now I would edit this page with Drive architects on the page I would probably not have this bottom section because yeah we already these people are already on our email list so they are already clients so they don't need to see this so the bottom section I would hide it and then instead of having collected some o'neill's as our title I would also called it something like leave us a testimonial and then here we can have the captured testimonials this is what we're looking for take the simple form let's change the form settings and so here we can say like ok we're asking for the name their email maybe we don't want a skinny and roll we do want to ask for the website not a testimonial title and then what was your takeaway from your coaching with me and maybe something else like would you recommend being coached by Esther and I was probably not you can have the image field which it's gonna load the image automatically from people they can load it from their Gravatar but you can also not have this and then you can either send people to a specific Thank You page so maybe you could give them a gift for leaving your testimonial and be like hey if you leave me a gift I'll send you this free ebook or you could just show a success message and this is how you can set up your testimonial form and now you can collect testimonials from your website and with Drive ovations these will automatically be saved in your dashboard here is where you will see all the testimonials and then you can very easily use this anywhere on your website so this is the basic setup that I would do for a coaching website I hope that that was helpful for you and if you have any questions then don't hesitate and let me know in the comments below

Channel: Thrive Themes

Views: 13,464

Keywords: Thrive Theme Builder, Shapeshift, WordPress, Build website, Thrive Architect, theme builder, website builder, page builder, thrive leads, thrive comments, Thrive Ovation

Id: h1MAbdNFvYg

Length: 76min 43sec (4603 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020