GoDaddy Website Builder Tutorial | Full Walkthrough (Step-by-Step)

what's up my name is Simon and in this video I'm going to show you step by step how to build your own professional website using the GoDaddy website builder now if you've been putting off creating your own website for a while because you think maybe there's too much stuff to think about maybe it's too complicated maybe you have to know some complicated technical stuff like coding then this is definitely the perfect video for you because the GoDaddy website builder is one of the easiest ways to start creating a website designing everything and getting a website up and running as fast and as easy as possible now in this tutorial I'll give you a complete walkthrough of the GoDaddy website builder from the point of signing up to GoDaddy to the point of actually publishing your own website to your own domain if you get lost at some point of the tutorial you can always go down to the timestamps and then you can see the exact topic that I'm talking about with that being said let's not waste any more time and get started right away all right so the first step is to go ahead and sign up for a new GoDaddy website builder account so you could either go to um godaddy.com forward slash websites for slash website builder or you could just go to medicsmedia.com forward slash GoDaddy which is the first link Down Below in the video description you can also just click on that link and that will take you directly to this website and this is also a free way for you you can support me and my YouTube channel because if you use that link below and this is my personal referral link which means that if at some point um you go ahead and sign up for a paid plan then I will get a small a small portion of that a small commission at no additional cost to you so if you want to support me there's uh I would highly appreciate if you would use that link down below but if not that's okay as well so when we're on this website we just click on start for free right here and then we can just sign up using a simple email address so what I'm going to do is type in one of my email addresses uh choose a username a password and then click on create account and that will take us to the next step which is where we'll have to choose a category for the website that we want to build so if you want to build a website for a consulting firm or a lawyer's office whatever you want to build a website for just type it right in here so maybe let's say lawyer and then you can see a lawyer laser tag laser cutting so they have a lot of different categories and depending on what you choose here they will kind of suggest to you different templates different themes different content you can put on your website later on so make sure you kind of choose the exact category that you want to build a website for and it will make it a lot easier so as an example for this tutorial I'm gonna build a photography website so I'm going to type in photography and there we go we have wedding photography session photography I'm just going to choose photography and then click on next and here we have to give our website a name and you can always change his name later on so don't think too hard about what your name should be I'm just going to name it Medics media photography and I'm going to click on next alright so let's now actually get started and customize our website now I always recommend to just start with the big stuff and then move on and go more in detail later on so the first thing we're going to do is start with choosing a general theme of our website now there's already a theme set up as you can see right here and when we go to the top right here and click on themes you can see that the current theme is the spaces theme but what we can do is just click on try new look right here and then it will give you more options of different themes that you can choose for your website so a couple of themes that I like is the modern theme I also like um one the bottom I think I like the focus one this is one I like and actually they're all kind of really uh good in my opinion based on the the design but just go through here and maybe try out a couple of different themes decide on what looks good for your website don't worry about the colors too much because we can change all the colors later on in the color settings so as an example I'm just going to use the modern theme that's one I like as well and then it'll automatically change all the content to this new theme and then the next thing we're going to do is change the colors so we're going to go to color right here and here is where we can just start changing around the colors and it will just kind of basically change the color theme so as you can see here it will change the buttons mainly and what you can do if you don't already have a color theme for your brand for your kind of business then what you can do is go open a new tab and go to um coolers dot Co and then you can generate very nice looking colors so this is basically a free website that you can use to generate different color palettes which kind of fit very well to each other so just click on generate on the top here and then you can see that it will kind of generate you different color themes that you can just then copy and paste for your website so you can just click on generate and then it will just keep generating new colors or just go to explore right here and then you can just choose based on these different color themes maybe go to popular and then maybe we're just gonna choose this one right here so we're gonna go to the three dots click on view palette or actually we're going to go to open in generator to see it kind of also large and let's maybe copy this color right here this blue color is the one I really like so I'm going to copy this color code um right click copy I'm going to go back to my website builder here and what I can do is just paste it right in here and then it will take the color that I had chosen here on this other website so let's just choose this here I'm going to close these tabs again and um I can also change the the different kind of um theme how light my or how bright my web website should look like so here I could just change it from very light so it would change the text to Black and increase kind of the brightness of the images behind the text or I could go to the dark mode and then it will obviously change the text to White and make everything a bit more darker okay so let's maybe choose this one right here I just kind of like it a bit more brighter and that's pretty much everything we need to do with our colors and you can always just come back to these settings later on now let's move on with the different fonts so this would be one tab below the colors we just click on fonts and what I would do is go to the advanced button right here and then you can choose a font for your primary font and also for your secondary font so your primary font is basically all your headings and your secondary font is all your your paragraphs and your text so what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose let's say primary font I'm going to choose and this one for yellow one because I think this looks pretty cool and um the secondary font I'm going to choose let's see you can also try out different ones and it will automatically change here on the on the website what I'm going to do is use Montserrat because I think that looks very modern as well and that's pretty much it for the fonts now we can go for one further down we can go to the buttons which is one tab below the fonts now you can change the primary button and the secondary button what I like to do is just make it round so um I I'm going to go for this one right here and as you can see it automatically changes on your website and then I'm going to click done that's every that's everything um kind of based on the the general changes that we're going to do with our website and now we can go more in detail so let's move on by clicking on website again on the top here and that will take us back to our main View and as I said if you want to change something we just have to click on the element and then it will open up a menu on the right side which we can just go through from top to bottom and make sure everything looks exactly how we want it to look so let's start with the first section here on the top which is our hero section and the first I'm going to do here is change the cover media which is like the cover image so we're going to click here on cover media and then we have a couple of different possibilities we can either have a static image so only one image here or we can have also a video so there will be a video played here on the hero section or we could also have a slideshow which is something I really like for photography websites because then you can already feature a lot of images on the top on the hero section and it will just kind of change as um as the time passes so every five seconds or something it will change so we could go through the plus sign here and choose different images you can either upload them by clicking on um but add images here or you could also click here on view more and then you can choose different images from the library um of GoDaddy so maybe we're just going to choose this one here maybe we can also type in photography on the top uh feel like this and we can just choose a couple of images here um maybe this one this one uh this one right here and maybe Also let's say this one then we're going to click on the bottom right to add to header and then it will automatically add those images to our hero section and you can all see these dots here there we can see how many images we have added and then it will change every I think seven seconds or something now one thing you have to keep in mind is that when you have a large image at the background here then the the text in the front might not be as as well visible as when you have just a simple color in the background so one thing to kind of combat that is you can change the accent of your your background so we can go with the blue here which is the color theme that we have chosen before to make it kind of in line with our color theme you could also go with black which makes the the font a bit better readable or you could go with white which will change the font to Black um so there's the possibilities you have and if you notice that it's still not really readable you could maybe go to Again cover media and change to um let's see change to image and then you could go to to insert right here and then it will just insert your image here on the bottom and it will be a lot uh more readable the text so this is actually what I'm going to do in this example here maybe let's also change the image right here um let's also go to view more go to photography and obviously you want to use your own images for your own website but I'm just going to use them here because it's a it's a lot easier for me to uh to add these images so I'm just going to choose this image click insert and there we go so again choose if you want to have a slideshow if you want to have a video or an image again if you use the the image as a background to make sure it's kind of dark and have white text or very bright and then you have a black text okay so let's click done here and then we can move on we can also change the alignment here to the left to the middle or to the right I think with the inside image here I think this looks pretty cool so to have it kind of on the left side um and then let's move on to site navigation and this is basically the top part here of the website where you basically navigate through your website so here's where you can add new pages so if you would want to add a new page then all you have to do is click on the little plus sign here and then you can add a page maybe called um let's say new stories as a photographer new stories and then if you want to have it shown in the navigation bar you have to take the show navigation you could also show it in the footer if you wanted to or make it a private page if you don't want it so that people should everybody can see this page that you have to log in to be able to see this page but that's not what we're going to do we're just going to click on create page and then as you can see here we have a new page called new stories but that's actually a part for later on in the tutorial now I'm gonna stick to the home page so I'm going to go to the home page again and continue designing our home page so we were at site navigation here and um so again we could change we can add different pages and we could also maybe let's move on here go to promotional Banner um if you want if you have a promotion maybe if you have an online shop you could just turn this on here and then maybe say something like free shipping on all orders or maybe 10 off in March or something like that so this really depends on what kind of website you're building but for this photography website I'm not going to really use this so I'm going to turn it off so let's go back here and promotional Banner now logo if you want to you can also add a logo if you don't add a logo it will just show the name of your website on the top left side here I'm just going to show you how to do it so so how to do it so you could just click on upload a logo here and let's click on ADD images then let's see I think I have prepared one GoDaddy tutorial and I'll let's take this one right here which is Medics media I'm just going to upload this and sometimes you have to reload the page here because let's see I'm just going to close it down click on upload logo and then you'll see your logo right here that you have uploaded click on insert and then it will insert your logo on the top left side here now I think this is a bit too large so I'm going to change the size right here I'm just going to drag this down and make this a lot smaller I think this looks pretty good you could also change like the background of the the logo make it white make it transparent whatever you want to align it in the middle align it on the left side actually I like it I like it in the middle so I'm just going to use it I'm gonna use this one right here then I'm going to click done and move on to the next part which is action button the action button here is this button that you see right here which is something that I would recommend for most websites because you want to have a call to action button right at the first thing that people see on your website so on the heroes section so um they could just type in something like um contact us if that's the main thing I want people to do on our website that's very good for business websites um or maybe also for a photography website because most people they want to see your pictures first before they want to contact you they want to see if you're the white the right fit for them so I'm going to type in maybe View uh portfolio something like that and and then that would link to a page that would link to the gallery page which makes a lot of sense because that's where I'm gonna show off all my work all right um that looks pretty good so I'm going to click done here then I'm going to move on to the headline so you could either change your headline by clicking on the element and changing it right here or I could just change it here on the right side so I'm going to type in something like let's say capturing uh your precious moments kind of as a slogan for a photographer capturing your precious or your most your most precious moment something like that and then you can also have a um a paragraph which is like a subheading so we could say something like um weddings um um let's say weddings portraits and what we're also going to do events maybe and also business so that people can see exactly what I'm a photographer for um I think that's a bit too uh too much here so let's just change this to only these three okay so we could also add a phone number so if you want to add a phone number it will show it right here which again also makes sense if you want to kind of get new customers from your website then people can decide to contact you via email or also via phone number many people just like to call right away so that's up to you then we're going to click done here and let's see if you're already finished so we have this yeah this is basically um our hero section so this is basically how we can change everything here on the top which is the most important part of your website because that's the first thing people see so now let's move on and customize a couple of more sections here on our website so as you probably have noticed already is that this website or actually most websites is kind of built with multiple sections so we have the hero section right here then we have a Content section right there and we have another one for online appointments and so on now and when you want to edit a section it's basically the same thing as our hero section we just click on the section and then it will open up a menu on the right side based on what kind of section this is so here we have a kind of a different stories so we can have a headline text and also a button so we could just go to layout here on the top right and maybe change the layout to this one right here where you have it kind of vertically or you can have it like this which also looks very good in my opinion you can also have an image on the right side and have all the text on the left side so again go through here and make sure and see what look what works for you and then just change it however you want to the same thing here we could change the accent we could change and the alignment here we could change the title if you would have a title um and then we could add more things so here um you could just simply add a new group let's say we have grab into we're just going to leave the text here as it is to save some time and here's also an image so we could maybe remove this and then we have the same style here as the other ones and also have an action button here so action button and then you can build out your website and the cool thing with GoDaddy is that they automatically adjust the design based on how much content you have on there so you never have to worry about it looking very bad and the same thing as well is for your phone it also looks bad later on so if you go to preview we can see that also on the phone it will look good as well because then they just change the layout from this grid layout as we've seen before to this kind of vertical layout so each group here has a no a known space the entire space on the phone so let's go back here and yeah that's basically how you can um change different sections now if you would want to add a new section all you have to do here is go to the little plus sign where you can see the plus sign here click on ADD section and then it will open up an entire kind of gallery or kind of menu of different sections you can add and to be honest to have a lot of different different options here so maybe you want to add some content so you could use these content templates you can maybe add a photo gallery right here maybe you also add a preview of your blog posts maybe a video maybe maybe I'm wasting your time here so you can go through them on your own just see for yourself what works the best for you as an example I'm just going to add maybe content and maybe let's see I'm going to add this one here maybe this works well for a photography website I can call it let's say um C or R um recent stories something like that and then I could change the images here I could also maybe link these images to different pages so I could maybe say okay this here This was um let's say check and Nina's wedding then I could obviously change the image right here I would change the image obviously to some to a wedding and then I would just change the text here and then people can also let's see maybe we can make this a link as well so let's see we could click here on ADD link on the bottom right then link to a page and then link to a specific page so maybe it is this page right here and then when people click on this they will get to the page where I actually show off my entire portfolio of this specific event here and then whenever you want to delete a section maybe you don't want this online appointment section here all you got to do is go to hover over it go to the three dots here and click on the lead section and just like that confirm delete if the section will be gone and then for most websites as well they have this little section which is dedicated to capturing the email addresses of the visitors of the website which is very helpful to kind of keep in contact with your visitors to kind of have a subscriber space if you have a Blog for example and and you release a new blog post you can send out a newsletter and let people know that you have new content on your website so I would recommend to use this kind of section on your website and again you can just click on the section and make all the changes on the right side change the text change the layout and so on but what I want to show you here is how this email marketing software that is built in with GoDaddy kind of works so when people go to your website type in their email address right here and then it will show up in your back office so to go there we can go to the top left side here where it says website builder we're going to click on close editor and then we'll go we'll get back to our back office and now if you go to connections and click on subscribers right here this is where you'll see all the different subscribers that you have already signed up to your email newsletter or just type in their email address on your website and obviously I don't have any subscribers here as you can see you can also import contact if you already have email addresses and import your audience basically and then what you can also do is send out newsletters so if you go to marketing here we could go to email and then we can start um creating different email campaigns this is like I said basically an email marketing software built in with GoDaddy so you have everything in one place so we could go to compose campaign we could make let's say a traditional newsletter here we're going to use this template and then you can already see how this newsletter will look like you could also start from scratch if you wanted to or you could use these templates right here and once you're done you can just click on continue and then here you can decide on who should actually receive this specific newsletter I would just uh click on all subscribers right here then again click on continue you could also schedule the email if you want to send it out later on and then you can click on send right here and and then the email obviously you also have to add a an address on the footer of your every email this is just by law in most countries you have to do that and then this email will go out to your subscribers so that's just something real quick I wanted to show you here and another thing I want to show you is if you have a Blog and let's let's for example add a Blog section on our website so let's go back to edit site and maybe add add a new page here so I'm going to go to website here gonna click on the little plus sign go to add page click and then I'm going to type in blog gonna create a page and then you can see here it showed up on our navigation bar and uh now I'm going to click on ADD section I'm going to go to content and let's see or actually I'm going to go to blog right here and then this is perfect for a blog site so let's choose maybe this one right here and you can see I don't have any blog posts yet so what I can do is go to my back office and start writing our blog posts and then they will automatically show up right here in this section so I could either go to again close the editor and go there manually or I could just click on the little section here on the blog section go all the way down and click on manage blog right here and it will automatically take us back to our back office here it will go to marketing and go to blog right here and this is where I can just create multiple posts so let's click on create post and then we can add maybe a title so let's say why it makes sense to hire a professional photographer and maybe also add an image right here um again let's say let's choose this one insert and let's see maybe make this a line here or however you want to have it so let's do it like this and then we can just start writing so hi there and yeah so just write out your blog post here and then once you're done you're going to click on publish click on go to editor and now as you can see let's see let's go to the blog and now we have our first blog post here and you can again create more blog posts and then we'll just um kind of Stack up here on this blog site again you can always change your layout so if you don't like how this looks you could go to this section here go to layout and maybe we're going to choose this layout here and then it will just show up just like this so this is basically how we can build a Blog also using the GoDaddy website builder cool so let's now actually go back to our main home page here so click on website go to home and make sure we're we're done here so one section we haven't touched yet is the social section this is very easy as well you can just click on the social section and then type in all of your Facebook um your Facebook link I'm sorry your social media links so for me it would be Medics media and Twitter as well uh and just by typing in your link right here the the links the icons will automatically show up here in the social section so this is very cool as well now let's go to the footer this is um the header and the footer is what will be visible on every single and site of your website so this the header with the navigation menu here and also the footer right here will be always visible so first of all let's maybe change the layout to something like this right here then we're gonna this is actually cool we're gonna leave the text here um the social accounts you can also put the social accounts on your footer if you wanted to or site navigation we could also add navigation to our footer but that's up to you now one thing I would do is remove this power by GoDaddy so I would just remove this text entirely because people don't need to know that you may decide with GoDaddy and then the last thing we can look at on your home page is this little chat box here on the bottom this enables your visitors to directly contact you just on your website so if we go to preview and just scroll down click on this little icon here you can see that they simply can type in their name their email address and then send you a question and then this information this question will be sent to your email address that you have set up in your back office that you have signed up with and then you can just get get back to your visitors like this so I personally would just leave this on your website but if you don't like this you can also just remove this by clicking on this icon and then going to uncheck this and then it will just be gone but again I like this so I'm just going to leave it on you can also change the email address that these messages should go to I go to messaging preferences have a customized thank you message and so on awesome so now let's say we are finished setting up our website we have added all the content we have made all the design changes that we have wanted to so now this next step would be to go through all the main settings and then we're going to go ahead and publish the site so let's quickly go to this tab on the top right here and make sure everything is set up correctly so what we want to do is go through each of these tabs here and make sure that everything again is set up correctly so let's start with basic information right here this is where you can change the name of your site and you can also change the category your email address add an address so if you have a physical store you can add the address right here and maybe also add a section and maybe also add a section on the bottom of your home page where people can see the exact map of where your store is actually located then we're going to go to social media links this again is where you can just add different links so Instagram we can also add the link right here and then it will just add it wherever you have set up your Social Links we can also go to favicon this is something we haven't done yet if you don't know what a favicon is it's basically just a little icon that you see on the top of the browser so right here we can see the GoDaddy on the top left we can see the GoDaddy icon and what you want to do is you want to brand and everything about your website to your own business to your own logo so what we could do is just click on upload choose and Logo right here so let's choose this one and then instead of this icon that we see here it will show my personal logo so this is something that I would do as well so let's click done and then on search engine optimization we could add a description of our website this is mainly if you want to use the search engines so Google Bing and so on to be able to rank your website for certain keywords so depending on what keywords you want to rank your site for you want to add these keywords in your headline and also in your description this will help you rank on Google as well but this is kind of a more complicated topic to be able to rank your site so but it it can't hurt to kind of add keywords here in your description to get some organic traffic to your website especially when you have a very local business and then it will not be hard to kind of get ranked in Google by adding the right keywords right here so if you have a dental office in let's say Santa Barbara then you would add Santa Barbara dental office and so on here in the description then once you're done go back to settings and go to site history this is basically where you can see different stages of your website so if at some point you mess up something you can always go back here and restore different parts of of your website so this is very helpful as well and then the rest here is very Advanced so if you want to have Google analytics installed in your website to have more data on where people are clicking on how like all the there's so much data that you can gather on your website but this is really like Advanced so when you start up building a website here you probably not want to install all these stuff like Facebook pixel Facebook meta tag and so on this is also if you want to have retargeting ads on Facebook so we don't need to worry about any of this right now and we're going to move on publishing our website but actually one thing I would recommend before publishing the website is to go to the preview option here and again make sure everything looks good so we could just go through the website you can click on each of the tabs that we have adjusted here and also make sure everything looks good on mobile as well you can just navigate through every part of your website and once you see that everything looks good everything works well then you can go ahead and start publishing your website so now let's go and publish our website by just going to the top here and click on publish and just like that the website is already published and now we can click on view side right here and then a new tab will open up with your published website and again you can just go through each of the tabs and make sure everything looks good now one thing you notice is that the URL of your website is whatever the name of your website is Dot godaddysites.com and this looks very unprofessional so what we want to do is we want to have our own branded domain so in my example this would be Maddox media.com if I would have like a photography website I would maybe name maddoxphotography.com or something like that so you could if you wanted to if you don't want to pay or something and then you could just use this URL if you wanted to um or what I'm going to show you now is to connect your own branded domain so here we're going to click on choose domain and now we could either connect an already existing domain which is maybe on an other registrar and then we would click on already own a domain here and then I click on I have a domain outside of GoDaddy but probably for most people you don't already have domain so what we're going to do is we're going to use GoDaddy to get a new domain and then set up also a plan for our website so we're gonna click we're gonna go to this field here and just type in the domain that you want to have for your website a couple of recommendations here is to make the the URL as short as possible or as let's say as memorable as as possible and also try to get a.com domain unless you may be very local then you can also get a DOT UK or in my case I live in Switzerland it would be dot CH but in general I would just recommend to get a.com if the.com for your desired URL is not available you could maybe also settle for a DOT Co or dot net but a.com is always the best thing so let's maybe type in Medics photography just to see if this would be available click on search and as we can see here this specific domain is available right now so yes your domain is available and now we have a couple of options to get this domain so we can either get it for free when we choose a paid plan an annual paid plan with GoDaddy or um we could also just buy the domain only and then choose a monthly plan so if you are serious about your website and you know that you will have this site for a long time then I would just go ahead get this domain for free and choose an annual plan and then you would just click on get a free domain with a website plan and click on select plan right here and that takes us to The Next Step which is where we have to choose a plan now like I said if you go for the yearly payment option so you pay up front for an entire year it will be a lot cheaper than if you go monthly I usually go for the yearly plan because I built websites that aren't just for a couple of months mostly they are relevant for multiple years so I save money by going for the yearly option and also I get a free domain if I go for the yearly option and another thing is that they have multiple plans so you if you want to sell something on your website you would have to go for the e-commerce plan so you can take payments on your website and then there's the basic the standard and the Premium plan I usually go for the standard plan because I think this is a um a good option because then you get the possibility to get organic traffic from search engines to get the SEO and you don't have that with the basic plan and also you get like 500 email cents per month which is a good starting point if you want to do email marketing as well and then if you want to do more you can always upgrade to the Premium plan right here so but you can also go with the with the basic plan and then upgrade whenever you decide that you need to to upgrade but if you go for the yearly plan maybe you want to go for the standard right away um because maybe your audience will grow quicker or like I said you'll be able to be found you uh on on search engines like Google or Bing and stuff like that so once you have decided go to add to cart here and then obviously we have to type in your payment information and all that kind of stuff here and um because I I'm not actually building this website I'm not actually wanting to buy this specific domain I'm not gonna go ahead and actually buy this but um you would just click on ADD payment complete purchase and then it would automatically and kind of connect your your new domain to your website and you're pretty much finished all right so that's everything you need to know to build your own website using the GoDaddy website builder if you found this video helpful make sure you click that thumbs up button down below that would be really helpful and also if you want to support me even further feel free to use my referral link for GoDaddy Down Below in the video description that will be also be highly appreciated now if you want to see more tutorials about how to build a website how to do email marketing I have tons of tutorials on my channel so you can subscribe to my channel if you want to see more new videos updated videos about also the GoDaddy website builder if they release new features then I'm going to update this video as well so you can subscribe to my channel to not miss that video and also if you have any questions you always leave them down below in the comment section I get back to almost every comment I get so um there's that and also I think that's it so thank you very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video