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How to Create a Business Website for Free using Wix

Build a beautiful website for your business using Wix. Simply follow along with my guide and you will have a professional & fully operational website in 30 minutes.

Wix affiliate link: (coming soon)

Table of Contents:

00:00 – Introduction
00:54 – Create Your free account
01:58 – Choose a template
03:34 – Learn basic functions of the Wix edtor
07:07 – Customize your template
27:22 – Select your free domain
28:13 – How to upgrade to a Premium Plan
30:35 – Making your Purchase
31:30 – Get a unique domain name
33:33 – Purchase a personalized mailbox

hi guys it’s Lia from build a site with Lia calm in under 30 minutes this tutorial will show you how to build and launch a business website using Wix Wix is a drag-and-drop editor that’s super easy to use even if you don’t have any technical skills in case you’re wondering yes you can build and launch a business website for free with Wix and they also give you the option to upgrade I’ll explain that at the end of the video so let’s begin from
step one of my guide you’ll click this link to open Wix in a new tab when you see this screen click start now go ahead and create a free account by signing up here you can also log in with Facebook or Google+ to make it a little quicker enter your details and log in now you’re asked what kind of website do you want to create there’s a variety of options here that allows Wix to narrow down some templates for you but for any type of business
website that you want to build you’re safe to go with this option here click business now you have two options you can start with the Wix Adi or artificial design intelligence or start with the Wix editor artificial design intelligence is a new feature from Wix what they do is they ask you a bunch of questions and then they create a website tailored to your needs now it’s a really awesome feature that they have but right now it has its own editor
and it only works with a limited number of apps that we’ll discuss later so because I want to give you the full experience of creating a unique website of your own and get the most out of Wix I’m going to start with the Wix editor so just click there when you’re ready now you get to choose from a huge selection of templates all designed by Wix graphic artists they give you professional look right out of the gate and it’s really helpful to have a
starting point so for example to find the templates that would suit your business you can enter a search term here or browse the broad list of categories over here on the left as you’ll see once I expand the section I have even more options to choose from now at this point I want to tell you that sometimes people ask me about changing a templates once they make a choice so you should know that once you choose a template you’ll need to stick with
it or start over with a new one Wix allows you to create as many free or premium sites as you wish so it’s not a problem at all once you see something that you kind of like go ahead and click view that way you can click around the website as any visitor would and see how the template functions in real time anything that you see can be changed so that would include the images the layout the fonts the colors but again it’s giving you a starting
point and that just makes it so much easier when you’re a beginner so today what I’m gonna do is use an example of a real estate site so let’s go over here and click on real estate and then I’m gonna browse my options and I’ve had a look earlier so I’ve chosen this one here so instead of viewing it what I’m gonna do is click Edit and then I’ll be in the Wix editor which is basically command central for your website where you make all your changes
so I’ll see you there and then we’ll start building the website you’re now in the Wix website editor so anytime you want to make changes to your site you’ll come back here even after you publish you can log back into your account choose edit this site and you’ll be back into the Wix editor there’s three main sections that I want you to want to point out to you right now first these buttons on the Left you hover over them and you’ll see the
different things pop up anytime you want to add a feature on an element you’ll go here to adjust an element the toolbar on the right is very handy for that and if you hover over any of the icons it actually tells you what that icon does and even the keyboard shortcut across the top is what’s called the main navigation bar the most important section is all your pages so if you want to work on a different page you can simply click to go to that
page you can also rearrange your pages from here remove them add them and more these pages have been set up with this real estate website to give you a start next you’ll see site so anything to do with your site including saving it previewing it upgrading you can all do that from here under the tools you’ll see that gridlines is check marked so if I just go back here you’ll see these gridlines so what I can tell you here is that they’re very
important to make sure that your site is viewer friendly on any device people will be accessing your website from their desktop their laptop a tablet and so forth so you want to keep all the important information inside the gridlines so that it’s not lost depending on screen size they have Wix has a really extensive help center and I encourage you to get comfortable using it so 24/7 you can access written content videos even screenshots so that
you can learn how to do different things on your website if you choose to upgrade you can do that right from the upgrade menu here and this is hide control so the buttons and the toolbar that I showed you previously sometimes they get in the way when you’re editing your site so if you want to hide them you click on that and they disappear temporarily zoom out in reorder is handy when you want to have a bird’s-eye view so that you can organize the
different sections of your site if you make a mistake you can undo or you can redo switch editor views right now you’re in the desktop version of your website but if you want to edit the mobile section mobile version rather that’s included for free you simply switch the editor views to work on that and then finally saving your work here previewing it to see how something functions or looks to a visitor and then publishing it online live is what
you would do in the publish button here that’s great so remember as you keep working with these buttons and sections you’re going to be getting more comfortable and right now we’re going to start to edit this site so that you can see how easy it is with the drag-and-drop editor from Wix so we’re on the home page and we’re gonna start editing at the top this is the header area so normally you’ll see a logo here you’ll see the name of your company
and also your horizontal menu this template didn’t come with a logo uploaded so no worries look at my step called get a great logo and you’ll have everything you need to source a local and also to upload it to your Wix website to change any text on your website you simply click on the text and then the button get it text and you’ll see text settings box come up so here’s the option to choose a different font and it applies right away the font
size with a little slider button or you can enter a value and see how it expanded the minute I did that so it just adjusts right away and it’s so easy to see how something will look if you want to change the color just look for this icon here once you click on it and select a color it actually applies right away again super easy to use if I wanted to change the text itself you just have to highlight the text and then go ahead and enter your own
excellent now the horizontal menu it looks pretty good I just want to show you if you click on it you’ll see this little design paintbrush and if you click on that you’re gonna have a lot of options as far as how the menu looks the ones at the top are called themed horizontal menus because they are designed to match your theme you’re probably safe to stick with those ones but if you want to be more adventurous check out some of the options below
and again they apply right away I’m gonna stick with what I have so I’ll just X out of that the whole menu itself can be moved to a different position just click anywhere in between and then drag it where you want you see how some purple lines pop up those lines help with alignment so just watch for those lines as you move things around it’ll help things to keep looking good to your visitors next we have the main area with a slide deck strip and
also two container boxes container boxes are just that their boxes you can add to your site you can add elements to the boxes so they’ve added a shape text you can add images and then you can move the box around as one unit it also adds visual appeal you can add boxes from the add menu here on the left or you can just adjust the ones they’ve already given you for example if you did not want a box to be there at all you simply click container box
and then hit delete on your keyboard or the garbage can icon and it’s removed let’s do some changes to this box here for example if you didn’t want the shape you would click on the shape and remove it to change the text like I showed you before it’s just a matter of clicking on the text and clicking to edit text but you also want it to be aligned now that you remove the shape so again you’re simply clicking on it and then you’ll see the align
icon here choose align to Center and now it looks good in the box if you want to change the design go ahead and click the little paintbrush icon on the container box choose a different color and it applies right away and then the whole thing can be moved to a different location simply by clicking and dragging it anywhere you want next let’s change some of the images on the site this one here is actually not just a static image it’s called a slide
deck strip and when you click on the image this will pop up so you can change the images from here or click on the settings notice if I use the little arrows here’s all the pictures that they’ve pre-loaded to this slide deck strip you’ve got it toggled here to auto play unloading and you can even adjust how in between images I’ll show you how that works in a minute to change an image simply click change images and what you can do is select an
image and then select replace image I’ve already used the orange button to upload this image of a home to my media section try to upload the highest quality images you can so that they display beautifully on your website so select the image you want and then click Choose image and then it’s replaced right away let’s go back and see that so now it’s in preview mode someone lands on the site and then every few seconds it’s gonna slide to the next
image you can actually add as many images as you like really nice so back to the editor you’d continue changing the images to your own let’s move on down so pretty straightforward because any image can be changed simply by clicking on it and then using the buttons that pop up here text again you’ll click on the section that you want to change and then go ahead highlight your text and rewrite it as needed if you have more text than what’s here
it’s gonna expand so you don’t have to worry about making room it’s gonna do that automatically for you these three buttons actually link to the book online page you’ll see that as I click and click change link it’s asking you where you want the button to link to so this is already preset to a page to the book online page but as you see if I use a drop-down menu I could choose one of the other pages if that was appropriate and you can even link
to an external web address or a certain point on your page so keep that in mind because you’ll have buttons for different things which really helps people to see what they need to do next in a very clear and appealing way you’ll see also that I changed the look of the button so let’s just try it with this one all I did was click on the button itself and click on the paintbrush design and just chose this theme button here to make it easy and
that’s it and then to change the text of the button you probably noticed that there’s a button here called change text again you just click on that and then type in what you want so keep on moving down and just see what you think of every section if you want to get in that bird’s eye view just use the zoom out and reorder right here let’s pretend I didn’t want this strip so a strip is a horizontal section it’s nice for a visual appeal and
dividing sections of your site if I didn’t want this strip all I would have to do is click on the strip itself and then just cut from this menu or delete on the keyboard and it would just remove it altogether so then in that case there’s too much space so I would just simply click on the strip below and then I would drag it up to meet the section that we just did above in this area they’ve added three shapes and then a little bit of text beneath
each shape if you wanted to add a shape or yourself you could go to the add menu and then click on shapes and you’ll see a whole bunch of things you can use banners Scrolls really really nice so go ahead and you know drag something out that you like or say you were happy with what is here you could just leave it you could actually change the direction of it move it into a different position change the design and so forth what I wanted to show you
was how you can actually link the shapes as well so what you would do is click the chain link and now you would tell it where you want that to link to so at this point I want to show you how to add a page let’s pretend we wanted this section to link to our frequently asked questions page where you can give the viewer more information about your real estate business so you’d go back to pages at the top here and we’re going to add a page it’s gonna
pop up and I want to call it f a Q now I don’t want that at the right after my home page as you see here I want it at the end so just click and drag it to the bit to the bottom could it be easier so now I have a new blank page called FAQ now we’re going to go back to where we were which is the home page let’s have to scroll down to the spot that I was at and now I’m gonna link up those shapes so if someone clicks on the shape they’re gonna go to
my frequently asked questions page there we go hit the link I’m I wanted to go to a page and which page and thank you right here done it’s a good idea to go to preview mode and test any links that you set up and buttons so that you know that your visitors will have a good experience and everything’s working well in this next section they’ve added a nice testimonials area with three three comments here if you wanted to change the background it’s
very simple to just click on the image and then click change strip background there’s a lot of free images from Wix as well so in this area where it’s not an actual property it’s more of a design appeal for the site you can actually go ahead here architecture and interiors choose a nice skyline image and then click change strip background it applies automatically and then you’re good to go the white text is getting lost on the lighter background
so go ahead and click on it click Edit text and then simply change the color to something else I’m gonna choose black and then it’s done I can do that for the rest of them move things around change the shapes and so forth and finally the contact us section or page is very important when on your site so that people can know how to get in touch and where to find your location I want to point out though that right at the top of the contact us they
put what’s called an anchor point so an anchor point is an invisible marker to a certain area of a page so what they’ve done here is they’ve made item in the menu contact but is actually not a separate page it’s just a section of the homepage so let me just bring back down my menu and if I click here you’ll see they added a page called contact but it’s not a real page it’s a and if I click here you’ll see that it just it’s telling that page that
when a person clicks on contact go right to that anchor point this is how you would set that up all right so instead of linking to a page like we talked about before you’re linking to an anchor and then the anchor is on the home page so that’s selected and then that’s how they got that contact now when you click just go right down to this area right here anchor points can be added from the add menu as well and I’ll just show you where to find
that you’ll find it under more and if you scroll down here just past it anchors right here basically you’ll click it out to drag it out and then put it where you want to put it and you can actually even click on the anchor point itself to rename it just to keep you organized no one’s gonna see that just you just you it’s an invisible marker and now for the contact us area of the homepage they’ve already pre-loaded a contact form as well as a map
for you if you didn’t have one already included in your template or maybe you’re starting from scratch you simply go to the add menu and you’ll find both maps and a whole bunch of different contact forms under contact different colorful Maps styles of contacts forms and the themed ones at the top that match your theme to change any of the settings on the map itself click on the map and click to change the address and then the map will adjust to
your actual location and then it even has a spot for changing the name that’s showing on the marker here so I just went ahead and typed in the name of my real-estate company and then I would type in the address so that it would adjust automatically I would change the text as needed and then the contact form needs to be set so that it goes to your actual address click on the contact form click set your email you’ll add your email address at the
top and then even indicate what information you want to be collected so if you didn’t want this subject line to be there just uncheck that box they’ve already included and it’s gone click and drag a whole section to move things where you would like on that page and that’s it you’re done and lastly you have the footer area which is shown on every page of your website you can change the background by clicking on the background and clicking change
for the design the text we’ve spoken about and then the social bar this is new for you so let’s just click on that and see how easy it is to set your social links here is what’s showing right now if you didn’t have one of these social networks you could just remove the image and it’ll be automatically removed from this site as well you can replace the icons and you can also set your links right here click done and your social links are set again
this whole area can be just dragged as a unit you’ll see the purple lines guiding you to the alignment excellent so you’re done this page and it’s a good practice to just choose the zoom out and reorder option to have a look at how things look now that you’ve made a bunch of changes sometimes the spacing is off for example here it’s a little bit a little bit too much space so you just would simply use a little icon here to drag it up alright and
that’s looking much better there you go excellent back to the website we can now move on to the next page so go through each page systematically make your own changes and remember if you want some tips about sourcing other images uploading them adding content I’ve got other steps that cover that so this is going to give you the basics of working with Wix and then you can supplement that with my other steps let’s move on to the agents page you’ll
see again they’ve got you started here with our agents now say it’s only myself I would just need to remove these other ones so I would click that hit delete on my keyboard and now there’s only one agent showing alright all this area can be removed so you’d simply just go through and adjust the page as you wish so maybe instead of just leaving it brief I could add a bit more of a blurb about my background here just to fill up this page or shorten
it up and just leave it very simple so I delete all that change my information so that page is fairly straightforward again the background you just would click on that to make that change we already went through the contact section with that anchor point the book online that is important I want to talk to you about that Wix has pre-loaded an app for you called Wix bookings and on this template they’ve given you the free version so let me show you
where you’d find that if you go to your app market here it shows that Wix bookings is installed see the check mark in the green circle if you open up the app you’re gonna have access to all the settings for the booking so this is gonna sync with your calendar then a person could go find out when you’re available booked your showing you just get started and you’ve got a ton of options ahead of you you can also upgrade from here but in this
situation you don’t really need to upgrade upgrading the Wix bookings lets you accept payments online but in this case you’re not really accepting payments you’re just booking a spot in your calendar to show them to help the property or the home so you don’t need to do that there’s a lot of other features that comes with the upgrade again you can look at that if you were to need that those features so what they’ve done is they’ve already set up
the bookings page with these sample listings and they’ve divided it into rentals and sales so for example if I didn’t have any rentals and I was just wanted to remove that whole thing I could just delete the entire category it’s asking me do I want to do that yes and now that’s gone I only have sales down below here I could add a new service if I had that and then finally I would go ahead and change all these listings just use the edit icon here
I would add my address what it is and the property and the image and then that would be changed accordingly I’m just gonna go back to where we were because I forgot to mention that you will set your calendar settings just by clicking on calendar when you’re in the Wix bookings app so here’s where you would sync your calendars here’s where you would indicate the times that you’re available and the times you’re not available all the bookings will
show up here as people booked to see a property and so forth very convenient to you so go ahead and set that all up all up and just remember you’ve got the help section right here if you need it and so now back to the bookings page you’ll see that anything you change within the bookings app is gonna be automatically changed here as well the rental area was removed because we removed that earlier and now we are on our last page of the site that
frequently asked questions which is the page we added so initially it was blank and I added this title simply by going to add and then to text I dragged out this title and change the text let me show you how to add a paragraph here’s a paragraph here so I’m just gonna drag it out close that menu and now I can use these little white dots to expand it to the area that I want that text to cover excellent edit the text and then you can start adding
your questions you can bold to the questions and keep adding text and you’ll see that that text box expands the background can be changed easily as well just click and you’ll see you can change the page back on from there so get that page looking as you wish and you’re done so we’ve covered every page you know how the different areas of the Wix editor work I’m here to help you with any questions but now you have the basics one thing we didn’t
talk about is saving your work you’ll want to do that regularly so if you go here and click the Save button this will pop up the name you see at the top is the name domain name you’ll be given if you stick with the free version it’s user name Wix site comm slash leach real estate that is the part that you get to change so I hit edit here enter the name you want for your website and now when somebody wants to come to this site they’ll need to type
in Lily trick site calm slash leach real estate so this will be your unique domain name I do highly recommend that you upgrade your account because then you can connect your own unique domain name it’s much better to have a name like leach real estate calm for example instead of the long Rick stranded name you see here I’m gonna save with a free version then I’m gonna hit upgrade to compare the premium plans and explain to you a little bit about
your options there here are the premium plans that Wix offers you now just take note that they’ve included the Wix bookings app but as I mentioned you don’t need to upgrade that because you’re not accepting payments online booking classes you’re just booking private showings and syncing your calendar and you can do that without having the Wix bookings plan upgraded so what we’re going to do is we’re going to scroll to the bottom there’s
frequently asked questions here but just look for this here Wix premium plans not using Wix bookings so click that and now you are gonna see just the regular plans and you can still use the free version of the bookings app so here we are you got a range of price points and the most popular one is usually the best bang for your buck take note – you have a 14 day money-back guarantee on all weeks premium plans so you can take them for a test drive
and then get your money back if you didn’t want to go that route let me explain some of the features so that you can see that this is really such a good value unlimited bandwidth means that your visitors won’t be frustrated by slow loading times that’s really important 10 gigabytes of storage allows you to upload your high quality images videos and more without running out of space if you have a domain already that you’ve purchased elsewhere you
can connect it with the upgraded plan you’ll have a free domain voucher for one year and that includes premium endings such as calm and so forth there’ll be no Wix ads appearing on your website and then you have these three vouchers which are really an awesome value so one hundred and seventy two five dollars worth of advo Jers gives you a boost in marketing the site booster app helps you get traffic and that’s a $60 value and then adding various
forms is a $48 value and that’s all included let’s select this plan so I can show you how you would go through the purchase on this page you get to select your unlimited plan subscription it’s tempting to want to go monthly but you should note that the monthly subscriptions do not include a free domain premium apps and ad vouchers so if you were to add those on yourself you’re really driving up the costs so it’s much better to use either the
two-year or the 1-year the one-year I like you say 45% and you got that one-year domain voucher included in that as well so make your selection and then click select so on this page we’ll enter the payment information for the plan that you’ve chosen so here’s a number of options you can pay with enter all your details check the summary of the amount in this case the plan comes to 149 us and then submit your purchase this is a secure page so that
you don’t have to worry about your personal information being stolen submit your purchase and I’ll see you on the next page great so when the payment goes through your site is now premium and here’s the page where you get to use that free domain voucher to connect your unique domain name so in the search field you’ll enter the name that you want in my case I’m going to enter in each realestate.com it’s telling me that it’s available if it wasn’t
available it would indicate that in red and then you would just choose something else it’s always good to double check the spelling and then click get it now the domain registration is separate I do have a one year voucher so I’m just gonna go ahead and click one year because then as you see here on the right I’m getting that for free click continue when you’re ready we’re on the contact info page where it’s just a summary of all your personal
details so have a look for accuracy edit anything that you need to and then go to the next page now domain privacy is something I do recommend as you’ll see it cost an extra 990 per year but you’re getting a lot of protection with that you protect your identity prevent domain related spam and prevent domain hijacking it’s worth the price so make your selection and then click continue and now you’ll see a summary of those two purchases so your
domain name itself and then the privacy registration I had that free domain voucher so I’m only paying 990 for the privacy registration hit submits purchase when you’re ready and finally you have the option to get a personalized mailbox on this page you can do that now right here or do that later from your Wix dashboard a personalized mailbox gives you a professional email address with your domain name on the end of it so in my case it would be
for example Lea at leat real estate com you can also just go ahead and use a free email address for the time being or go ahead and purchase it now it’s around fifty dollars so just keep that in mind and that’s it I hope you feel more confident to build your business website today if you want to take your site to the next level please have a look at the other steps in my guide I’m here to help you with anything you need thanks so much for watching