Today we're going to get you all set up with paid accounts for your website builders and your own personal domains. Here's how it is going to work.

If you want to proceed with Tilda

• Use this link
• Log into your account
• Upgrade to a personal website through the annual subscription method
• Input your personal card and pay for the year
• Once you get the email notification, forward the confirmation to [email protected]
• When Andy receives that email, he'll followup with you about getting you your reimbursement
• Next step is to buy your domain name. Go to Google Domains and search for your domain
• Find one that is $12/yr, add it to your cart, and check out
• Just as you did with Tilda, input your own card info and send your email confirmation to [email protected] to get your reimbursement

If you want to proceed with Squarespace

• Use this link to navigate to the student discount which will get you 50% your first year
• Signup for the personal plan that is $8/month, billed annually
• Through the checkout process you will be prompted to reserve a domain name for free for the first year, do that!
• Once you get a confirmation email of your payment, forward it it to [email protected]
• When Andy receives that email, he'll followup with you about getting you your reimbursement

If you want to proceed with Wix

• Use this link to get a student discount.
• Signup for the Combo plan that is $11/month, billed annually. Don't forget to use your discount code during the checkout process!
• Input your own payment information and confirm that yearly plan.
• During the checkout process, Wix will prompt you to set up a free domain name for the first year, do that!
• Once you get a confirmation email with a receipt of your payment, send it to [email protected]
• Andy will followup with you about getting you a reimbursement

Some inspiration

Now that you've gotten everything set up, you should be good to go with creating your personal website and getting it ready to show to the world.

Here are a few personal websites to look at for some inspiration. Just remember, yours doesn't have to be and probably won't be on the same level as these sites. These are professionals who have been working in industry for 10+ years. These are just meant to give you some ideas, not to discourage you!

Joshua McCartney

Sean Halpin

Trey Ingram

Zhenya Rynzhuk

Meagan Fisher

Some tutorials

All three website builders that we allowed for you to choose from are relatively straight forward and easy to use. They all also have active communities to help you if you come to a problem.

Below are a few basic video overviews of each tool. If you have more specific questions, I encourage you to google the problem you're having. Odds are that someone has had the same problem before and another person has posted the solution.

Tilda Walkthrough

(For Tilda users: we strongly encourage you to stay away from Zero blocks unless they are absolutely needed. Tilda is great about automatically resizing all of their template blocks to work with all screen sizes but they do this automatically with Zero blocks. If you make a Zero block, you have to set what that Zero block looks like for every possible screen size)

Wix Walkthrogh

Squarespace

Setting up a website structure

Today we're going to focus on just getting the basic structure of your website set up. Don't worry too much about what it looks like, what font you're using, what colors are there, or even the content that is on each page. Just work to get the following pages created (and, don't worry about what's on it, just make sure it exists).

1. Home page
2. Projects or Work page
3. About page
4. Contact page