Your logo is soo so important for your business or blog. It tells a bit of a story and it instantly communicates the perception of your business or blog. When you're starting out, there are many different ways that you could obtain your logo. Below, I share the five steps that you can take to design your own logo to fit your brand.

Mailchimp is a great "starter tool" for building your email list. Building an email list is very important for both bloggers and entrepreneurs. This is because it allows you to communicate directly with your blog readers or your target audience.

Having an organized website can make the difference between people staying on the website to learn more about your products or services or deciding to keep it moving to the next app that’s buzzing on their phones. If you’re taking the DIY route for your site, strategically organizing  it is something that can easily be overlooked.

The more I learn about promoting online, the more I realize that people are hungry for connection with the content creators who they follow. Almost every marketing expert in the online space talks about how crucial it is to infuse your story and your personality into your website.

I love a beautiful website! It's so much fun for me to admire the strategy and aesthetics of the websites of other bloggers and businesswomen. Everyone starts with a blank slate, so to me, it's interesting to see the beautiful outcomes that everyone comes up with.

So when I first started my blog, I got my logo from a random logo design website. It was pretty cheesy, I must admit. The name of my blog a the time was "The Queen Life" so I asked for a logo with "Queen Life" in calligraphy pink letters with a gold clipart crown on top on the letter "Q." It was functional at the time, but it quickly became outdated. I honestly got it designed on a whim and I didn't put any brand strategy into it at all.

When I created my first digital products, the Blog Refresh Workbook and the Brand New Blogger Workbook, I had no idea how to present them on my website in a compelling way. I knew how they would benefit buyers, so I at least had some good phrases to describe it, but I wasn't sure how exactly I'd lay out the sales pages in the most strategic way.

A brand style guide is essential when you’re ready to get serious about your blog or business branding. It serves as a place of reference when you get visual materials done for brand, like invitations, cards, brochures, flyers, etc. You can even reference it yourself, if you do your own graphics. A brand style guide helps to ensure that there’s consistency in everything you create, so your brand is recognizable to others.

In this post, I wanted to provide a few examples of some font pairings that work well together. Pairing fonts is truly an art and it takes practice to become good at it. However, it’s certainly not impossible to learn with a little research and some trial and error. With time and effort, you'll be able to create font pairs effortlessly that articulate your blog or business in the perfect way.

I know when you’re not familiar with font types, it can seem like you have an endless array of options to choose from. And sure, there’s a little bit of truth to that. But it's really not true at all. lol. You see, all fonts have certain meanings, just like colors do. Some fonts are more traditional, some are modern, and some are even country western. It’s important to know a bit about the meanings of fonts first before selecting the options that will represent your blog or business.

The sidebar is an important part of your website. It can add to the beauty of your design and it can help you guide your website visitors to specific elements of your website that are important to you, like your signup forms, your Instagram profile, blog post categories, etc.

Your color palette for your blog or business explains what you’re all about before people start reading any of the words. If you do research on color meanings, you’ll quickly discover that all colors convey subconscious messages to us. For example, the color red conveys a message of passion, anger, and even hunger. This would explain why you see red used so much in fast food restaurant logos or in anything talking about love.

The footer of a website is often a “valuable piece of real estate” that's forgotten or neglected. Yes, it’s all the way at the bottom of your site, but it still matters because you can use it to make one last statement. Look at it as your last chance to wow people before they leave your website.

Squarespace used to be the most underrated website hosting platform. Now, it’s starting to get more of the recognition that it deserves, as one of the top places for hosting a website, along with Wordpress. Contrary to what many think, Squarespace can be customized beautifully to meet your needs and it automatically has a mobile platform built in. So as you design for desktop, you're automatically designing for mobile. This is one of the things that I love most about Squarespace because on some Wordpress websites, the mobile versions don’t align right and words and photos are sometimes cut off in awkward places on Wordpress.

If you’re new to creating your own visuals to represent your business or blog, you may not yet understand why your colors and font choices matter. You may randomly choose colors and fonts that seem “cool” or colors that you think you should be using because of the type of business or blog that you have. However, I’m here to let you know that the color and font choices that you use for your business or blog matter and choosing them should not be done haphazardly. They can make the difference between your business or blog appealing to your target audience or running your target audience away.

Squarespace is my absolute favorite website hosting platform. I love it because it’s so easy to use and it looks beautiful. You don’t have to search for hacks on how to make it perform the way you want it to. You don’t have to over-exert yourself to make it work properly on mobile devices. And you don’t have to do the absolute most to get an eCommerce store up and running. It’s great all-around! It’s especially good for bloggers who are re-designing their websites

Convert Kit and MailChimp are the top two email providers, among bloggers and online business owners. Both tools have pros and cons and I’ve used both of them, myself. However, I know when you’re in the beginning stages of getting an email list set up, you may be unsure about why you should choose one over the other and how you should even start growing your email list in the first place.

Your homepage is typically the VERY first impression that someone gets of your blog. As I’ve said before, you literally only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention when they visit your website and the page that people are most likely to start on is the home page. Therefore, you need your home page to be ALL THE WAY on point when someone visits it. It’s the place where someone will first learn what they will get of your blog, who you are, and what you can offer them.

Squarespace vs. Wordpress can be sort of a debate in the blogging and web design world. For me, the best option is one that's easy to use, easy to maintain and change when I need to, and one that presents itself beautifully. As I learned more about web design, my skills in Squarespace got even better and now my site wouldn't be what it is today without Squarespace. The main reason why I prefer Squarespace over Wordpress is because it's clean, easy-to-navigate, and contrary to popular belief about Squarespace, I was still able to make it unique.