Starting a business is daunting. There are so many decisions to make. We know, we just launched a business Lynk Partnerships and The Workin Moms community. Before we made any decisions, we did a bunch of research and consulted with people in our network to find the best tools for our purpose. Just to clarify, when I am talking about tools, I mean programs, applications and digital tools to build a business. 

Logo

Your logo is one of the first interactions that potential customers will have with your business. It’s understandable to want it just right. When we got to the planning stage where we started discussing logos, we decided it was best to hire someone to create the design and colours. There are a few different platforms out there for getting design work done but we decided on Fiverr because Alessia had used it in the past with good results. You can choose a designer based on your price point, style, timeline and file type and there are usually many different options available. 

A tip from our experience is to give them some guidelines on colours, what you would like included, what you don’t and generally, what you are looking for. For our logo, we didn’t like the first round of colours or designs but we went back with specific feedback and were very happy with the result. 

Domain name 

If you want to have a website for your business then you need to use a domain name. Generally you lease a domain name. You can check to see if your desired domain is already taken. Depending on which country you live in and where you will be marketing your business, you can choose a different top level domain such as .com, .ca, .org etc. If you are interested in learning more about domains, this article from Moz has some great information.

Some website builders offer you to purchase a domain through them but personally, I have just found it easy to purchase (lease) a domain then attach it to my website. When we were looking to buy our domain names, we purchased through Web Hosting Canada (WHC). They allowed us to buy both the .ca and .com top level domains. WHC offers other options for top level domains as well. They often have sales on their domains, you can check them out through our link.

Website Builder

You’ve got your logo and you purchased your domain name; now it's time to get started on building your website. There are so many options available depending on your knowledge of building websites. We both have some prior knowledge of websites, maybe me more so than Alessia but we both wanted something that looked really good, was easy to maintain and didn’t require us to learn how to code. 

This left us with two options: Wix and Squarespace. We ended up choosing Squarespace for a few different reasons, one being price and the other being we really liked the templates available on Squarespace. For any of the templates, you can change the colour scheme to match your brand colours. It is also very simple to add, remove and change different elements of each page. A tip that really helped us is we spent some time beforehand mapping out what we wanted our website to look like and what elements we wanted to include. This really helped us stay focused when we were building our site. We liked Squarespace so much that we built two different websites using it. If you are interested in using Squarespace, I have a link for 20% off for the first five people that use the code MJ2FLZZMJ5 when purchasing a monthly or annual website subscription. The offer expires June 6th 2024 at 11:59pm EST.

If you have questions about these tools or about starting a business, please send us a message.