How to Make a Website With Strikingly

If you’ve never heard of them, Strikingly is a very polished website builder, which enables you to create a website or ecommerce store in a matter of minutes, with no technical knowledge.

In fact, they even have a free plan, so you can get plenty of web building experience before paying to get a custom domain or additional premium features.

In this article, I will walk you through how to make a website with Strikingly, and publish it for absolutely no cost. Once you are ready though, you can then move to a paid plan which comes with extra benefits, which I will explain below.

Step one: Sign up to Strikingly

First step is to sign up on the Strikingly website.

You will have to confirm your email

Step two: Choose a website template

Then choose one of the 100+ great looking templates they have available. All these website templates are designed for you to make a website with Strikingly that works just as well on a mobile or tablet device, as it does with a laptop or desktop computer. This responsive design is extremely important nowadays!

The website templates are all categorised to make it easier, into 7 main categories, being;

• store
• business
• startup
• creative
• personal
• blog
• blank

This was probably the hardest decision when you make a website with Strikingly; that is, which template to choose? Luckily, the team at Strikingly know what most people are like, and the Strikingly website editor has been built to allow you to easily change templates later too.

You can click Preview on any of the templates, to see a larger version, and remember you can always add and remove sections. You need to be looking at the general layout, not so much the images, which you will upload yourself.

Remember that

Step three: Edit your template

Once you have finally settled on a website template (congratulations!) and you are ready to make a website with Strikingly, then all you need to do is click the Start Editing! button on the top right of the screen.

Then you can begin to change images and text content in no time at all.

Here is a very short video (43 seconds) we have created, showing how easy it is to edit the text and add a link to another website.

You can add new images either from photographs you have taken, or stock images you have found, add a call to action, embed a video and even set up an ecommerce store.

Step four: Start free or upgrade to Pro

When you launch your Strikingly website, if you are on the free plan, you get a sub domain, like premier-web.strikingly.com However, if you upgrade to their pro plans, you then get to either bring your own domain name (like my-domain-name.com.au), or register one through Strikingly.

They have three different plans, at time of writing, and they are all in US dollars of course. These are;

Limited ($8/mo)

2 Limited sites
Unlimited free sites
Connect custom domain
Free SSL for custom domain
Free domain for a year!
1 GB storage per site
50 GB bandwidth
Up to 5 pages per site
Sell up to 5 products
5% transaction fee
24/7 chat support

Pro ($11.20/mo)

3 Pro sites
Unlimited free sites
Connect custom domain
Free SSL for custom domain
Free domain for a year!
20 GB storage per site
Unlimited bandwidth
Up to 100 pages per site
Sell up to 300 products
Remove Strikingly branding
Custom Forms
Password Protection
Site memberships
Paid subscription memberships
Customise Checkout
Store Product Reviews
Pop-Ups
Site search
Mobile action buttons
Embed custom code
Custom font upload
Import/export products
Restore historical version
2% transaction fee
24/7 chat support

VIP ($34.30/mo)

5 VIP sites
100 GB storage per site
Unlimited bandwidth
2,000 Active Contacts
Sell unlimited products
0% transaction fee
Multiple Membership Tiers
Multi-Language & Auto-Translation
Send newsletters
Live Chat widget
Priority customer service
Phone support (English)
Dedicated account manager

Personally, I feel that Pro plan gives you the best features for the price, however many people have also found that the Limited plan works well enough for them; depending on what you require. Obviously, if your website is crucially important to your business, then perhaps the VIP{ plan would be most suitable.

Step five: Launch and celebrate!

Now comes the fun part; launching your brand new Strikingly website and getting your first visitors.

You may have read our 10 point website checklist article, which (spoiler alert!) lists these ten critical elements to any great website launch;

• Make sure you have the latest version of CMS
• Integration of website analytics tools
• Check whether the SSL certificate is working
• Test the internal links and navigation of your website
• Browse your website using a mobile phone
• Ensure that the admin email address is correct
• Enable search engine indexing
• Integrate some SEO plugins and set meta descriptions and SEO titles
• Optimise several aspects of the performance of your website
• Never proceed without a backup policy

However, many of these are already taken care of, when you build a website with Strikingly. This is one of the main benefits when you make a website with Strikingly or other similar tools; they take care of things like SSL, backups, etc without you needing to consider anything.

Monitor your success

Once launched, the inbuilt statistics within Strikingly give you an amazing amount of detail.

These statistics are really valuable for you to determine what inbound marketing or other digital marketing is working well for your website and brand.

Conclusion

There we have it! In no time at all, you have learnt how to make a website with Strikingly. All the best in launching your new creation to the world, and attracting traffic and customers.