Building a great site is good for your business. Below are some common tips and tricks.

Colors

We’ve chosen color themes that we know work well together and for light and dark mode. You can view your currently selected Theme by clicking the [Theme] button in the top toolbar in the designer view.

That said, you can still recolor specific sections by selecting a different background color from the Color switcher. Text and button colors will update automatically based on the background color selection.

If you’re interested in a sequence of sections with the same background color, like all dark or all white, toggle on the Bottom border setting in the Theme settings right sidebar to add a subtle horizontal line between sections.

Font pairs

Heading fonts with unique visual styles, and paragraph fonts are optimized for legibility. After selecting a font pair, there are still several simple customization options you can further make.

Heading size

Control the scale of all headings with the slider. Short headings can have more emphasis at a larger size, while longer headings may be more legible when shown smaller.

Heading weight

Thicker weights command attention, while thinner weights convey simplicity or precision. Not all heading fonts support this feature.

Paragraph text editing

Most instances of paragraph text have a rich text editor with bold, italic, link, and bullet list options. Some these best practices:

• Break long text into another paragraph
• Add links to direct customers to your scheduling tool, external blogs or articles, etc.
• Emphasize links or pricing info by making the text bold
• Condense ideas into a bullet list (keep text left aligned if using bullets)
• The Article section paragraph editor includes a dropdown to apply heading styles. Headings help organize long form text content into blocks.

Make a good impression

• The first few sections, Header, Intro, and Services are the first ones your customer will see, and are your best chance to make a good impression.
• Add links, social icons, to the header, but not too many as it’ll look crowded. These links provide social validation for your business and can also be a way to connect them to other portfolios or posts of your work
• The initial website tries to create a strong foundation for headings and descriptive text but please edit and make it authentic to your voice and brand
• Try to keep the text in the Services section about the same size for each service

Logo/company name

Solo websites display your company name in the header and footer. You can edit this from [Settings] which you can click from the top toolbar of your page from the designer view.

If you have a custom logo, you can upload it for use in the header and footer sections. A PNG file with a transparent background is recommended so that the logo can appear on different background colors. Choose a background color that plays well with your logo color for the best effect.

Images

• Initially generated sites feature stock photos as a foundation to get you started, but consider uploading your own. Having your own pics can create a more authentic feeling and result in more business.
• Gallery section has options for a “Grid” and “Carousel” layout. Choose the one that works best for your type of business.
• Crop photos to show only the most important details.
• Consider using the “Shape” feature to mask images with fun non-square shapes.
• When using background images with a transparent overlay, consider selecting a color theme with a dark overlay and light text.
• Use the Photo Banner section as a visual separator between text heavy sections
• If you upload a custom image, use higher resolution images and the correct aspect ratio. Recommended image sizes and formats
• If you upload a custom image that you don’t want cropped in any way, consider setting the style to “Fit”. When to use image fill vs. fit

Contact form

Make sure to add your email address so if your customers submit into your contact form, you get the email of their message

Collect reviews

Reviews are good for your business. Add a link to the header or footer of your page to request Google Business Profile reviews from your customers.

Custom domain

Websites with a custom domain simply get more traffic. Custom domains display your brand, are more memorable and index better by Google.

SEO

To access SEO settings, click the [Settings] button in the top toolbar in designer view of your website.

Within Settings right sidebar, you will see that Solo has generated a page title for you. If you edit this title, use words that your customer might use when searching for your website.

In the keywords section, you can further edit or add words or phrases that a customer might use to search for your site. Use words or phrases that your customer might use but don’t add to many, just focus on the most common ones.

Finally, Search Indexing is turned-on by default but if it’s not on, toggle this on to make sure your website is included in the Solo sitemap which Google and other search engines may use to make your site discoverable from search.

Summary

Above are a range of common tips to make a beautiful site for your business. We sometimes feature sites in our upcoming newsletters and/or on our website. If you’d like to be considered for inclusion, please send an email to support@soloist.ai and let us know.