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Surprise, surprise… Our favorite and preferred website platform is Showit 🤪 It’s no secret that Showit is the website platform we use and always recommend to our web design clients. Today, we want to talk about why it’s our favorite. We’ll be diving into all of the things that make it our favorite, from design to SEO!
Limitless design ability (with no coding needed!)
There is no coding necessary, making your site completely customizable. You can do literally anything you want and don’t need to know code to do it. This is something unique to Showit; other platforms like WordPress and Squarespace require coding knowledge to add customizable elements. And let’s be honest – some of us just don’t want to learn code OR don’t have the time to commit to learning it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t add code to your Showit site; it just means that it’s not necessary. If you look at our newly branded website, you’ll see that on some of our pages, we have logos that are spinning or icons that are dancing. These can easily be added with a little bit of code to create some fun visual movement on your site. Now, we know nothing about code (or very little), so to get these fun elements on our site, Court used some code from our friends over at Northfolk who give you clear steps on how to add fun elements like this to your site with a little bit of code – that they ALREADY did for you.
The biggest selling point of Showit is the drag-and-drop capability. This is one of the reasons you can make your site completely custom because you can put anything, ANYWHERE on your site – no restrictions. Elements like — paragraphs, headings, images, videos, icons, whatever—and drag it to where you’d like it to be.
A custom design option for Showit that I (Court) am absolutely in love with is the customization of fonts. You can upload all of your brand fonts and use them HOWEVER you want within your site design. You might be asking, “Okay, so why does that matter?” Well, with other platforms, you’re limited to what the design settings are for headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. You may be able to use your brand fonts, BUT they are limited in how you use them.
You can design a custom mobile site — just as you do the desktop version.
And it can look different from your desktop version! Seeing as Google is conducting mobile-first indexing lately (meaning Google only crawls mobile), it’s important to be able to design a custom mobile version. Therefore, you don’t have to rely on your desktop layout and design for your mobile design, which is HUGE.
With that being said, you can sync your settings between mobile and desktop with a new feature Showit just rolled out – merge using mobile or split mobile and desktop. You can edit design elements within your mobile and desktop site designs at the same time, or split them to edit both independently to quickly and easily customize your site.
You can have spot-on branding.
Because you’re in control of your design, you can have spot-on branding. You don’t have to sacrifice elements of your branding because of the limits of your website platform.
Here are a few examples:
Design Settings
- Site Styles (color palette, type styles, global styles)
- Fonts (upload brand fonts)
- Link colors, hover colors, etc.
Media Library
- All of your branding assets
- Photography and graphics
- Can make folders to keep things nice and organized
- Don’t forget to optimize your images by using a program like TinyJPG or Compress JPEG so your images aren’t too large, causing slow page speed (a little SEO tip for ya there!)
- Changing colors
- Adding logos and submarks wherever as playful touches throughout
- Images and shapes and icons
Supportive community
Their customer service is TOP NOTCH, which is so crucial for something like your website. If something goes wrong, you need a responsive and helpful support team. Every time we have to reach out to Showit’s customer service, we have a positive experience. Plus, it’s real humans monitoring the chat, not bots that take you in loops until you get frustrated enough to figure it out yourself. 😅
They’re always available via live chat, and the wait time is never that long. They send the occasional GIF, and if you know a thing or two about us, we looooove ourselves some good GIFs. Whether you want to add an interactive quiz, embed an email opt-in, have a question about something, need tips or tricks, etc. – all you have to do is ask their customer service or pop over to their Facebook Page Showit User Group – aka the Showiteers!
It’s great for SEO!
Showit has all of the features necessary for SEO. You can easily update meta descriptions, page titles, alt text, and more. Plus, Showit integrates with WordPress for the blog, which means you can use plugins like Yoast to make sure your blog SEO is on point.
FAQs About Showit
Is Showit just for photographers?
Not at all. We’re currently working on three custom Showit websites for our clients right now. One in the podcast industry, the other a commercial real estate company, and the last a Toxin Free Lawyer. We occasionally take website designs with our SEO projects – otherwise, we work with website designers.
Where can I buy templates?
Sometimes starting with a template is worth it because building a custom site from scratch can be, well… daunting and a lot of work. Tonic Site Shop has really beautiful templates to get you started, and if eventually you want to make it more custom, you absolutely can! Use our code DuoCollective15 for 15% off Tonic templates! Showit has some free templates, too!
Do they have a free trial?
You can get one month free of Showit with our referral link! This gives you plenty of time to play around with the platform and decide if it’s right for you.
For us, Showit is hands down our preferred website platform simply because you just can’t compete with the level of customization. If you’re looking for a platform where you can have complete freedom to design your site exactly how you want while also being able to easily update and manage your site design long-term, Showit is your answer.
If you’re considering a move to Showit as your preferred website platform or have recently moved over to Showit, we hope this episode was helpful!
If you liked today’s episode on The Duo On Air Marketing Podcast, don’t forget to leave us a review & subscribe!
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Abbey Oslin and Courtney Petersen are Minnesota-based marketing experts, educators, and co-founders of boutique marketing agency Duo Collective, which specializes in SEO, social media strategy, and branding for small business owners and creative entrepreneurs. To learn more about Duo Collective or to inquire about working with our team, head over to www.duocollective.com.
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And to submit a topic or a question for next week’s episode, send us a DM on Instagram! See you on Monday!
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