Do these 4 things BEFORE you start customizing your Showit template.

Are you totally in love with your new template purchase? Can’t WAIT to dive in, make it your own, and share it with the world? It’s easy to want to dig in and immediately start switching out photos for your own and adding in your copy. But wanna know a little secret? If you go in without a plan, you’re likely going to run into roadblocks that will trip you up along the way. You run the risk of getting stuck, uninspired, and putting it all off until you can pick back up the pieces.

By taking care of these 4 things before doing anything else, you can set yourself up for success to quickly and easily customize your new Showit website template and get the thing launched already!

Don’t feel like reading? Here’s a video version instead! And after watching, I invite you to stick around for the remainder of the series all about setting up your Showit website template.

Determine Your Colors

You’ll want to consider the four elements of a good color palette – a dark tone, a mid tone, a light tone, a pop color. When you have these four color types that complement each other well, you’re off to an awesome start. 

Now when designing your website, there are plenty of instances you will certainly need a black and a white, or slight variations like a really dark charcoal and maybe a super soft cream color, so throw those into the mix.

If there’s another color you’re dying to use, certainly toss it into the mix, if it balances well with the others. But I like to leave room for 1 or 2 colors that are shades of my main or favorite colors in that first set of four we talked about earlier. 

Once you have them figured out, you can actually add them into your website template as a preset, so that the whole website automatically adjusts to those colors and instantly looks like your branding. Check out the video above to learn how to do just that.

Logo

If you don’t already have one created, that’s the first step and if you’re looking to hire someone to design one for you, along with determining all of your colors and fonts and everything else, I’d love to chat!

But when customizing your website, it’s helpful to have either svg or png versions of your logo. These versions will have a transparent background that can beautifully be placed over other colored backgrounds or images.

Another tip when preparing your logo is to make sure you have a few different color options to use. The main ones I recommend is one with your primary brand colors, one in all black, and one in all white. It’s nice to have them ready to use in case one version isn’t showing up well on a different colored background.

Once you have your logo files ready, go ahead and upload them to your website’s media library to have ready to use when it comes time to design.

Fonts

Of course, you can use the preloaded fonts that come with the design, but if you have your own brand fonts, you’ll want to input those instead. First of all, if you choose to just use the preloaded fonts, be sure to check if your template requires you to purchase any of the fonts used. It is illegal to use a font that you yourself don’t have a license for. 

Google Fonts is a great resource for finding free fonts that are totally okay for anyone to use, and actually they are all available already on Showit to use, so no need to get a license for those. If you’re looking for a place to find some premium fonts that stand out from what your competitors are using, Creative Market is a great place to look. They have tons of beautiful and unique fonts that you can incorporate into your brand and website! Just be sure you will be able to have access to a web font version or a WOFF file that you can use online.

Now, be sure to set up the global settings for your fonts in the Showit design settings. You can preset 4 different styles: your title, heading, subheading, and paragraph text. That will help you maintain consistency in your font styling throughout your website.

Photos

Next, it’s time to prepare all of your photos. You CANNOT use the photos that are already preloaded into the template, as they are another photographer’s work.

Now whether you have professional branded headshots and photos of your own, or you’re using your own purchased or free stock photos, either way or both is totally great! Now is the perfect time to get all of them prepared and compressed properly for web and uploaded into your Showit media library.

Once you have these 4 things completed, you’re ready to dig into the fun part of customizing your Showit website template! And the best part? It will go WAY more smoothly now that you’ve got yourself locked and loaded to dive in. Happy customizing!

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