The game is changing
For too long, experience creators, like you, have had to stitch together ineffective tools, pay third-party booking fees or create your own custom solutions in order to sell experiences online. These old ways don’t work because they weren’t made for you.
That’s why we’re on a mission to make the first Experience Commerce platform that’s specially designed for selling experiences. No more broken integrations, massive fees, and looking like every other experience business on a marketplace. With Easol, you’ll finally be able to build the website of your dreams.
Build your website, your way
No matter what type of experience business you’re running – whether it’s wellness, adventure, festival, sports, or food and drink – Easol gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can build your website. Here are three ways:
Option #1: Configure a free Easol Theme and add your styles
Easol’s free themes are website templates, specially built for experience commerce by world-class designers and experts. Once you’ve chosen your theme, you can select a configuration that best suits the experiences you sell (e.g. retreat, festival, workshop).
Acting as a foundation for your website, these themes can then be fully customised with your branding and content. Themes also come with highly configurable “content blocks” that are commonly found in optimised experience commerce websites, such as testimonials, FAQs, videos etc. Check out our step-by-step guide on customising Easol themes to learn more.
With these tools, you can create and launch your website effortlessly – no technical skills required!
This approach is perfect if you:
Are building a website for the first time
Need to launch as quickly as possible
Have limited budget or resources
Check out Unplugged, Imara Retreat, and Large Minority for an example of this approach.
Option #2: Customise and modify the code of an Easol Theme
Want more flexibility? Through Easol’s CMS (content management system), you also have the ability to add and edit custom code. This will enable extra functionality, styling, and special effects, such as hover effects and parallax (check out Lucid for an example).
These small changes can go a long way to add that extra wow factor and impress potential customers.
Don’t have the technical skills to make these modifications? No problem! You can tap into our Easol Partners Directory and hire a talented, Easol-approved developer. You can also find designers and branding experts to help bring your vision to life.
This approach is perfect if you:
Check out Atjan Wild Islands and A Week Awake for an example of this approach.
Option #3: Build a custom theme from scratch
Have a grand vision for your website? With Easol’s simple Liquid templating language, you have the option to create a fully custom theme from scratch. This means you get complete freedom in terms of site design and functionality, while also leveraging Easol’s other experience commerce features.
Again, you can access the Easol Partners Directory to hire great developers and designers to turn your vision into reality.
This approach is perfect if you:
Are very familiar with your customers and their needs
Have very specific requirements for your website
Have the budget for a designer and developer
Check out Envision Festival, Impact Marathon, and SurfYogaBeer for an example of this approach.
Best practices for building your website
Across these three approaches, we’ve seen great results across the whole spectrum. But there are a few steps you should consider to ensure a successful website launch.
(1) Plan out your website structure
Whether you’re using an Easol theme or creating a custom website from scratch, you should plan out a sitemap by listing out all the pages you need for your website. This will also make it easier to gather all the content you need for the website and ensure nothing critical is missing.
(2) Prepare your brand and content assets
Branding and content is a critical element of your website. It helps you stand out from your competitors and convert site visitors into paying customers. To make the website creation process as efficient as possible, prepare all your brand and content assets in advance. This includes:
(3) Use your branded domain
For the security of your customers and of your business, your website should live on your own custom domain, including your checkout. That way, you have full ownership of your site and data (as you should!) and you’ll look professional and trustworthy in the process.
Privacy changes in technology also requires custom domains if you want to continue tracking traffic and run effective advertising campaigns.
Once you’ve purchased your custom domain, you can connect it to your website via the Easol dashboard. Easol will automatically apply a free SSL certificate across your whole site.
(4) Don’t forget SEO and marketing integrations
A great website is nothing without traffic. Make sure your website is optimised for search engines, has analytics running in the background, and integrated with your other marketing channels, such as social media and email.
If you’re migrating your website to Easol, check out our SEO migration guide.
Build your website on Easol today
As an all-in-one platform for experience commerce, Easol doesn’t just let you create a beautiful website, it also comes packed with marketing features to help you sell more experiences. We also take care of web hosting, so you don’t ever have to worry about downtime during flash sales, promotions and launches when your site has more traffic.
Ready for the next step? Book a demo now to get started.
Lisa Simpson
Chief Creative Officer
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