Podcast Episode 54 – Building a Small Business Website from Scratch with Dawn Hoelz

In this episode of Website Success, Chrissy Rey interviews Dawn Hoelz of Snapdragon Event Design about her experience building a website for her new business. Dawn shares insights on choosing Squarespace, creating a brand identity, and the challenges of DIY website development. Chrissy shares tips to help Dawn clarify her target audience as she works towards completing her website. The conversation offers valuable tips for small business owners embarking on their own website creation journey.

Listen to the Episode

Show Notes

Chrissy Rey discusses website development with Dawn Hoelz, owner of Snapdragon Event Design. Dawn shares her experience using Squarespace to build her business website, including her process for choosing colors, creating a logo, and writing content. The episode provides insights into the challenges of DIY website creation for small business owners and offers practical advice on target audience identification and branding.

Key Topics

  • Choosing Squarespace as a website platform (0:01:22)
  • DIY approach to website development (0:02:42)
  • Importance of identifying a target audience (0:05:23)
  • Creating a brand identity and logo (0:08:17)
  • Using AI tools for content creation (0:14:15)
  • Timeline for DIY website development (0:16:43)
  • Balancing website creation with a full-time job (0:19:28)
  • Future plans for website and business growth (0:20:38)

Resources Mentioned

Guest Bio: Dawn Hoelz

Dawn Hoelz has worked full-time over the past 24 years in research administration but has always wanted to do event design and planning. She started doing wedding flowers in the early 2000s but wound up moving states and having a baby, so she put her event dreams on hold. Recently, she created Snapdragon Events to offer event planning, day-of-event support, and custom event decor services. It’s currently a side gig, but she hopes to one day make it her full-time job.

Transcript

[00:00:09] Hey everybody, this is Chrissy Rey with Website Success. Welcome back. Today I am talking with Dawn Hoelz. She is with Snapdragon Event Design. She’s based in Severna Park, and she does full event planning, day of services, and she also specializes in custom event decor for events, so none of that off the shelf stuff. She actually makes her decor, and she does this in the Baltimore area.

[00:00:44] And today we’re going to talk a little bit about Dawn’s business and what she does. And I’m also going to try to help guide her through a few things to help her finish up her website that she’s been working on for awhile.

[00:00:56] So Snapdragon event design, relatively new business. Is that correct?

[00:01:02] Very new. Yes. Very new.

[00:01:03] And you, so you don’t have your website up and running yet. You’re currently working on your website and it’s going to be in Squarespace, right?

[00:01:13] Yes.

[00:01:13] What made you choose Squarespace for your website?

[00:01:17] Snapdragon events is a side gig for me right now, but in my full time job I actually built our website and we built it in Squarespace, so it was the platform that was chosen for me, and it’s the one I’m most familiar with, so that’s why I chose to use it.

[00:01:30] What do you like about Squarespace?

[00:01:32] It’s pretty self explanatory, so I like that they have lots of templates you can use, you can drag and drop photos that they have available, you can put your own photos in, it is pretty I think, user friendly.

[00:01:45] Do you have web development experience from before or just, we were talking about you have worked on websites for other people before, but do you have development experience? Would you consider yourself a web developer, a web designer?

[00:01:58] Absolutely not.

[00:01:59] So Squarespace is a good choice for somebody who’s not a web designer, needs something user friendly. Would you say that’s accurate?

[00:02:06] Yes, totally. If you’re, you don’t know how, if you, yes, if you are not a actual web designer builder, it is a great way to create a simple website with minimal effort.

[00:02:20] And for the current website, so for the Snapdragon events, event design, it’s snapdragoneventdesign.com, are you doing it all DIY or do you have somebody? Okay, you’re doing it all DIY?

[00:02:33] I’m DIYing the whole thing myself. About the only thing I have is a family member who’s in communications who’s probably going to look at some of the content. But otherwise, yep. Doing it all myself.

[00:02:44] Okay, and are you pretty, pretty confident with it? You feeling pretty good about it so far?

[00:02:47] I am. I’ve had it I was able to build it pretty quickly. I think the only thing holding me back right now is just getting portfolio photos, trying to collect those from various events I’ve done over time before this was an official thing.

[00:03:01] So they’re not very well organized and I’m getting some testimonials.

[00:03:05] Okay, great. And we, as we talked about earlier, you have worked on a website. You said you were doing Squarespace for your day job. Have you used any other website builders for other websites in the past?

[00:03:19] Yes, many years ago a similar situation, the company I was working for needed a website and I built one in an Adobe product. I think it was called go live. It was much more difficult and much more felt more meant for programmer developer type people, but I somehow muddled my way through and created a website back then.

[00:03:39] That’s pretty impressive. I used to use what Was Macromedia, now Adobe Dreamweaver. And I am a professional developer. So I, I do it for a living. And, but that stuff is not super easy for somebody without a background in it, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to use. So I’m impressed.

[00:03:57] Yeah, absolutely not easy. I guess I was slightly lucky in the sense that I had familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator.

[00:04:05] So I knew Adobe products. It helped a little bit, I don’t know, but it was many years ago.

[00:04:12] So what kind of planning did you do for your website when you said I’m going to make a website. Here are the steps I’m going to take. What kind of planning did you do for that?

[00:04:21] Actually I didn’t I would say mostly what I did was go around and look at other websites for similar companies. So I looked at some other company event planning websites and tried to see what they have And then decided which pieces do I want to contact me page? Do I want a portfolio page? Do I, what was important to me to show? And then I just laid it out and then put things in the order that I thought they should be. And then it seems that websites these days tend to be much more minimal than they used to be several years ago. And more like one page ish, like you just scroll through one page. So I sort of tried to plan how I wanted that to look when you just scroll. So mine is just a, like a homepage, one page, but it just scrolls all the way down instead of multiple pages to click and link to.

[00:05:10] Who is your target audience for your website and for your business in general?

[00:05:14] Anyone and everyone. Anyone that’s throwing a party, whether it’s, a private at home party, whether a corporate holiday party yeah, just anybody that’s planning an event. And again my specialty is event decor. So I’m really into the design aspect, how the event looks, the feel, the theme. Everything from invitations to, flowers and parting gifts, all that kind of stuff. But I do full on planning and event coordination. So I can help get, vendors and locations and deal with those contracts and help manage day of and set up and flow and all that kind of stuff.

[00:05:50] Have you found in your experience with the events that you’ve been doing so far, is there one type of event or a particular type of customer that you find yourself working with more often than the rest?

[00:06:03] Considering I’m very brand new at this, I wouldn’t say I have found any kind of pattern yet. But I think what I’ve done the most or more just private events neighborhood parties. I did a gala for my son’s school. Some more private things rather than big, no big conferences or anything like that.

[00:06:24] Okay. And now I have to put my web designer hat on here and make the recommendation. Try to narrow your target audience a little bit. If you say you’ll work for anybody and everybody, It’s hard for your ideal client to see themselves in your website. So it, it does help to think about if you were gonna do a party for a client, what do they look like? Not specifically like physical characteristics or anything, right? But who are they? So are they a woman? Are they a man? Are they 30 years old? Are they 70 years old? What is their income level? Because certain people are going to be able to hire a party planner. Some people may not be able to hire a planner. So you might want to think about the sort of financial availability that they have.

[00:07:10] If there’s particular geographic locations that you prefer over others, then that might be worth adding. And there’s, so there’s two things that I want you to do after we’re done here. Number one is just describe your target audience a little bit more specifically than just saying everybody. Try to narrow it down a little bit and then create what’s called an ideal client or an ideal customer avatar, which is a fictional person that represents your ideal client.

[00:07:38] And the reason that’s super, super helpful is because when you pick out your colors for your brand certain colors are going to resonate with certain audiences.

[00:07:48] Actually, I’m going to skip ahead a little bit because we haven’t talked about brand yet. Did you already pick out your colors and your logo?

[00:07:54] Yes. So I have designed a logo. I’ve got the colors pretty narrowed down. Fonts are narrowed down. I guess they’re narrowed down in the sense of I have a particular font for the logo.

[00:08:05] And what colors are you using?

[00:08:08] It’s actually mostly in the purple realm. There’s purple and a little bit of a little bit of pink and white and lilac.

[00:08:17] Why did you choose those colors?

[00:08:19] I wanted to have my look be more modern. And originally I was looking at logos and designing stuff in teals and they were looking antique y and I was like that’s not really me! the feel I wanted. I wanted something a little bit more fun and streamlined and colorful and bright and modern.

[00:08:40] Okay. So what you’re doing, you are thinking of what your potential, your ideal client is going to like. Like the theme that you’re trying to give off. So you I’m thinking you have some idea of who your idea is.

[00:08:54] Yeah, I probably do have a better idea than what I expressed.

[00:08:58] Yes. And I find that a lot. I get a lot of clients that come in and say I already have my logo, I’ve already got my colors and. Just by looking at the logos and color, I’ll say why did you pick this? And they’ll sometimes they’ll say cause I like those colors. And that’s not a good, that’s not a good reason. Yeah, it is a good reason. You need to like your logo. You need to like your colors, but those are really going to be more for your client and your target audience. It needs to speak to them. They need to be able to relate to it. It sounds like when you said you wanted to go for a more modern look and feel. To me, it says, you didn’t say I like purple. Which, again, is totally fine.

[00:09:35] It’s actually not my favorite color,

[00:09:37] But there you go. But it sounds like the people that you want to appeal to like purple.

[00:09:42] Does that sound pretty accurate?

[00:09:45] Um, maybe I looked up what does it mean for logos that have purple in their color and they were like it’s like a represents like royalty. And I’m not looking to work for royalty by any means. But I think, you know, people probably that are in the middle to upper class would be more likely to be my clients.

[00:10:07] I wanted it to be something that was made me look professional and Not so much like I’m doing this as a side gig, which I am.

[00:10:15] So see, there you go. You said the upper to middle income.

[00:10:18] Upper to middle. Yeah.

[00:10:20] So you’re already narrowing down that ideal client avatar a little bit there. That’s one of the things you want to think about is that, that, those kind of demographics. And purple means luxury for a lot of people. It’s luxurious, it’s rich. Even if it’s not financially rich it’s got that rich feel to it. So that’s painting a picture for that ideal client. I think if you just fill it in a little bit more you’ll, it’ll help you and is your logo already done?

[00:10:48] I think so.

[00:10:49] Okay. Okay. Yeah, you haven’t put it up yet. So I was wondering your fonts you haven’t, you said you’re still working on your fonts.

[00:10:56] I have the font of the logo, but I haven’t really decided on a tiered font structure.

[00:11:01] Like your main, supporting fonts.

[00:11:03] Having some, a better idea of who that ideal client is might help you with picking your fonts because, there, there are certain fonts that, that some people will like. And some that they will not like. So if your ideal client, if you pick a font that they’re just like, no, that’s not a good, I don’t like the way that looks, they’re not going to like your website.

[00:11:21] You’re not going to speak to them. You’re not going to, they’re not going to see themselves in your website. So I do think it, it would be good to, to narrow that down a little bit before, before you finish the website, at least.

[00:11:33] For the ideal client avatar, if you’ve never done this practice before you want to think about their sort of identifying things.

[00:11:40] So you give them a name, like an actual name, like you can call them Martha or something. And then you say like, where do they live? What is their income? What jobs do they have? Do they have kids? What is their education level? What kind of things are they interested in like outside of your business?

[00:11:58] What, what are, do they like to go hiking? Do they like to go, are they outdoorsy? Are they more they like to go clubbing on a Friday night or, are their hobbies? All of the things like, what do they like to do? What is their personality like? What are some adjectives that describe them?

[00:12:13] And then you also want to think about what are their goals? What do they want? What do they need that you offer? What kind of things do they need?

[00:12:22] If you offer custom event decor, maybe one of their wants is that they just don’t like the off the shelf stuff. And so they want something that looks bespoke and really shines at the party. And everybody’s Ooh, where did you get that? That looks awesome. Those speak to their wants and their needs.

[00:12:39] And like the pain points that might be that they haven’t been able to find. Exactly the decor that they wanted in the store. So they might need something custom.

[00:12:49] And then you also need to think about where do they get their information from? And this is going to come into like when you’re sharing the website. You need to know like, where are they on social media? Where are they on the internet? What websites do they look at? Where do they get recommendations? Where do they do research?

[00:13:05] And then, also know a little bit about their buying behavior so that when you write your content, which we’ll get to in a minute but when you write your content, you’re speaking in a way that they’ll understand it and they’ll recognize themselves and say, Oh, yeah that’s exactly what I need. And you’re going to be speaking to them.

[00:13:23] I want you to do that when we’re done.

[00:13:25] Okay. Okay. I’ve been taking notes.

[00:13:28] Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Now speaking of content I know you said you are, you have a family member that’s helping you with the content?

[00:13:36] Yeah, she hasn’t looked at it yet, but she, I was just talking to her other days and she offered to read everything. So I’ll be giving her a link to look at it all.

[00:13:46] I will say that was one of the things that I found really nerve wracking when I started was what do I write and how do I write it? And I definitely turned to AI. So I, had my basic ideas I would put down and then ask AI to clean it up and make it sound pretty.

[00:14:03] And what tool did you use for that? Do you remember?

[00:14:06] I used the one that was in Squarespace. Squarespace now has an option for it. And I also, I think one of them was, I just wasn’t getting anything I liked. And so I went to ChatGPT.

[00:14:18] Okay, I will, another recommendation, for writing, I’ve found that CLAUDE aI, it’s C L A U D E dot A I, is really good, especially if you do that ideal client avatar exercise, and you basically paste all of that in there and say, I need help writing content for this person. And then it’ll write to speak to their challenges, their pain points, their wants, their needs, their behaviors and all of that stuff. It’s pretty good at doing that.

[00:14:45] Okay, great. Thanks.

[00:14:47] And I would recommend before you speak with your family member about the, or before you share the content with them is maybe try to do that ICA and share that with them as well. Cause it would probably help for her to understand who you’re trying to write for when she’s reading that content. And then, and we did already speak about your brand a little bit. So you’ve got your logo, your colors. What kind of planning went into getting all of that together? I know we talked about a little bit, but can you go a little bit more in depth in what you did as far as thinking about what your brand was going to look like?

[00:15:20] Yeah, and it what I planned for initially and what I wound up with in the end were totally different. I think when I started planning, I started thinking one of some of my favorite colors, so I started working with those and I knew that with the name snap dragon, I wanted to have a snap dragon in my logo. So I tried playing around with that. And I just I had a particular sort of style in mind. That was more. I don’t even know I antique was the first kind of term that came to my mind like a modern antique mix. But more I developed various logos and I used. I used Canva for creating my logo.

[00:16:02] It just kept evolving and changing and what I liked and didn’t like in the end were very different than what I thought they would be. But I shared lots and lots of logos with family and friends. I think they got sick and tired of seeing them all. But ultimately just went with the one that I liked the best. That spoke to me more than the others.

[00:16:20] Now this is a big question. I know a lot of my listeners are doing the DIY with their websites. How long have you been working on your website? So when did you start working on it? And when did you stop? Do you think you’re going to be ready to launch your website?

[00:16:34] Okay. So again, this is a side gig. So I haven’t been able to commit. If this was just all I was doing, I would have been done a lot faster. I probably started toying with it, mostly toying with the logo in December of 2023. Got the logo probably now down in February. And then started building the website. So I’ve probably been building for most of the spring. So yeah. And I’m hoping to be done. I thought I’d be done by now, but I just got held up with the two pieces of getting portfolio photos and getting some testimonials. So I just have to reach out and really get that and get the reach out to people and then get those photos organized.

[00:17:19] And I’m hoping to be able to finish it by the end of the summer.

[00:17:23] How many hours a week would you say that you work on it?

[00:17:26] Oh, I’m lucky if it’s one.

[00:17:29] Okay, so it’s been, let’s see, December, so six months, seven, seven months? Does that sound right?

[00:17:36] Yeah, if you’re including Logo in that development, yeah.

[00:17:40] Okay, so you probably worked on it like 30 to 40 hours so far, altogether?

[00:17:45] That sounds about right.

[00:17:46] And you said you wanted to try to launch it this summer. So you think maybe what are you like another six to eight hours?

[00:17:54] I would yeah I’m, hoping end of august beginning of september.

[00:17:58] Okay, that’s I mean for working on it, you know about an hour a week that’s completely reasonable totally reasonable timeline. For those of you listening if you are diying your timeline is up to you. If it’s your side gig, you’ve got to think about how much time you have to commit to actually working on the website. And it takes time. You can get a template, but you don’t want to launch a template. You want to launch your website with your content and your branding to speak to your audience. Cause if it’s a template and there’s 50 other businesses using the same template, you need to have some way to stand apart from them. That having it customized is really going to do that for you.

[00:18:37] So let’s say that you were starting over from scratch. Would you use the same process that you used this time? Or would you maybe try to tweak it a little bit?

[00:18:46] That’s a good question. I would have been a little better about trying to organize my photos and various things ahead of time and been ready for that so that when I did all the building I could just plug those in and be done.

[00:19:00] But I did all the building and now I’m sitting there with a portfolio page with nothing in it. And I would like to spend more time focusing on it than I am. So maybe planning better my timing and when I work on it and, probably could have done a better job about that and been done a little bit faster

[00:19:19] When you’re doing it as a side gig and you’re DIY and you got it, you got to use the time that you’ve got. And if you can’t necessarily make more time cause you’ve got your day job, so you can’t really pull hours out of that to work on your own stuff. So it’s, I, it can be a little tricky.

[00:19:34] Is there anything else that you would like to share about your website or about the process that you’ve been through so far or any plans that you’ve got for your website in the future?

[00:19:44] Just getting it launched, I think I also need to get my social media presence available as well.

[00:19:49] So I wanted to have the website done before I did much on social media. So I at least had, somewhere to put it. point. And I also, I made a mistake of printing up some business cards before I launched my website. So everyone I have to give it to, I have to be like, the website’s not up yet. So that goes to your previous question. What would you do differently? Um, so yeah, for I guess I don’t really, nothing else about the website, I think for as far as what’s to come. I think it’s just got to, I got Sit my butt down, get this last couple things finished and get it launched, get some social media going, get that connected to my website, and then see how it goes from there.

[00:20:29] And I guess future wise, we’ll see what kind of feedback I get on the website from people. . If I need to make changes or tweaks or that kind of stuff, and we’ll see where that goes. And I’m hoping one day I can do this, not as a side gig and have it be a full-time job.

[00:20:43] And maybe one day I’ll be able to have a actual developer clean up my website and make it nicer.

[00:20:49] You gotta take those steps. Some people they start with a professional from the beginning. Either, they don’t have the time, or the desire, or both to do it themselves. And that’s totally fine. And then some people want to DIY when they start out and that’s totally fine too. Both ways are totally fine.

[00:21:08] In some cases it ends up being less expensive to get a professional to do it, because if you think about how much time you spend on it versus how much money you could be making in that same amount of time. Sometimes it evens out or ends up going one direction or the other. Yeah, so it’s definitely something to keep in mind with that.

[00:21:28] Yeah.

[00:21:29] I so appreciate speaking with you. It’s really good to get the perspective of someone that is currently in the weeds, so to speak and working on their website and trying to get something launched. Thank you for coming on.

[00:21:40] Do you have anything else you want to share about your business?

[00:21:43] Just keep an eye out for the website, Snapdragon events. It’s snapdragonevents. com, right? snapdragoneventdesign. com is the website.

[00:21:53] You open to feedback from listeners?

[00:21:55] Absolutely.

[00:21:56] Okay. Yeah. So fill out her contact form and send her some feedback. If you’ve got it, if you’re willing to share, especially if you are her ideal client.

[00:22:03] Thank you everybody for listening with, again, I’m with Dawn Hoelz with Snapdragon event design. She is again, based in Severna Park and she works on events, event planning, day of services, and custom event decor in the Baltimore metro area.

[00:22:19] Thanks again for listening. Make sure you’ve subscribed if you haven’t already, and I will catch you in the next episode.

[00:22:24] ​