If the idea of building a website with no experience is a bit overwhelming, then this tutorial is for you. Today, we are going to look at how to build a website using GoDaddy. Starting with a blank website, we will pick layouts, add text and images, build an online storefront, add logos and more. By the end, you will be ready to publish your very own website. Best of all, everything that we look at today is free. Let’s get started. To get started, head to the following website. You can also click on the card in the top right-hand corner. I have also included a link down below in the description. Once you’re here, select the three lines on the left-hand side, and then click "websites" and "website builder." As I mentioned earlier, everything we’re going to be doing today is completely free, which means you won’t need to use a credit card to get started. As we go through building our website, I’ll make sure to call out any features that do require a paid subscription. Let’s go ahead and sign up for a free account. The first step to building your website is to create a free account. I should note that everything you’ll see in today’s video is going to be free. Any features that are part of one of GoDaddy’s paid subscription plans, I’ll make sure to call out, but we’re not going to be using any of those in today’s tutorial. Go ahead and use the link in our comments to get to the GoDaddy website, and then decide in which way you want to create an account. Go ahead and enter your contact information and click "create." GoDaddy will start by asking you what some of your basic website needs are. I’ll be building an online storefront today for my company, Elizabeth’s Candy Company. Don’t worry if you’re not yet sure what type of features you want to include. You can add them on at any time. GoDaddy already has content, images, and template suggestions for a number of business types. Go ahead and enter what kind of business you have. Next, what is the name of your business? Based on the type of business that you told GoDaddy that you had, it will suggest common sections that you may want to include on your website. Again, if you are not sure what type of sections you want to include, don’t worry. You can always go ahead and add or delete sections later. I’m going to go ahead and add all of these sections for now to give me the greatest flexibility as I continue building my website. Here is what GoDaddy has built us based off of the information I’ve provided. You can see they’ve included a lot of colorful images, and they’ve already pre-built content here for me. This is already a pretty robust site, but don’t worry. We’ll go ahead and make lots of edits and changes to it so that it’s really customized to your business needs. So, let’s begin with editing our website. One thing you may have noticed as we were scrolling through this content is that GoDaddy has put everything on one scrollable page. Go ahead down to the bottom and click on Pages. Here you’ll see that GoDaddy has built us one long page that has all of the information we asked it to include as we were designing our features. If you want to have your website broken out into multiple pages, you’ll need one of the paid GoDaddy plans. Today, since we’ll just be talking about the free website builder, I’m going to have everything built on just one page. Now it’s time to begin customizing your website, and GoDaddy makes it pretty easy to do. Let’s start by selecting Theme in the bottom left-hand corner. Based off of the information we provided GoDaddy when creating an account, they selected a theme for us. But you can go ahead and try a new look. This is an easy way to redesign the website with just one click. It will show you here what our current theme is and what that main website looks like now, and it will then give you additional options that they have pre-built below. We’ll still be able to edit and customize these options, but it gives you a good starting point. I like this bright template, so I’ll go ahead and select Select. If you’re happy with the new design, great. Otherwise you can continue to repeat that step until you’re happy with the finished product. Now let’s talk about your company’s brand and logo. At the top of the page, GoDaddy has listed the name of your company. You can continue to use text as your logo, or you can upload an existing logo or create a new one. If you do not already have an existing logo for your business, GoDaddy will build one for you. Let’s check out what that looks like. First, they will ask you some questions about your business, including some words that might describe the personality. And then it will go ahead and use AI to generate a logo for you. Here is what GoDaddy has come up with. You can scroll through some of the other design options, and you can quickly change the color and text on the logo. You can also click on it and adjust a single color or a single image. While we’re not going to be walking through all of the ins and outs of creating a GoDaddy logo, it’s relatively intuitive and all of your options are displayed here on the left-hand side. If you want to use the GoDaddy logo, go ahead and select Continue. If you don’t want to create a logo on GoDaddy, you can upload an existing one. I have one on my computer that I’ve already created using Canva, which if you’re interested in how to create a logo on Canva, check out our other videos. Once it’s uploaded, select Insert. You can adjust the size of the logo as well as the alignment. Once you’re done, select Done, and then X out of the screen. And you’ll see your logo appear at the top of the page. I’m actually not happy with how this looks, so I can click back into it and make edits. Or if you want to eliminate the logo at the top of the page, just select the trash button. This is what the website looks like if I don’t include a logo at the top of the page at all. I think I like the way that this looks better, and I’ll add my logo in other spots later on. As much as I like the image that GoDaddy selected for my website, it doesn’t make too much sense for my business. Any time you want to change an image, all you have to do is click on it, and then select the image that you want to change. GoDaddy will provide a number of stock images, and you can view them based off of the type of business that you’ve told GoDaddy that you have. Or if you want a completely different type of image, you can search for it up here in the top right. If you’d rather insert your own media from the computer, you can simply click on Add Image, and then select the photograph from your computer that you want to use. Once it’s been uploaded, all you need to do is select Insert. If you’d rather have a video, all you need to do is click on Video instead of Image and go through the same process. Once you’re happy with the image you’ve selected, click Done. And now you can see what the new image looks like on your website. I’m actually really happy with what GoDaddy came up with in terms of the verbiage here in the text, so I’m not going to edit that, but if you want to, all you need to do is click on it. However, I do want to change the color scheme here to go a little bit more with the picture I have. So, I’ll go ahead and click on that, and then select Edit Theme Colors. I want to pick a red that’s going to pop a bit more on my page, so I’ll select red and click on Done. Again, you can edit this as many times as you want, and even after you publish your site, you can change the colors and text whenever you wish. You’ll see here that there’s a Call to Action button already created for you. Let’s click on that to see what we can do with it. You can add action buttons anywhere on your site, and it’s an easy way to allow a customer to navigate your website very quickly. However, you don’t need to use this button, and if you want to eliminate it, you can simply toggle it off. I do want a way for my customers to be able to easily navigate to the shopping section of my website as soon as they arrive. So, I’m going to keep the text of Shop Now, but you can change this to be whatever you want. You can also edit your button’s style. Once you know what action you want a user to take, you then need to select where that button is going to navigate you to. As I mentioned earlier, in the GoDaddy free version, you’re only going to have one page, your home page, but you can pack a lot of content onto that. If you’re using one of the paid versions, you’re likely going to have multiple pages constructed within your website. So, you can link this directly to one of those pages. You can also have a go to an external website URL, and this could include social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. If you already have an external shopping site set up, you can link that as well. You can also have this action button go to a phone or email address. In my case, I wanted to take users to my online shop that we haven’t yet created. But I do have a section of the page that’s already been created in the GoDaddy set up. So, I’m going to select products and then click on done. You’ll notice on the page that there’s these blue buttons with a plus sign on them. Let’s go ahead and click on this. This is where you can add additional content called sections on your website. GoDaddy has already pre-populated sections based off of what we told them when we created our website. We’ll go ahead and touch base on these a little bit later, but I just wanted to point this out now because you might wonder if this button is going to appear on the finished product. I assure you that it won’t. This is your first section here, your cover photo. Now we’re moving down to the second section, which has created an about Elizabeth’s Candy Company. Let’s edit this as it’s a bit too much information for my liking. We’ll go ahead and click into the top of the section. Here you can change the title as well as see the different section groups and edit them. You can see here that you can have up to 12 section groups with this particular layout, each having their own image and text accompany them. If you want to change the layout of the entire section, you can click on layout to see other templates that GoDaddy provides and find one that works best for you. I want to pare down the information that’s already included here. So, clicking back into this, I’m going to select the first section group within this section. Here I can edit the text, but what I’m most interested in is eliminating some of the photos. I can click on media and I can change this image. Similar to before, you can use stock images or upload from your computer. But as I mentioned, I think it’s a little image heavy, so I’m just going to delete it in its entirety. Even though I’ve deleted the image, I can continue to leave the text here. Let’s see what that looks like on the page. You can now see that that image that I previously had was removed and instead it’s just taking us to our story. I actually think that About Elizabeth’s Candy Company looks a little out of place as well. I can click on that and leave this blank. This provides me with a little bit more continuity, I think, so a user can just click on down to our story. You can continue to make edits in this section, changing the image and the text that accompanies it. You can also use GoDaddy’s AI feature to get copy suggestions. If you decide you want to delete this in its entirety, you can delete the group as well. As we continue to edit our website, let’s scroll down to the image gallery that we had GoDaddy create for us when we first began designing our website. If you want to include an image gallery, similar to how we changed images earlier on, all you need to do is click on it. Scrolling up, you have a few options. You can change the image and add one from your computer or use one of GoDaddy’s stock images. In this example, I’m going to select the gummy bears and select Insert. Once the image that you’ve chosen appears, you can zoom or adjust the image to a different type of layout. You can also shift the image around to center it or lift it up and down. Once the image is as you wish, there’s a few other things that you can do. One is adding an image description. The image description will not appear on the website itself, but instead help you become more visible in search engine rankings. As a search engine is unable to view an image and necessarily decipher what it is, this will allow you to describe your image for two purposes. One, it allows search engines to get a better idea of your website by describing the image in alternate text and allowing you to rank higher. But also, if your image fails to load for some reason on someone’s browser, this will display in the image’s place so that your website is still functional. If you wish, you can also add a caption to be included underneath or on top of your image. Once you’re happy with how this looks, select Done. And X out to go back to your image gallery. You can now see that we’ve adjusted this picture and we’ve added no text underneath or above. I want customers to be able to purchase directly from my website, and there’s a few different ways that you can do this. Early on, we asked GoDaddy to include an online storefront where we can add products and have customers buy directly from the website, as well as use the GoDaddy payment functionalities in order for customers to be able to purchase, handle shipping, tax, etc., directly from GoDaddy’s platform. However, this is something that you will need to purchase a subscription in order to use. So, I’m not going to dig too deep into it during this tutorial. But if this is something you’re interested in using, your first step would be to click Add Products. Here you’ll be prompted to add your products. If this is something you’re interested in adding to your website, you could go ahead and click on Explore Plans to learn more. I want to show you how to build a website completely for free today. So, let’s go ahead and delete the online storefront that requires a paid subscription. In order to do this, just click on the section and select Delete Section. I still want customers to be able to learn more about my products without having to come into a physical storefront and without having to purchase an e-commerce plan. So, let’s look at some of the options that I have. Here’s a menu and price list that GoDaddy included when we first designed the template for our site. Here you can see that you can add product descriptions, prices, and include different categories. If I want to change the design of this, I simply click on the section header. Here you can see the options for different templates. One of them has just text options. The other includes images. If I want to change the layout, I simply click on the layout that I want to use and then select Done. Before editing the text, let’s see what this looks like on the site. Now you can see that your categories have images within them. If I want to go ahead and adjust one of these images and text descriptions, I simply click on the text. Here you’ll be brought back to the main product page. Here you can see that you can add up to 64 different items. However, if you want to add more, all you need to do is add an identical section. To go ahead and change the description, just click into the text box. Here you can change your product name, edit the price, as well as add an item description for each item that you’ve included. You can also go ahead and change the image down here. And again, you can either upload images from your computer or use GoDaddy’s stock images. While the product list can be very handy and allows you to include a ton of different products, it’s still a bit manual. Because you’re not using the e-commerce plan, users would need to see these products and then send you an email or give your store a call in order to purchase. Like I said earlier, this is simply one option. Let’s take a look at an additional option that still can be used in the free subscription plan. Scrolling back up, let me go ahead and add a section by clicking on the plus sign in the blue circle. Scrolling down, I’m going to select PayPal button. Now, while this option is free to use for GoDaddy, you will need a PayPal business account in order to use it. Let’s go ahead and select Sell a Product or Service and add this to our homepage. Once it arrives, let’s go ahead and click in to edit. Similar to how we edited the product list, you could go ahead and name each section title, include the product name, price, if there’s an additional shipping fee, and a description and product image. Then click into the PayPal section. Here, you’ll need to create a PayPal account and link it to your GoDaddy account. This allows users to purchase the product directly on your website, but it will take them to PayPal in order to complete the transaction. If you don’t want to include a PayPal site, the product list is going to be your best option. However, if you do want a more seamless customer experience and collect payments directly from your website, this is a great opportunity to do it. If you do choose to subscribe to an e-commerce platform, feel free to grab the link from the comment section below the video, as this will help support our channel and take you directly to where you need to go. Once I’ve edited the text and connected my PayPal account, this is what the user experience would look like on your website, allowing someone to see the product and then select Buy Now. Depending on how your PayPal account is set up, you could also offer the opportunity to pay via multiple types of credit cards. So those are two options for free e-commerce tools that do not require a paid subscription plan. I’ve gone ahead and added a few products here, just to give you an idea of what it could look like. As we continue to look at what some of the other editable items on our website include, we come down to one of the additional About Us sections. Discover the sweetest treats at Elizabeth’s Candy Company. Let’s say that I want to edit this, but I want to adjust its location on the site. Going down to the gray bar at the bottom, select Content. Here you’ll be able to see all of the different sections that are included in your homepage. Again, we only have one page because we’re using GoDaddy’s free option. If you want to adjust where any of the sections are on your page, simply come over to the two lines on the left-hand side. Use the clicker to adjust the location on the page. I’m going to go ahead and move this up to the very top. At any time, you can adjust the location of the sections on your page without removing any of the content. You can see now that this section has been moved to the top of my homepage. Let’s scroll to the bottom of the page to see some of the other sections that we can customize. One of the first things we’ll come to is the Subscribe section. This is a great way to capture users’ email addresses and build brand loyalty. This is a completely free opportunity that GoDaddy provides. Here, you can click into the text and edit your coupon offer, including what percentage you want to offer off when signing up. You also have the opportunity to create a custom thank you message and coupon message. This is what the text of the email that users who sign up will receive. Again, this is completely free of charge. There are additional email marketing tools available. However, most of those options do require a paid subscription. And again, if you don’t want to include this section, you can always click Delete. Next, we come to the Contact Us section. Again, you can easily click into any of the text boxes and customize this entire section. There’s also a map here as well as Connect with Us, which includes a lot of links for social media. Let’s take a look at that in more detail. Here, you have the opportunity to connect a whole plethora of different social media sites. In order to do that, you simply click on Connect or Create a Page. Here, you can directly connect your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. accounts, and have users click on the icon and be taken to an external website. However, you don’t have to have all of these various social media links. Anything that you do not connect will not appear on your website. So, all of these icons here are simply placeholders. If you only include, let’s say, a LinkedIn or Facebook account, all of these other icons will disappear when you preview and publish your site. In order to look at some of the other sections that you can add to your website, simply click into any of the blue circles with the plus sign. Here, you can either search for specific features or scroll through to see the different templates that GoDaddy provides. You could add additional subscribe sections, even include Instagram feeds or reservations if you have a restaurant. You can include reviews, return policies, and additional buttons that can take users off of your main website and direct them to other locations. This is a fun thing to play around with. And remember, if at any time you add something and then decide you want to delete it, you can do that without affecting anything else that you’ve already built. Some of these, like the online store that we’ve already talked about, do require paid subscriptions. If you go ahead and add one of these sections, it will explain to you that there is a cost associated with it. And then if you don’t want to continue, simply delete. At any point, you can go ahead and click the preview button in order to see what your website would look like to an end user. Now that I feel comfortable with the content that I’ve added to my site, let’s go ahead and put it in preview mode. Here, I’m previewing my website as it would appear on a mobile device. Here, it includes all of the edits that we have made so far in our site. If we want to see what this looks like on a desktop view, simply change the view up here on the left-hand side. Here, you’ll see what the website experience is like when not on a mobile device. If you’re happy with how your website looks and you’re ready to go ahead and publish it in order for people to find it, click on publish. When using the free service, your website address will include GodaddySites.com at the end of it. If you want to upgrade to connect a custom domain, you can go ahead and do so by selecting a paid subscription plan. This would get rid of ending where it says GoDaddy Sites. If you already own a domain, you can go ahead and connect that here as well. Once you have published your website, you can still edit it at any time. Let’s take a quick look at some of the more advanced features that you might wish to use. Here, under the settings bar, you can look at things such as analytics and tracking information. You can also better optimize your site for both paid and organic search. Most of these are things that require a paid subscription, but you can go through them one by one to see what makes the most sense for your business. If at any point you want to unpublish your website, go ahead and click on the unpublish button. This won’t delete it, but it just will take it down from being shown online, allowing you to edit or revamp as you see fit. Congratulations! You’ve built a free website using GoDaddy! Although the experience may seem overwhelming at first, once you begin playing with the website, it becomes much more intuitive. If you need features that are not available using the free plan, check out the link below, which will help support our channel so that we can continue to make content like this. The sales should start rolling in anytime now for Elizabeth’s Candy Shop. I hope that you buy something sweet!