livebooks blog

While growing your portfolio may be a daily task, updating your website tends to get postponed. Because this is a common occurrence among many of our clients, we’ve added a number of features to ensure that your online presence mirrors your offline hard work. You won’t have to be a trained magician for this one – you will be able to make your pages invisible with one easy tap of your finger.

So far we’ve covered the tools that allow you to add contributors to manage your content, the ability to duplicate pages or blocks as well as your Save Design tool, just to name a few. In this week’s article we will focus on your Work in Progress pages and the feature that makes them truly awesome: keeping them invisible from your website until they’re ready to be published.

Any new page that you add to your website can be set as invisible. All you need to do is:

1. Go to your Content editor and click the gear icon attributed to the page you want to set as invisible.
2. When prompted with the page settings pop-up, disable Page Visibility.
3. The page set as invisible will now be displayed as orange and it will have the Invisible attribute above its title.

Now you can work on that page while still making changes to the rest of the site and publishing. While the page is set as invisible it will not appear on your website. When your page has the content you want, simply toggle back its visibility and hit Publish! Now your website will have a new page with awesome content that you can share on all your social media platforms.

Pro tip: When you toggle visibility for a page that has an Legacy URL, the redirect will be deleted automatically. Before making a page invisible make sure you’ve copied the redirect link so you can add it again once the page visibility is turned on. This will ensure that all legacy links will properly send your visitors to your new pages.

Your website is the online extension of your brand, and as such, it should follow the same visual guidelines as your entire business. While your logo is your own trademark that distinguishes your brand from your competitors, it alone does not tell your business’ story, its values nor does it depict the entire picture.

The tone of your business voice is an important aspect of how your market relates to you. Your marketing campaigns and how you choose to run them are indicative of your business’ core values. The fonts you use when addressing these messages can become trademarks of your brand. And the colors – think about the Coca-Cola red – not only is it unique, it’s also recognized by millions of people all around the world.

Colors matter when you create your brand, just as much as they do when they accompany your services and products. It is the fastest way to create a connection between your brand and your audience. This precise reason is why the liveBooks website templates can be customized beyond their initial state.

Let’s focus on adding borders to the images you upload on your website. These borders are a great tool to use that give each image its own presence on your website. They can be white and thin, which goes well with any website that has a color background, they can be colorful and bold, or anywhere in between.

There are two ways you can go about to adding borders to your images.

1. Sitewide borders – In your design editor go to Sitewide – Images. Enable Show borders and define their color, opacity and width. This will add borders to all images on your website. 
2. Gallery borders – In the design editor go to the page with the gallery or image you want to customize. Scroll down to the image settings and enable borders.

If you added site-wide borders and want to disable them on specific pages, you can do so by following the second set of commands. When you’re happy with the result, publish your page and the changes will instantly become visible.

When changing your colors you have to make sure you’re picking the right one. Going solely on visual similarity does not guarantee you’ve made the right choice and you need consistency in your brand. One reason you might not pick the right color is your monitor’s colors: sometimes it’s calibrated and it shows the precise colors you need, but most often it’s not.

That’s why you need to check the HEX code of your brand colors and add it when using the design editor. If you know the name of your color, you can find its HEX code here. In our design editor you can either use the HEX code, or the RGB (red-green-blue) inputs for your colors.

So what are you waiting for? Give this feature a try! Remember, you can always save your design before making drastic changes to your website, so your work is always safe.

Don’t have a website yet? We offer a two week free trial for all our websites, so you can play around our editors and create the perfect website for your business.

Your homepage, or start page, is the entryway to your entire website. It’s what your visitors see when they first access your website. It’s the best opportunity to catch their interest – it’s where their focus is at its finest. So why not use this to your advantage?

One of the many liveBooks features allows you to set any page on your website to be the homepage. Here are just a few ideas on how this great tool can work in your favor:

Set a Campaign page as homepage – online campaigns can help you gain more visibility. When running a campaign on your site, instead of editing your homepage, you can use another one specifically designed for your marketing purposes.

Set your Shop page as homepage – when you’re running sales, or have new merchandise you want to bring the attention to, this is the way to do it.

Set your Events page as homepage – any shows, fairs or other events you want to invite a large number of guests to are better shared the instant your visitors set their eyes on your website.

Set your Contact page as homepage – when you’re updating your contact information, email, phone number or physical address, you can opt to direct your clients directly to the Contact page for a set period of time.

To give any of your pages the homepage attribute, you need to follow these seven easy steps:

1. Log into your account.
2. Go to your Content editor.
3. Choose the page you want to use as homepage and click the Settings gear associated with the page.
4. Select Use as homepage.
5. When prompted on your decision, choose Yes. 
6. Your new homepage will have a small house icon next to the Settings gear. 
7. Publish your changes.

Unless you hide your original homepage, it will still appear on your website and function as any other page, leaving all your initial info intact. The only thing that will be different now is the first bit of information your visitors see when they enter your website.

As all businesses differ, so do the services and products they offer, and there are tons of ways to design your homepage with the liveBooks platform, whether it is a temporary one or the one you wish to settle on for a longer period of time.

To gain access to all the wonderful tools liveBooks has to offer, sign up for a free 14 days trial today!

What started in the late 1990s as a personal platform to share interests to the online public, blogs have steadily developed as trustworthy sources of information and pillars of communities whose followers may not be living in the same geographic region as the blogger, but their bond to the content creator and the rest of the members is as sturdy as they get.

Blogs come in many shapes: from the classic textual weblog, to vlogs (video blogs) or podcasts. But what emerged as an online-diary created and updated by only one individual is now becoming more obviously a very useful tool for businesses. Not only do they guarantee a constant flow of content, they are also the perfect answer to the newly-emerged question: WHO are these companies?

Trust is earned through hard work and commitment, and businesses rely on blogs more these days to assure the general public that their heart is in the right place. So they share their actions, their thoughts, their vision with everyone who would lend an ear. Whether in marketing campaigns or simple year-round content creation, businesses now turn to blogs to build better bridges.

The results? A reliable online community, an increase in brand visibility and more happy clients. If you’re not still convinced your creative business needs a blog, give this piece a thought.

Before starting a blog, you will need to take some things into consideration:

• You will need to be consistent, make a schedule and stick to it.
• You must find the topics that best suit you and your business and create your posts around them.
• You should know who your target is and adjust your writing persona to them.
• You should use an online platform that is easy to update.

We’ve already covered the top three items in a previous article, so make sure you give that a read to familiarize yourself to the process of starting a blog. So what we’re left is choosing the best platform for your followers and ultimately for yourself.

Use your website as the platform for your blog

There’s a chance you already have a website to showcase your products or services. It’s also very likely you’ve covered all the SEO bases and the website is generating valuable reach each day. So why use another platform for your blog when you can incorporate it to your website under a separate page? Think of all the perks this merger brings.

SEO
Take the SEO you already have set up for your website and add to the reach well-placed keywords within your blog posts can bring! Furthermore, think of your visitors: now they won’t have to change tabs to read your blog, instead they’ll spend more time on your website, where they can easily find your contact info and thus, making it easier for them to get in touch with you.

One platform
Adding a blog to your website means you don’t need to familiarize yourself with the functionalities of a stand-alone blog platform. This affects how you see your future blog posts: the easier it is to post them, the more likely you are to keep posting.
Choose a responsive platform that allows you to easily edit and upload your posts on the go. Once the restrains of your work-space are cut off, the limit to your possibilities goes with it.

One login
We have created tons of users and passwords for our online presence. Too many to keep track of. So why create another if you can bypass this altogether? Having your blog on the same platform as your website means you login once and all your tools are there for you to use.

Regular updates
We know updating your website is more than often postponed. If you had your website and blog on the same platform, though, every time you logged in to post something, you’ll inevitably be reminded that you need to address your website, too. Chances are you’ll find a couple of minutes to make those changes and provide your visitors with new content.

liveBooks is the website builder that allows blog incorporation on the same platform. Your posts, as well as your portfolio, are easy to update and share.

Try our responsive platform today and start your 14-day FREE trial!