S1, E19 of the Dream Doers Podcast – “Why You Need A Showit Website, Like, Yesterday!”

🎧 Still stuck on a website that feels clunky, confusing, or nothing like the brand you’re building
Feeling overwhelmed by tech and unsure when it’s finally “worth it” to invest (or afraid to get it wrong)

This episode is for you.

In today’s episode, Jana Marie pulls back the curtain on Showit, the website platform she wishes she had invested in years earlier. After resisting the cost and riding the fence far too long, she realized Showit was not an expense at all, it was the system that finally made her businesses feel aligned, professional, and sustainable and gave her TIME back.

Jana walks through the backend live, sharing how she runs multiple brands, podcasts, blogs, shops, client portals, and even link-in-bio pages from a single Showit account. More importantly, she explains why strong systems matter so much, especially when life gets heavy, seasons change, or you simply do not have the capacity to hold everything together on your own.

This episode is for creatives, entrepreneurs, and dream doers who want their online presence to work for them instead of draining their energy.

💬 Leave a comment about what you want to see more of in the back end and I can do some YouTube shorts for you. What other questions do you have?

🌈 If this episode helped you rethink what your website could be or gave you permission to finally stop waiting, share it with someone who is building a business and needs systems that actually support their life.

📝 Read all the Show Notes (script) on our blog: ⁠https://www.janamarie.co/blog⁠

✨ Grab your first month free with Showit at: https://showit.com/r/tvfbwd26

🎙️ Follow @thedreamdoers.podcast on all platforms and find resources at www.thedreamdoers.com.

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Resources to favorite designer templates:

• Grab 1 month free with Showit: https://showit.com/r/tvfbwd26
• Tonic Websites: https://tonicsiteshop.com/ *Shop our affiliate link here: https://tonicsiteshop.com/?ref=11243
• Northfolk Websites: https://www.cotfc.com *Affiliate code coming soon
• With Grace and Gold Websites: https://withgraceandgold.com/

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✨ Episode Highlights:

00:00 Introduction to ShowIt: The Ultimate Website Builder
00:28 Overcoming Hesitations: Investing in Your Business
00:42 Navigating Life’s Challenges
01:49 Introduction to Showit and Account Setup
04:36 Designing with Canvases and Templates
07:18 Customizing Visual Elements and Animations
10:23 Branding and Design Settings
13:13 Creating Multiple Websites and Plus Sites
15:54 Integrating Podcast and Business Pages
18:51 Exploring Templates and Design Options
21:20 Cost-Effectiveness and Value of Showit
23:51 Building Custom Websites for Clients
26:25 Managing Plus Sites and Custom Domains
29:03 Design Efficiency and Alignment Tools
34:41 Introduction to Design Tools
35:15 Understanding Screen Size Adaptability
37:29 Creating Clickable Elements
38:59 Organizing Your Media Library
39:42 Customizing Canvas Views
43:03 Previewing Your Design Changes
44:37 Utilizing Parallax Effects
49:05 Investing in Essential Tools
49:10 Maximizing Instagram Links with Linktree Alternatives
50:12 Customizing Your Online Presence with Showit
01:04:44 You Tube – Outro – Dream Doers.mp4

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S1, E19 Show Notes:

Jana Marler (00:00)
Hi everyone, I am so excited for today’s topic. I remember when I first started my business, there were so many programs to consider and I rode the fence many years before diving into some of these programs because of the expense. I get it. But today I’m talking about ShowIt, the king of all website builders for creatives and businesses. I wish I would have invested in this much sooner than I did. So today I’m going to be showing you the back end and why you need to stop waiting.

pop the fence and dive in like yesterday.

Jana Marler (00:42)
Welcome back to the Dream Doers podcast. This is where we talk about how to soar through the shit storms of life and keep our life and our businesses sustainable through all of it. I went through a lot this past decade and everyone asked how I survived it all. And then I realized I had systems in place that were like a well-oiled machine operating my businesses for me when I needed to navigate a whole lot of the trauma and grieving I was going through.

So one of the top three programs I invested in finally after years of watching and trying to figure out if I should was Show It. I am so glad I did and I wish I did sooner. So if you’re listening in today on your favorite podcast platform, feel free to do that. But if you want a visual to see the back end of what I’m doing and talking about, I’d love to encourage you to hop on over to YouTube.

and see it all while listening go back to the video after you’ve listened in from your car, gym or wherever you may be. Okay, let’s dive right in. I’m going to be screen sharing today with you so you can watch me navigate it all and simplify it even more than it already is. I’m so excited.

Jana Marler (01:50)
Okay, the very first thing you’re going to do is go to showit.com and create a free account. Once you have a free account made, you can open up app.showit.com, log in with that account information, and this is what it looks like. Now, I’m gonna walk you through my podcast website. There’s so much I wanna say so quickly, so let me just try to wrap my brain around all of the awesomeness of Show It and start here.

So for the visual people, this is money. You can see on the right, the desktop version, and then on the left, you can see what it would look like on a phone. Now the really cool thing with Showa is that the sky is the limit. You can make both of these identical or they can look totally different. You can turn off pieces of your desktop so that it’s only on mobile. You can turn off things from your mobile that’s only on your desktop. It’s so cool.

Okay, I’m gonna scroll down for those who are watching me and you want to see things you’re going to see as I hit certain sections, it kind of highlights it. These are called canvases. So they work on horizontal canvases. So you’ll have your traditional header at the top.

then you might have an intro section, maybe you have a video playing in the background, but each section horizontally is how you’re going to design this. Now, Show It is such a beast, I’m telling you. They’ve been doing this for so long. They just know what we need and they’ve catered to all of our voices. Anything we say we need, they build it. What’s cool is that they have tons of free templates already designed that you can go into. ⁓

and you can select those and have a starter. This is what I do every time I build anything. I have bases and then I tweak as I go. You can also find designers like Tonic

or North Folk and there’s tons of other people on Etsy that offer templates you can go in and buy and I’ve done that before too. I tweak them so much so it ends up looking like a custom website that I’ve built but at least it gives you a starting space. So see how you can see each section. This is a canvas. Once I select those sections it’s going to open up the left side which is sort of like a Photoshop.

layer if you are someone who’s been in Adobe programs before they work off of layers so you can see each of those sections those canvases I keep mentioning on the left and then inside of those sections it’s going to do a little mini drop down so that you can see page title the about and as you hover over them notice on the right side you can see exactly where those are on the screen if you want to resize something like your logo

You can go directly to the visual, select it.

and then make it bigger or smaller and move it around. How amazing is that? If you want and you’re kind of a non-visual person and you would rather mess with the pixels and the layers, you can click on these on the side and you can see them highlighted. Then you can go to the right side and tell it where the X and the Y axis is that you want it to go. You can change the width there or the height.

But why do that when you can just select a corner and make it bigger and change the size? This is so easy. I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter if you have design skills or not. You can operate Showit. And the reason why I am so obsessed with Showit is because it is easy. I went to school for visual communication. So that was graphic design. I had a minor in photography.

Everything is how we are visually communicating with each other. When I was in school, we had to go deep into the back end and we had to build all of the different layouts and pages on the back end. We didn’t get to see it like this and then just click on it and change it. So show it is awesome for this reason. You can see it all right here. Okay, let’s talk a little bit more about what some of these things mean on the right.

So if you click on this first canvas below my header, you’re going to see its name. So I named it intro one. You can name it whatever you want. You can also put it in a stacking order. So if you start looking into really creative show at websites from amazing designers, they will make things higher so that when you start scrolling, maybe my header stays in place.

and then this intro section I’m working in right here, maybe it then pulls up over the header as if the header is disappearing. There’s so many different stacking orders you can do with individual photos, individual icons, text, that it gets really fun and I’ll show you another, I have another website that I can open up and show you what that looks like and why you would need that. But you’re going to find all of the details on the right. So if you wanna change the background,

You want to make it an image? You want to make it a gradient? You want to make it a color? Do you want to make it a video? You would select those things. And again, it’s kind of self-explanatory. So I know when you’re first diving into any new program, you’re overwhelmed because there’s so much to look at. I really love how Show It simplifies it. You’ve got your visuals in the middle. You’ve got your layers on the left, and then you’ve got your settings and things on the right. So say I wanted my little

mic here to slide in from the right side of the screen. Whenever you’re scrolling down my page, you can make this animate so many different ways. So select it, click animation, and then you can tell it what you want it to do. Do you want it to fade in? Do you want it to slide in? And then from which direction you’ll select. Do want it to bounce in, rotate, zoom? You can do a lot of fun things there. I try to keep things pretty simple, just simple fading or simple sliding.

And that makes that high end website feel instead of having all the crazy zooms that make people’s eyes go wild when they’re looking at your website.

You can also make it to where when your visitors mouse hovers over that image or that text. This is what I love to do with text. I will select hover and then I will customize it. And right here is where you can open up those settings. So I will kind of make it fade away about 50%. That’s what I’ve set here. I want it to be pretty quick. I don’t want it to be a slow fade. I want them to know that when they’re hovering their mouse immediately, this is something that can be clickable.

And then you can even change the size of the font, the type of font, the color, and make it really stand out if you want. I just always love a basic fade that seems to be a very traditional way people do it on websites. I think it would be a little overwhelming again if you have too much movement and too many things happening for your viewer. You can also click different effects. Do you want drop shadows? Do you want something to be rounded? Maybe I want this mic to be a circle or an oval.

So you can go in and customize anything you want. When you first drop things in here at the bottom, it says add element. Again, very self-explanatory. You can drop in a line if you just want a line that kind of separates your sections. You can drop in an image or your icons. You can put buttons here. You can embed videos from YouTube. You can put gifs on your websites. And this is what I love because then it kind of adds short little films.

that are appealing to your audience without making your website bogged down with big heavy long videos.

Now before building anything, I always tell people go over here on the left side, you’re going to click on site. This is going to allow you to go to design settings and build in all of your font colors, all of your type styles, all of your fonts, any buttons, anything that is custom to you. You are going to put this into this brand. So anytime you drop anything into your website,

a header that you want to always be a certain size font, always be a certain color, maybe the headline or the subtext or you know the paragraph fonts, you’re going to just drop it in and it’s going to automatically drop in your brand settings. The coolest thing about this, if you do this right from the jump, if all of your headers on your mobile and your desktop drop in exactly how you tell them and then your paragraphs and everything else, if

in a couple years or even months, you get bored and you want to change up your header font. When you go back into your settings here and you change the fonts or maybe you change the colors and then you say save, it’s going to take everything on your entire site that has those colors and those blocks or the fonts and it’s going to change all of it automatically. Now this can get…

really messy if you don’t start designing from the jump the way that I just said. Like you want all of your headers on your mobile side and your desktop side to match all of your subheadings, your paragraphs, because what I first did when I very first started, I thought it was so cool. I went in, I did all of my brand stuff. I came in here, I started dropping things in. But as you can see, once I select something here on the right,

I can then go change it. So I dropped in my heading with the font that I wanted, but I was like, you know, I want this bigger or I want this a different color. So you can click on the right. You can change its color. See that you can change anything you want. You can change its size. But what happens is you might be customizing all of these things just on the desktop and not the mobile.

or somewhere else on your website that maybe you’re not aware you dropped in the heading somewhere else. So once you change your design settings back here and you click save, it’s going to change everything on your website. So you wanna make sure you don’t have a lot of additions when you drop this in. So you can see mine says title plus. That means I dropped in the title and then I added some things to it. So I probably made it a little bit bigger. So just know.

If you’ve designed your whole site and then you change your mind and you think, I’m just going to go change my paragraph fonts, if you’ve tweaked any of them, it’s going to go back to what you tell it to in the design setting. So just remember that.

The next thing that probably I’m the most obsessed with is that not only can you have one website, you can have a thousand plus sites. It doesn’t matter. So let me show you. I’m gonna come down here and click on my name. Click view my designs. This is where it gets really wild. I have in my business an umbrella that I call Jana Marie Co.

It’s me, it’s kind of who I am, and it goes into all the different things that I do. I’m a wedding portrait and brand photographer. I also help small businesses and brands with their visual identities, matching their heart with their brands online, with, you know, graphic designs, photography, videography. But I teach and I educate them on that. So it’s kind of two different pieces to my website.

And I wanted to have sort of a splash page, if you guys remember those, where when you go to janamarie.co…

It says, hey, this is who I am. This is what I do. And then you can click into all the different kind of sub umbrellas under my umbrella because they kind of have the same overall aesthetic since it’s me. But there are pieces of my website that are a little different. one side might be more high-end and elegant for my wedding photography. My business side is a little more bold and fun. And then I have.

my podcast, which you saw, and my photo booth business. So all of these can become little plus sites. They can all match your brand totally perfectly how you have done your full umbrella, or you can make them look different. So janamarie.co started here. When you click inside wedding photo and video, it’s going to take you again to that more elegant, higher end, more aesthetically pleasing to a wedding or a portrait client.

and you’re gonna see that site here. So now you can see it says my URL is janamarie.co slash photography. That is how any website works, right? It’s called a page. So the slash photography is a page. These are pages within my website. But if I wanna have a totally different URL to something, that becomes a plus site.

So watch this, as you scroll my beautiful photography page, look, I bought a template years ago. I’ve tweaked it so much, this is totally custom, custom what I’ve done now, and I am just obsessed with it. I was obsessed with the template that I bought. I love the designers from Tonic, I buy a lot of their stuff. But again, I just tweak and I tweak and you refine over time and it changes, it evolves into you, it’s pretty cool.

So that’s why I say start with the free versions because you’re gonna start with a base anyway and then you’re going to design and it’s just gonna become you. Okay, over here when you select a business EDU and you go to my business home page, this now will open up another page of my site, still janamarie.co slash business you see. So I still have the shared header up here. A friend actually suggested I do this. A lot of…

Educators, photographers, designers, as they grow, they kind of put everything in one. But my problem is that I have so many sides to me. I have the elegant and professional side. I have the fun side, and I wanted to share a piece of all of that. So I’ve unified it by my header and my footers. Actually, this footer is different over here. So again, this is why I show it so fun. You can play and make anything new. My thing was once people got to the

brand and business side of things. If it was another company coming to look for a brand photography session, I wanted them to kind of be stuck on that side because they didn’t need to have any information about wedding photography and vice versa. If you’re coming to plan your wedding, you don’t need to see the business side. So it used to be that when you scroll through all of these business things, I didn’t have any way to get back to the wedding and portrait photography, if that makes sense.

So I made my footers a little different. Now since then, I’ve kind of unified them again, which is why you can access anything up here in my main menu. I also made my blog a combination of all things me, my podcast, sometimes even my photo booth company, my business side of things and photography. So this is really fun.

The footer here is a unified footer, so you can see you can access my main site that goes back to my umbrella, the photography side, the business side, the blog, which has everything, and now I have a podcast button. This is where it gets really fun. I splashed in my podcast here in a drop-down menu for my business because this is where I want people who are coming to my page as a business owner, who are wanting education and they wanna up their visual identity.

The podcast is the honey to all of this, right? They get to listen and they get to watch. It’s my YouTube channel. I don’t talk a lot about wedding photography or anything on my YouTube channel. So I’ve put my podcast here also in the footer. But once you click on the podcast, watch what happens.

Okay, I have an older page that’s still on my janamarie.co page. That way they can just watch my little intro and if they’re interested they’re going to then go out to my plus page. This is a plus site, we’ll show it. This is where you can create thousands of different pages. You’re always going to have the ending URL, so janamarie.co. I think this is why I chose that because again, it’s kind of my umbrella. It’s…

so vague that I can add anything before it or after it and it makes sense because it’s always going to be me. But you can see in the URL, dreamdoers.jannahmarie.co is now where you will go. If I want people to just access my podcast page, this is its own little entity. You can see I still have some of the same kind of fonts and things, but I’ve changed the colors. My colors now have more orange tones, more bold, there’s a lot more blacks.

But this looks completely different. It’s kind of its own thing. So if you’re tuning into my podcast or you found me on YouTube and you just want to go access my podcast page, you can click right here. Now I did add some more things up here on this menu too. If they want to go to my photography page or my business, that’s great too. But for the most part, everything here is podcast related.

Ahem.

Okay, we’re going to head back over to the backend so you can see all these different plus pages. When I’m designing something for another business or even my clients, I come in here, I start a new design. If you click create a new design, this is where you get to see all of the free templates they already have for you. And so many of these are so good. So you would start here or if you purchased a template,

That’s where you would drop in the code that they gave you so that it pulls up their template and you can begin working in there. If I click on your designs, you can see these are a lot of the templates I’ve either download from show it’s free designs or I’ve purchased from Tonic or North Folk. Those are definitely my two favorites. I’m quite obsessed with both of them. So go check them out. This is where my business side started. I bought Poppy Lane by North Folk.

and I loved it so much I wanted it to be its own entity. So I started out that way. I had the romantic photography side of course and then I’ve meshed them over time. Now the cool thing is that some of these designers like Grace and Gold, I love them too, I definitely don’t want to leave them out. Check out Grace and Gold as well. They offered a free template to download. So I downloaded this and then I worked in this for another client. We tweaked it a whole bunch of course.

and then we built their site from there. You can see so many others I have. There’s little things like the Palm Shop. They’ve offered just pages. Maybe you want a specific page like a pricing guide. You can buy that for some designers offer it for as low as 50 bucks and then you can just design that page. And again, it will add your design settings in it. So when you select something, it’s going to say at the bottom, do you want to

start with your design. can’t see the screen fully since I’m, you know, recording here, but it’s going to ask, do you want it to apply your design settings or do you want it to have the design settings that came with the template?

Okay, let’s go back to all of the different pages that I had. These are called Plus Sites. So here is my mothership, my head umbrella, janamarie.co. I have also started a company called Rich Life Alliance with my friend Stacy, which I’ve talked about on a few podcast episodes. This is where we’ve designed our site to live. It currently lives within janamarie.co, and so we’ve put Rich Life Alliance, you can customize that.

and then .jannamary.co because it’s still under me. Now the great thing about Show It, it’s $408 a year. It sounds like a bigger expense. This is why I was so resistant for so long because when you start, you think it’s just a big expense. Listen, it’s not. The amount of time that you get back and the amount of like high quality that you represent and you present to your clients via these beautiful templates and how easy and quick they are to build, you will look…

like a high-end professional in no time. So I always say, dive in. There are certain things you want to invest in. This is one of them. In a matter of days, you could have a brand new website up and running. And I forgot to mention, Show It is built on WordPress. So a lot of people think, well, you can use WordPress for free, or you can use WordPress with…

another platform. Yes, you can and other platforms are making it a little easier as well, but show it is where it’s at. It’s too easy to not dive in. And if you’ve purchased one account for $408, any account you purchase after that is half the price of $204. So eventually we will purchase another account for $204 50 % off so that Richlife Alliance, its URL can be richlifealliance.com.

Now the great thing about Show It sites is when you open another tab, we purchased richlifealliance.com and when you go there, we’ve redirected it to go to richlifealliance.jannamarie.co. We don’t want the janamarie.co to be there, but currently we just don’t have the funds because we’re building something new and we don’t have a budget over here for Rich Life Alliance. But you can redirect the URL, that way everything on your social media

and your marketing pieces, will say richlifealliance.com. Now see, once I’ve opened it, it’s added the janamarie.co at the end. But this is a plus site. Currently, this is not costing us any more money because it is a plus site, under my janamarie.co account.

You can see it looks totally different and has a whole new set of brand colors, a whole new vibe. Everything is totally different. It’s got all of its own pages underneath it. So when you click on any of these, now it’s going to say richlifealliance.janamarie.co slash about. So it’s made another page, but under this plus site.

any of these pages you click on, they are all going to have a page, but still under the Rich Life Alliance plus site. This is so cool, right? This just should excite you like beyond words. I know it does me because what this allowed for me to do was create all these additional websites for my clients. So when I have a wedding client come to me,

I will build them their own little custom website. Let’s see if this one will open still. Yes, and so this is the first thing that they see. I send them this link. This is a little preview link. It says, congrats to the newlyweds. It has a picture of them. When you scroll down, the first thing I want them to see are my favorite photos on the blog. So I’ve created this. It can click right here. It opens up to the same janamarie.co blog that I’ve unified everything in.

They can view all of their favorite photos there. and then as their friends and family and them scroll through their website, depending on who they share this with, they can view anything else that I wanna put in here. Do they wanna see the full wedding gallery? Do they want to order an album? Do they want to meet the photographer? I can add in coupon codes and so much more. So this is a really super simple way to make something extra special for your clients.

so that they have their own custom website.

When you work within these plus sites, you can go to site settings and you can change the name just like you see here. So this is their name, .jannamareefotos.com. Jannamareefotos ironically used to be my website umbrella, now it’s jannamareef.co. Why did I change that? Because photos again kind of separated the photography side of the work that I do.

But I now have the education side and I wanted to kind of operate as all of these entities under myself.

But you’ll go into site settings. You can change the name of the site right here, so it’s really easy, and then you can make a custom domain for them. So this is where you’ll add your custom URL for your Plus sites.

Okay, going back to all of the other designs I have here. I have other podcasts that I almost started with friends, so I’ve designed some of those sites in here. Those are really fun. I have another company that I have built and a friend and I are in the process of getting this up and running. So again, let’s just open this and show you. It’s its own entity. It’s its own brand. It’s got…

a totally different feel in here. We have information about him and his videography services and me and my photography services. So this is completely separate. This is Travel Media Co. It will become its own identity as well that we will eventually purchase another Show It account for once we’re ready to kind of like launch this into the universe. And it will only cost $204, half of the price, because I am the account owner of Show It.

I get discounts for every other account that I build for 50 % off. How cool is that?

But if you want in the meantime, you can keep all of these plus sites exactly how they are. So I have not changed this URL to be super custom. Right now it’s just travelmediaco.showitpreview.com. But it still has all of its own brand elements and information under this alone. And you cannot access anything else, janamarie.co.

Again, if you want to get creative, you can add a million different pieces of all of these sites into one place. I kind of do that when you go to my photography site. I’ve got different places again under drop down menus where you can access my podcast. You can go to my YouTube channels. You can kind of add pieces in.

I know under my business section I talk about Travel Media Co. I believe it’s under the brand sessions. Yes. So here is our page for small businesses,

But Travel Media Co. we created to be for much bigger businesses. We realized the price differences for our small business local friends is much different when we’re traveling the world on the other side of the seas to go help a really huge resort company. So as you scroll down, this is why it’s fun again. I’ve added a little section right here for Travel Media Co. So I say, are you a larger business?

Are you a destination resort? Do you do retreats? Do you have conferences? Are you a travel agency? All of the bigger companies that might have more needs than just a basic brand photography and video shoot locally, this is where they can click out. And now it’s opening that plus site.

Okay, I hope you’re not feeling super overwhelmed by the amount of things that show it can do. For me, the biggest thing is that it is really easy to build. It’s really easy to design. It’s really easy to upkeep. A lot of people think, well, I’m not a web designer. I can’t do all of this. I get that. That’s why show it is here.

Typically in the past you would have to hire your designer. They would have to go in and do everything for you. It would cost so much money. Now you could potentially hire someone like me or another designer to come in do this for you once. Then when you need to update something maybe you want to add some team members. You can just come in here yourself. You click on the section and then you add a new photo and a new font and you can copy things over. So let me show you really quick. When you’re designing a section

similar to this, and you’re going to have a lot of repeated things. So you can see this is episode one. I’ve got a photo. I’ve got a title. I’ve got the little subheading to show you what season and episode it is. All these things are going to be duplicated. Now you can highlight all of them at once and you can just do a normal shortcut on your computer. It would be command C for the Apple users and then command V that’s going to paste.

then you already have a second thing you can drop down here and then change out the photo and change out the title. And it’s so easy to just copy and paste. So you’ve got the same thing. Now, when I just did that on the desktop side, I’m going to have to go over here to the mobile side because it’s not just going to guess what you want it to do. I’m going to have to also move this. This is how I duplicated all of these all the way down.

I just kept copying and pasting and then updating the photo and the text.

This is why it’s so neat because you can turn something off over here on the left where you have your layers. It will highlight what you have selected. If I don’t want this to show on the mobile side, can turn off all these little mobile buttons and it disappears, but you can still see it on the right on the desktop side. You can also turn off pieces on the desktop side. So.

You can play how you wish. Now I don’t need that there because I’ve already built it, so I’m going to go ahead and just delete those that are selected. This part is really fun. It’s an upgrade that happened a couple years ago. It was so needed, but it makes designing really fast. If I want to change the size of this font, I can come in here.

I can make it bigger. And then if I want to match all of these without manually doing each one, all you have to do is select that one, do command copy. And then when you come down here, you’re going to do shift command V and that paste. And do you see how it automatically resized it for me? I didn’t have to go over to the right and manually do it. You might think that didn’t save a whole lot of time, Jana, but watch here. If I select each.

one of these and then do shift command V. It does all of them at the same time. So it saves you so much time to be able to just copy and paste, move things how you want to see them visually on your screen, and then match them.

Now I’m going to undo a lot of these. Here’s another fun little trick. When you’re designing things and you might think, okay, well, I don’t know where this goes. Well, now they’ve got alignment tools. If you want to turn off either side too, maybe I just want to work on the desktop and zoom in more. can down here on the left, can turn on viewing both of them or just mobile or just desktop. Super cool. Lets zoom in a little bit more.

You can see as I select this image, once I start moving it around, it’s going to give me those pink, see the pink lines? It’s going to tell me the alignment to the photo below me. It’s going to tell me what is centered with my text on the right. And so this is kind of how I’ve designed things to make sure that they match each section down.

If you didn’t copy and pasted it like I showed you before, I would advise you to build this little piece first. So put in your photo, put in your subtext, your title, whatever you need, and then copy and paste it. That way everything just can be quickly designed.

But if for some reason something feels off, whenever you moved this, maybe you don’t have the alignment pieces you need on the left there where you see the pink, you see the center alignment, pink is the boldest bar, that’s going to show you it’s aligning to the whole canvas. Now over here on the right, you can even get more in depth by clicking align to canvas. So the whole entire section you have selected right here, you can align it to the center of the canvas.

or you can align it to the section below you. So if I start selecting all of these pieces and I say align to canvas in the center, it’s going to do that. If I say align to selection, watch this, it gets a little jumbled because it took every single thing that I had selected and it put all of those in the middle. You don’t necessarily want to do that. So I would align it to the whole canvas.

Or if you take pieces like each of these images, you can select all of those and then you can tell it to align centered or align to the left or the right, whatever you need it to be. The reason you would have a left or right alignment is for something like text. So each of these titles, when you highlight over it, you can see they’re aligned left. I set that up under the text style. They’re aligned on the left side.

So I don’t necessarily want each piece below it to be aligned in the center. I might have a text box a little different size if I didn’t copy and paste them. So I would just want them all to be aligned on the left side. I’m going to select each of those titles

align each of those on the left.

other things you can do. Maybe you forgot again to copy and paste your titles.

If you did manually come in and maybe take this title box and drag it out longer, maybe you didn’t want it to be double

your box sizes are going to be different. So you don’t want to center align these two because then it’s going to make your top title off centered from the left alignment that you’re wanting.

But if you want all of those box sizes to match, you can select this one and then any others and you can tell it to match the size. So you’re going to match the width of the box or you can match the height of the box or both.

So a lot of these tools on the right are going to be really helpful for you. You can go through each of these. It’s very self-explanatory as you start to look just one at a time. The locking here, now this is really neat. So what Show It does is you’re going to see a normal desktop as you’re designing. But what happens is somebody might be on their iPad or they might be on a large iMac or they might be on a television.

It’s going to size your screen to their size. So it might look different. It might be much more horizontal on a TV screen. So my logo might be a little off from what I’m looking at right here. So it’s really neat because it’s going to keep it beautiful. But what you can do, for instance, this section up here, this bar, I want this little audio icon and I want the text.

to be on the far left of the screen, no matter the screen size.

So when you select it and you come down to size and position, you can click on the horizontal locking that it’s going to stay all the way on the left side of anybody’s screen, no matter the screen. Or you can tell your title. I always want this to be locked on the far right side of the screen because again, if they’re looking at an iPad or a smaller tablet or they turn it vertical, it might shrink it a little bit. So now all of your things seem like they’re in the middle.

If you tell it to either lock on the side or stretch, you might want to take an image like this and tell it to stretch. So no matter what screen it’s on, it’s essentially going to look like this on anyone’s screen. It’s going to stretch to the far right side or the far left side that you tell it to. Or even this long bar, it’s going to stretch the entire left and right side of the screen, no matter the size that they’re looking at.

So the downfall of that is that sometimes it can cut off an image if it’s making it much skinnier. As you see, if I were to tell this to stretch, it’s going to lose a lot of the image and it’s going to do it how it feels like it should look when it might not be what you want it to look like.

Now when you’re bringing in any element, if you’re going to drop in an icon, anything can be clickable. What’s really neat about this is that they have so many different icons within their little system here of things they already know you want. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, RSS feeds. So you can select the icon that you want and then you’re going to go to click actions and tell it. Do you want it to go to another URL? Sure, drop that URL in here.

Sure, drop that URL in here and then you can tell it to open in a new tab. That way they don’t actually leave your website. It’s opening, but it’s not going to steer them differently. That way they have both tabs. They can refer back to this one. Or maybe you want it to be another page within your website or you want it to be an email. Maybe you change your icon to the email.

You can also change the color right here and then the size again. the fact that you can just drag and drop these things, move them where you want. See, it has the alignment tool so you can visually see it or just select all of them and tell them align center. Now see how there’s space right here in between these two and this one’s a little bigger. This is where those tools I just showed you to match their size of the box.

or even distribute it evenly in between horizontally or vertical, that’s where these would come in. Look how it just spaced those out

just by saying distribute them evenly, horizontally or vertically. Isn’t that cool?

I want to show you two more things that I really love. So let me go into other websites here. I’m going to go back to my photography page.

This is my main page. So on the left side, you’re going to see each of the little sections on this page. If you click on site, it’s going to open all the different pages that I have in this website. And then also you can access your design settings and your media library. So any of your photos or videos you drop in, they’re all going to be in this media library so you can see them. You can organize them too. So I’ve got all the different sections of.

You know, my clients, when I built their custom website, I had to build them folders with their own images in there. That way it was easy to find.

But what I want to show you is how a canvas can slide and change within itself. So for instance, maybe you have a review section such as this. Now that I’m on this page, my photography page, I’ve scrolled to this canvas and selected it. I want to customize this canvas. So I need to go specifically to the page photography and see each of my little canvas sections here.

and then each of my elements within the canvas are going to be right here.

are going to be right here on the left. What you can do is create a view within a canvas. So what I’m viewing right now on the screen is Mayetta and Brett’s review from West Virginia, and that’s all I see. But you see I have an arrow on the left and the right, so I have created those little icons to be clickable. Now see, I’ve locked it on the right side of the screen and the left, so no matter where they are, on an iPad, a desktop, it’s going to be on the far left and right side.

and they’re going to consistently click through those arrows to another view. So once they click on the right, it’s going to drop down another view.

it’s going to scroll to another view, which is another review, because it’s the review section I’m in. You can do anything. This could be a frequently asked question section. This could be an about section, and they can scroll through and learn different things about you.

To do that, you’re first going to design your canvas, and then you’re going to select everything you want in that view. So imagine what you’re viewing on the screen. It’s called a view. Then over here, you’re going to say, add canvas view. So then it drops it into the folder of view one.

Now I’m going to really advise you when you are designing from the start to keep everything organized from the jump so you don’t have to go back and reorganize everything. When you drop in photos and videos, make sure they’re organized in those folders like I just showed you. When you start working with views, make sure you label them. So it’s going to automatically label them, view one, view two, view three, view four.

I then copy and pasted each of them, so I just put duplicate here and then it would do another

It should put it in chronological order and show it does, but I messed that up because I would come in and start adding things to the end when I said rename. Now it’s going to tell you exactly what slug it is. It is view two. So this was the second one that I duplicated, but I came in here and changed it by adding a little dash or maybe I added other

names, and you can do that if you want to keep your brain organized, But trust show it, labelings of your canvases. Let them remain in view one, view two, view three, like it’s showing right here on the left.

And then if it’s easier for you, you can come in and label it like I am. That way when you’re going back to design, you know that Canvas 1 here is Brett and Mayetta. And then it doesn’t look so chaotic like you’re seeing here. I just need to go back in and tweak that. But how cool that you can have multiple things slide. Let me show you what that looks like whenever it’s live. When you click on the preview button like you just saw me do, it’s going to open up this quick preview.

where you can scroll like you’re on desktop or even mobile, you can see it. But the coolest part is if you select this preview button, before your website is live, before you’ve published those changes, you can view this preview tab and it’s going to show you what you’ve been changing or tweaking before you click publish. So as you scroll down to my review section, you can see here, my arrows are right there. Every time I click it, it goes to the next canvas view.

a little slide. Now you can see that I moved my mouse up a little bit and when I clicked the arrow it’s going to recenter it. I can tell it to do that or I can tell it whenever somebody has viewed it this way. This is probably how they want to see it. They can see everything they need. So when they click the arrow it’s not going to scroll back. It’s just going to stay put. There’s so many cool things you can do with Show It. I’m just so excited for you guys to be here and view all of this.

Let me see if I can find another canvas view how it shifts. Think of it kind of like an Instagram carousel. You can put multiple things in one section. Now see here on this part of my page, I have a video in the background. It’s very short, but how appealing is that? It looks so high end. And then here is my stacking order I was telling you all about earlier. My about photography canvas is stacked.

one number higher than my header. And I took my image and I just made it a little bit taller. So let’s just go right in there and see it from the back end.

Even on the mobile side, you can see I’ve brought this image a little bit higher. The canvas ends where the line is. I’ve brought it into my header canvas. So when I scroll on my mobile, that video can stay put and everything can scroll above it. There are so many different cool little animations you can do. So I’ve utilized them in a few sections like this. You can see in this canvas here, I’ve got my image that I’ve pulled higher.

So when you’re looking at it on my website, it’s going to look like it’s above the header section.

This is also one of my favorite things. You know what? Everything about Showa is my favorite. Let’s just be honest. I love the video backgrounds. I love the stacking orders.

I really love that you can take a section like this that you see of me laughing. This is called parallax. I actually don’t know how to say it right. It might be wrong. But you can make that setting. See how it’s kind of a slow, it’s scrolling too, but the rest of my website is scrolling faster. So this right here is stacked on this canvas, but above this one. And I’ve made this canvas be a parallax, which is slowly scrolls while this one.

scrolls above it. See how neat that looks? And then you can see I’ve animated things to fade in as you scroll down my page. Things are going to pop up as they fade in and out.

Now right here, this is another example of a canvas view. I’ve created this one little white box with information inside it and an arrow that when you scroll to the next one, it’s going to pull up more things that we believe in. What do we believe? What do we do? Who are we? What do we hope? And you can change the background. It’s still, oh, no it’s not. Now it’s not a parallax once you’re in there.

I’m actually wondering if that’s something I don’t know about, if you can take a second or third canvas view and still make the background be a parallax so that it slides like this one, if that makes sense.

One more example of a canvas view that scrolls under my Meet the Team section. I don’t want to have a million pages for all of my people to go to. This is why canvases and having multiple views on a canvas is so important because it keeps your client or your viewer right there. It’s not bouncing them all over your website a million different pages. Look how clean it looks for me to have a menu bar across the top. That’s just a few things.

The main things you want your viewers to click on should be right here. I’ve created a few drop downs under services and then my business side. But other than that, everything is on the pages. And then once you’re here, for example, on my Meet the Team section, once you click me, it’s the same page. It’s just going to open a new view. Here’s a new view on that exact same spot.

Okay, hey, here’s me, here’s who I am. If you wanna view my photography packages, if you wanna view my portfolio, if you want to work with me, or if you want to click back to the team, you go right back to the first view. Now maybe somebody wants to learn about Matthew. They’re gonna click on him. Another view opens. It’s still in the same spot, you guys. Isn’t that so cool?

So you can learn more about him. You can work with him, which is going to take you probably to my contact section. Or you can go back to the team. And then you’ve got my little Floyd. He’s my mood booster. He does not have his own canvas view because he doesn’t need one. He’s just cute right here.

I would really encourage you to go to janamarie.co and look through my site and see all the different things. See how I’ve got another video in the background of this canvas. And then right above it, the canvas has a photo that pops out and it’s on top of it. So it’s got that dimension. It’s so cool. One of my favorites, favorite examples of this is on my Rich Life Alliance page. If you scroll to the bottom,

Whenever our about section pops up, they all scroll over each other and it’s really cool. Look at this. So I’ve got the background staying in place and then I have other images on a canvas below it that are higher. So I stacked them higher and they’re scrolling over to add all of this different dimension. Isn’t that so fun?

you can really look like a high end brand super quick with a show it

Jana Marler (49:10)
Another hack within Showit, if you click on myInstagram I’ve actually created my own little link tree page because again, you can have so many plus sites. If you click on the left side, I’ve got two. I’ve got one set up for my business side and one set up for my photography side. ⁓

scroll down to your page and here’s my own little link tree. You can design it again however you’d like. So I customized it to have some photos that went along with it so it was a little more pretty. And then when you scroll down, here’s where some of my discount codes are for my favorite programs. You’ve got my podcast you can tune into here. And then here’s some sustainability swaps. So I can, again, turn these canvases off if I don’t want them to see this.

I can simplify it and just make it like a little link tree or you can add in a video or anything that you want. So I’ve got this one for my business side.

I’ve got my own for my photography as well. So again, totally customizable. Thank you to show it. So that’s another way to not have to have so many different programs. I’m telling you, Dubsado does everything. Show it does everything else. And you don’t really need anything other than your social platforms from there to run a business. So it’s a no brainer. Show it for the win.

Jana Marler (50:37)
Single-handedly, if you are a new business and you got Dubsado, it runs.

all of your organization, all of your contracts, all of your invoicing, all of your bookkeeping. And if you got to show it to have a very beautiful website, those two things are all that you need, which is ironically the two things I refused to invest in when I first started my businesses. Why? Because they were monthly expenses, they were yearly expenses, they were bigger expenses, but you can fully operate an entire business just by having Show It.

and Dubsado Isn’t that amazing?

The reason why these programs are so important to invest in is because not only are they easy to use Instead of someone like me who tried to do it all and I had to build my beautiful side of my branding a lot slower,

You can dive in and look like you’ve been around for 10 years already, and then you can have all of these additional pages. You have so many opportunity here, and what these programs do is they, once you set them up, it might seem like a lot at the beginning, but once you set them up, they’re going to give you so much of your time back so that you can focus on working on your craft.

Jana Marler (51:49)
Another quick favorite, you can also host a shop straight from your show it.

I sell stock photos and templates for brands. And so I built a page called the stock up shop that way you have all of these beautiful curated themed templates. You know, if you’re on something like Canva, you might find something like a template that you love, but then you don’t have a way to have tons more. That way you have a full brand identity. So what I’ve done is come in here and I’ve designed a lot of Canva templates.

And then I also have a lot of photos for sale and you can buy them right here from my site. But how do you do that with show it? Well,

I have a Shopify account for $7 a month. And what this does is allows me to design my shop visually how I want it. But then whenever I go into my Shopify account, all I do is put in the price, I put in the description and the photo to match what you see right here on my shop.

That way, when people are viewing my shop, they’re going to see it beautifully how I designed it in show it. But once they select the item that they want to buy, it’s going to add it to the cart. So right here, add to cart. You see the little cart pop up in the corner. That is from Shopify. It is only $7 a month for their lowest package. And that’s so that I don’t have to have my shop hosted on another website.

I built everything in here and then my button here is just linked to my Shopify account. This way everything again is beautifully designed and done in my showit account for them to stay in one place to keep their attention right here and they’re not bouncing all over the place. I did have an Etsy account for a while. That was another thing. And then I had all these different spinoffs and I just honed it really truly back to who I am.

Jana Marie is me. This is all the services, all of the things that I offer. And I put everything back in here with some plus pages. It was the best decision I made once I jumped ship, once I hopped the fence and dove in to show it. I was like, why did I not do this sooner?

Jana Marler (54:02)
Okay, the last thing I wanna show you, look at all of these, how fun, I have so many plus pages.

The last thing I want to show you is because ShowIt works on WordPress, you can pay for the package that allows you to have a blog. So you can see over here I’ve got my home, my photography, I’ve got my podcast page, I’ve got all my plus sites. If I scroll all the way down, I’ve also purchased that I can customize a blog. So.

Let me show you really quick when you go to Rich Life Alliance. I told you all that this was a plus site of JanaMarie.co So we’ve purchased richlifealliance.com and once you click on it, we’ve had it redirected so it goes to the .janamarie.co not super professional, but this is what we’re doing for now. We have this page. Now, we also have a free version of WordPress.

elsewhere that’s not attached to show it. So when you click on blog here, it’s going to open a separate WordPress account. Now, this is doable. If you want to be super frugal, it’s doable. But you have to design WordPress from the back end and it’s not as easy as show it. Show it has said, listen, we’re going to help you guys out. We’re going to make your blog on your WordPress.

Also, a drag and drop that’s so easy your grandma can do it. So when you click on the blog page,

Everything that I want to design on my WordPress blog is right here. Does it not look like you are still on my website? How beautiful is that? I can put any canvases I want in. If I design something like this and then I want to maybe turn off that section, I can just come in here and turn it off. I don’t want it anymore or I don’t want it for a while. Maybe I don’t want it on the mobile side, just the desktop. You just toggle them on and off. That way they don’t ever get deleted. They’re still there.

but you can have them on and off when appropriate. This is the page of my blog. WordPress is going to drop in everything you blog. You’re still going to log into WordPress. You’re going to blog like normal there, but it’s going to drop into your show it plug and play right here. So I’ve designed that I want all these things appear to be on my blog, but then the blog portion, it’s going to have blog one.

it’s going to have blog post one, then blog post two, and then I have duplicated that in other views, so it knows once you tell the settings where to go. This is where all of my blog posts, so let’s see. On the right side.

So let’s see, on the right side you’re going to click on the image and it says this is your WordPress featured image. So when you’re in WordPress and you say this is the image that I want to drop into this, so it’s going to plug in right here, it’s going to take that image, every single post, and put it in and show it’s going to do it automatically. They work hand in hand. It’s incredible.

you’re going to click on the title and then you’re going to tell it that this is the post title. So the placeholder is the post title from WordPress is going to plug it in right here. You’re then going to click on the paragraph. You’re going to say the excerpt from the blog post that I created in WordPress is going to drop in right here. So when you’re on my website and you click on blog, this is the beautiful top that you were seeing.

and then the WordPress blog all falls down in here. Now I’m in preview, so let me get out of that and go to my real blog.

When you scroll down, you can see how it dropped in each of my posts, the title, so it’s all custom to what I posted. I don’t have to go back and just show it and tell it each time. It’s like a placeholder. So when I’m going into WordPress and designing my blog post, it’s really just typing, selecting my photos, and then it drops in here and you can tell it as many times as you want it to scroll down. It’s going to scroll or you can have a button like this. It’s going to say, show me the older post.

then it will open the older posts and it will go on and on and on as long as you’ve told it to.

So the thing with Show It is that you need this because it is so easy. Now see whenever I hovered over the footer and there’s all these diagonal lines? That means that I have said I want this to be something that’s duplicated on all my different pages.

So I’ve made it a site canvas. All of these things over here are site canvases, which means they’re going to be in different places all over my site. I don’t want to go into each page and customize each of those pieces every time I need to update it. I want to be able to come into one. And when I change it here, it’s going to change across all of my footers on all of my pages.

because it’s a site canvas. So again, saving you so much time. When I was a designer in college, we were literally sitting at our desks in the art studio, pulling our hair out because it was so hard to do all of this and site maps and the backend and coding. And now I’m like, I get to be the creative that I want to be and do all of the things that I love, but do it quickly. Show It is a rock star in this arena.

Once I have everything exactly how I want it, I click publish and voila, it’s on the internet. You have to set all of those things up with your account whenever you’re first signing up. But if I come in here right now and make any changes at all, once I click publish, 10 seconds later, people can see it on the internet.

There are so many things I love about Showit. I could go on and on and on, but I want to remind you that this is a place where you can have multiple pages called plus sites. You can have multiple websites. Look at all of this. All of these look different. They are all branded different. They all have different URLs. And what’s cool is that I can design them right here in this account for no extra cost. So play all you want.

Once I’m ready to launch Travel Media Co. as its own entity in its own URL and its own spot on the internet, I can then come down here to customer service. Their customer service is incredible. Not only are they super fast, they are super informative. They have an emergency button. If your site is down, they will help you right away. But all you have to do is say, hey, I designed this and now I’m ready to migrate it to its own account. And I went 50 % off.

because Jana told me that if you have more than one account, it’s 50 % off. And they’re just gonna transfer all of that to you. And a couple of days later, they’re gonna email you, hey, your site is live, here’s your login. And now you have a whole new login. So as you can see, when you go back to my sites, I do not have my photo booth company under here. Why? It’s its own entity on the internet. So I can log out.

And when I’m back on the login page, I can now log into my second account, which is Banana Who booth. This operates as a whole different entity on the internet because I want to be able to have multiple businesses that aren’t just Jan and Marie. can eventually in the future sell this brand, sell all of the assets that come with it. Someone could buy this whole business. It’s its own entity. How cool is that?

So I designed Banana Who booth for free as a plus site under my umbrella. And then when I was ready, I had them migrate it to its own thing. So that way when you type in Banana Who booth, like you see there at the top, it’s just going to go right here. It’s not a plus site of Jan and Marie anymore.

Their customer service is out of this world. I have built every one of these sites. See how beautiful they are and how unique each one of them are. You can design a million different ways with Show It. I have my photo booth website. This is my fun and funky side. It’s totally different. I’ve got my rich life alliance website. Here’s the blog I was telling you about.

So the blog over here, I had to design with my friend Stacy separately on a WordPress. That’s why it looks a little different. So when you come in here and you want to read our blog post, this is on a WordPress that we had to set up away from Show It. Rich Life Alliance is a plus site on my Show It account. The blog is separate. This took a lot of extra time and it’s not quite as easy. It was fun for me. I’ve been on the back end of many of these things. I can do it.

So I had lot of fun designing and they’ve got drag and drop things themselves, but nothing is as easy as a show it account.

And when you have them separate from a Show It and a WordPress blog that’s not on Show It, they do look a little different, but you can make it work. So whatever your needs are for the moment, I’m telling you, Show It is right for you.

I hope all of this has been so informative. As you can see, we have so many different websites and all of them are different and they’re so fun and creative and they kind of represent who you are. I’ve got my elegant side, I’ve got my fun side of my businesses. I’ve got so many different things and it’s all because Show It is a beast and it allows you to do just that.

So if you guys are interested,

in learning more about this, make sure you subscribe to all of our channels. You can find me at the thedreamdoers.podcast across all social media on YouTube. You can follow my website. You can follow my blog. janamarie.co is who I am. And then all of my businesses fall below it. So I hope I’ve been super informative. I really do want to see my small businesses thrive. And the way to do that is get all your systems set up so that it’s a well-oiled machine operating for you.

so that you can spend an entire year of your life on the floor if you need to, grieving some really hard things because you’ve got systems and you’ve got programs that are set up to sustain you. This is why I preach, show it and Dubsado and I’ll make sure to put in the show notes a discount code if you guys want to try out show it.

Leave your comments below and I’ll be sure to respond if you have any further questions. I can do little YouTube shorts too if I left some things out that you want to see. I can show you little pieces here and there on social media, so make sure you guys let me know what you want to know more about And I can walk you through more of the back end stuff.

Thank you guys so much for listening in and until next time, don’t just be a dreamer, let’s be a dream doer together.