The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra: Pages

If you read the first installment of this series, The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra: Part One, you’ll know I’m a complete beginner when it comes to using powerful marketing software like Kartra. Fortunately, Kartra’s interface is incredibly friendly and makes starting up effortless for a newbie solopreneur, like myself.

However, one area I have a little experience in is building a web page. Now, I’m no coder (unless the one course I took in college where I almost threw my computer against a wall counts), but I have dabbled with a few different page builders over the years. So when I learned how easy it is to build beautiful web pages with Kartra, I was pretty excited.

Tip: Play it safe and regularly save your work. You can save by going to the green “Actions” pulldown in the upper right corner and tapping “Save Progress”.

Get Acquainted:

As with any website builder, there are tools and processes unique to the platform. Fortunately, learning Kartra is super simple!

Navigating to the Page Builder is as effortless as clicking “My Pages” on the main blue navigation. Once in, tap “New Page” to begin.

A popup will make its way onto your screen with a bevy of templates from which to choose. You can opt for a specific template, like a squeeze page, or you can do what I did, and start from scratch on a blank canvas. Brave, I know.

During your first time through, you’ll get a mini-tutorial to help get you started. This certainly helped me get familiar with the basics of the tool. Then, once I learned the nuances, it was a breeze and I was cranking out pages like it was my job (which it kind of is).

Here are some tips I picked up that will shorten your learning curve. Note the difference between column and component mode.

The side highlighted in pink is “Column Mode”. “Column Mode” is the default mode that appears every time you open a page to edit. This mode allows you to adjust the layout of columns and sections on the page, whereas “Component Mode” allows you to edit the content of individual blocks within columns, as well as reorder or delete those blocks.

To edit a component, simply hover the cursor over an item (i.e., a piece of text, a whole section, or an image), and a series of icons will pop up.

There’s an option to move the item around, clone it, go in and edit the styling of the item, edit the text, or delete it altogether.

NOTE: When editing text, hit the “T” icon. However, if you need to edit anything else, such as an image, margin, or button text, click the pencil icon.

Maneuver the many features:

Like Kartra’s main dashboard, the Page Builder has its own navigation links in the left blue side bar. Here’s a breakdown of what each function allows you to do:

Settings: Add SEO parameters, tracking codes and tags to help optimize your page in search engines.

Styles: Set your page width and default settings for backgrounds and fonts. If you’re CSS knowledgeable, you can even write custom CSS.

Sections: The sections link is a bit reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls. Open the tab up to get 16 different drop-downs, each filled with all kinds of sections to customize your page. They’re carefully labeled so you can quickly choose the sections you want to add to your page, such as an empty block, a navigation menu, a testimonial template, and more.

Components: Like the sections tab above, the components link has many drop-downs within. But rather than whole templated sections, the components tab features individual content blocks, such as a button or a headline that you can add to customize a section. If you want to build a whole new section with only components, place an “empty block” into your layout, then add a “column” before dropping in your desired components.

Pop Window: The pop window allows you to have a pop up upon entering/exiting your site that solicits visitors for their email. For example, on my art site, I can add a pop window upon leaving that says “Wait! You forgot something. Get 20% off your first art purchase” with a spot for them to enter their email.

Alert Bar: Lastly, there is the alert bar tab. It’s a bright bar that alerts visitors to something important, such as a big sale. Typically, you’d find these at the top of a page, but they’re also regularly placed towards the bottom.

Sell with pictures:

Look at any beautiful website and you’ll notice lots of stunning imagery. But, where do you get these photos if you don’t have a personal library? You can upload your own photos to the Kartra platform, or you can use Kartra’s built-in search to access a library of beautiful royalty-free images, ready to place right in your site.

In my case, I used a combination. I uploaded my original art images for my product page but used one of Kartra’s free stock images on my homepage hero. Just make sure any image you upload is under 2000KB or you’re in for some re-saving and re-uploading.

One thing to note: If you need to rotate/crop an image, do it before you upload it into the platform.

Pretty up your product page:

When I first laid the groundwork for my online sales, I added a product to the Kartra platform. My product was one of my original art pieces, but for you, it could be an e-book, a coaching session, therapeutic oils or anything your mind can dream up. Now, the next step is to add that product to my pages so the world can see it and purchase it (cha-ching!).

There’s a bit of artistic license in this step, as a lot of it depends on how you want to display your product. You may want a beautiful module that describes what your product does as well as testimonials before a visitor goes to buy. In my case, I just wanted to plainly display my art side by side and make it easy to purchase.

To get this look, use the “Section Content” templates and replace the preset images with your custom images, delete the description text, and change the button text from “Learn More” to “Buy Now”. This took a little finagling to look the way I wanted, as not all my canvases are the same size, but all I did was play around with the margins (the space around your image/text).

Once you’ve aesthetically set up your page, remember to link your product checkouts to your buttons. I did this by clicking the pencil “edit” tab when I hovered over one of my buttons. Once in, I went to the “link” section, and tapped “Pop a product checkout.” From there I selected the specific product and price point.

Link it all together:

So you’ve created a stunning page that will pull in your visitors. Now what?

Spend some time building out all the pages of your website. For me, that meant creating my homepage, my product page, my commission request page, my about page, and a couple of thank you pages.

But when it came time to link them together on my navigation bar, I hit a little snafu… my pages weren’t showing up when I went to link them.

Turns out I missed a step. I needed to publish my pages live before I could link them to one another. So I went in and pushed them all out onto the web.

Side Note: You can choose to either host your page on the Kartra platform or use your own server and just pop the JavaScript Kartra provides into any  website or CMS, such as WordPress. See how to do it in depth here.

Once I had all my pages published I linked the “home” button on my navigation bar with my homepage URL, the “Shop Art” page with my shopping URL, and so on. And you know what? It worked perfectly.

Fun fact: Did you know you can save a section as a template to add into other pages? I did this with my navigation once it was all linked, so I didn’t need to repeat the process on all the other pages. I just replaced my old un-linked nav on those pages with the new, nifty linked nav. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Plan for all platforms:

My guess is you don’t just use your computer to browse the web anymore, and neither do your customers. A good website is a responsive website, and Kartra is optimized to help you do just that.

On any of your pages, you can toggle from desktop view to tablet view to mobile view. And most of the time, it will look perfect as is, because Kartra was designed to build responsive pages from the get-go. However, I recommend checking, just in case.

Preview your super awesome site:

Once You build your pages and link them together, click the preview tab to make sure everything’s running smoothly. This step is important to test if your links work and that everything appears just as you like it.

Start selling (and earning moolah):

Building my page wasn’t just a piece of cake. It was pretty fun, too. And now I have a snazzy new site to direct customers to (and so do you)!

Think of your site as a growing organism. As your business expands, so will your website. For me, every time I complete a new painting, I’ll be adding it to my funnel and website so customers can find and purchase it. Luckily, Kartra makes it painless to add new products and continuously grow your site.

Whether you want to build out squeeze pages, video sales pages, long sale pages, coming soon pages, review pages or anything in between, Kartra has scores of beautiful and professionally-designed templates that you can easily customize to build you site quickly.

The journey to discovering how Kartra can boost my business (and yours!) isn’t over yet. Stay with me as I uncover how this all-in-one platform can launch a solopreneur to new heights in the next installment of The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra.

Next up:

Build out a broadcast email to alert customers to new products, sales, updates, and more!