My Experience Attending the Thrive Summit 2023

I should start this by saying... Wow, what an experience! The virtual Thrive Summit is an event where like-minded individuals interested in building their skillset in web design, logo design, and branding attend workshops from top industry professionals. You receive free, exclusive content and they provide challenges for you to take part in if you're interested, and it not only helps you practice the skills they've taught in the videos but it also allows you to build your portfolio!

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I found this event through an Instagram post from Foxtrot Branding. They advertised that they were going to be one of the live speakers so I knew I had to attend. This was a three-day event, all online, where you would watch about 5 speakers a day based on the daily topic.

Day 1 - Branding Essentials

On this first day, we discussed the beginning process when booking a client. We discussed topics like creating effective client communications, taking your designs and making them into a brand identity, creating a mood board with a color palette, and how to create a mock-up! As a beginner, this was the most helpful week for me. I benefitted from the client communications workshop by Nicole MacDonald. Her workshop was very informative and made me think of how to approach creating my client forms. I was able to start my first welcome packet after attending this session! It was almost as if we were shadowing the speakers because of how in-depth they went into the topic they were presenting and the examples given were helpful to me in understanding how it all came together for the starting phase of branding.

Day 2 - Design Essentials

On the second day, we talked about the next steps in helping your client, or yourself, to achieve their website goals! The day was solely focused on creating wireframes, building websites and e-commerce sites, as well as editing pages to your site (if you have one) to use the skills learned on this day. I had no experience with Squarespace and Showit so those were the most exciting workshops for me! The challenges this week allowed us to dive deeper into web design by having us push our limits to what we believe we could create. With this, I also learned a bit more about SEO and how that ties into the content you put on a website. So, next time you build a website, think twice before skipping over a final review of your content (pictures included), because you never know if you miss a small detail that could affect your SEO ranking on Google.

Day 3 - Brand Development

The final day of workshops! By this time, you should have a clear understanding of how to communicate with a client who is interested in booking your services, how to speak with them regarding their vision, how to brainstorm together and compile a mood board for inspiration, plus a good direction of how to approach building their website. Now, you finalize those steps and put everything together to market yourself or the brand you're working with. An often overlooked portion of your brand, which I fell victim to in the beginning, is the photos you put out! There are great stock photos available and sometimes, you have to use them due to convenience however, you should still have some photos of yourself and photos representing what you do. This was the biggest takeaway from the workshops this week was that yes, you could have an amazing site and amazing work but do you market yourself well? Your photos and logo will stand out the most to viewers, especially if they tend to skim most information so you want to make something that will capture your audience! As I'm rebranding Ashley Hart Media before I graduate, these tips have already helped me come up with new ideas and I'm super excited to share what's next with you.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you all have a chance to attend next year, it's free! Premium access is available to those who are interested in receiving more bonus content and freebies.

Click here for more information on the Thrive Summit