Designing a website these days has never been easier. With so many WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website builders out there, replete with templates and drag and drop functionality, you can easily get a website set up within a couple of hours. But different websites serve different functions. A website in the Web 1.0 era was meant primarily to deliver information in an authoritative, unidirectional manner. Websites in the Web 2.0 era are much more varied, ranging from websites where user content can be uploaded, to e-commerce websites which sell products. Similarly, NFT project websites serve the functions needed to establish the presence of an NFT project. 

You are most welcome to create a website for your NFT project using any editor you want, from Wix to SquareSpace to Google Sites. You can even write your own code in HTML, add on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and add Javascript code to make it responsive (that means that the width will adjust according to whether its a laptop screen, mobile screen or tablet screen). Whatever method you prefer, your website must contain these pages:

1. About Your NFT Project

A page about your project is very important to establish your NFT project. What do website visitors want to know?

  • Why you are creating this set of NFTs
    • What is your vision?
    • What is your mission?
      • Are you hoping to build a community?
      • Do you have a social cause that you are pledging to?
  • What is in store for members of your NFT community. Aside from ownership of the NFT, what else do they get?
    • Are they going to get an excellent investment opportunity?
    • Are they going to get an entry into a microverse or metaverse virtual land?
    • Are they going to be a part of a community of fans, with continual engagement and fandom?
  • Who you are: Declaring who you and your team are as a real human being is what is known as “doxxing” in the web3 space. People don’t trust NFT creators who hide their identities, so be open with who you are. The web3 space is all about transparency. On the blockchain, everyone can see who owns what NFT, and which NFT has been sold to whom. You can see all Ethereum NFT transactions on Etherscan https://etherscan.io/.

2. Whitepaper/ Roadmap

A page about where your project came from, where your project is right now, and the direction your project is going towards in the future. There are just too many pump and dump schemes out there, so if people are going to invest in your NFTs, they want to know that you’re not going to leave them high and dry.

These three parts are important:

  1. Where you came from: What was the genesis of this project? What inspired it? 
  2. Where your project is right now (your milestones): 
    • How many NFTs have been released from the total number of NFTs in this project?
    • How much has your community grown?
    • How has the reception to sales been?
    • Have you had any collaborations?
  3. Where your project is going to in the future
    • Do you plan to have merchandising?
    • Do you plan to create Webtoons?
    • Do you plan to have a Microverse or Metaverse virtual land for your community?
    • Do you plan to adopt social causes?

Your whitepaper can be as simple as a PDF on your site, or it could be a fancy Prezi presentation. As long as you have one, you’re on your way to winning the trust of your community.

You need to have your social media links on your website. Website visitors need to know where to participate in your activities.

At the very least, you will need to have:

  • A Discord server – Discord has many features that are amenable to community building and engagement, more so than any other platform. Discord is also the main platform that other NFT projects are using. You need to have a Discord server too.
  • A marketplace for public minting – Where are your NFTs minted? OpenSea is the most popular for many reasons. Firstly, it has the greatest number of NFT creators and buyers. Secondly, it sits on the Ethereum blockchain which was the first to create ERC-721 token thus allowing for the minting and sale non fungible tokens (this is where the acronym NFT comes from). Thirdly, it has progressed rapidly through collaboration with other platforms such as Twitter to verify PFP NFTs (profile picture NFTs) as well as incorporating the Klatyn, Polygon and Solana blockchains on top of its native Ethereum blockchain. 

You may also additionally consider having:

  • A Telegram channel – Telegram is great for for one-way communication. You can post announcements, news and other media here. It could serve as another way to keep your NFT community informed of your project developments. 
  • A sub-Reddit – Reddit is also a great place to share announcements and other information in relation to your NFT project. You can get comments from your followers on your posts and get awarded Karma for useful or entertaining posts.
  • A Twitter page – Twitter too allows you to post announcements and engage your audience. Since many NFT influencers are on Twitter, you may wish to have a Twitter page too.

4. Mint site

If you’re running your pre-sales, whitelists and airdrops to a relatively small group of people, it’s easy enough to do that on OpenSea. All you have to do is allow only certain wallets to buy your pre-sale mints, thereby effectively setting up a whitelist for them. To airdrop, you can simply send NFTs as gifts to specific wallet addresses.

But if you’re running large and don’t want to do the manual work of adding wallets one by one on OpenSea, you need a mint site. This mint site will only appear as a page on your website during early or special minting periods. You can either create this website using code (remember that you also need a Smart Contract for a mint site). You would need to add the wallet addresses of all the people you are going to allow to mint from the site. What that means is that those people are whitelisted and only they can buy during those early or special minting periods. 

If you don’t wish to use code but nonetheless want to get a mint site for your early or special mint periods, check out https://ambition.so. There, you can create a mint site without code and add a whitelist for your early or special mint periods.