Hey everyone!

My name is Akarsh, an intern at Zoho and I hope that you are safe and sound during these testing times. I will regularly be posting about booking pages in this community page and I am looking forward to helping you out in creating some great booking pages that you can use to showcase your business. If you have any doubts or clarifications regarding this guide, feel free to comment below. So, let us get started!

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Your appointment scheduling page is a critical part of your organisation’s image. Most studies have shown that a great online experience instils a sense of trustworthiness and confidence in your customer’s decision of doing business with you. Hence, it is crucial that you offer a good-looking and convenient appointment booking experience to your clientele so that you can have more people wanting to do business with you from initial impressions alone. In this guide, we are going to show you how to do so effectively with minimal time and effort. So, put on your creative hats and let us begin!

When you started thinking about your appointment scheduling page, how did you imagine it in your mind? Getting at least a vague image of what your result should be the first step that you are going to take. If you have seen a appointment scheduling page anywhere in the past that impressed you, you may draw references to it while imagining your own page. In case you are finding it hard to do so, try looking around the internet to get inspiration from what others have done. Check out other appointment scheduling websites, landing pages, websites and other sources that give you some clarity and inspiration on what direction you should be heading in when you are designing your scheduling page. Try to carefully analyze the elements in these websites to look for signature characteristics that are used extensively in your industry. For example, you are far more likely to see colors like sky blue and grass green in the spa industry as compared to colors like black and red because the former ones are far more peaceful and calmer to human eyes. Once you have an idea on how your page should look like, from hereon, everything that you read should help you lead to that as a result.

For this guide, we are going to use just the on-board customization options for designing the appointment scheduling page. This way, we can keep the whole process simple and quick with minimal effort. The customization options that are present in Zoho Bookings can transform the look of your appointment scheduling page if done right.

Now, where are these customization options that we are talking about? If you are on the home page of Zoho Bookings, navigate to the workspace settings page by clicking on the gear icon on the top right corner that says Manage Business. Click on the Workspaces option on the left pane after which, you should click on the workspace for which you want to design the appointment scheduling page. Scroll to the bottom of all options that are available and click on the Booking Page Settings to get started on our process.

On the right half of the page, you will see that the options given are divided into two sections: Header Options and Footer Options. Like the names infer, you will be able to edit the elements that are present in the header and footer of your appointment scheduling page. Here is what each of them mean:

Header Elements: Logo - This is the top left corner of the page where your company logo goes. Ensure that you upload a PNG version of your logo in which the background is transparent. This gives a professional look to the logo on your page.

Header Elements: Title - The text right next to the company logo is the title which can be edited to say either your company name or any other text of your liking.

Footer Elements: Contact Number – The contact number that you need your customers can use to contact you goes here, on the page footer.

Footer Elements: Email Address – Same as the contact number, give your email address to through which your customers can reach out to you.

Footer Elements: Facebook – Your Facebook tag goes in here. Your tag comes in after https://www.facebook.com/ on your Facebook URL.

Footer Elements: Twitter – Likewise with Twitter. Your tag comes in after https://twitter.com/ on your Twitter URL.

Footer Elements: Instagram – Just like Facebook and Twitter. Your tag comes in after https://twitter.com/ on your Instagram URL.

Let us go over the Booking Page Themes next.

You have 4 options to pick a theme for your page. The Default and Modern Web templates let you customize further than just picking the style from the theme with options to change the color scheme, which we will go over in a short while. The Classic and Fresh themes do not offer any options to customize their color schemes and are perfect for those who just want a simple theme for their appointment scheduling page without having to spend too much time tweaking it.

Like we had mentioned earlier, the Default and Modern Web offer customizability in terms of the color schemes that they can portray. While the Default option offers you 10 pre-set colors on your header that you can try, the Modern Web allows you to pick any color from 16 million colours to be set on the text, buttons and background according to your liking. In this way, the Modern Web is what we would recommend as it offers more granular controls over your appointment scheduling page theme when compared to the other options.

Under the color options in Modern Web you will be able to see 11 pre-set color schemes that you can check out on your appointment scheduling page. Try out the ones which you think may suit your appointment scheduling page well. If you need to apply something that is not offered in the pre-set schemes, click on the custom scheme at the very end (the one that looks like part of a rainbow in a box) to customize every part to your liking. It even offers a numerical hex value input so that you can precisely get the color that you need.

After that, you will see the Banner options where you can edit the Title, Description, Button Text and the Background Image that goes into your appointment scheduling page.

Custom Colors offer complete control over what you need in terms of the colors of your page.

For this specific guide, you will just need a place from where you can get your background image. If you have an image already that you want, go ahead and skip to the next part of the guide. If not, there are several websites on the internet where you will be able to purchase an image or get free royalty-free images. Please do note that sites that offer royalty-free images may not give you the same quality or specificity of paid ones. Some of the websites that we offer are:

Paid Sites:

Royalty free sites:

https://www.freepik.com/ (You can get paid ones here as well.)

In this specific guide, we will not be editing any part of the image as we are going with just the image itself as the background. So, all you need to do is use your own image or go through the website of your preference and download one that you think is the right fit for your appointment scheduling website. Ensure that the image isn’t too cluttered and is visibly pleasing as it can portray a good and positive look to your page. Also, it will be much better if the majority of colors in the image match the color of your logo as it will make the design of your page look seamless and uniform although it is not mandatory to do so.

For choosing the color scheme of your appointment scheduling page, the first step that you need to take is to observe your background image and your logo and answer the following questions with a color or two:

If you have a color or two that answers these questions for you, then that is probably what you are looking for. Don’t forget that you can always apply a certain combination of colors and try them out on the appointment scheduling page to see if it goes well. Also, ensure that you try all colors that you think may be good because sometimes, the colors that you think aren’t that great may be the best fit for your appointment scheduling page as a whole.

If you have a website for your organization which follows a certain style and color pattern, it may be better just to go with those specific colors and backgrounds that look just like it as it helps put both together as a visually whole and uniform package to your customer. This makes your website and bookings page look like a very professionally done experience.

Note: For every change or edit that you make to your appointment scheduling page, check out the page after doing so by clicking the Go To button at the very end of your workspace options so that you get an idea of how it looks on your appointment scheduling website.

Under the Banner section in Booking Page Themes, there are 3 places where you will have to give sentences or phrases on your appointment scheduling page: Title, Description and the Button Text. For the Title and Description, you can get creative and write anything that you think is appropriate and attractive for your business. As for the Button Text, you are pretty much limited to phrases that say that the final button on your appointment scheduling page confirms the details entered by the customer and confirms the booking. Here are some of our suggestions for each field:

Feel free to try out your own suggestions and do not forget to check out your page with the changes done so that you get a feel on how it looks like to your customers.

Get feedback! Work on your page until you have done the best you can and try to show it to some people (your colleagues, friends or family) that you are comfortable with seeing what they think of it. Who knows, perhaps they will point out a thing or two that can be improved which might have been missed by you because you were so focused on getting everything else right as well. This happens to the best of us and it is always a wise idea to get opinions from others and incorporate those into your design if you think that they make your page better. Ask for feedback from your customers as well after they start using it so that you can make the page easier for them to use to book appointments with you. If you have followed and implemented most of what we have said in this guide then congrats, you have designed an awesome appointment scheduling website all by yourself! Way to go!

I hope that you have found this guide to be helpful to you. Please share this with anyone who you know will benefit from this guide. Once again, let me know of any questions that you have via the comments sections down below.

Note: Some of features mentioned in this guide are only available on the premium subscription. 

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