Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Course: Welcome to the course. My name is David. I'm going to walk you through step one to step done, and how to start a blog with WordPress, starting a blog is easier than ever and I'm going to show you everything that you need to know to create a beautiful, responsive, fully optimized blog with 0s. In this course, we'll be using the base WP theme. The BCWP theme is a free theme that looks fantastic on mobile devices, impairs really well with page building plug-ins. So you have a lot of control over the look, feel, and design of your blog. The services will be using our name sheep for our domain names, blue hose as our web host. Then we'll be installing WordPress in designing our block. So if you're ready, click that next video and I'll see you on the inside.
2. How to Register a Domain Name: Welcome to name cheap. Now you may be more familiar with GoDaddy. And GoDaddy is a good company and they provide a lot of helpful services. But strictly for domain name registration, I find that Name Cheap has the much better price point. So to get started with named Sheep is very simple. You just type in the domain name that you want to register right here. So we'll go with my super amazing blog.com. And let's go ahead and click Search. And now on this next page, it'll tell you if you're a domain name is available. So this one is currently available and I can add it to my car. If it's not available, then you have to search for something. Again, I strongly suggest going with a.com as it is the legacy extinction. Anyways, let's go ahead and click Add to Cart. Okay, so now it's been added to cart with view item. And let's go to checkout. Ok, now you can register your domain name for one year, up to nine years in advance. I definitely recommend registering or doing it for two or three years. And then as your project sticks around, you can renew it again for a longer period of time. And I suggest weaving auto renew off that way. When your domain names up for registration to pay for it again, you can just log into your Name Cheap account and then pay for it yourself. Get who is guard for free with name cheap, and that is it. And go ahead and confirm your order, which will involve you creating a Name Cheap account in submitting payment. And that's it.
3. How to Get a Shared Hosting Account: Welcome to blue host.com. So blue hose is actually the number one recommended web host by WordPress. Now blue hose offers free SSL certificate one-click WordPress install 24-7 support. And I know it says Free domain in here, but free is not Frigyes. It's free for the first year, but then you're paying an inflated price after that. And so it is actually cheaper to go with Nim cheap, I strongly suggest you coat with ni Jeep. Anyways, let's get started. So to get started with the hosting account, you click on the big green button that says Get Started. And now this will take you to basically they're shared pricing plans, okay? And so you have two options I would recommend, I'd recommend the choice plus or the plant. And so this is an introduction rate. All web host having nice introduction rate and then the normal price is 11.15. Now I like these plans because they provide enough resources to allow your website to grow to 100 visitors a day, 1500 visitors a day, et cetera. And then as you need to upgrade your web hosting account, you can easily upgrade what we're posting cow at a later date when it makes sense. But when you're starting out, you just wanna go with plus or choice points. Okay? And so I'm going to be going with choice plus in. So just click on the green button that says Select. Okay, and next you can use a domain name you own or create new domain. We do not want to create a new domain name because this is going to register your domain name through blue host. We already have our domain name and name chips. So just type in whatever domain name you use that you registered at named sheep and this will become your primary domain name, IQR accounts. Okay, so I will just say bin, my, let's get us out of the way. My super amazing blog.com. Click on next. Okay, and then this is basically your standard information where you thought your account information. I'm not going to insult your intelligence. Walk you through how to pay for something online, package information. This is where you want to pay attention to. So you can have 1224 or 36, be longer, you select the bigger discount you get. I definitely would recommend at least the 12-month plan. It's only $90. You get 30-day money-back guarantee. So I would definitely go with 12 or 24 months because, you know, it takes it does take one or two years to really build out the website to get to a point where it's starting to get a lot of traffic, et cetera. And so it's really up to you and that is it. And so we don't need this site like security. We don't need anything selected here. Go ahead and submit your payment information. Click that you have read and accepted the terms of use and then submit your payment and then the host will have a onboarding process that you can go through. Welcome to boost.com. So after you go through the onboarding process, which I suggest you just click on skip, skip, skip each step. You'll get to this area which is your dashboard for your hosting account. Now you may notice that your domain name is not coming up properly. It probably says like temporary box something, Something that's because you still have to set the name servers at Name Cheap two points your hosting account. So let's get to it.
4. Setup Nameservers: Okay, so now it's time to setup name service. So we have our domain name and name cheap and we have our hosting account with blue hose. How do we connect the two? The answer to that is we have to set up name service. So it's really simple process where we have 2 the domain name to our hosting accounts. So that way when people visit our.com website, there are redirected to all the files and information found or web host to do that is very simple. All you have to do is login to your name sheep account and then edit the name servers. Click save, and that's it. It's a simple copy paste process. It takes five minutes and I'm going to show you how it's done right now. Sitting of name servers is quick and easy. Now, this is the welcome email that you should get from blows upon purchasing a web hosting plan. This is the primary domain name that is associated with the account. And this will be basically the domain name that you use when you are signing up for Burrows. Now, when you're in your dashboard for blue, as you're looking at something like this, like box temporary domains, et cetera. You're like How do I get my domain name to appear? Reason as you guy, just setup name series so it's quick and easy. So just go to Name Cheap goto domain or less, go to manage. And then under your domain you want to scroll down to where it says name servers. Now here you have, it should say Name Cheap basic DNS. You wanna make sure to go and select custom DNS. Then all you do is put in the name servers, which is an S1 and S2 Blue Host into your name server section within your domain. And then click on the check mark to save. And now it will say there could take up to 40 hours digg effect. I have never seen a take 48 hours, usually takes 20 minutes or so. So go make a cup of coffee, come back, log into blue host, and everything should propagate correctly in your domain name should be appearing within your account as expected. So anyways, that is it for name servers.
5. Install WordPress on Your Website: Let's install WordPress. So we have our domain name, we ever hosting count, we have named server set up. Now the next step is just installed WordPress. It's so easy. So just go to my sites. And then with blue host, you just go to Create Site. And here you can enter a site name in tagline. You can change this later, so don't worry too much about it. So I'm just gonna call it my website and we'll just call this tag line. Now, more importantly is to pay attention to the Advanced tab email address. This is basically the recovery email. If you ever forget your credentials for your website, there'll be sent to this email address, admin, username, pick something that you can remember and then pat and then the password obviously pick something that you can remember. So I'll just go ahead and do that. So I'll create an admin username and let me go ahead and create a nice password. Okay, next, click on Next. And now helpful free plugins. We don't need any of these, and we want to install it on this domain name, our primary domain name for our accounts. And then you click on Next. And WordPress is installing. Okay? And WordPress has successfully been installed. So until August WordPress, you just click this button right there and WordPress will load. And that is in. So welcome to WordPress. You have successfully installed WordPress. Now whenever you want to log into your website, make sure you do go to WP dash admin. So let me just show you that really quick. Let me walk out. Ok, so this is basically the dashboard. So to get here you have to go to WP dash admin, and then you just enter in your username and email address and entering the password that you just created. So your username or email and your password you just created. And so every single time you want to log into a website, this is what you have to do. Go to WP dash admin, and then just enter in your credentials and then login. And it's that simple.
6. Important Security, Permalink and Backend Settings: Alright, so security perma links in various settings. Let's get to it. So the first thing that we wanna do is we want to go over to users and then you want to click on users. Now, you're gonna notice that you have one user accounts and this is your administrator account, and this account has full access to the website, can add anything, delete anything in. When you publish content, you wanna publish content as an editor just because it adds a level of security to your website. So to add a new user, you just go Add New. And here we go. So now you can just create a new user name. So I can just call this David. You then email, you have to answer a different email address. And that is it. And now you come down here and you go to subscriber it and want changes to editor. We don't need to check that. And then let's go ahead and add new user. And this is also helpful to know just in case you want to ever bring on a writer for your website, then this is what you can do, just create different accounts. And so that is it. And so now when you publish content, if we come over to posts was opened up the hello world post. And if we just take a look, just make sure that whenever you publish content, just to make sure it's selected as your editor account. And so you just navigate over to where it says author and just make sure you select the admin or the editor account, the human, and published the blogposts as okay, and now we can jump into a little bit more detail. So now that we have this editor count, let's open this up. And now a couple of different things that we can do. So we have a nickname here. Here is where you can change the nickname. And so I'll just put it in my actual name and we want to display name publicly as our name. And so what that means is that if we come down here, let me, let me update the user. And let me go ahead and update this blog post. And so let's just take a look at it. And so how it says by David right here, and that's basically being powered by this rate here, okay? And that's it. So you want to go in and make sure to change this to an editor accounts. And next you're going to notice that right here is a bio. And so let me just put it in. This is a bio. Let me update the user. Now if we do that on some themes that have a bio at deep bottom. And so let's just reload this page. And now you've noticed that I've had a little bile. And if you're wondering, well, how do I get this little image to appear? Very easy. That is a gravity star image. So gravity is a service by Wordpress where you can just basically link an image to an e-mail select whenever you leave comments on a blog or publish content on your own website, you can just associate an email to have an a picture appear and that's basically it. And I'm most names you can turn this on or off if you want a bio to show or not, okay? And that's basically it for users. Now, the next thing that we need to do is change our permanent nx. And so we want to go to settings and then we wanna go to promote WIX. And now you have a bunch of different options here. So we have dates, and dates are good if you have a news oriented web, say if you're publishing time-sensitive content. Now, what I recommend is using either post name or custom post structure. Post name is ideal for small websites that are only going to have a 20-30 pages in general, I would definitely suggest you go with custom structure. In the custom structure that I like is slash blog slash post name. I find that this is, gives a nice site architecture to the website as a whole. And it good user experience, and it just helps search engines index everything really well. So let me just go ahead and save changes. And just to show you what I mean is like so let's just take a look at like website creative pro, domain, domain names. We'll take a look at domain names. And if we come down here, you can notice that it looks so nice like website grey probe, blog domains has a nice architecture because I'm using breadcrumbs on my site. So organizes the URL really well where it's like if you take a look at other different types of domain names, just a little bit more confusing like this one, hike GoDaddy, GoDaddy garage, great domain names for businesses. Or like essential tips for choosing best the meaning for it, like wow, man, such an ugly domain, such an ugly URL. So that's why I really like to organize everything as under the block. So it's up to you. Okay? I'd recommend Post Name or custom post structure. I personally like custom post structure where you add in the blog into the Euro structure. And that is it.
7. Delete Demo Content, Plugins and Themes: Themes, plugins and adding these WP theme. Let's get to it. So I want you to do now is navigate over to Appearance and Themes. Now you're going to have a bunch of default theme's installed already. So 201617192020. What these themes are there? Just the default themes that WordPress it releases every single year. Now we want to go to add a new theme in. And now once you click add new theme, I want you to search for WP base, stipend WP base. And there we go. So now we have the BP base, go ahead and install it and activate it. Okay, so now we have the WP theme or base WP theme already installed. So let's go back to our themes. And now we just can delete all these other themes for security reasons, you always want to have just one theme installed on your WordPress installation all times. You don't want to have like one thing active than a bunch of other themes just for security reasons. So to delete themes as easy, Click on it and then there's a little red at Delete button in the corner and click OK. And let's just go through this. And now the last one. Ok, so now we have base WP installed. Now next we need to go into our plug-ins. Now, plug-ins are little programs that add as different types of extensions for your website. Now, depending on your web host will be or using Blue Host and this tutorial, usually you'll get a bunch of default plugins already installed. So the only ones that we really want to have installed right now are jetpack. And so go ahead and deactivate everything else. So this blue host plug-in, we don't need it. I'm gonna walk you through and that's sort of how to install specific plug-ins that we need. So this hello dolly, we can, we don't need that. And now that we just deactivated the blue host plugin is changed into mojo marketplace. So just go ahead and delete it. We don't need it. And I'm going to weave Kismet as inactive and I'm going to deactivate jetpack by WordPress. And so far we don't have any plugins currently installed. Actually, this one is saying update now, so we'll just go ahead and click on that. And that's basically it. Okay. So he should have WP bays are based on BP currently installed. Go ahead and delete various plugins, and that is it.
8. How to Install Breadcrumbs: Well, let's install breadcrumbs. Now. Breadcrumbs is this little section right at the top of the sites. Now, I love bread crumbs because it provides a nice structure for search engines. It allows users to know where they are. It provides internal Lincoln to say like your category pages, use breadcrumbs. Now again, you don't have to it, but I strongly recommend using breadcrumbs in one thing that's really nice about BCWP, it's so easy to setup. So anyways, let's go and install our first plugin. So we'll go to plug-ins. And now I want you to click on add new. And we're going to install a plugin called Yost SEO. Now once used, SEO is comes up, we want to go and click on Install. And you wanna go ahead and activate it. Ok, so now IOS is installed and activated. You're going to have a menu item over here. So quick on this SEO item right there. Okay, so now you have a couple of different links within this. You have search social tools in premium, we wanna click on search. And once that opens up, you want to click on a breadcrumbs right up top there. And so you want to have, make sure Breadcrumbs is enabled. Ok, so click on this, it make sure it's enabled. Then I always like to have the last page bolded so it stands out a little bit. And we want to organize everything by category so you can choose whatever format you want. I like to organize it by category. So it's blog category and then the post title, that's what I suggest. And once you set up, Click on Save. Ok. Now what's view our website. Okay, so we just open this up. Now let's check our blog post. And there we go. So now to enable breadcrumbs, we have to turn it on. So we want to click on customize. And once we do that, we want to click on theme settings. And then you want to go to post. And then you want to click where it says display breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs will come up right at the top and go ahead and click publish. And we'll click the X. And there you go. So you now have breadcrumbs setup in enabled on your blog.
9. Create and Design Blog Posts: All right, so let's edit some blog posts. So I went ahead and added a few demo blog posts just to help you show you how to basically manage your blog posts. Now you should have a blog post called hello world. You can go ahead and just delete that and just trash it. So you just go here and then click on trash and adds it to the trash. Simple. Now, let's go ahead and edit this one. What is the difference between ingredient green tea and black to you? Let's pretend this was like a blog post and I'm making like a TSA. That's all about how to brew tea. Now, this is a good that we have this breadcrumbs up there. But look at this URL structure. It's slash blog site. Well, is the difference between green and oh, that's really that you don't need to have your URL be that long. Now it's fine to have the page setup would be that long. But for the actual URL, you want to jump into your blogposts. It make sure to keep things short and sweet. And so what is this blog post about? This block was his boat, green tea. So it's a green tea, dash verse, black. And even that's a bit long, but, but that's okay, that's much better. Now because we installed breadcrumbs. We have the Yost SEO plugin. And right down here is where you can manage the way you're basically content will appear in the search engines. So basically one which just make sure that everything's okay. Like you want to have this Barbie green. And so basically it's what is the difference? So we have the blog post title followed by the website. In other words, it is currently called my website. So maybe we should change that. The change that you just go to general. And under General is where you can change the site title. So I have a tagline. I don't want to tag line. We don't need a tagline and now call the say title, caught what the website is or what the domain name is. Okay? Matching the site title to the domain name. And you should do the same. And then go ahead and click save changes. Okay, so now that is good to go. So let's reload the blog posts. Oh, let me just click on update it. Now if we take a look, again, everything should look correct. So we have the post title and the name of the website. Now here is your meta description. This is where you want to just incorporate keywords and phrases that people actually use. And you also want to describe the blogposts as accurately as possible. Okay? So just, just describe it as quickly in short, a short paragraph as you can right there, okay? Next is the category. So right now we have a category called uncategorized. We don't want to post anything into an unknown category called uncategorized. You wanna create categories that are specific to what your website is about. And I would suggest starting off with a two to four categories, then fill those categories up with like ten blog posts and then go from there to create more categories. Typically, I stick a, typically most my websites had between 47 categories have Macs. So you don't want to create random categories like like, like thoughts, okay, that's a terrible category, or blog. Or blogs. So it's like what is this website about? This website is about t. And so I could talk about Lake tea brewing, tea brewing Tips, for example. That would be an irrelevant category or T gear or T equipment, something like that. Just you gotta think about like what is your site about and create categories related to what it's about. So I'll just reduce, I'll just call this IT brewing. Keep it short and sweet to a one to three CAT words most for a category. That's it. Go ahead, Add New. And I'll click the, I'll uncheck the uncategorized. And now we have a nice new category. Now right here you'll see tags. I do not use tags Personally. I find tags to be redundant. They just create a bunch of pages, but there's supposed to be used to like tag a blog post that's about something really unique and specific. But so I don't use tags, I use only use categories. Okay? And next right here we have feature image. So a feature image. Let me just show you what that is. Briefly, we'll go back to the website, create a pro.com. Now if you click on blog writes here, these are all featured images, okay? And you can see that the has the branding of the website. And so that's what a feature image is. It makes your image a little bit more clickable and interesting. And these images can sometimes come up in the search engine. If you get a rich snippet from Google, you can't control that. But if Google does take your blog posts and make into a rich snippet, it could potentially show the image that you associate with the blog posts. So it is a good idea to pay attention to creating a good image. Okay, so anyways, how do you add a image? Let's get this done. So what I recommend is using something like an splash, for example, there are plenty of websites that offer free pictures, but I like unspliced, which just uses for this demo. And so go ahead and download an image that you think is, you wake in, I search for T for example, and here's a bunch of pictures of t. Now, once I download that image, okay, so let me go ahead and download this image. And it's downloading. There we go. Okay. Now I'm going to open and I'm going to open Microsoft Office picture manager, use whatever picture editor you want to use. Now we need to resize this because right now this is basically 4,500 pixels. It's gigantic. We do not need an image this big. Like this is a feature image for a blog post. This is fine if it's something like 700 is okay. And so we'll just click OK. Even that's a little big. So we can just reduce that a little bit more. And OK. We'll leave it at 750. It's just something small. And then I'll click on save. Now make sure to title your image something that's related to the blog post. So it's like, I'll call this black tea for example. Okay, now it's time for our next plugin to add to our sites. So we'll just click on update. And what I want to do now is I want to install a plugin called smush it. So go to plug-ins. And let's click on Add New. And I want to go to smush. It's what smoosh it is. It's an image optimization plugin that will reduce the file size of your image so your website loads more quickly, providing a better user experience, taking up less bandwidth, just making it, just making your website load more quickly, which is very important. Okay, let's click on activate. And that is it. Ok, so now let's go back to our blog post that we were editing. Okay, so we'll go into Posts and then I'll go back into my, what is the difference between green sea and black tea? Now to set the feature image, it's very easy. You just click this set feature image. Okay? And now we can take our image and drag and drop it into place. And now the file is uploading. Okay, so now the image is ready to go. So the alt text is here. So the alt text is very important, but it's more important when you add an image to a blog post. I only add images personally to basically demonstrate something. I don't add images for decorative purposes, but the feature image is, has a purpose. Now we've empty if it's purely decorative. So normally for a feature image, unless it's about specifically about picture of something that's related to the bulk OS. I would leave it blank, but this makes sense to call this like like black tea. Okay. And so we've seen smush it. So smush it just reduce the file size by 6% in now that feature image o, right? And that's looking good. So now we have a category, we have a feature image, we have our blog post, we have the meta-description. Now for the actual blog post itself, this is your H1 tag, and when you publish content you can give subtitles. Okay? And so this could be a subheading, so sub heading, ok. And for this you want to just go here heading and then you want to make an H2, okay, and so this is a subheading of the title. Now, say if this paragraph was a sub-heading of this band V-Lake subheading. A subheading. Okay. And then we can come in here and then it's three, boom. So this is a subheading for this. Okay. Does that make sense? And so you should use headings and subheadings to break up content. Again, when you publish content, you don't want to create a wall of text. You want to break things up, so it's easy for people to read. This is not a, not a report for school or college where you need to have like three paragraphs. With publishing contact line, you want whitespace, you want small paragraphs that are easy to read. Now let's just take a quick look. Okay, so now we have our category showing up there. We have our blog post title. We have a beautiful image right here. And it's looking really nice in that we have different headings. Okay, now one little thing is, I don't like having this here. And so how do you get rid of this? It very easily if you really want to hide this, I can show you how. So what I would recommend doing is click on Customize. Okay, and now with customized, you wanna go to additional CSS. And all we need to do is put an entry meta display, none. So that's basically kins call your meta description with this team, they don't give you control over the meta description. But here we can just put that in entry, made a display, none, okay, and that will remove the meta description from all your blog posts. So like if you don't want to show the day, you don't want to show the author. Yeah, it's totally fine. And that is it. Ok. And so let's click on X. And there we go. Okay, so now we have a breadcrumbs feature image title. We've OK, we've hidden the meta description. We started setting up categories as appropriate. And we went through the meta-description for the blog post there. And we also change the site title to something else. So right now it says blank there. So let's just go back to setting. Let's go to general. Alright, so this make sure, okay, so I've got my name there, okay, so we'll have to upload a logo and just a bit, we'll get to that in a little bit later. But anyways, that is it for the blog posts. Okay, so I went ahead and added a feature image to each blog post. Now one other little piece of advice I have is to also consider using something like canva.com. And you can also use Canvas to make different types of thumbnails and images. And so like we can take this type of image and you can just download from here and keep your images all the same size. So this is basically like a YouTube thumbnail, but the image is quite large. Then you can download it as a JPEG and then resize it. And then that way all your feature images are the same size. Not a big deal, but just something to just something to know. And that's personally like what I do on website crater pro.com just in case if you're wondering. And I also like to add branding to each feature image. So I have as web secret pro.com, and that's all done with Canada. And so just in case if you don't know how to do that, that's how I basically I do it. And, and next is for the categories on the backend, just you can come in here and come to categories. And another little thing that you can do is you can jump into each category and then you can write a specific keyword focus, a description of the category here, the name, the slug, it then this could be your basic category description. So tea brewing made easy obviously you want to write like 11 to three sentences, something to describe what the page is about. And then you can take a look here. So I would change it from like Archives, caught Laika, something like how to brew tea, made easy page separator and then like the site title and I'd give it something like die and then give it a meta description as well. And now let's click on update. And now we've just edited basically the tea brew and category. So like if we go back to our site and actually what's me open this up. And so this is green tea respect t. So if I was to click on the category page, and then we have the name of the category and then we have the description for the category right here. So that helps search engines, that helps users. And it's nice little way to just introduce the category and that is it. Ok, so go through your posts in Add feature images, add relevant categories. You can give a description for the category, et cetera.
10. Edit your Websites Menus: Okay, so now let's edit our menu. Now, unassigned. No, I found a little quirk with this scene, I didn't know. So if we go into basically general, if you keep it as a say title and then delete the tagline, what ends up happening is that the site title disappears. I've no idea why it does that. It's kinda strange. I've never seen that before. So this team, you have to keep a tagline or where everything disappears. Okay, so, so what I would do is just create a tagline that's relevant to what they say is about. So tea brewing, tea brewing, tea brewing made easy. We'll just call it that. Okay. And I'll save changes. And there we go. Now for the sample page for this menu, this is your menu or navigation. Now within WordPress, it's called the menu. So find your minions good appearance, and then go to menus. Okay, so now we don't have a menu here, so we have to go and create one. So we'll just create a menu and call it menu. Then click on Create menu. And now for demonstration purposes, we'll just add sample page. Okay, and then we'll just call this example example, and then click on save. And now we wanna go to manage locations. And so with this team we have a primary and a Header Menu. Ok, so it comes with two menus. And so we want to select this menu as the primary. We'll click on save changes. And let's see how that looks. Okay, and so there we go. So this is the primary menu. Now if we were to add the menu to the Header Menu, basically the theme adds a header menu right to the very, very top of the website. So just, let me just show you that quickly. So if you want, you can add it up there to really up to you. I prefer to keep menu's short and sweet. So again, like I keep and coming back to when x8 gray bro, I keep my menus is minimalistic as possible, like five items max, I do not like to create a website with tons of things to click on the menu. I guy keep things as simple as possible, particularly with like a niche website, are awake whenever, whenever I'm stealing like any type of like blog. Anyways, let's just get rid of that. And we'll keep the primary menu. And that is it. Ok, so let me just reload the site. And there you go. So now we're all set with the menu at the top.
11. Homepage Design and Layout: Now let's create a homepage for our blog. Now this is the blog roll, that's what this is typically called, this kinda layout. It's OK as a homepage, but we can create a dedicated homepage which I think would be a little bit more impressive to potential visitors to help organize the site content a little bit better and just make our website stand out to be just a come across as higher quality than just having this like Blogger, which I think is a little lazy to go with this anyway is to make a homepage is very simple. So go to your admin and then you want to go to pages, okay? And now within pages we want to click, Add new. And we want to create a page and call it home and then click Publish. Now this will make sense in just a bit. So just follow along to scrape page and call home and want to add a new page. And you want to call this page block. Okay? And click on publish. Ok, so now we have David, the domain name and then slash blog. Now we wanna go into settings and you want to go into General or sorry, you wanted to go into reading? I believe it is. There we go, reading. Okay, so Settings Reading. Now we want to click on a static page. So the homepage we want it to be home and the post page we want it to be blog. Okay. And let's click on save changes. Oh, okay, now let's open up the site again. Okay, so now we have a homepage and now we can start editing this. And we also have our first menu item that we can add, which is our blog page. So let's jump back into our menus. Okay, so we'll go here and go to menus. And now, what's your view on? And let's go ahead and add the blog. Okay, and then let's click on save. And let's reload the page. And there we go. So now we have our blog added to our menu bar at the top. And let's open it up. And so now we have a nice structure. So now we have a dedicated blog post page and we have a homepage that we are ready to design. Ok, so let's design our homepage and turn this into something nice. So to get started, we just want to navigate back in to our WordPress Dashboard. And then you want to go to where it says plugins. Now for plugins, we wanna go to add a new. And at the plugin that we want to install is called stackable. Stack bull. Not what stackable is. It's a more of a premium gutenberg block editor. You may be wondering, what is this guy talking about? Well, the WordPress editor is, uses blocks and it's actually called the Gutenberg editor. I have no idea why they call it that. But there's lots of plug-ins that add additional blocks to the Basic Wordpress editor. And I have to say that stackable is one of my favorite. And so now we have justs, that's okay. So now we're good to go. So now we just installed stackable. And so now let's go ahead and edit our homepage. Oh, right, so the first thing that we need to do is we need to navigate over to where it says Template. And then we want to select Full Width. That means that this particular page, the homepage, is just going to be a full-width page and it's not going to have a sidebar. Ok, so we just take a look at it now because they'd just change it to full width and the sidebar is gone. And now we are ready to basically design. Now, this is the Gutenberg editor, so it's basically a bunch of blocks and you can choose what you want. Now if you click the plus sign, you'll notice over here that there are a bunch of different blocks. So you have your most used common formatting layout, widgets, embeds, et cetera. But we just installed the stackable plugin. So now we have a couple of different more premium blocks. And so again, you can play around with this to see what you like. But I'm going to use the call to action, for example at first. And now, now that we've add a call to action box, now over here is where we can change the style. So there are a couple of styles that you can download for free and there's a couple of premium ones. So if we click on free, for example, here we can change it to this block, for example. Or I guess select this block or this block. And then you can just jump in here and quickly edit the text and edit the background image as you want. Okay? But let me just go ahead and select the basic block. Ok, so this is where it, where you'd want to have a call to action for your website. And so this should be something that's related to like what your website is about. So like if I have like a tea brewing seat, tea brew, beauty brew tea routine, like a pro I don't know, something like that. So you've got to come up as I'm better than that. But that's kinda like what you wanna do there. And so next you can go to style. And now Style is where you can adjust everything. So for example, we have title there and so the title written as h three, I would go ahead and change it to H2. So that means this will be an each to title tag now. Okay. And then you can change the topography to something that you like, or if you like that, you can just keep it. And now if we open up general so we can center or have the text off to the left or right. So I'm going to just keep it as centered. And then we have the button down there. The button can open a new tab. You can have a no file link if you want to. So this is really helpful. Wake C, If you haven't email opt-in form you want to link to or you have some specific guide that you want to link to or a product that's where you'd link to this right there. And so very nice. So you can just click it and change the text. I'm like, I'll say something like click here, click, Click here to learn more, click here to learn more, something like that. And so then you can just change the different block or sorry, the button styles. Okay? And so I'll weave at something like that's okay. But you can change the button size to make illegal really large. If you want border-radius, you can change. So if you want to have it, maybe, maybe we'll make it a little bit more round like that. Okay? And then here, let me just minimize that, okay, and then we have basically the description. And so button right there, and then spacing and then a black background. So we click on the black background, which is X out of that. Now, here we can add an image or a video if we want. So we'll just go ahead and click this. Now select one of the images I've already uploaded. And then I'll click selects, and then there we go. So now we have a nice background image. Will quick updates. And then let's go ahead and view the sates. Okay, so now this looks, this looks nice. But like, oh, I don't like that. How do I get rid of the home? Very easy guys. You just backspace. Okay. Then you update it and then the page will adjust correctly. Okay. And there you go. Now, because the home was the H1, what we should do is change this to make sure that this is the H1 tag. So we want to just jump back in quick the block you want to edit, go to title and make sure that this is one. So this will become your one title tag you need and you need one H1 tag on a page. And so basically this should be screened, makes sense to what this page is called. So for example, I really, I should go ahead and edit the page. So I have right now it's just david, My name. And so let me just jump in there and so we can change that by going to our, we can even change it just down here. We can go down here. And then let me just delete all of this. And so I will just call this david. Are caught your website's name, page separator and then the keyword phrase. So Brew, brewing, tea, made easy, something like that. And then we'll have a meta description there. So you write something that's keyword focused, related to what your website is about. So rights, your description here. And so you should incorporate keywords and phrases there related to like what the main focus of the sate is about. So like brewing teammate easy social and corporate lake brew teammate easy. Or how to, how to make tea proper way to make green tea, whatever, whatever phrases people are looking for, that's what you kinda want to incorporate into the Meta Description and just keep it short and sweet. Because as you can see, see the orange line, how it fills up. Okay? And so you just want to add in a meta-description that gets to the point where it's about green like this. And that's it. Okay? And so there we go. So now we have a nice little call to action at the top of the website. And so we can click the button there, then you can link to the specific page there. And then that's it. And so that's why I really like stackable because how easy was that? That was so easy. You don't need to install any complicated page building plug-in, just use something like this. And now we can come in here, we can go stackable again. Now you have all of these different things that you can click and play around with to see how they look. And so what I'm going to just go ahead and do is like, I personally like to keep my website's Simple, particularly my content oriented websites. So I like to just have like my blog posts that are, I mean, you can just look at how I personally designed websites. I want I'm creating like a blog. I like to have a dedicated homepage and I like to have a call to action of something at the top. I typically like to have some type of welcome message to explain to people what the say this bell. And then I'd like to just introduce people to be squeezed like either you're best blog posts, your categories, but different products, your latest blog post there, whatever. And so that's kinda like how I typically approach designing any type of state. So we can just do the same type of thing there, okay? Or we can just Like I'll remove this block and we can just create this as like a, you could just keep this as a paragraph, okay. Or we can have it as a cover image if we wants or whatever. So I can just say something like, welcome, welcome to my expert expert T blog. Where where I show you pro professional profile, professional tips and tricks to making quality tea from your home. Okay. We can add a little welcome message like that's okay. Or and then I can underscore that are space that keep this. And since this is one, I can make be make this an H2 so I can go there and make that NH2 and then centre it. There we go. And we come in here and it's like I can add in my latest posts like that. I can click on scroll down here. Quick free. Pick the one that you think looks nice. I like that one. Okay, so now these pages are coming up, these blog posts that we have coming up quite nicely. But we can maybe change the style a little bit. So I want the feature image. I don't need the category. I want the title. Do I really need an excerpt? Now? I don't really need an excerpt here, so we can just minimize that. And then that looks nice. Okay, and so that's looks very simple. And so let's go ahead and click on update. And let's reload the site. Okay, so now we have a nice page title. We have a little call to action there. We have a little welcome message. And now our blog posts are coming up quite nice there. Maybe we can go ahead and center this block, so it all kinda looks a little bit better. Okay, and there you go. So now you have a nice little beginner homepage of things getting set up correctly. And that looks really nice. And so you can just continue on with this if you want. So we can come down here and click on the block. We can add in more stackable features if we want something come down here for a stackable and we can add in like DIF, just different things that you want. So you want to have testimonials, team member pricing, image boxes. I got video, feature, image, expand divider, more of this good stuff right here. So it's very, very, very powerful stuff, very easy to use. Like I can enter there and like maybe I'll go here and I'll come down here and maybe I can add a and I'll add in a divider. Ok, and so that looks nice. And then I'll come down here and I'll click this and maybe I can add in this as a divider. So when we come in here and find the divider again, there we go. Boom, click on update. Ok. So it's a very subtle feature, but like, okay, and that's it. Okay, so that's how you can kinda structure this and start creating your own little homepage, dedicated homepage that looks quite nice. And of course, you can always change the layout of this. So if you want. The way out to look like that. Or if you just don't like this at all, you can just come in here and select free and then select a whole different feature, like if you want this one instead, if you want like that or this or that, like whatever you wanna do. So I personally like having the images above. That's personally how I like to structure everything. And so let me just minimize the extra again. We don't need that, okay, and then that's it. And so that should give you some idea of potential design ideas. But whatever you do, I would keep things as simple as possible. Ok, just like the way I designed here, this looks complicated, but I'll keep it simple and elegant like this. Ok, so we have a nice called action. There are weight as blog posts there. Next is to start like designing the footer and other little elements of our website. Ok, so let's just finish up. So what I went ahead and did is that I reduce the size of the images here. So what I, all I did was I go, went into feature image and then I reduce the image height to about 194. So the images are a little bit more square then very long. Let's go ahead and add one little elements at the bottom that I really like with stackable, and that is the feature image. And so this is a great image if you ever want to promote a product. So this could be something we'll just call it like how just called this affiliate? Affiliate product? Products. Okay, then short description of product. Now it's called it shorts, the scription of ducts. Okay. Then we can just add an image over here. And so I'll just go and add a image that I've already uploaded. Okay, and next we can just click on basic, and then I'll click on style. And then I can have image calm with I'll make the image nascent, small. D border-radius. I'll create nice and large and, and shadow. I'll make it big. And then let's come down here and change this button to maybe something else. So let me just come down here and I'll cheat has been to read, that looks great. Okay. And then hover effect, that's fine. Okay. And now let me just click on the button. Size will make it like medium or maybe, maybe large. They'd be really McKnight, nice, big button topography. We'll change it to something that's a little bit more fun. I'll change, I'll click on Poppins. There we go. Okay, and then let's change the button text here. Click here. Ok, then cooling. Click here. And there we go. And then I'll update this. Okay, and let's just take a quick look at how this homepages looking. And that's looking good. Okay, so we have a nice little call to action there, and we have our blog post there. We get to the bottom there, and then we have this product at the bottom right there. So we can change the more of the style here if we want. So for example, if I wanted to, to will come up, will come back up to general image column width. We can change this border radius. We can have the pole product censored. And that's it. And so now that's looking, that's coming together quite nicely. So typically you'd want to have a more of a product description there. So short product description where you, So the band he fits benefits of the product with great copy. We'll just call it that. And they just go to the, we go to the image column so we can make this a little bit bigger. Because on the website, too much whitespace actually. So you need to like make this image a little bit bigger. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so now that's starting to look nice. Okay, so you have the collection there at your waist, blog posts. You know, you can link to an affiliate product with this right here if you want. You can also throw in your categories are specific things that you want to link to above this. But for a basic layout for homepage, I think this is looking quite nice.
12. Logo Design For Beginners: Now it's time to make a logo for or what x8. So I recommend using something like logo maker. If you wanna make your own logo for free, or hiring a designer on say something like fiber. Those are basically your best options here. You don't need a big complicated logo. Okay, if you see, if you look at websites the way most websites are designed today, the logos are simple because simple works. People want, you want a small logo, so your website loads quickly. You just want to get the point across. I mean, we can take a look at anything like we can take a look at and making sense of sense.com. This is a website that gets 300 thousand monthly visitors. And let's look at their complicated logo. Wow, that is so complicated. Or say t's I meet, say t's, I will teach you to be rich. This is a multi-million dollar a year education company. Now, what could their logo? I will teach you to be rich or as so complicated. It's simple, okay? Simple logos are the way to go. And so I'm making a say about T. Let's get started. So, but the logo maker, you want to start with the text over here. And so what's the name of my website? We'll start with that. So we'll start with the name of my website. And now that looks pretty ugly. So we can come up here and change the fonts to something we want. So simple, modern pixel, whatever you want to pick, I'm going to pick on the designer picks. Okay, then let me go down here and let me click on Anton. Alright, that looks nice. And I want to change this color. I don't know why it's set to blue and so let me just go ahead and change that to black. Okay, and now I want to add some like imagery next to it. So what's my say about, I'd say it's about T. So let's type in T and see what comes up. Okay, so now we have all these like really cool cups popping up I can select from and use. So I personally am going to go with this one right here. So I really like the way that looks. Okay. And so let me just change this and like was play around. Okay, so now you have to play around with this. Let me hit enter me, sensor this to the left. Okay, move it over. Let me make this bigger, right. So this is our first issue. It's like the space between the last name and the firstName is too much. And it's like, well, how do you reduce it? Sometimes it can't. Sometimes like thing you gotta do is like, oh, okay. I mean, just let me just get rid of it. I'll just get rid of it and just, and just create more texts. Ok. And so I liked the way this is looking. I'll make this nice and big. I'll put like the David rates right next to this. Okay. We'll keep it right there like that. And then I can just go here and click on text here and then type in my last name. If I want to add it, then we can just move it down. Okay? And so make sure the text font is the same. Ok, and there we go. So now we have a very, very basic logo, but that's kinda how you do it. And so like that or I can do something that I can keep going with this. I go add in something like.com, okay? And then I can change this to black and I can make this even like really small like that. And then we can move that right there. Okay. And kinda, that kinda helps sell the point that this the website or we do, we can just get rid of this. So if you ever want to get rid of something, you just go here and click on remove right in the corner down over there. And so let's just set this up correctly and home make that bigger. And okay, so that's looking, that's looking fine. Now we can change around with the color if we want. So it's like if you wanted to change this to make, say a green, a green would make a little bit more sense because it's T, I don't have to do black and white. It looks okay. I like to keep things simple, so maybe we will just make this like a nice dark green a little bit and make the, make the name a little bit bigger. Maybe make the last name that go a little bit smaller. And yeah, that's fine. Okay, so now it's time to download our logo. So to do that, you click Save logo and then you say no thanks that download low resolution file. And right here you have your logo downloading. And so we'll just take that and drag it to the desktop. And I will just call this logo. Okay, Let's go this logo and that's it. And, and now how do you actually upload the logo to your sites? It's simple. You just have to go to customize. And once you go to customize, you want to go under Theme Settings. And then right here, you have different items here we can select the header, for example, GAD, header, background rate, their blog posts, topography. And so. And once customize loads, you want to go to where it says site's identity, okay? And then you want to click on select logo. And then this is where you just want to drag and drop your logo into place. And smoosh, it will do its thing. Okay, let's click on select. Now we can basically crop this image to what as we once. Okay, so maybe I don't want that space above it. I don't want maybe a little bit of white space below and keep it like that. And we'll click on crop image. Alright, so that looks great in, so we can just get rid of the say title and we can get rid of this tagline there. And there we go. So now let's click on publish rates. Okay, so now we want to add in a Say icon. The icon is this little thing right here. See how it says logo making silly little triangle, square and circle. That's basically your favicon for the website. And so it's important to have a favicon because when people visit your site, it gets saved and it's delicious. Make this cup of tea cup into our favicon. So let me just go open width in. I'll go to picture manager. And I'll click on Edit, I'll click on crop and then take all the, all the texts. Leave it like that. Okay, I'll reduce this down to that. Okay, click, click save. And let me rename this baby avocado, okay? Then select Save icon and then drag and drop the favicon in. Literally called the favicon. That's what I don't know why, but that's the name of it. And click select and we'll just click on. See. Now I made a mistake. Okay, so basically you want to have enough space so you can crop it in appropriately. But I think that kinda looks nice, actually. Tbi, it's kinda like school. So I think I'll just keep it like that. But if you ever run to this situation, which you need to do is just make the image a little bit bigger, okay, so there's more whitespace so you can just crop it in appropriately. Anyways, that's how you upload a favicon and that's basically how you upload a logo. Lets click X out of this. Let me click on publish. And let me click X. Oh, okay, so that's looking equates nice. Okay, so now we have a logo, we have a little menu, we have a nice little designed homepage. And so that is it for your logo and African. Okay, and one last tiny little design tip is to make sure that you use a two funds. Typically for a website you don't want to be using three or four different font styles. So like we have hands-on in the logo. So be better if we could change this to ancestors who would match a little bit better. Now I know I'm gonna get the question like, how do I change the font style for this or whatever. Unfortunately, you can't. I mean, you can, but you have to up pay to upgrade. And so this is kinda the issue with all free themes that could they, they just limit and various aspects like this. So if you want to change the fonts, you have to basically go and get the premium version of this. But it's okay because it's still looks nice just the way it is. Anyways, let's go into the back IN, change this brew like, brewed tea like a pro, and let's change that to antichain so that it matches the site a little bit more. Alright, so we'll just click on this and then we'll go to title, and then we'll go to typography. Click on edit, and we'll just type in and tn. Okay, there we go. And we'll click yes. And that's it. So we'll click on update. And then let's also make this bold so it's a little bit heavy, so it matches the anton fonts a little bit better. And that is it. And so let me just go ahead and make sure that this is bold, so this matches well. And then also make sure like this is Anton is well, so it's just going to the title then cite biography and like and tn. Okay. And so you just want to pay attention to little details like that because that's something that you don't notice as when you view on websites. But that basically that's good. Rule of thumb, so to speak, is like pick tooth to fonts, to font styles, and stick to it. Okay, so like maybe a font-style for like all your headers and another font-style for your body, or just one font-style for everything, whatever. But because we're using a free theme, we are a little bit limited into in terms of our options. So I'm just picking Anton when I can, and then just leaving everything as the default font family for these sites.
13. Create Your About and Contact Pages: Now it's time to create an About page and a contact page for a website. And we're going to put that right in the menu bar at top. So how do you do it? So basically you just navigate over to dashboard and you go in to jump into pages. And then you just want to click on add new. And so we literally want to create a page and call it the About page, about or about this website. Or the story behind, or something like the story behind my passion for brewing tea, whatever. Like you can just get creative. And now you can basically talk about the website, okay, so About pages are never about you there about the website, why the website was created, why you have the authority to write what you're writing about that sort of thing. So it's a conduit with a website created Pro for example, I have a story about my history and, and I have a very helpful guides, wings on the about page. You could do something similar. Ok, so you can either make a very long About page or make it very short About page, whatever. And then always tried to direct people's attentions somewhere either to an email opt-in form or to some specific guide or product or whatever. Okay. Don't just leave don't leave people hanging. Were you don't direct them anywhere. Okay. And then you want to just come down here and then edit snippet and make sure that it's something that fits. And so it's back out of this and then back out the separator. Okay, and then we'll click on publish. And then let's go in here. So now we have it as there's really ridiculously long Euro, the story behind my passion for brewing tea. No. We want to get rid of that, minimize it, and then click on about OK, we just want to create it and make it say about you. Now we can change the default simple here. We can change this to maybe like a full width where we don't really need a sidebar on our about page, right? Not really that important. Okay, and then there we go. Here we go and get back out of this. Let me open this up, and there you go. So now we have this. Now, what you can either do is you can either go in here and writes content, or you can use stackable and create a very beautiful, creative looking Home About page, whatever. Okay, so it's up to you, but basically that's what I would that's my approach for bringing about page. Now, let's go ahead and create a contact page. Okay, and to do, we just click on add a new R. Let me just click on update. And let's go ahead, click on add new. And the next thing we wanna do is click on con tact, okay? Or we can create something like a need to get in touch. Question mark, and then keep your, keep your message shorts and sweet, something like that. Now, give people some, give like three sentences, two or three sentences. Explain how you want people to contact you keep your messages short and sweet to the three sentences, checker FAQ, guide. We reply to emails within 24 to 48 hours, also messages on our Facebook page, whatever. Now, let's come down here and then make sure this makes sense. And so now we have the site title separator. And so let me just go ahead and add in a separator and I'll put my the name of the website at the end. You can give it a contact page or you give it a meta description for the contact page. Let's go ahead and click publish. And now the same thing, we need to change this, go to Edit and then just minimize that and call it Khan attacked. Something is simple, is that ok. And then default template, I'd go again, I would do like full-width. There's no need for a sidebar on the contact page. And so now if we open up the contact page, it's looking nice, but how do we add an email form so people can just send us a message via a form that's very simple to do with Wordpress. And so the first step is to just basically navigate to plug-ins. And then we want to add in WP forms, okay, so add new. And then we want something called WP forms. And this is one of my favorite plug-ins for email forms. Ok, and this right here, WP forms, we can go ahead and click on install. And let's click Activate. Okay, now we can create our first form. Let's go ahead and do that. And it gives us this nice little onboarding process. So we just want a simple contact form. So we'll just click Create is simple contact form. Simple is that. And now here is our form. And so I want to edit this part up top there. And the format is, I just want it to be simple. I want maybe name, email, then comment or message. That's fine by me. Okay, we can keep it that simple now, obviously, you can play around with this as you want because it's your website. But let's keep moving with the tutorial. And so I'm just going to actually add this two are the same. We need to click on save first. Now the form exists. Now click on embed. And then you want to take this form because this is our form right here. That's the short code for the form. Navigate over here and then you want to click on edit page. And next step is so complicated. Copy, paste. So card. And then next, open it up. And now you have a nice-looking contact page. Okay? And then the last step, the very last step is to add our About and contact pages to our menu. And so to do that, we just want to navigate back over to our WordPress Dashboard. When a navigates you appearance, then go to menus. And then we want to get rid of example. We don't need this. And then we need to add our about page and our contact page. And so ats menu. Ok, so now these have been effectively added, but you'll notice something that it takes the entire name of the page and it's like, oh, this looks terrible. Like how do you make it shorter, easy. Just click this drop down and you delete this needs to get in touch, no contact. Con, texts. There you go. And then same with this one. The story behind my passion for brewing tea. We don't need that. You can just call this about, Keep It Simple, OK. menu items should be simple. Now click on save, and let's reload this. Okay, so now we have blog contact about and to switch things around is very easy. So you just drag and drop and then you can move things as you want. You can also create things to be a sub-items. So if you ever want to create like a dropdown menu item, you just add pages and then just move it over. So now like about as a sub item of blog, we don't wanna do that obviously. So we're just gonna move everything back over, but just, just to let you know what you're able to do. And then that is it. And so let's reload it. And so now we just move things around. So there we go. So now we have a nice little menus. We have bog about contact, maybe adding something like resource pages or whatever, whatever you want, where maybe you could add in like a category page, something like that. But anyways, that's how basically what you want to do for your about pH contact page and how to end at, add it to the menu.
14. Designing Your Footer and Legal Pages: Alright, so time to Azure legal pages and stuff to the footer of your website. So do you have to do this? No, you don't have to do this when you have a brand new website. This is more important, particularly when your website's search generating money and starts getting a significant amount of traffic. So I would say like when you certainly couldn't get around like $1000 and it's really important to like maybe sit down with an accountant and sit down with a lawyer and helped me to help you craft these pages. I know that's not what people want to hear, but it's the truth because you're what's it's starting to become a little bit of a business. And so I could assist your first time doing this. You really need to have someone to kinda help you. But in general, what do you need to, what do you need to be aware of? You need to add a privacy terms in disclaimer. And if you're going to be using Amazon Associates, you also need to put this in the footer. Now I have a dedicated page on web secret protocol. It gives you an overview of what each is. So a privacy policy page is basically tells users what the information gathering process is for your website. And then what a terms of use Page is is basically describes to people what they're agreeing to abide by when they visit your site and if they don't want to abide by that, told them how to opt out, which usually just means leaving these sites. And then a disclosure page is basically just to disclose any interests at night might not otherwise be obvious. For example, if you have sponsored content, for example, you have to say that that's a d, okay? And so that's basically what you want to go ahead and can add to your site. Maybe not right, and that maybe not today, but there's just something to be aware of that you're going to have to do. So in order to do this, we want to add something to our footer right down there. And so in order to manage the footer, this is basically how this theme works. So we have to go into Appearance and go over to widgets. And now with our widgets, we have four widget areas. We have 1234, so it comes up as like little blocks like 1234. And so if you have to, if you, for example, if I only have information in two widgets, it comes up as like two blocks. So I'll just put in like hi, and then we go to footer, footer widget to. And I'll put something in here and I'll call it high. Okay, and we'll click on Save. Click on Save, then was opened us up. And then you'll see how it appears. And so now it has like two little blocks, but say if I go to footer widget number three, and I do the same thing, and I add in another textbox here, I'll click save, for example, and we load it and so forth. So just adds blocks. You can add up to four little blocks. What's best? It's up to you. It's your website, whatever you think is best. I'm personally I'm personally going to just leave it as two. Okay. And so let me get rid of that. And so for footer too, I would probably just use something like like this. I go go ahead and put maybe my Amazon Associates disclaimer. I'd put it right there. Okay. So put that there and then click on save and minimize that, okay? And then I want this to be the legal pages. So we'll just say that like we'll just say also say late. We'll just call it like legal or something like that or maybe nothing. You know, we could just give it some good you don't have to give it a title at all if you don't want. But I'll just call it like also. Or maybe I'll call it more question mark or make it a little bit more fun. Okay, now we'll save that. Ok, so let's load that. Ok, so we have more, more and then we have this. Okay, so maybe I can come up here and I'll call this disclaimer. Or something like that. You know, it's really your sites. It's up to you how you want to decide design this. So let's go ahead and now add something else. This I want to add, I want to make a menu for my specific pages. So first off, we need to go into pages and now we need to create the about privacy in terms of use page. So privacy policy was do that first. And so just go here and we'll just type, I'll just call it pry, arrive a C policy, privacy policy. Click on publish and create this one. And then go to Add New. Okay, and then we'll call this a terms of use. Will click on publish. Okay, and let's click on add new. Then you can add either call it disclosure or disclaimer if you want. So I'll just call it disclosure. And we'll click on Publish. And so you have to craft these pages yourself. So, you know. So that's something that you have to pay attention to. There's a lot of free templates you can take advantage of, but we'll just leave it at that. Now, I want to go to appearance and I wanna go to menus. And what I wanna do is I want to create a menu for these pages, okay? And so let's go create a new menu. And then I'm going to call this menu, we'll call it legal, okay, then I'll create menu. Okay, so now I'm adding a menu called wiggle. So we'll add in disclosure terms views, privacy will click on Add and menu. Ok, so we'd all, I'll change it. So the privacy policies first, then Terms of Use and then Disclosure, we'll click on save menu. Okay, so now I can navigate over back to where my widgets are. And right here we can go underneath footer one, okay? And then I can add in like say a menu here. And so here we can come down here and find where it says menu. Okay, so we just come here and navigation menu, drag and drop that right there. And then the menu I want for this could be labeled, just call it menu and then click on save. Okay, then let's go ahead and reload this. Okay, and so now we have a couple of menu options there. Okay, so make sure to select legal so it doesn't come up as the Header Menu and then reload it. And there we go. So now we have a privacy terms disclosure. We have a nice little block that's kinda like the title of this. You don't have to do it this way if you don't want. And so you can just give this, if you want to call this a title like this called More Than click save. And then you want to go ahead and delete this. You know, just you got to play around and see how you like and how it works and how you like it. So if you make it like this or like that up to you. And so let's go ahead and just delete this one here. Okay, then we'll reload this. Okay, so there we go. So now we have more and we have our privacy policy and all our legal stuff. We have our disclaimer. No, if you have like social media links that you specifically want to link to, you can go ahead and do that as well. And so you can add a new link here, and then you can come down here and find makes social media links that you want to specifically add. So like you could just have to do a kind of manually as a way to do it like this. You could add in texts and then you can add in like Twitter. Facebook, or you could create like a bullet points, okay, like Facebook and Twitter. Twitter, pinterest, whatever you're using. Okay. And so that's and that's basically it. So I'm just not, I'm not personally going to do that, but just to give you some ideas of things that you could add into the footer if you want. And so I'm just gonna keep it very simple like this. So we have our legal pages into disclaimer. And that's basically it for the important stuff that we need to do for the footer. And basically in general, how do you edit the footer?
15. How to Use Email Opt-in Forms: Well, let's add some email opt-in forms to our website. So I'm going to be using convert kit in this section, but you can use any provider that you want. I have other videos on this topic, but providers that I like, like male, chimp, male or lights, a Webber, send in blue. There's plenty of other choices. But convert Kate is currently the one of the industry leaders. So that's, I'm just going to walk you through quickly. What I like about convert Kit is that it has the ability to add multiple forms and have different funnels. So what basically a funnel is like, look if you sign up for her, how to serve a blog freedom. Of course, you're gonna get like five emails related to creating a blog. And then you're going to be added to the mainList if you sign up for this one up top there, which is about making money and all that good stuff you're gonna get like five or six. He knows about how to save money, how to make more money, and then you'll be added to the mainList. And that's basically what you can do with Convert key. You can create various forms, have different funnels for each. Anyways to add form C website is very simple, so we want to go to create new. Then we have an option to basically create forms or create a landing page. Now the landing page is actually hosted on convert kids sites. If you pay, if you have a paying account and you can host it on your own site if you want. Or you can just jump into your site. You just create your own landing page for your own him opt-in form. It's really up to you. But the way you'd use something like this is I create like a form like this. And then you'd like Lincoln from this button right here. Just an idea of something that you could do. And so we're just going to back out of this and we're gonna go to the form function. And now the form function is really nice. You have modals and you have inline sliding, sticky bar. All this stuff you can add to your site. We're going to be using inline and we're going to be adding a form to our sites. So let's click on Choose. Okay, so now it's basically edit Dino template. It's very easy. You gave a lot of feature options over here as you click something. So here I can change the text to this, this, and I want cheese as bunk color, you just click it, that sort of thing. So let me go ahead and change this button color to something a little bit more. Brights, stunning. Let me move this up a little bit. Okay, so I like that. I'll click on Save. Ok. Now let's go add this to our site. So you may think like, oh, I go to WordPress, but you have to install the career kit WordPress plug-in. I personally like to use just the JavaScript, so we'll just take this JavaScript right here and it copy it. Now let's go to one of our posts. And let's open this one up. Okay, and let me go to edit post. Now to add the actual form is a very simple process. So we just go here, enter and then wherever you want to enter it into the page on the site, you just go here quick plus, and then you go to HTML, then click on HTML, and then boom, paste it in. And then that's it. Done, Update. And now if we take a look at the website, we should have a form within the blog post, right? That again, there we go. So now we have our form effectively added. Now, one of the best spots to add the form, and from my experience is to just put a form at the bottom of every blog posts if you want to be aggressive about it. So I mean, if you really want to be aggressive or email marketing, you just take a look at other websites because this works like D, have this email opt-in form up top there, enter forms into the blog was itself. Use light boxes if you really want to build your list and it's something that's going to be very important to you. It's okay to be very aggressive about it. But anyways, if you're just curious about how David, how do I add a form to every page without having to do it manually like this. Ok, so this is what I would recommend. So let's go back and go to appearance. And let's go to, let's go to plug-ins and go to add new. Now we want to add a plugin called P, Y, R, C. Or sorry, it was good that was keeping me PR YC. I always get that mixed up. Ok, so now this all looks the same. The one we want is add a custom content to post and page top and bottom. Let's go and click this and install. And then click on activate. Now once the plugin is activated, you can find it over here in your settings and then p are YC. Click on this. And now we just wanted to add content to the bottom of every single blog post. That's very easy to just paste this in right there and then click save changes. Okay, now that should be, it's so now if I go into any of these other blogposts, we'll just open this one up. How to properly brew green tea. There should be an opt-in form right at the bottom. There it is. Okay, and so that's basically from one interface, how you can quickly and easily add a form or whatever you want to all blogposts. So if you want to add something specific to the bottom or the top of the blog post. I really liked the PR YC plug-in. And so basically that's, that's basically for how you add an email opt-in form quickly and easily to your sites.
16. Install "Related Posts" on Your Blog: Okay, so how do you add it related blog posts at the bottom of your page. So on web secret pro.com, I have this powered by jetpack. And what this does is basically it shows related blog posts to the current page. The persons on. This is very helpful because one adds imagery and color. It makes this a little bit more visually appealing, but more importantly, it gives users something that quick on somewhere else to go. And it provides good internal linking, which is beneficial for search engine. It's basically it's a win-win for all. I recommend using jetpack to power this. Jetpack is a plug-in from WordPress. So you go to a dashboard and then you want to navigate over to plug-ins. Now with most WordPress installations, you get jetpack as one of the default plugins. So go ahead and activate jetpack. Okay, next we have to go ahead and set up jetpack. So let me just go ahead and do that. Now it's telling me to basically improve the connection. So let's go ahead and improve. Now, you're experienced may differ depending on whether or not you have a WordPress accounts are not. Basically, I already have an account and I'm just completing the setup and says jetpack is finishing setup. Okay, and that is it. So jetpack is set up. Now. Jetpack is free and provides various features for free, but they do have upsells for other various things. You can just ignore this. Okay, and so let's just navigate back to our Dashboard. Okay, and now we have jetpack over here. So click on this. Now again, just what emphasize it is free. You don't have to pay for anything. They do offer a free plant, but they'd usually hide the link somewhere or whatever, depending on when you watch this video. Anyways, now we want to go into Settings. And now once we're in jetpacks settings, we wanted to go to traffic. Then right down here where it says related post. When I say Click on this show, related post after your content, highlight related content with heading show thumbnail when appropriate. And that is it. Now, let's go here to settings and let's go to reading. Alright, and so once you have jetpack installed, now you'll have a new little option down here. We can control the look and feel this. So I'm going to kick this off. I don't want to show the date and I don't really care about showing the category. I just want to show the image and I want to show the link, and that's it. And so click on Save Changes. And then that's it. That's all you have to do. Now this populates automatically. So if you have a brand new website with like five pages, don't expect related posts show up. This takes time. Ok. You have to have a, you have to have a decent amount of content from various related piece of content to recommend. Okay? And that is it. That's basically how you set up related posts for your website.
17. Install Social Share Buttons: Let's add some share buttons to our blog. Now, these are shared buttons. And how do you add this to your sites? There's a lots of different features and plugins and whatever you can use. I personally like to use something called add this.com. Not only does it tell you the specific items that have been shared, it gives you a broad overview of your traffic. I mean, you can check this with your analytics, but anyways to get started with adding this, you just want to click on Tools and then you want to click Add new. And then right here where it says Share buttons. So let's go ahead and do this. And we're going to add a floating Share button to our site, which is this. Let's click on continue. Now you can basically have it be smart sorting by add this or you can select it by you. So smart sorting basically means that per individual visitor, it'll show buttons that are most related to the individual visitor to the site. But I'm just going to go with selected by you. And so I'm just going to keep it simple. So maybe like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter or maybe even just Facebook Pinterest and email really just depends on where your audience hangs out. If you want to add more services, you can just click on that to scan and add something that's really specific to your country, whatever. For example, a what's app if you're european, because what's apps not a thing in America, so it's not important. Anyways, click this. And now mobile size, I wanna make this small. So when people on their mobile device, the buns are nice and small and don't take up a lot of real estate. And I want the share counters to show a number maybe when people will share it like 20 times. And then click on activate tool. And then activate tool. There we go. And next is just to get the code right there. And right here is another scripts. And so we need to install this into the website. Now, we need another plug-in, so it's go to plug-ins and then that's good to add new. And the plugin that we want to install is headers and footers. Headers and footers. Now, go ahead and install now. So it's headers and footers. It's this one right here. And activate. Okay, so now you want to navigate back to Settings and then go to Insert headers and footers. And you wanna go ahead and put this script into the footer. So we'll put there and then click on save. And that is it. So now it's opened up. New website in. We should have some share buttons coming up on the side right here. And there you go. So that's basically it. So now we have share buttons on the entire site that people can share our content quickly and easily with their favorite social media website.
18. Install Google Analytics and Search Console: And the last is to set up Google Analytics. And analytics basically allows you to see your page views, how many visitors to your website, how long they stay in your site, what pages they found, et cetera. To find Google Analytics, you just type in Google Analytics and it's the first result you can sign in with any Gmail accounts. So once you're signed in, you should be looking at something similar to this. So you're going to have to create an account name. And so I'll just create like my website for example. Here you can basically share your information with a count specialist and technical support. You don't have to, but it's completely up to you. Will just click on Next. Now, I want to measure a website, so I'm going to leave this selected and then click on Next, then my website name. So I'll just call it, I'll call it my blog. Whatever it's called, the blog name, whatever you want it to organize it for your own internal usage. And next you want to go here. You want to make sure it's HTTPS because our, because we went with blue hosts, our website is actually secure and then just put in your website. So David, and then I'll asked, and that's it. And so you can select the industry category now give you benchmarking data against other websites in this, in that category if you want, again, you don't have to do there. Then just click on it creates. And then I accept. And then I except, we'll just have to go through this and go through this and then click I accept. And then you're going to be getting some code in any take this code. And then it specifically says, put it in the header of the webpage that you want to track or all the webpages you want to track, et cetera. And so this is why it's really helpful that we have headers and footers installed. So we want to go ahead and install it. The script in the header, click on paste, and then click on save. Now we're all set. Now, once you have that done, I want you to head over to Google search engine console. And in here you can verify ownership of your website because now that you have Google Analytics installed, sign into searching and console with the same email. And now all you have to do is put in your website.com. And it'll verify that you own this website. And then search engine console gives you really hopeful back-end data about how your website is ranking in the search engines and what phrases, what people, what, what phrases people are using to find your website, et cetera, et so I definitely recommend is again, analytics and Search Engine council aren't particularly helpful when you're first starting out, but they become more helpful in a month or two modes, agreements as your website ages. But anyways, that's how you get set up with analytics and Search Engine console. Alright, so once you're logged into Google Search Console and your website is verified, which I want you to do next is to just submit a sitemap. So navigate over to where it says sitemaps. Then here is where you can enter in your sitemap URL. What's a site map? Basically Saint map is a map of all the URLs associated with your website. Submitting a sitemap to Google just helps Google index your say a little bit more quickly. And your URL, where is that? Well, because you're using the Yost SEO plug-in, it automatically generates a site map for you. So you just want to go to SEO, you want to go to General, and then you want to click on Features, ok. Now you want to navigate down to where it says XML sitemap. Go ahead and click the question mark, then see the XML sitemap and click this, and then that is it. And so next you want to highlight the sitemap part, and that's basically your URL for your sitemap. Take that, then copy and paste that into the interstate map URL. Submit it, and that is it.
19. Setup Sitemaps: Alright, so our website and blog is basically done. So we have just cover a couple little warrant final details before we wrap this up. So first things first, this is the sidebar of the theme. And obviously if you want to manage anything over here, you want to go into appearance and, and you want to go to Widgets, OK. And then under this widget area, you want to navigate to where it says sidebar. Now there's a couple of things that maybe you want. Maybe you don't want. For example, we don't need Mehta, We don't need archives, we don't need recent comments. So we can just come in here and delete. That's we can go ahead and delete archives. And we definitely can go ahead and delete meta. Alright, let's reload that. Ok, so basically you can add whatever you want to the sidebar if you wanted to add images to your weight as wild post, or just leave it like this. It's really totally up to you. Now. We can just take a look and it says blog, and that's not really good either. So let's go ahead and enter a proper page title for the blog. And this way we definitely recommend you doing so come down here, quick edit and then make it something like the tea say name t, blog. I don't know, just give it a proper title. Okay. And then go ahead and update this. Ok, then let's reload this page. Okay, and so now our blog post title block was page has a proper page. Okay? And so basically that is it for this now, for colors and fonts that we can change that by going under customize. And right over here with theme settings is where you can change the colors of different things. For example, like the typography. So the body texts, cars is light gray. What if we want to make it black so it's a little bit easier to read. We can just do that quickly there like that and that looks a lot better. Link hover color is orange like this. If I hover over, it's orange. I wanna change that to something else like red. I can just change that at the click of a button like that and then should change once I click Publish. And so we'll leave it like that, a wink color. Okay, link color is all black. Okay, so let's back out of that. Ok, and so I can change like for example, if Lincoln maybe I'll make this red as well. Okay, so let's see how it's red now. And so if I go play around with, if you don't like that, maybe I like as black for example. But then when I hover over it, it changes the color. Okay? And so I see now hover over it and it's read, that looks a lot better. Okay, so now buttons, button core is currently orange and changes. So like a dark orange. We can change that with ease. Again, just sheet-like, change it. So quick read so the background color is red, okay, and then background hover. Ok, I'll change it to red, but then we'll make it like a little bit darker. Ok. We'll do the same type of thing so that when someone mouses over it, it changes color to be a little bit darker. And so let me change the background color and maybe make it a little bit later. And there you go. So now, yeah. Now you mouse over it. It changes color as appropriate. Okay. So now I know why we were going to be asking them. We get to the bottom here. How do I get rid of this based on BP designed by blablabla. That's easy enough. So you go in here and you want to go into where it says custom CSS, so or additional CSS o, this is called additional CSS. And so we have entry display none, and that hides the meta-description for the blog post, but the hide the information at the bottom. It's called Site dash info, then display none. So go here and then paste that in. And then that hides everything in the footer. And let's continue onward. And so we basically have a bunch of different things here. So you can change the header image. If you want to. Have an image at the top there, you can do that. So colors right down there. So background color if you want to change it to say white or gray, whatever, I personally would leave it as a way I think white looks nice. Or really again, up to you. And then that is it. Okay? And so basically our website is done, our blog is done, and I think it looks really nice. I think that's a nice theme. Hasn't wanted nasal built-in features to make a nice niche website that's based around some type of specific product or topic that you want to create a blog on. The mix of stackable plugin allows you to design a site that's quick, quick, and nice and easy. And I think I really like the way this came out, so I think this looks really nice. So anyways, that is it for this tutorial on how to start a blog with the BCWP theme.
20. Thank You For Enrolling: Okay, that is it for this course. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got tremendous value out of it, and I hope you're able to create a beautiful responsive blog with WordPress base WP, My name is David, I just want to say thank you very much for enrolling. Have a great day and thank you.
David Utke, Web Pro and YouTuber
