Blogging for a Living Level 1: Build an Amazing Blog from Scratch: [Perfect Small Budget Project]

1. What You Will Learn in Level 1 : Hello, everybody. My name's Theo MacArthur on. Welcome to blogging for a living level born on. This is where we build out a fully flake blawg from scratch. So this video is going to tell you what you will be learning throughout the course. No, I'm not big on talking about myself, but I think it's important to give you some kind of introduction just to let you know who your teacher is. I have over 20 years experience now off building websites and blog's Andi online marketing in general. I've been teaching others to do what I do. Since 2015 on to date, more than 86,000 students have taken my courses. Andi, for my blocking courses. In particular, over 11,500 students have enrolled. Now the average rating given to my courses is 4.7 out of five by students who've taken them . All right, let's get home with it. Andi, find out just exactly what you're going to be learning. First of all, in case you haven't already decided, I'm going to give you some pointers and tips to help you decide what to block about. And then I'm going to explain why we use Ah, particular platform to build our blogger. On on that platform is wordpress dot org's and then you're going to choose a name for your block on get low cost, reliable hosting. We're going to go through the basic blocks set up, and then we're going to create a free professional email address on install. The best plug ins are plug ins are just tools that help us out, features and functions to the block. Andi. After that, you're going to choose and customize a free WordPress theme. You will learn how to use widgets on witches are simply content areas on your blawg. You'll learn how to create menus on at the required legal pages to your block. I'm going to give you 10 plates for those. These are pages like privacy policies in terms and conditions. You're going to learn how to upload images to your blawg and to create a really great looking slider, where to get content ideas on inspiration for your blawg and how to create really great titles for your block posts. Hand, of course, how to write post that people want to read and then you're going to be adding your first post using best S CEO or search engine optimization practices on this helps you to get free traffic from Google and the other search engines. You'll learn how to schedule posts for a future date so that you can write all of your posts a month in advance. If you want to on schedule them to publish automatically, you'll also discover how to add static pages to your block so we have our blood posts. But we also have static pages that don't change. You'll learn about all the free tools that we use to enhance the block on to make it more user friendly. Andi Mawr. So by the end of this course, which is a Level one, you will have a fully functional blawg, complete with everything you need pages, posts and everything else on. It's going to be completely ready to start driving traffic on monetizing, in other words, implementing options to earn an income from your blawg. And we do that in Level two, which is a different course. But you'll also find that here on skill share as well. Alright, I'll see you in a minute. In the next video 2. Choosing a Subject for Your Blog: Hello, everybody. Let's talk about choosing a topic for your Blawg. In other words, what are you going to blawg about? I recommend that you choose a subject that you are passionate about. Something that you really enjoy. Now that could be a sport. It could be a craft. It could be pets. It could be anything at all. But if you enjoy what you are writing about what you are blogging about, you are much, much more likely to keep going with your blawg and not get bored and fed up on give up. So identify your passions. Think about what would you stay away doing or reading about at night on? What would you get up for at four o'clock in the morning on I mean happily get out for I don't mean something that you have to get up for whether you want to or no, I mean something that you would really want to get up for a four o'clock in the morning. Andi, which activities really give you a buzz? What you really love doing on what you look forward to doing? Are there certain things in the day or in the week that you really look forward to on what are you good at? Andi? Enjoy doing. We're all good at some things that we don't really enjoy doing. So you want to think about something that you're good at on? Do you enjoy doing or what would you like to be doing if you had more free time and resources? We all have things that we love doing. Onda. We have things that perhaps we would love to be doing mawr off if we had the free time on the resources to do it. Now, along with this lecture, I provided a niche memory jogger list. It's just a memory jogger. It's not that you need to pick something from that niche list, but hopefully it's going toe help you to start thinking brainstorming on coming up with a topic for your blawg. Something that you really want to do and something that you feel passionate about. Boots. Okay, So you in a moment 3. Which Blogging Platform and Why: Okay. Now, in this lesson, I'm going to explain which blogging platform we use in this course on why the platform we use is WordPress door or which is, without question, the best blogging platform out there. In fact, it's the best platform for building any type of website. So the question that you might have is, why don't we use something like Wicks or blogger or weebly, even wordpress dot com, which is not the same as wordpress dot org's Or don't confuse the two. Why don't we use one of these for re blogging platforms? Okay, first reason on a big reason you need toe own your own block if you build a blawg or a website on one of the three website builders you don't own. A. You are merely borrowing a space on that platform because you don't own it. You don't have complete control. You don't have control over the content. There are certain content that's not allowed. You don't have control over whether or no your website or your block stays online. There are certain things that are frowned upon on the website Builder Plot Forums affiliate marketing, for instance. If you want to promote affiliate products. I'm sure many of you will want to do that on your blocks. That's one reason second reason is your block is an asset. You might at some point in the future, decide to sell it. You can't sell it if you have built it on a free website platform because you don't actually own it. Okay, Now, second reason is you're probably going to want to monetize your block. I just touched on this. There are certain things that you are no allowed to sell on these website platforms like Weebly a blogger wordpress dot com etcetera. There are restrictions in what you can do on what you can sell. Andi. The other thing is free platforms. They're not really free because there are lots of hidden costs that you will need to pay if you want Ah, fully functional block. So, for example, if you want to attach a domain name which you will need to do otherwise, you will have are very a long U R l for your blawg something like your name dot we we dot com which does not sound. It'll professional and it's not memorable. If you want to attach a proper domain name to it, a proper name. You're going to have to pay for that X amount per month. That's just one thing. There are many other hidden costs, which actually makes the free part forms more expensive than hosting on your own hosting. Now that's what we do here. We use wordpress dot or go on your own hosting on. We can get fast and reliable hosting for just a few dollars a month. It's very simple to do. I'm very simple to set up on. In any case, I'm going to guide you through it on doing it this way. The way we do it in this course means that you will have a functional and user friendly on feature rich blawg. Andi. Most importantly, it's yours. It belongs to you. Okay, See you in the next lesson. 4. Getting a Great Name for Your Blog: Hello, everyone. Let's go through. The process of finding a great domain name for your block now is important. Toe watch this lesson right through to the end. Because if not, you might be confused in the following two lessons. All right, there's some information at the end that you need to see. Okay, So first of all, I've got a few guidelines here on you'll be able to download thes as a pdf handout as well . No, you Shourd go for either a dot com domain name or a country extension. So, for example, like dot co dot UK or dot i n If your audience is going to be worldwide or a U. S audience, you should go for dot com. If your audience is going to be country specific to another country, So not the U. S. You should go for the country extension off that country, right? So if I was creating a blawg for an audience in the UK Andi, that was my audience. So I wasn't looking for an audience outside of the UK I would buy a dot co dot UK domain name if I wanted my audience to be worldwide, so I was creating a block with content for anyone in the world. I would go for dot com. Hope that makes sense. You should avoid things like dot biz dot info and all that kind of thing. Just stick with dot com or a country extension. Avoid hyphens. Hyphens are detrimental to domain names because when people are typing in a two main aim in the address bar, the hyphen will very often get missed out. It also doesn't look as good. It has a less professional feel and look about it. You should also avoid numbers, so avoid numbers with either digits or words. For example, top 10 destinations using the digits 10 or using the word T e n tain. That should be avoided because people get mixed up. So if they're typing in the address bar on, if you've got Top 10 with 10 they might type in top 10 t E n and vice versa. You should also avoid very long domains. People make mistakes, typing them in on their not memorable domain privacy. What is that? That is where you can have your personal details hidden in the domain. Who is database If you don't have to main privacy. It means that anybody on the Internet can look up your domain on See your details, your home address. Everything. Now, if you're purchasing, ah dot co dot UK or any European extension like dot fr dot i t dot d e. Anything that seemed within Europe or the UK for the extension you do not need to pay for a domain privacy because of the new data. Privacy laws that came out in 2018 means that your details are already private for a dot com domain name. That's not the case, at least not yet. Maybe in the future. So for a dot com domain name, you need to pay a few dollars extra for privacy if you do not want your personal details to be available for anybody on the Internet to view. Okay with that said, let's go through the process off finding a great domain name because many of the names that we come up with think up in our head. They're not going to be available, so we need to go through a process to find one we like that is available for this demonstration. I'm going to pretend that I'm going to create a blawg about helping young Children to reach their full potential on the block is for parents of those Children. So parents of Children seven years and below on for this demonstration, I'm going to look for a dot com domain because dot com domains are the most difficult to find a good name that's available simply because many of the names have been taken already . All right, so the two that I came up with just off top of my head, early achievers and reaching potential let's test those on how we test is. We type them or we copy and paste them in the search bar here on Click Search. Early achievers dot com is taken, and that's what I expected. All right, let's try the next one. Do a search on again. This one is taken now, since I only have these two domains on the list was only two that I could think off just off the top of my head. I'm going to go over to a website called thesaurus dot com on going to find some words that are similar to the worst I want to use so First of all, what would be another word for early? Let's try that young. So how about a young achievers? We're going to go ahead and try that on Go, Daddy. It's available, but, oh, no, it's a premium domain and we definitely don't want to pay $25,000 for a domain. Okay, so try again. But the drawing board, What else have we got here? Under synonyms for early, fresh initial new recent. None of these make any sense for the domain name. Fresh achievers. Initial achievers sort of OK, but doesn't really make a lot of sense. So have a quick look through here. There are more further down, but the list of the top is usually the best. Warn. It's the most relevant warm. How about budding budding achievers? That does make sense on it. Sounds pretty good on search on. Yes, this one is available. It's a 99 cents if you register it for two years, so if you register it for two years, you pay 99 cents for the first year. But you're going to pay about $15 for the second year on the he registered for one year, you're going to pay about $11.10 or $11 for the one year. Okay, now that didn't take us too long. It may take you longer than that. It's a lot to do with the lock. Sometimes when I'm looking for a domain name, it might take me 20 minutes. It might take me 30 minutes to find a domain name that I like on the name is also available . Now when you are searching for another extent shown, that is not dot com. So, for example, dot co dot UK is usually easier to find the name that you want available because there's less competition for names in other countries, so dot com is the most competitive domain name. Andi. That's the one that tends to be the most difficult to find a domain name that you want, but it can be done on. I just proven it here on day. I've done many of these demonstration videos where I have found really good domain names using the dot com extension so it condemn innately be done, and in fact, I have never not been able to find a domain name that I want. As long as I spend enough time half some patients and go through the process. All right, Now what? You founded a main aim that you want to buy. You have two choices. You can either buy it from here. Go, Daddy. Your other option is to buy it along with your hosting in the next lesson. So if you're going to do that, just make a note of it. I already have it here. I'm going to delete everything else on. Then, in the next lesson, when you get your hosting, you can also purchase your domain name along with your hosting, which is a little simpler. But it will cost you maybe $3 more for the domain name. That's the main difference. So I'll leave that up to you on one more thing here. If you do purchase your domain from Go Daddy during the purchasing process, you are going to be asked, Do you want to buy email? Do you want this? You want that you don't need anything else. You only need the domain name on maybe privacy. If you're buying dot com on, you don't want your details to be public, you will need privacy on extra few dollars. If you're buying a dot co dot UK or any you extension any European extension, you don't need it because it's all already included. You already have privacy due to the new laws that came out in 2000 and 18. All right on just to make it absolutely clear, let's go through the buying process here for a domain butting achievers dot com at two CART . I'm already locked into my account here at Go Daddy. If you don't have an account already, you'll be asked to create one during the buying process. So add to cart continue to cart. We've added privacy. Here is why Andi? It's an extra $7.99 per year. You do not need this. UnTech. You do not need this because you will be creating a free professional email address in the following lessons continue to cart, and now we want to change from five years toe one year aunt complete purchase. Now what happens as if you're buying dot co dot UK or any European extension. When you click on complete purchase, domain name privacy is removed on your left with a price to pay off about nine or $10. All right, so that's how to buy your domain from Go, Daddy. And your other option is to buy your domain name along with your hosting in the next lesson . Okay, So you in a minute. 5. Hosting for Your Blog: Once you've chosen a domain name for your block, the next step is to get hosting. This is where your website lives on the Internet. Andi, this is what makes it available to users on the Internet. Now, the type of hosting you use is a really important because this is going to determine things like how fast your website loads, how often your website is down. So not working when you don't want that to happen at all. Andi, There are lots of other things that need to be taken into consideration when you decide which hosting service to use now. The first thing, of course, is it needs to be affordable and it must have all the features that you need. For example, we need access to something called C panel because this is where we pretty much do everything where are hosting is concerned. Andi, it needs to be fast. So us just mentioned. You need your website to load fast for your users. Other things that need to be taken into consideration is that it needs to be reliable. Some hosting services have a lot of downtime. That means your websites not available so people can't visit it. You really don't want any downtime? It all on the best. Hosting has something like 99.999% up time, and that's really what you want now. The last thing but really important is that you need fast on efficient customer support. You will need to get in touch with hosting support from time to time. Even I myself with a lot of experience, I still have to get in touch with my hosting support from time to time. Now it's really important that when you get in touch with support that you can get Ah, very, very fast response. Often times it will take a day or two to get a response or if there's online chat, which is something you really do one. Sometimes you might be waiting for 30 minutes to an hour, even to be connected to a representative, which is a huge waste of time. So what we want is virtually instant support via online. Sharp on also have the option off phoning or sending an email. But online shot is usually the best way, with very, very fast response rate. All right now in the project and resources section on the dashboard here, you're going to find a pdf download called Hosting. Now, the reason I've put this honor download is so that I can provide you with the correct link to get the hosting. The I recommend is the one that I've been using for well over three years now, exclusively for all of my websites on blocks. It's low cost, extremely reliable. It's fast on. Best of all, it has absolutely first class customer support by shot email or phone. So before you go any further with this course, you're going to need hosting, so recommend you go ahead and take a look That, pdf because from now on, every lesson in the course is going to be based on the assumption that you have hosting for your block. Okay, I'll see you in a minute. 6. Connect Domain and Hosting: all right. No. I am going to show you how to connect your new domain name to your hosting. This step is no applicable to you. If you purchased your domain name along with your hosting, it is only applicable if you purchase your domain name from go Daddy or somewhere else outside of your hosting. Okay? So if that's what you did if you have a domain name the you purchase out with your hosting So you didn't purchase it along with your hosting, you're going to have to connect the two. And here's how you do it. Log into your hosting account. Now, us may look different to mine and you may have a different dashboard here, but what you are looking for is my accounts. So look from my accounts. Onda under my accounts, look for C panel. You want this orange button? Go to see panel on What you need. Here are the name servers starts with N s one and s two. Now your name service may be the same as mine, but they might not be so Don't copy mine. Go and get your own. Let's take these one. Copy them onto a note part or a text file next to go over to your domain, Registrar, wherever you purchased the domain, I'm going to show you how to do this in Go, Daddy. Now, if you purchased your domain somewhere else, like, for example, name cheap, then look for the instructions there to do what I'm going to do here. What I'm going to show you how to do is very similar. No matter where you purchased the domain name from All right. Now, the domain name that I have purchased and I'm going to use in this course is do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. The block is going to be about creating a garden that attracts wildlife on It's perfect for wildlife, but also, they're going to be other things in there. Like talking about wildlife crying, how to know if a crime has been committed, how to report it, various other things. So do it for a wildlife. It's a kind of a catchy name. All right, this is what we do. You need to go into the settings for the domain name that you want to connect your hosting scroll down until you find manage DNs scroll down again to name servers. Now here, You want to change from a default name servers to the name servers. For your hosting, this is all you're going to need to do. There's not much to it. Click on change, Select custom. We can ignore this message here On here. We're going to enter the name servers one at a time. We've got N s one on. We've got N s to on. We're going to click. Save features may be unavailable while we process your update. Now, this is only going to take a maximum of about one hour and maybe two hours. Most doesn't take long. In fact, most of the time it only takes about 15 minutes. So you do need to be a little patient, because until the name server changes process, you won't be able to start working on your block. But as I say, it shouldn't take more than two hours. That's at the very, very longest. Okay, see you in a minute. 7. Installing the WordPress Software: Hi, everybody. We are going to install the wordpress dot org's software onto our new hosting. Now, this is using the recommended hosting. If you didn't get hosting yet, you need to go back a couple of lessons on get hosting before you can continue with this course. Now, once you're logged into the dashboard, it will look something like this, But yours may look a little different to mine. Anyhow, you're looking for my accounts, so find the my accounts top on. Then you are looking for ah, button that says go to see panel, find the button on click on it. And now in the sea panel, you're going to install a WordPress. You can do this either under auto installers or WordPress tools. It doesn't make any difference is going to take you to the same place. But you're looking forward price Or were present Stoller. Click on install under Choose Protocol. Choose Http, we are going to be adding https later, but we haven't done that yet. On under choose domain. If you only have one, it's going to be by default in this field myself. I have a lot of domains, so I'm going to choose the correct one. Do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. Leave this blank site name on site description. You can leave those as they often I We're going to change them later. Do not take enable Multi site on here for your user name and password. Now you do need to decide this Now on by default, you're going tohave a user name and password. That's not going to be memorable at all. So I'm going to change these DFW Do it for wildlife for the user name. Andi for my password. I'm going to choose something that I know I can remember for your admin email. We're going to set this up later so you can create an email now. Anything you want, you're going to be able to set up multiple emails as many as you like, So let's just make one for now. DFW do for wildlife out to do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. Choose your language by default. It's usually English. If you're blawg is not going to be in English. Choose the language from the drop down box. We're not going to take any of these on. We are going to UnTech or press starter because we don't need it. We don't need anything under advanced options. Just go ahead and click on and stole on. Here is installing. It will take maybe 30 to 60 seconds on. There we go. Now, this is going to be your logging your domain Focus Lodge WP hyphen admin. So you're going to take a note of that? And hopefully you noted down your user name and password as well. And you thought we should be able tow law gain right now You're so let's go ahead and try it. Yes, and it's just log me and automatically. It will love you in automatically the first time you click on that link. When you come back later, toe log in. You will then need to actually log in with the user name and password that you set up. All right, so that is installing the wordpress dot org's software on your hosting. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to set up https. Andi, enforce it across the whole website. Okay, I will see you there. 8. Add SSL and Make Your Blog HTTPS: Okay, now we're going to install SSL on that makes our blawg https instead of http. Https is something that we must have now because Google penalises websites now that don't have it, it doesn't cost anything, so there's no problem. You want to head, but you're see panel. I don't worry. If you close this page down, just go back and log in your hosting account and navigate about your C panel Scrolling on down. You're looking for security on less encrypt under install New A Lesson Crypt certificate. Select your domain name. Andi. There will be a tick by default in the top one. Let's encrypt SSL. If there is no put a tick in it and click on install. Let's encrypt certificate rd successfully to the installation. Cute. This usually only takes a few minutes. Aunt. Here we are and that talk about 30 to 40 seconds. So once you have it under manage, let's encrypt certificates. There's a one more thing you need to do. Go to select an action on https settings, https and force on on click. OK, and that's it. That's all you need to do to set up https across your whole block on to test it. So here we are on day. If we just go on, visit the site in a new link on there. We have it Https instead of http. Okay. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Create an Email Account: now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create an email account now. I mentioned already that you can have as many email accounts as you like. It doesn't cost anything. But first of all, we want to set up on email account for the email that we used during the WordPress installation. Now, if you can't remember what you actually used, don't worry. Just go to your WordPress dashboard on Go to users on. You will have the email address there that you used in this case. It was D I f w Do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. So I'm going to create that email address, scroll down to e mails or mail email accounts. D i f w do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. Create a password for logging into your email account. You can leave Max mailbox quota as is on click Create account I can't created. Now I'm going to show you how to log in to that email account the U N L that you need is your domain. Full slosh web mail, So let's go ahead on log it. Enter the email address on the password on a locket saving password on you. Get this message here. Got it. Now, here you can choose a default application to read and send emails. They're really all are very similar. I always choose Round Cube just as a matter of habit, so I'm going to set us default. Andi, Here's the inbox. It's just a regular M box. You have the normal functions here for composing, sending, marking, important, that kind of thing. So that's how you log gain to your new email address after you've created it. See you in a minute. 10. Your Blog Title and Subtitle: Okay, what about coming up with a good title and subtitle for your blog's now the Block title? This is pretty easy, because it should be the same or very similar to your domain name. So with the domain name budding achievers dot com that we looked at earlier, the title would just be budding achievers on do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. The title would simply be Do it for wildlife. Now there may be occasions where you want to add a word either in front or after the domain name, for example, the budding achievers or let's do It for wildlife. And neither of those names sounds as Gord as using the exact May name. But sometimes it may sound better with a word in front or after I have a block called Theo MacArthur. The domain name is Theo MacArthur dot com on the title of the Blawg is just Theo MacArthur , but I could have something like learn with Theo MacArthur on that would still sound Okay, so that's the title. Want about the subtitle. What is a block subtitle is a short, descriptive tag line, for example. Now this is a blawg that's about travel for solo females on the name of the Blawg. It's something like Kate's travel. Blawg on the tack line, is traveling as a solo female, so that describes exactly what the subject off the Blawg is on as a subtitle for Do It for wildlife dot co dot UK. It could be something like encouraging and protecting local wildlife, because that is going to be the subject of the block. Now, where will this title on some title show up on your blawg? Well, probably nowhere as far as your visitors air concerned, because the way that themes are constructed, WordPress themes were going to be using a theme and setting one up shortly the way it's all set out. Normally, the title and subtitle won't be showing because instead will be using a logo. However, Google, on the other search engines can read the title on the subtitle. So it's important that we do have a proper title and subtitle for the search engines. So, for my title is just going to be do it for wildlife on the subtitle Encourage and protect Your A local wildlife I probably won't have in the UK It's not necessary because it's a dot co dot UK domain anyway, all right. Now, if you're struggling with coming up with a subtitle, here's a tape. Just open attacks file and start jotting down words and phrases that describe the subject of your block. And ultimately, you want to come up with something that relays what your block is about. You don't want it to be too long or too short. Five words to maximum. 15 words, usually for a subtitle. All right, see you in a minute in the next lesson. 11. Basic Blog Settings: Hello, everyone. In this lesson, we are going to go through the basic were price settings. So go ahead and log in to your WordPress dashboard. Now, I already showed you the U. N L earlier when you installed WordPress, but just in case this is what it looks like. It's your domain. Forward slash WP hyphen. Admin. So that's the ur no, you go to to logon to your WordPress dashboard. All right, so go to the menu year over on the left hand side. Andi, select settings. These are the general settings on. This is where you're going to enter the title under subtitle that you created earlier. Now we set up https. So let's change the u R l from http to http s and in here a swell on here is the email address. This is the one that you entered on the WordPress installation. And since then, you have created that email address. In a previous lesson, we leave this UnTech two on for new user default roll. It will be subscriber. No. Unless you're running some kind of membership site where you're gonna have people sign up to a membership. This is really no applicable anyway. But we just leave it as as your site language. Nobody fall for me, it showing English us. But in this case, because this is ah blawg for the UK UK audience. I'm going to select UK, English UK. Select your time zone. Now this works on UTC right now. UTC time is 10. 15 in the morning. Currently, here it is 11. 19 which is a little strange, but I'm going to go UTC plus warn on for the date for Mark. I am going to set this to the date format that people in the UK would expect to see. Which is this one here? 28 off the 4th 2000 and 19 lasted eight. Right now on for the time for Mark, you can check out the different formats here. I'm going to leave it as it is. Week starts on Monday. That's up to you. But I like my week to start on Monday, so I'm going to leave it like that. Save changes. All right. Now, the next thing under settings is writing default post category, Yes. Leaving as uncapped tick arise. We won't have any post in on categorized, but in WordPress. That always has to be a default post category, so we'll leave it like that. Default post format standard. Yes. Post by email. Leave everything as it is here. That's fine. Andi. Right here. You should have Ping o Matic. Basically with WordPress every time you publish a post or page. So any content like that is automatically ping to the search engines on that helps your pages get indexed faster in Google on the other search engines. Okay, so that's fine. Nothing changed there under reading. Blocked pages show up most 10 posts. I think that's perfectly OK. People are scrolling down, I think. 10 posters enough before they go to the next page saying with syndication feeds for each article show full text normally, yes, I would have that ticked on search engine visibility. You don't want to take this. You want to leave it until eqt Nothing changed their onto discussion. Okay, Now, this is where we decide if we allow people to post comments or traumatically or if we need to prove them first, all that kind of thing. All right, so we want these ticked. 03 other comments. Settings comment. Author must fill out name and email. Yes, users must be registered and logged in no automatically closed comments on articles older than X amount of days. I wouldn't do that because comments are content its new content on Google on the other search engines like new content, so we don't want to close comments even on older posts. Show comments, cookies opt in check box. You don't need to have that for comments so you can take that enable threaded comments five levels deep. That's about right. Leave that break comments into pages yet I would say that's a good idea to do that common that should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page. I like it the other way around. During the newer comments of the top. Email me whenever anyone posts a comment. A comment is healthy in moderation, and you could do that if you wish, or instead you could just law gain on check your comments so we can see that under comments here. Obviously, there are known here because this is just a brand new blogged I'm setting up. But if you don't want to receive the emails on tick thes here now, before a common appears, must be manually approved. Yes, you do not want comments to be posted automatically. At least I don't because you don't know what you're going to get. You could get spam comments. You could get troll comments, nasty comments. You've no idea. So really, you should check and approve comments first before they go live, so we're going to leave. That takes. We don't need these. Take to comment. Author must have a previously approved comment. Comment Moderation. Hold comment in the Cube, it contains two or more links now, I would normally say one, but in this case, because we're going to manually approve anyway, it's not such a big deal, but when you think about it, you don't really want comments from people who are going to be posting lots of links because most of the time they're trying to do that for self promotion purposes. But there can be times where comments contain educational links. That's different, and you can approve those comments. You can also add a list of words in here that would cause a comment to be held in the Moderation Cube. But because you are going to be manually approving them anyway. They're always going to be in the moderation. Q. They're not going to be posted automatically on comment. Blacklist. Now this could be handy because if you have words in here, blacklisted words and any comments contained those words. Those comments will go straight to the being, which means that you won't even need to look at them on and manually approve them or manually been them. But it's a difficult thing because you may not know which words that you want to enter in here. Now you can put obscenities and that kind of thing in the black list if you want to. But that does not mean to say that spam comments or weird comments are going to go automatically to the bin because they may not have any of those words in them. But anyhow, I'm sure you understand exactly what this means, so I'll leave that to you. Avatars display Avatar. Yes, no rating for your blawg suitable for all audiences or not. If it's not, you need to take one of thes default avatar all right, mystery person. That's normally what I leave it as so that's if somebody comments and they don't have an avatar, it will show up as mystery person. All right, Once you've done all that save changes on under media thumbnail size 150 by 150 that's pretty standard. So I would normally leave it like that. Andi, you can crop thumbnails to the exact dimension. Normally, thumbnails are proportional Now, I usually untech this because I would rather a resize or have a thumbnail resized than have part of it cropped off. Andi, this is standard as well, so we can leave that on that on save changes on the last thing we're doing here. Perma links. What we need to do here is change days because if not your post, you RL's are going to show up like this with the date and then the name off the post. So we're going to go post name. That's a lot better on. Go ahead and save changes again. All right, we're going to deal with privacy later. So that's it for this lesson on. I'll see you in the next one 12. Installing Plugins Part 1: All right, we are going to install some plug ins. So on the menu, gain select plug ins. If you use the recommended hosting, you should have this plug in here SD optimizer, which is a great plug in for speeding up your site, purging the cash, all kinds of things. Now, if by any chance you I don't have it on you did use the recommended hosting, you can find it. Uninstall it. So look for the button at new Andi if you don't have FG optimizer but this is only a few And use the recommended hosting just to make clear. You can use the search by here on tape it in Aunt here is right here now, in my case on probably in your case as well. It's been installed by default, but I have known instances where it wasn't installed by default for whatever reason. So in that case, all you would need to dough is click this button here, which will say install now and then a Wait a moment until the button appears to say Activate on, then click Activate. That's all you need to do to make sure you have that plug in installed. Okay, Now, one thing you might want to dough is you might want to install an under construction plucking because in the past, students have said to May I don't want anybody to see my blawg while I'm working on and setting it up so you can use an under construction plugging for that. Let's do a search in here for under construction on this is the one we're going to use its DeBose popular one under construction by Web factory. So go ahead, click the install. No button on. Activate on. We're going to go to the settings on choose and under construction page template. If you don't see this pop up box or if you've closed it, just click settings right here. Andi to enable the under construction page Select on on. You can leave all these off. In fact, I think you need the pro version ie the paid version off this plug in to use thes features . We don't need the paid version because we're only doing this as a temporary thing designed . You can choose any of these free designs here. I'm just going to go with this one. Activate now. That's pretty much all you need to do. We want to make sure everything saved. And now when we go to the site, we should see the under construction page. We might need to purge the cash. We can do so just by clicking. Purge SG cash visit site. Ah, yes, under construction mode is enabled, but you are white listed. So you see the normal sight. So in other words, I can see the site because I'm white listed, but nobody else can. We can check it out in an incognito window on Dhere. We are so that's just looking at it in an incognito window in my browser on This is what everybody is going to see until I decide to disable the under construction mode on to disable it. Very simple. Just Tuggle under construction mode to off Aunt, Don't forget to save your changes whenever you make any. Okay, Now the next plug in we're going to install is an anti spam plug in. So back to plug ins at new on You're looking for a kiss mitt now very often, just on a default at new page. This is the first plug in showing if no, just do a search for a kiss. Mutt. Click on install. Now on. Activate Now Why do we need this anti spam parking? We need it because even though we have comments held for moderation, we could end up getting hundreds of spam comments a day, which is extremely time consuming toe have toe looked through those comments on approve or declined them. So instead we install an anti spam plugging on that filters out all the baht. Comments. There are people who use bots to spam, the comments sections, off blocks and websites on. Once your blog's starts to get a decent amount of traffic, you could very well get targeted by these bots. So we do want to filter all that out so that we never have to deal with that kind of thing . Okay, so set up your aqueous mitt account. Get your A P I key. Activate kiss Mitt. Now here is where we choose the three version. All of the plug ins that we use in this course are three, but with a kiss. Mert, Once you start to make money from your block, you really showed upgrade, then two plus on pay $5 a month But at this time you are not making any money from your Blawg. So just use the personal three version on. What we do here is we derogate over 20 here. You're going to enter your first name, Your last name on the U. R l off your site. Please verify the following. I don't have ads. I don't sell products or services. I don't promote businesses. So at this point in time, that is true. OK, continue with personal subscription. It looks like you're adding a site quick to activate. Do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. Activate the site on. We're done. So now we have a kiss. Mert set up active, aged and protecting the blawg from spam. Now in the next lesson will continue with the plug ins. So you in a moment 13. Installing Plugins Part 2: Hi, everybody. We're going to install two more plug ins on the first part. Gain that we're going to install now is Yoast Seo. So do a search in the search bar here. Yoast. Seo, this is what you want by Team Yost. Install now on Activate. No. Right at this time, we're not going to do anything with the settings for euros. Tesio. Right now, we're going to have the next plug in back to plug ins at New. And they were going to add a social media sharing plugging called sassy social share. Here he is, right here. Saucy social share install. Now on activate. Okay, we're going to work on the settings for this. So you can either click on, configure the part, gain in the notice bar or just click on settings here. Okay? How do you want your icons to display around square or a rectangle? I prefer rectangle, so I'm going to leave it like that. Width and height is about right. 70 by 35. Now. Border radius. Do you want some rounded corners? So the higher number you put in here, the more Ryan did. The corners will be if I put five in. We've just got a little bit rounded. If I put in, say, 20 we are very rounded. I'm going to set it up. Five logo colors. If you believe these blank, it's going to show with the default color, so I would normally leave those blank cantor position. Now. This will show the number of people who have clicked on the icons to share your post or your content. Now, in the beginning, you won't have many. In fact, you won't have any. So it's a good idea to have this disabled, which we will do in a moment. But if you wanted to display, you would select one of these boxes, and that's what it would look like to the left top right bottom or like that, like that probably looks better. Okay, floating into face theme. This is if you're going tohave. The floating interface enabled on this is where the icons will move up and down the page after user scrolls. Now I personally don't like that enabled, but if you do, here's where you can select a gain, your shape and your radios for around the corners on your counter position. So just the same as with the normal interface here. Save changes. Okay, Now you standard interface enable standard sharing interface. Yes, We want that target. U R l U R L off the web page where the icons are located. That's default on. That's what you would want Title spread the love We don't want that. Let's get rid of it Rearranged the icons This is the order in which you want them to show here we can to select which ones we won I'm going to have Facebook Twitter. I will have Pinterest I might have. What's up? But I'm not going toe have thes anyway, so let's see. We can untech what we don't want here. Maybe I'll leave. Read it Horizontal alignment left so you can have this aligned left center or right on the page position with respect to the content top or the bottom so you can have the social sharing icons showing at the top of the content or the bottom of the content or both. It's less intrusive at the bottom, but you get less shares. I definitely would no have it at the bottom on the top because it's just a little bit too much placement post pages? Yes. Show share counts. No, If you don't put a tick in here, the show share counts is going to be disabled. You probably want to leave it disabled. And we discussed this a little earlier. The same with Joe Total shares. You can leave that disabled as well. Now, later. Once you start to get a lot of traffic and you're getting shares, you can always put a tick in these boxes and able to show more icon Onley applicable if you have a lot of icons. In that case, what would happen is a certain amount of icons will be shown on the page on. Then there will be a button say, to show more. But in this case, I've only got these five, so we don't need the button. Save changes Onda under floating interface. I'm going to disable this, but if you want to enable it on, that's where the icons move up and down the page of the user scrolls. Then you go through the same process as you did with the standard interface. Okay? And that is all you need here. Let's make sure it's all saved. Okay? Now we haven't got any content on the website yet, so there's nothing to look at in respect to these sharing buttons. But we'll be able to see them properly later once we start to add some content to the blawg . All right, so you in the next lesson. 14. Add a Cookies Consent Plugin: Okay, The next thing we're going to do is we're going to install cookies, consent, plugging on. Set it up. You must have this even if you are no, operating in the U. Is a big problem. Now, if you don't have the cookies consent plugging. Okay, So in the search bar, under plug ins are new type in cookies. Consent on. The one we are going to use is GDP are cookie consent. So go ahead on and install. Now on. Activate. All right. Now, go ahead and click on settings under General Cookie Bar is on. Cookie bar is banner cookie bar will show in footer. Own load. Sticky own hide, disappear. Auto hide cookie bar after delay. No auto hide cookie bar. If the user scrolls. No. So these are all the settings that you want here. Update settings. Customized cookie bar. Heading a leave blank. Andi message leave us is. You know, this is where you can customize the color, or you may not know what color you want it yet because you may not be sure the color scheme off your block as yet, but you can change this at any time. So for now, I'm going to leave the color as it is on, then come back later. Andi, edit it to suit the color scheme off the bog wants the bloc has bean set up Once we're a little bit further on with the development Customized buttons, the accept button text except well, I like to change that too. Okay, on text color by default is white with a background color. Black again. We can change and customize this, but for now I'm going to leave it as it is. Show Ask button or link is better as a button action. Close headed, Yes, size medium medium's usually the right size update Settings reject button. We can change this to know again. I'm going to leave text, color and background color as it is and everything else, as is update settings. Read more link text in text color. I'm going to leave us is now for the u. R L. We will be replacing this with the privacy policy page or once we create the page, we haven't done it yet on everything else. Leave us is update settings. We didn't change anything. But anyway, okay, now back to general because we need to do something about the show again. Tamp, Use the show again. Tab. I recommend that you don't use the show again time because it really interferes with the mobile experience because it tends to cover up part of the footer so it covers up important information. Or it can cover up important information. So I would go no for that update settings. All right now, there's nothing else we need to do out this time. Here, we can check it out. Now you just see what it looks like. But don't forget, we are going to customize the colors etcetera later on. Dhere is so right now. It's white background black buttons with white text on as mentioned. Later on, we can go back and we can edit the colors if we want to make it more in line with the color scheme off the block. 15. Create an Author Profile: Hello, everybody. In this lesson, we are going to set up on author profile. Now, to make it easier to add a picture to your author profile, we're goingto install another plug in. So go to plug ins and act new again on search for user profile. Picture on. This is the one that you want here. So go ahead, Install. Now on. Activate. All right. Now we can go over to the menu again. Select users and all users on here is you. You should only have one user at this time. Quick on edit. Okay. I don't recommend you. Take any of these boxes on for admin color scheme. This is just for your own personal preference for the admin area. I normally just leave as default now show to borrow when viewing site. This is really handy. It means that whenever you look Dane, the two bar will always show. So, for example, let's go to the site on at the top. Here we have the toolbar, which means that I can access the dashboard or anything right here from the toolbar. So it's handy to leave that as ticked language will be Site default. Now, here is where you can add a profile image. So what you can do is you can either add a picture of yourself or you can go to a three avatar website. There are lots of them. Just Google free avatars on you can get an avatar. Don't use an animated avatar, though. That's my recommendation, because animated avatars air very distracting. Or you can go to a website like Kiss Ping. Andi, you can find an image here. I'm going to search for something that's going to be relevant to my blawg Now. The great thing about kiss paying is that all the images have transparent backgrounds. I'm going to go with this one three download. I'm not a robot, all right, that's downloaded to my device. Now on. I'm going to go ahead on Add it. Now What we need to do here is in the media library. You could either click here to select files from your device or just drag and drop them in . I'm just going to change the title of this. Just make it hedgehog. Andi. It's good practice to always put something in the whole text boxes Well, because Google can't read images, but they can read the all text set profile image. It's a little bit squashed, but it'll do for now. I could change it later. Your user name, which cannot be changed Now. Here you can enter your first or last name if you wish to do so, a nickname that could be something else or it could be the same as your user name display named publicly as so here I've only got worn to display. But if I decide to enter something else for a nickname here, I could display that instead. Email. Here's the email address website. If you have another website saying with Facebook profile You are Dell on all these other social media. You what else which you can add in the future or when you have them about yourself or about your blawg. So biographical info. You can enter some information here about your blogging about yourself and the CEO settings Title to useful author page. I'm just going to use DFW now. They're meta description for the author page. What you would do here is just take the top sentence or two sentences off the biographical info. In fact, I'm gonna pause the video I'm gonna write a short biographical info paragraph. Andi, paste it in here. All right. I've added a few sentences here on. I'm going to take the top one on. Put it in the meta description. This is for the search engines, primarily Google going to remove the exclamation mark. All right, now, at this point, you might be wondering What is this, Green G? What is it? What does it do? It's a furry extension for chrome. Andi. It shows you your spelling errors and grammatical mistakes and even gives you the correction. So it's a really handy thing to have. Just do a Google search for Graham. Early on, you can install it for free. Now, there is another graded paid version off the extension. But I don't have that. I have the free version. I use it all the time on I find it absolutely invaluable. Okay, so that's that. All right, Now you can leave this and this indicts. But if you want to take this disable readability analysis you can do because we really don't need readability. Analysis for the biographical info. Okay, update profile. All right, Now, this profile image will show up whenever you reply to any comments on posts on your block, so make sure you do get it right. And I am going to change this because it is squashed up. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Choosing and Installing a Theme: okay, In this lesson, we are going to install a theme. Now the theme that I'm going to use is called Human. It's a great looking theme, both on Mobile on Dawn desktop, and it's highly customizable on the developers. Keep it updated. Click on appearance in the dashboard, Andi. Straight away. You'll see some of themes that have been installed by default. But to add a new theme, click on Add New Now there are literally thousands and thousands of themes to choose from. But, ah, couple of tapes. First of all, the theme you choose should be a popular theme. So you want to see ah lot off reviews on that theme. Let's check out a few of thes details in preview. Only got three reviews, so I probably wouldn't want to use this theme, even if it was something that I liked. Let's go for popular Now here's Hess Tear, which is a very popular theme, has got 221 reviews and five stars. Now, Color Mark is a great theme, and this is the theme that we used inversion warn off this course. As you can see, it's got five Stars 453 reviews. Now many themes have demos that you can go and check out on how to find out when the theme was a last updated Go to Google and type in the name of the theme on Look for the wordpress dot org's page, with the information about the theme Last updated March 28 2019. So yet the developers off this theme do keep it updated very, very well. And that's what you want if you check out a theme so you find the WordPress dot or page for that theme on that theme has not been updated. A tall in the past say, four months. You should probably avoid that theme because it means the developers are no keeping it up to date. All right now it's going to depend a lot on the style that you are looking for. But as mentioned already for this course, I'm going to use the human theme on Dhere is so I'm going to go ahead on install Onda. Activate now, If you want to change your theme, which you can do it any time, all you need to do is choose a different theme. Andi, activate it. First of all, install it if it's not already installed and then activate it on. When you do that, you automatically deactivate the current active theme. So that's how simple it is to change themes. All right, now, we're not going to install the Dragon Drop section builder, at least at the moment. Anyway, we may install it a bit later on, but not right now. Okay, so before you decide if you're going to do exactly what I do on used the human theme, I'll show you a couple of the different layouts that you can have. Using this theme, you could have a double left sidebar for a double right sidebar or boxed. That's not full width. So that's a layout. If you don't want to have a full Whitley ICT on do you don't need to have a header. You have a choice of header or no header. So let's check here, headed with simple Bonner image like that, headed with no image just like that. Okay, so there are different styles of header as well. There are lots of things you can do with this theme. As I said, it is highly customizable. If you want to follow along with the customization. This is the theme to install. But if you're not worried about following exactly what I do with the customization, then go ahead. Andi, spend some time looking for the right theme That's going to suit what you want to do on the look that you really want to get. Okay, See you in the next lesson. 17. Setting up the Privacy Policy: Hello, everybody. We're going to create a privacy page. This is really an important part of the set up. Especially now. There's quite a lot we need to include in the privacy policy page. Okay, Now we can dismiss this message here on the menu pages at New on the title should be privacy policy or just privacy. Okay, now I have provided you with a template, and you need to edit is 10 plates. So wherever my domain is, you need to replace that with your own domain. So I'm giving you this template on a pdf Andi on an edit herbal file as well. So you can edit it before you copy and paste it in other things. You need to edit the date that is effective from that would normally be the date that you published the page. Andi, wherever there's an email address here, here, on here, make sure that you change that as well. Okay, I'm going to copy and paste this whole document in Andi that's copied and pasted pretty well. All right, now, we haven't quite finished yet with this page, but I'm going to go ahead right now on publish it and then get the rest of the information that I need on. I'll show you what you will need a swell because you're using a social sharing plug in. You're going to need some mawr information on your privacy policy page. So this is the information that you will need. You're going to need to take the paragraph for each social sharing button that you are using. Okay, so I'm using Facebook. I'm going to take this on. I'm going to insert this information below this paragraph here links to other websites and above controlling your personal information. I don't want to do Talic. So just like that, aunt to insert a header above this Just like so Now the WordPress editor is very easy to use. This is the new editor, the Gutenberg editor, which was only recently released. Andi, it really is very user friendly on very simple to make great looking pages on posts. Okay, So the social sharing buns that I'm going to be using the ones that I set up in sassy social share its Facebook Twitter Pinterest. What's up on? I think it was Read it. So I need to go and get the snippets for each of those on Pace him in here. I'll pause the video. Andi, be back in a moment, all right? I couldn't find one for what's up, so perhaps it doesn't apply. But once you've done that on, did you've I copied and pasted everything else? Said make sure that you've edited the domain names on the email addresses throughout the document, and then you can click on Publish or update No to get to this page here. This is the page with all the snippets that you need to copy and paste into Europe. Privacy Policy Page This here is the U R L, but you can actually get to it from your dashboard or from your plug ins. Page, go back to the dashboard. It's this notice here. So if you click, this link here is going to take you to that page we just looked at. But if you happen to have closed this down, no sure, whites here twice, but let's get rid of it anyway. You can probably get to that page to do the plug in Here we are, and that is the same page. So if you do happen to have closed and not notice on your dashboard. Just go to the plug in. By selecting plug ins on the menu, click on support documentation on You'll be able to navigate back to the page that we were just looking at. Okay, that's the privacy policy page. In the next lesson, we're going to set up a terms and conditions under contact US Page, I'll see you there. 18. Setting up a Contact Us and T&C Page: All right, let's go ahead and add the terms and conditions page. So over two pages on add new, give you a page, a title, terms and conditions on Once again, I have provided you with a sample page for these. So what you need to do is again you need to go through. There are four places here where you need to change my domain to your domain. So here's one on another one. Here on there are two more, further dime. So make sure that you do replace my domain for your domain on. I'm going to go ahead on pace. The same and that's it. Very simple. There. I'm going to go ahead on published the page. Okay. Next, we're going to add a contact us page on for this. We're going to use a plug in called WP forms light over to plug ins and at you typing in the search box. WP forms on here is a right here. Contact form by WP forms. Go ahead and install on. Activate. Okay, So we're going to go ahead on 38 a contact form. The template I use is this one here. Simple contact for by default. We've got a name email on comment or message. This is absolutely fine for a block. If you do want to add anything else you can. You can drop down menus if you want to, to let people select what their question is about, whether it's a question or feedback or whatever. So let me show you how to do that dropped dime. We can move it up to say here if we want to. And now we need to enter the choices that people can select from the drop down menu on there. We have the 1st 1 here out of 2nd 1 on may be 1/3 born. Just get rid of these extra ones. I'm just going to have three year for now. Now here we can make a field required or not required. As you see. Name is already required. Emails required comment or messages required. This field here can either be required or not. I'm just going to leave it like that. Onda. We can edit the form name. We can also edit the submit button text. Send your message. I usually like to put that on. This is the text of that. The user will see when they've clicked on the button. Sending I'm not lets them know that there a message is being sent. Confirmation. This is the message that the user will see after their message has been sent. Thank you for contacting us. We will be in touch with you shortly so you can edit days. I'm just going to leave it like that. Thank you for contacting us on. I'm going to go ahead and say you this four. Let's get the embed code on. Here it is, right here and now we're gonna close this time. We are going to go to pages at new out of title Contact. Does get in touch anything like that on your right here. This is where we pace that code published the page on Let's go ahead and view it. Alright. And here's the four. We've got this drop down menu here for selecting what the question is about common or message. And send your message very easy to set up in use. No. If you want to edit your form or create a new form, all you need to do is go to WP forms on the menu to edit a form that you've already set up . Click on all forms Aunt to edit This year. Click on Edit two. Other new for either click on Add New or add New here on it really is that simple? OK, that is now a contact us page Onda, a privacy policy page on the terms of conditions page set up. So in the next lesson, let's look at creating some menus and adding the pages to a menu. I will see you there. 19. Creating Menus: right, let's create some menus. Now. This theme is great because it gives us the re different menus. Andi, on additional menu that weaken set up just from Mobile. Now, some themes only have one menu, which is a real nuisance, but this theme has plenty menus. There are two ways to set up menus. You can go to appearance menus, or we can do it the other way. I'm just go to appearance, customize Andi, do it through the customized panel. All right, now, depending on the theme you have chosen, your customized panel will look different to mine. It's only going to look like this if you have chosen this theme human. Otherwise, you will have different options. So I'm going to set up menus here through the customized panel. If you do not have the option to do it here, you need to do it from here. Appearance menus. In fact, I'll show you both ways to do this, so we'll set up one menu this way on another menu through the customized panel. All right, I'm going to set up the main navigation menu here. I'm going to call it Main Menu on this name is just for your own reference on a quick, create menu. Now, once the menus created, you can add pages to the menu. We don't really want terms and conditions and privacy policy showing in the main navigation menu at the top off the block, but we might want to get in touch page showing in the main navigation menu after menu display Menu Location. Well, this is the main navigation menu, so it's going in the header auto ad pages. I don't recommend you take this because it's better if you choose manually where your pages air going on safe menu. All right. Now let's view the site so we can see the main navigation menu, which only has that one page in it at the moment. Getting touch. That's fight. Okay, now let's go on on a menu through the customized panel menus. And here's the menu that we just set up view all locations. So we've got top bar header. We've set that one up footer. We're going to create a footer. Men, you know, create new menu menu name, falter, menu, location. We don't want it in the top part because this is the footer we don't want it as mobile. We don't want it in the header. We want it in the photo. We may add it to Mobile later, but let's see how we go. OK, next add items. So now we need to add some pages to the new Falter menu. We will add terms and conditions on privacy policy. And maybe we could I get in touch as well. We can have that in the footer menu. Andi In the main menu, too. On publish. Right, Let's come out of here on Let's take another look at the site. And here's the filter menu. Terms of conditions privacy policy on Get in touch. All right, I will see you in the next lesson. 20. What if the Theme Only Has One Menu?: Okay. Now what if your theme on Lee has one menu? There are some themes that don't have a foot to menu at all. In that case, what should you do? Because you don't want tohave pages alike terms and conditions in your main navigation menu . They really should be in the footer. There is a solution on Were to show you how to do it now. So the first thing to do is go to pages, all pages on here. You need to get the u RL's off the pages that you want to put in the footer. So we want to get the U R L for all these three pages on to do that. Go to view. Andi, just take a copy off the U. R L from your address bar, putting on a note pad and then do exactly the same thing for the other pages that you want to put in the footer. So you're going to end up where the text file with a list off. All the U. N. Tells off the pages that you want to port in the foot to menu. Next thing to do is to go to appearance widgets on DWI are going to insert a menu in a footer widget. The best place to put this is in Footer warn. Now, if by any chance your theme doesn't have photo widgets, that would be very unusual, and you have definitely picked a bad theme. If that's the case, Andi, you would need to change your theme. Now remember in the earlier lesson choosing a theme, I showed you how to change your theme. Now it's really unlikely that your theme won't have photo widgets. But if just by some slim chance you have picked a theme like that, you will need to change it. Okay, let's go ahead and do days. So the widget that we want to use on place in photo which area warn is the HTML widget custom. Html add to foretell warn at now. Here is where we are going to put in some very simple HTML for the three pages. Now here's how it works on I'm giving you this as a dime load. So if, for example, I want to create a link in the footer for my terms and conditions, Page is going to look like this exactly like this. So This is the opening code here. This here is the link. So the u R l on We've got this code in here, and then you've got the text that you want to show up on the footer. In this case, terms and conditions on. Then close the code. All right. And it's the same for the others on this is just the structure of it. So this is the code. You are l text closing code. Okay, now let's do this. I'm going to take this on paste in here, take the next one, paste it end on the next one. All right. Now, remember, you only need to do this if you don't have a foot to menu. If your theme only has one menu and therefore you don't have the option to create a for two menu in the normal way and now we can go and check this out on the site. Let's go and have a look. And here it is. But the problem is we haven't got any spaces in between. We need to do that. We're going to need a little bit mawr html To do that on, we can use the p tog. That's the paragraph tack. Let's try that. So that is just opening and closing a paragraph. Let's see if that's enough. Refresh it almost. We just got a little bit too much space between privacy policy and get in touch. Okay, I pause the video there for a moment just to try a couple of things. So instead of the Pitak, we're going to use the brake tack, the BR time, so that does not need any closing tack. So what you can do there is. You can pasting the 1st 1 and to the BR tag paste in the 2nd 1 and to the BR tag pace in the 3rd 1 But the thing to remember is that this is the way it's working with this theme. So try it without Thebe. Ours. First of all, just put in the three links on if you end up with it looking squashed up like it waas on this theme. Use these BR tags. If no, it's fine as it is. Sometimes it's just fine as it is to put it in without any BR tax. No, this is a mistake. Black spot. Historically, there have bean a lot of students who make mistakes here. Andi, the links don't show up, or what shows up instead is the HTML. Now, if that happens, so if you go to the page to take a look and instead of seeing the links you're seeing HTML , it always means that you have an error. So you've made some kind of at a year with this code. Similarly, if the links are showing, but they're not live links, they're not clickable. You've made annettor all right. So be very, very careful. Watch this again. If you do make a mistake, don't worry. It's no big deal. You can fix it because you can't break anything here. You can always delete everything that's in that widget on start again. Okay, so once again on Lee, for those of you who have a theme that does not have a for two menu Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Lets Talk Widgets!: Hello, everybody now, because widgets are such a big part off were praise Andi off creating your blawg. I think it's important at this stage. No, that we talk about them a bit on. We take a look at the available widgets or some of them on what you could do with them. There are two ways to get to your widgets. First of all, on the menu dashboard appearance, widgets and that's where we are right now. The second way to get your widgets is by clicking on customize on going to the customization panel. You could do the same thing here as you can do on the customized panel when it comes to widgets. The difference says that if we use the customized panel, we can see changes in real time. So let's do that. Okay, now, in your customization panel, you may just have a non option that say's widgets for this theme. It's a dynamic Sidebars on widgets. So we've got the primary widget here. No, this is the sidebar. Andi bite, if all were pressed, usually adds these widgets to the primary widget area. So we're going to delete thes because we don't want to be confused where things that we may or may not be using. In any case, we would never have something like Meta. We would never have that in ah widget showing on the website. So let's just delete all of the's. But maybe we'll leave the search bar. Let's delete the rest for now. Remove now. If we wanted to add some more witches to the switch area, click on Add a Widget and here's where you can see the available widgets. There are a lot no, some off. These widgets are specific to this particular theme, and that's often the case. Often, a theme will have widgets that are specific to that theme, But most of these widgets are standard, like archive's audio calendar categories. Custom HTML gallery image navigation, menu pages, recent comments, recent posts, etcetera. These are standard WordPress widgets, so they're available with every theme. We also have some extra, which is here for the sassy social share plug in that we installed on. We have a widget down here WP forms. That's where we could add a form that we've created using the WP forms plug in to a widget in the sidebar, footer or somewhere else. So let's take a look at some of these options. A kiss. Mert is not something that we ward use. That's the anti spam plug in, and we don't really want to display that on the block Archives. A monthly archive of your sites posts fairly self explanatory audio displays. An audio player, self explanatory calendar of your sites, post categories. So a list or a drop down menu off your categories. So when you create posts when we get round to creating posts here a little later in this course, we always add post to a specific category. So we create a category for that post to be added to custom. HTML. Well, we used that in the last lesson when we created a menu in a Footer. For those of you who have themes without a for two menu gallery, that's where you can display an image gallery, which can be pretty good. No, this is a theme specific, so I'm not going to go into that at the moment again, a theme specific on a theme, specific image you can display any image on you can hyperlink it so you can link it so that when someone clicks on it, they're taken to another page or place on your blog's or to an external link to somewhere else. Another website. Social Media. Perhaps whatever matter, this is not really applicable, not something that you would display for users to see. Navigation menu, whatever menus that you have already set up so you can put them into a a. Which area have them displaying somewhere else, wherever you want in the sidebar footer. Whatever pages self its monetary. A list of your sites pages. Recent comments again, self explanatory. Any comments that users have left on your posts? A recent posts self explanatory RSS feed Self, its planetary. These are the sassy social share widgets. A search for, like this here tag cloud again. Not something that you would normally want to put on your blog's for users to see. Text. This is really very similar to custom HTML. Just where you can display some text anywhere, but you can use HTML in the text widget as well. On video displays, a video from YouTube video or another provider okay on to add a widget to a witch area. This is an image widget, so we would need to click here to add an image. Let's just do that on if we want to link it to somewhere linked to, you can place the U R L in here on. If you wanted to enter a title, you could enter it here. But normally we don't put titles for widgets. It's not normally necessary, and it tends to look a bit clunky and messy. Other things that we could do with, which is, as we can add advertisements in a widget so we could add a banner. If we decide to promote any affiliate products on, we want to add a banner so that when a user clicks on that banner, they're taken to the affiliate offer page. We could do that as well. Similar thing. We just add the image on then linked to. All right, so that's a quick look at which it's explaining widgets what we could do with them on what they are. Four. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 22. Basic Customization Part 1: Hello, everybody. Let's do some basic customization on the theme. We're not going to do everything right now, but let's do something on that way. We can start to see the block taking shape. OK, over to appearance on, customize on. The first thing we can take a look at here is the front page content. This here is the global layout, so we've got a sidebar at the left on the right, on the main content in the middle. This is going to be my preferred layout, but there are many more. Let's take a look. You could have just one color. No sidebars, Just two columns with the content on the left on the side bar on the right, or vice versa. Or three columns with the content in the middle, which is the default one or 30 columns with the content on the left or on the right. Like so I'm going to put it back to global default, which is where the content is in the middle. Your home page displays your latest post. That's what we want. We don't want the home page to be a static page. In fact, I will show you that under the settings in the dashboard as well before the end of this lesson. Okay, Blawg heading Display a custom heading for your blawg. No, I don't want that. You can if you like, But I've just removed it. No for the home page blogger posts. There's nothing we can really do here yet because we haven't added any posts, so we're going to ignore that for now on. We'll ignore these on the Post somebody excerpt length for now as well, until we've added some posts. Featured posts display a future post of the top. That's a good idea to have that, so we'll leave that on. So let to Category two feature. We don't have any categories yet. We haven't done anything yet. No content. So we have to leave that. Let's go back. No. What about the head of design? And this is where we can add a logo on. We will be adding a logo. So instead of displaying the site title in the header, we will toggle this toe off on. We will instead have a logo, but we don't have a logo yet, so we'll leave it like that Head of design. So once again. We will be talking this toe off Andi talking this toe on when we have a logo, we will also be talking the tagline Toe off us. Well, probably. But we'll leave it there for now. Now here is where you can customize the background. So the head of background on the top bar background We won't customize any colors at this time because we may well be using a header image. Use a header at Bonner image. Obviously, we need to create one. I've just picked around them one here from these default images. But that's just a placeholder. So we're going to need to create a nice header image. We can change this background color as well. Header advertisement, widget. So here's where we can activate a widget in the header if we want to put a banner ad in there. So with that activated, we could then put content in that widget area some kind of banner advertisement if we wanted to. Okay, Main body design. Now here again, is where we can set the layouts for different pages on the blawg. So for a single post page, if we did not want to have this layout. We could change the layout to something else so you can set the layout for category pages, archive pages for the search page. You can have different layouts for those pages. Single post settings. Either the global layout like these or for a single post. Instead of having both of the sidebars, it might be a good idea to just have one sidebar. No, of course, we can't check it at the moment because we do not have any post yet. Okay, now here is where we can change the colors. So general color options we can change the font. We can change the font size. We can change the max with 13 Aito is a pretty good width for full whip, so I would tend to leave it like that. Now, Here's where you can change if you want to to box layout. I prefer widely out, so I'm going to change it back. Primary color. So that's the color that you're seeing here on. Secondary color is the color you're seeing here. We could change this by selecting a different color that's a little darker on that's no more of an orange. No, the body background Currently, it is a ah, pale gray color. I prefer the body background to be white, so I'm going to change it. Toe white social links. Here's where we can add links to any social media accounts that we have add new. So like icon. Let's look for a Facebook here. We need to enter a u l o our Facebook page. You are l I don't have a Facebook page for this block, but I'm just gonna go ahead and grab a u R l off one of my other pages just so we can see what it looks like. All right, now we can change the color of this if we want to. Off the icon, you can have it any color you like. I think I might have it like that. It's almost white on. I think we can make it a little bigger size in pixels. Okay, that's better. And then, of course, we can add, um, or just by clicking at new to add another one on another another. They're all here on. There's Twitter added as well. All right, let's take a look at the photo design full to design logo and layout display a full with which it area in your footer. Well, if we do that, it means that we won't be able to add a multiple which it areas in the footer. So I'm not going to do that because I prefer to have a few different widget areas going across the floater, maybe three widget areas. Set columns to enable for toe widget. Three columns. Yep, that's about right. We can also upload our logo to our photo here as well on change the photo background color . All right, now, how do we change this color here? The background color behind the header on the menu bar. It's right here. Header design, header, a background. I'm going to try White for this header menu background. A mobile, a menu background. Let's check this on mobile on Houthi Mobile menu. Here on tablet, we get the regular menu. I think I'll just set this back to the default color, at least for the time being. Okay, that's a little bit of customization. Andi introducing you to the customization panel on as mentioned already. If you're using a different theme, you will have different options, so you will need to click around and explore those options Treks pere menting with things. As long as you don't click the publish button, none of the changes are saved. So you can play around here in the customization panel on do you can try different things I'm providing. You don't click that button. Publish. If you're just click this button here, close changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page. Okay, So that is how you can try things on. Then just close it down on. Nothing will be saved. Okay, The one thing I was going to show you here, under settings on under reading your home page displays either your latest posts or a static page. Your home page should always display your latest post because this is a block. All right, Now we set that in the customization panel, but just in case you don't have the option in the customization panel, I wanted to show you right here. Okay, I'll see you in a minute. 23. Basic Customization Part 2: Hello, everybody. I had planned to leave it there as Faras Customization is concerned for the time being, but I wanted to show you something else. First on, they will move on to creating header images on logos. No, currently, we have a site that doesn't spanned the whole screen. This is a widescreen monitor, so on a smaller monitor it would span the whole screen. But what if you want to get the effect so that even on wide screens, your block is full with? Well, there is a way to achieve that effect. With this theme, I know what you need to do is go to Web page design General design on in the Max with Enter 1920 Andi under Box a layout. Toggle it toe on. Now we've got forwards even on wide screen. But let's just do a little bit mawr to enhance the effect. Let's add a header image just as a placeholder under head of design image total it toe own Now. What we would need to do here is we would need to upload an image that was wider, the Nace, because this image is on Lee. 138 a wide. So to get the right effect, we would need to upload a header image that is a 1920 pixels wide. But that's easy enough to do. We're going to be doing all this in the next section on to enhance this effect even further . We can add a top bar. No, to do that, we need toe add another menu. So we need to create a menu for the top bar view menu locations Top bar, create you menu. I'm just going to call it top on the location is going to be in the top bar, so well, untypical of these next. I'll just add a couple of pages to the menu just so that we have the effect. All right. Now, this bar here, this is the admin bar. So this is not a viewable to use us only to you when you are logged in as an admin. So here's the top bar on. We can change the color of those. The issue we have now know that we've made this block much wider. The menu items are the way over to the left. We want them centered, but we can fix that with a little bit of code, I'm going to give you this code. We'll do it right now. Andi. I'll also give you the code on a handout to go with this lesser. All right, So how to add code under advanced options? Additional CSS. And we add it right here. Here is a right here on now. The menu items are centered. Okay, now the menus are obviously bare at the moment, but they won't be once we add mawr pages, Mawr items to the menus. But let's check this out in smaller screens as well and make sure it still looks OK. We know it's going to look great in wide screens once we've got this image here going right the way across the screen on once we change our colors and that kind of thing. But what about smaller screens? Okay, so this is a big monitor, but let's go smaller on smaller and smaller, still looking OK and when we get to about here. But this would happen anyway, though, regardless of whether we were using this layout or not, because on small screens there's not enough a room to show both side bars on Then, as we move to the tablet size and very small screen sizes, we get it like this. Which means that we have these really nifty little animations where users can open the sidebars on close them again. Going smaller. Still on my were onto the mobile phone layout. On As you can see, with this top bar, it's sticky. So while the user is scrolling down, it stays in place on its even slightly transparent so that we can see the header image through it. Okay, that was just an extra lesson, their own customization. Because I'm going to use this layout. I'm going to make my layout as wide as possible because I think it has a really good look. Okay, See you in a minute. 24. Getting Headers and Logos Made: Hi, everyone. Let's talk about the header image. Andi, your Balog logo, the header image and logo. They are pretty important because it's the first thing that a user sees normally. The first thing they see when they land on your blog's. Now, if you want to skip this part for now, so if you're not sure what type of head or local you warn, you can skip this section of the course on Come back to it later on. But anyway, let's go ahead. You have two options. Get somebody else to do it for you or a do it yourself. Now with the first option getting someone else to do it for you. The best place is fiver. So go to Fiverr dot com on simply typing logo design on what you want to do is price range 0 to 5 now. There are so many local designers over here on Fiverr on so many really good local designers, So take a look through a few off them just by clicking on What you're looking for is 4.8 or above rating. Andi, I would say a minimum of 30 reviews, so this one here, she's got lots of different styles and I'm sure she could do a really good logo. Delivery time is one day. Andi. She will even do five revisions on the logo. What? She's delivered it to you if you're not happy, all right, that's basic. Basic is really all you need now. A standard will give you some Mawr options, but basic is fine, so that's $5 similar thing with your website header. Thai pain website header Image design on. We can do the price filter again. 0 to 5 and you need to read the descriptions for website header design because some of them do social media head rose. Some of them are doing other things. So awesome Header image for website or blawg, Great website header, slider or banner website header. Image. So that's what you want and there are lots off them. Even on page two, we're going to find some more creative website banner. Anyone who say's they can create a website banner can create a website header as well. But even if you're going to get somebody else to do this, you're going to need the information to give them things like dimensions. Exactly what you want The more information you give to the seller on Fiverr, the more likely you are to get back something that you like. So the first thing that you need to know is the size. Now, if you go to the customization panel on, find the part where you add a header. So if it's not this theme you're using, you're looking for where you upload the header image. It will be here somewhere. Here it's under header design on header Image and it says here 1380 by 2 80 pixels. But since I've already decided that I'm going to make this block wider, I'm going to make it 19 to a wide. I know that's the web off the header I need. What if your theme does not have this information? So what if it just say's upload your header image, but there's no dimensions. In that case, you would go to Google and just type in header image dimensions for X y Z theme, and you will probably find the information. If you don't, the only thing you can do is test it and try it until you get it right. So upload one if it's not right, if it's too big, make it smaller. Uploaded again. If it's too small, making bigger uploaded again, sometimes you need to do that, but hopefully you'll be able to get the dimensions. Usually the dimensions are shown here in the customization panel. Now the other thing we need to know is the position off the logo, because if we're going to have a logo in the header, we need to know where that's going to go. What I'm going to do here in order to test this is I'm going to upload an image, any image at all but the right wigs on the right depth, and then I'm going to upload anything. A toll is a logo, and I'm going to be able to see their where the logo is positioned, and that's what you can do. All right, where do we find images that are free for commercial use? They're going to be big enough on we're going to be able to hopefully find something we need. A website called Picks a bed, probably the best place to find high resolution images that are free for commercial use, and there are literally tens of thousands off them now. It doesn't matter what I use here. It's just a test. I'm going to grab this one, Andi. I want the 19 to A with because 1 to 80 is going to be too narrow. Usually you're going to need 1920 anyway, and then crop it because anything below that won't be wide enough for a header image. I will go ahead and download this. I'm not a robot. If you want to avoid this, you can sign up for a free account. I do have one, but I'm not signed in. All right, I need to crop this to the to 80 depth. That's what it told me on the customization panel. I'm just using a free program here called Microsoft Paint. It's a free program for Windows on. I'm going to just crop a part of this, okay? And now to upload it as the header image at New Image Andi, I'm going to Dirac and drop it here, all right. And now it seems like it should bay deeper, although it say's to 80 here, let's just try it and see what it looks like in a live environment on the site. Actually, it looks fine now. So now to find out where the logo is going to be positioned here, let's go back to the panel. Display the logo on top. Let's go back on. Bond at the logo. No site title. Display a logo. Onda, Hide the description. Select logo. Now here. I can also decide the max height off the logo. Let's just try this. This is just to use as a test. Okay, so there is there, and it will be way across at the far left here. Let's see if we can make it bigger. Doesn't seem to do anything with that particular image. Let's try a different one. Try days and let's see if we can make this one bigger. Let's try that. Okay. So I know this is where the logo is going to be. If I'm going to get somebody to design ahead of for May, I would take a screenshot here off this on. Show them the screenshot just so they would know the positioning off the logo on that will allow the designer to create the header with that in mind. Okay. No, I'm going to leave that head of their now just as a guide as a placeholder. But in the next lessons, I'm going to show you how to use Can va to create your own header on, even create your own logo. I'll see you there. 25. Creating a Header in Canva: all right. I'm going to show you how to create your own header using a free tool called Camba. So you need to know your dimensions. Now, in this case, I know the depth off the header is to 80 pixels. Andi, I know that the width I one is 1920 pixels. Let's go to canvas dot com. It's free, but you need to sign up for an account. So once you've done that, click on create a design Causton Dimensions on here, you're going to enter the with on death in pixels. In this case, it's going to be 1920 by 2 80 Create new design. All right, now, here's the canvas. I know it doesn't show up very well. I really wish that they would do something to make this show up a little better. But anyway, you can just about see it now, depending on the dimensions. If you entered a narrower wave, you will probably have some templates here that you can use. But because I'm making such ah wide header that are no templates to fit my header and the templates are all pre made anyway, you might not find one you like. I've not used a template before. I've always created my own header. So what we can do is we can go to pick Sabei. Andi, find some images that relate to the subject off your block. In this case, I'm going to find a few wild life images on download them to my device. And then I am going to corrupt them on and make some kind of ah ah ka lodge for the header . So let me go ahead and pulls a video while I find some images on Download them. All right. I've downloaded a few images on dive, corrupt them to be to 80 high, but I don't think I've got enough. Anyway, this is how we upload images here to convert. Just goto up loads. Click on, upload an image on, then choose the image from your device. Okay, so these are currently uploading, and that seems to be it. And then all we need to do is drag and drop them resized to make sure they're fitting the canvas. Move around on. I'm going to need one more for here, so I'll just pause again. Ongoing. Grab another image. Okay. No, I have another image in here on day now, I have the whole header filled up, but I'm not sure how this is going to work with the logo over here, because if the logo is going to end up on top of the head chalks face, that's going to look a bit strange. So I might have to change that yet. But I want to show you a few tips here. When you're creating a banner, you can position different images by just moving him around, but you can also send them to the back or bring them to the front position backwards. Now you can see the all tress in front the Owls behind. I could send the auto back now on. If I wanted to, I could move this up here. So let's say I wanted to have more images on the header, which would be probably a good idea. Instead of having just six wider images, I could have maybe nine or 10 images all in this same shape, so that would look pretty good, probably better than it looks right now. But for the time being, just to get this done, let's leave it as it is. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and download days. So all we do here is download on. We do not need a transparent background for the header image. We do need a transparent background when we create a logo. We don't need it this time. I'm just going to click download, Okay? And here it is here, so and I can go ahead and upload this at new image. I'm going to drag and drop it here from my folder on for the title. I'm just going to give it some kind of title on I'm going to skip cropping. I don't want to crop it all Publish. Let's take a proper look at it. All right, so that is the header created in Canada. As I say, I will need to go ahead and create a logo and added to the header See what it looks like If it doesn't look right, I can go back on, do make some edits to the header. But you see how simple that waas Now I want to show you a couple of other things here with can va under elements, you can search for pretty much anything you want here. Many of them are free. And if you only want free, just click free on. Then do your search. You can also our text here out of heading on. We can put text on here if we want to know in this case. Obviously, I'm not putting any text on it, but I just wanted to show you the different features available. Now you need to spend a little time on this. There's a small learning curve, but you'll soon get used to it. Aunt. To be honest, I use convert virtually every day. Andi, I don't know how I'd manage without it. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 26. Creating a Logo with Canva: Hi, everyone. I've created a logo in Camber Here is here now. I did experiment with a few different colors first, as you will see here on then. Once I had decided on the color I wanted I actually purchased a premium image. It was $1 these a corns here. So initially I downloaded with the watermark. And then when I knew I definitely wanted it, I downloaded it without the war to mark on paid a dollar. So the great thing about Can va is that we can change the colors and then we can upload the logos, see what they look like. If it's not right, we can go back and change the colors. Now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to run through how I created this logo. It's pretty basic because I'm really know a designer, so it's just really as much as I could do to create a local like this on. I think Logo's are more difficult to make than anything else. Anyhow, let's run through it. Okay, here's the logo. So let's go to a blank page on going to show you exactly how I created days. First of all the size of the file is 400 by 200 but you don't need that. I just made it wider because I wasn't really sure how big I was going to make the logo. But if you just make it 200 by 200 that will be better. So when you are here under create a design, custom dimensions 200 by 200. Now the thing is, your logo is very likely not going to be not big. That will be a very big logo, but if we make it bigger than it is actually going to be on the website, we get a sharper image. It just looks better. So that's what I recommend you do. All right, let's go to the blank page. Now the first thing I did waas I looked for circles on the one that I chose. Is this one here? So let's find that one. There are lots of different circles here, and you don't have to make a circle logo. I'm pretty limited on what I can do. So a circle is a safe bet for me. With my limited skills, I think this is it. So first of all. I stretched it. I wanted it to be bigger. So I wanted to fill the hole canvas like that. And I want to get in the middle. And then I changed the color. But I experimented quite a bit with different colors, as you saw already. When you looked at the up loads the different logos I'd uploaded to the media library on the block to change the color. It's really easy just up here. I think that is the color. Yeah, that's the color. And the next thing I did Waas Instead of having a transparent Mittal here for the logo, I decided to pull in here another circle to fill the background so that it wouldn't be transparent. Because currently, this is just a a circle, Andi. Although it looks white, the background at the moment is actually completely transparent. All right, so I found just a regular circle. That one there put it on there. You can't even see it at the moment. But if I change the color, you will. I think that's the color. Yes, lost the color. I did try it white as well, but it just looked a little bit too harsh. on the website. We've got a bit of a space here, so let's make this a little bigger. Next thing I did, I added some text. But to get it like this going around like that, we need to are four different blocks of text. So text out of heading delete everything except for one letter. And in this case, it's a d. I moved up here, Andi, we can move it around like that. And now we can copy it because we need four different blocks where you need to double you on. We need an I. All right now we just position them the same as I've done up here. All right. I just paused for a minute just to move them around. Now we want to change the size 2 36 with all of them on the font that I used Is this one here? Allegra sounds sc irregular. There are tons of different fonts that you can try. And I did try a few before deciding on this Born. Now the next thing I did waas I found this squiggle here just went to elements on do research for squiggle. Ah, lot off the time you're going to find all these cartoony types of things. But the warm that I won't is here somewhere. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. Just need to turn it around. So select it flipped, flip horizontal. I made it bigger, roughly that size and then because I had to space over here. That's when I looked for the acorn on here is here. As you can see, it's a dollar, but this is the one that I wanted. There's no watermark on it this time because I've already paid for it, all right. And then I changed the color off the squiggle on. Then I trained the color off the letters. No. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to select things, So if that's happening to you, go up to position, just play around with it like that. Now it's working, all right, so that's pretty much it. But as I say, it did take me a little while just experimenting with different colors. Initially, I tried a hedge hop here. I tried a deer high trade, and I will. I tried a few things, but none of them look quite right. So it does take a little time to do this. If you don't want to do this, just head over to Fiverr on. Get someone else to do it for you on one more thing. When you're downloading your logo, don't forget to take transparent background, Okay? No. Then I have this set at 1 to 5 high. You can try different sizes for your logo to see what looks best. I did try it smaller. I did try it bigger, but it looks about right at 1 to 5 high. No, as expected. Andi, as I mentioned, it doesn't look quite right on top of the head Chocks face. So I'll do something about the image about the header image just to make that a look a little better with the logo on top of it. But for now, I'm going to leave your house. It is We don't need to have things perfect before. We've even got any content on the blawg, and that's what we're going to be doing next. We're going to be starting to add some content. I'll see you soon 27. Getting Content and Ideas: her low Everybody. Now, unless you are a really expert and have a lot of in depth knowledge on the subject that you're blawg is going to be about, you are going to need to research to get ideas for content on, to get content that you might want to share on your blawg. Even if you are able to write certain posts without any research at all, it's very likely going to be other posts that you're going to need to do some research for . So the first place to look is your own knowledge and experience. What do you already know about your subject now? You might need to do some memory joking here, so just use a pen and a paper or a text file on your device or even your phone as you're going about your daily activities on. Start jotting down words or phrases about your subject. And once you start doing that, it's like brainstorming on other ideas. Come into your head on. You remember things that you have for gotten Okay, No. The next thing is researching on Google. Now I remember when Google didn't exist, and I'm not really sure how I manage without it. Of course, I did a lot more reading back then, but being able to just go to the computer and type something in or type something in on your phone when you want to find out the answer to something or get more information about something, there was a time when we couldn't do that. So we really have it very easy now when it comes to a research Onda Online news channels We've got Yahoo News, Fox, BBC, CNN and many, many more article directories on one of the biggest ones or the biggest one is easy in articles dot com, you can, in fact, take entire articles without changing them at all to repost on your own. Blawg, Andi Wikipedia. So any website. That's what we call public domain, which means that you can take that information, including images on Do you can repost that on your own website. On there are forums. Places like Reddit now read it is one off the most popular websites on the Internet. Andi forums that are specific to your subject. These could be great sources off ideas and inspiration on Facebook groups, Facebook pages, the same thing this also YouTube, another video sharing sites, but YouTube is the main one. Andi. There's nothing that you can't find on YouTube. But don't forget offline research because local libraries can be a really, really good source of information and ideas. Know everything that we read online is factual or correct that sometimes we've got to take another step, go one step further, undo some offline research as well. Andi, We've got newspapers, magazines, so print magazines on television as well. All great sources, off information, ideas on inspiration. 28. Crafting Great Post Titles: Okay, let's take a look at post titles. Andi crafting really great post titles. The title is so important because it determines whether or no your post gets red. So it does need to grab the attention off the reader. It needs to generate interest or curiosity. It needs to generate some kind off feeling, some kind of emotion that makes that person the reader want to start reading the post on Even when you're Block starts to build followers. People who want to a read on keep coming back to read more of what you have posted. Even your followers won't read a post if the title gives them no reason at all to read it. So let's compare some titles. What about this one? Five things you never Knew about grapefruits on your health Now, compared to days why great fruits are good for you. So the 1st 1 generates a much more curiosity. It has a much more attention grabbing appeal than the 2nd 1 How an apple a day could literally save your life against eating apples is healthy, which warn sounds more interesting. Which one says, more exciting to, you know, boy wives audience with his incredible singing voice versus talented two year old boy sings on stage Now in this case, even the second title, or would generate interest because it's got that cute factor. It's the kid are singing on stage, so that would even work. But the 1st 1 why was audience with incredible singing voice that is going to get a more people clicking through from the title or carrying on and reading the rest of the post? Three things you must start doing right now if you want to live to 100 versus How to Live. To be 100 years old on another 1 90 year old marathon runner reveals the three things she does every day to stay fit versus how to run a marathon at 90. So I'm sure you're starting to get the idea of the point I'm trying to make is that your title needs to grab your reader's and compel them to read Mawr. If you want a crash course in this, the book that I would recommend is Cash Advertising by Drew Eric Wittman is a classic. It's not a new book. It's been around for a long time, but that doesn't make any difference? Because the copyrighting principles that were used 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago are the exact same ones that we use today on. Very little has actually changed. What worked then still works today. Pretty much all the really good headlines on sales copy that we see online now. All of it, in fact, is based on the copy writing grades from years ago, decades ago? 50 years ago, even 100 years ago. Okay, you can get that on Amazon for a few dollars on. Do you can get it as a any book. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson. 29. Writing Posts: so we've all looked at creating titles. Now let's take a look at a writing posts. Very soon we are going to be adding our first post to the Blawg. But before we do that, there are some guidelines I am going to tell you about. First of all, keep paragraphs short. You're not writing an essay or a book you're writing for the Internet, you're writing a block. Post is a completely different thing. Paragraphs should be no more than a few sentences. Even long sentence sometimes is a paragraph. We don't write big blocks of text when we're writing for a block. Andi add images to break up content in your longer posts. So any post that's mawr than, say, 4 500 words should have at least one image as well as the main image. You'll understand more about this shortly, but you need toe break. The post up the optimum post lens is 400 to 2000 words, and now you might be thinking 2000 words. How on earth am I ever going to be able to write a post of that length? It's not that difficult when you break it down into sub parts, so you'll have subheadings throughout the post anyhow. We're going to be doing this shortly so you'll learn more about it. You can vary the length of your posts, but make sure on this is important that you do have some posts over 1700 words Now the reason for that is because Google favors a longer content. Andi posts on content that ranks on page warn is almost always 1700 words, orm or but we also know that if you go over 2500 words, that tends to have a detrimental effect because it's just a little bit too long. So don't go over 2500 words. Keep your long posts between, say, 1700 on 2500 maximum. You're short of posts should not be less than 300 words. In fact, I would say not less than 400 words unless you are posting a video post. So you're sharing a video and you're just pushing a few sentences. But what you can do with a video post this is even better is you can write out a transcript of the video, even if it's only more like a summary but just a few 100 words summarizing, not video on post that below the video in the post. All right, let's take a look at post that work well. List posts always work well. For example, three Amazing Places to Visit in Barcelona. Five Unusual ways to cook potatoes or seven tips to make your garden the best in the street . We've got video posts. People love video so you can share videos from YouTube. Andi. There are other places that you can share videos from a swell. Sometimes new sites have videos that you can share. If the embed code is available, it means you can share it on how to posts. So, for example, how to make your running shoes waterproof. How to fix a dripping tap in two minutes. How to teach math to your two year old? What about breaking news? Posts These air pretty easy to dough if you monitor the new sites for interesting and new news about your subject. But of course it needs to be interesting. Otherwise, there's not much point. We've also got controversial posts. No, the thing with controversial posts is that they can be very good because people love controversy. But you need to weigh up. Andi, think about whether or no you are offending your audience. Of course, we can't please everybody all of the time. On often there are going to be some people that don't like what we right. In fact, there will always be some people who totally disagree with what we write. So we can't please everybody. But there are some subjects that are very sensitive. So if you're going to write controversial posts, you need to use your own common sense. All right, what if you're sitting there and you just can't start? You don't know how to start. You don't know what to write. This is really common. It's called Writer's block. It happens to just about everybody. Even very experienced writers get it. There is only one way to overcome this, and that is just start writing, write anything at all. Even if you don't publish anything that you write initially, you just go back and delete it'll It doesn't matter, because if you don't start writing, you will not get over that block on is the only way to do it. No, I remember one time in a Facebook group I had to block somebody because he got very upset. Andi, angry about the fact that he couldn't get started writing his posts, and he thought that I should be able to do more to help him. But the truth is, there's only one person who can get you over this block on that issue on. There is only one way to do it just to start writing anything at all. Okay, I'll see you in a minute in the next lesson. 30. Preparing Your First Post: no. In the next lesson, we are going to add our first post to the Blawg. But before we do that, we need to prepare it, so we need to write it. So the first thing to do is, do your research on gather your sources on for your online sources. You can use a spreadsheet or text file to list the you are else for easy reference. I use Microsoft Excel, but it's not free. There are plenty free ones that do the same thing, like Google spreadsheets or Apache Open office. Next, create the title on the subheadings, so you're going to need subheadings throughout the post on a rough guy. But this is a very rough guide. Is one subheading per 200 words. However, you shouldn't cut powder rough short or make paragraphs longer, just in order to try and get 200 words. Because you're gonna have a variety. Sometimes you might have on Lee 100 words below one subheading on 300 boards below another on In case anyone's just wondering, what exactly are subheadings? Let's just take the example off the title that we had. I think it was five unusual ways to cook potatoes while the subheadings. In that case, that will be the five different ways Whatever they are. I can't think of any unusual pays to cook potatoes, but I'm sure there are lots off them or a post that had the title. How to Teach math to your two year old. You could have that broken down into a number of subheadings, such as which books to use, how long to spend on each session, how to make it fun, various things like that. So put your subheadings in a logical order. So once you've got them down on a text file or just on a no part with a pen or pencil, then rearrange them into the most logical order for your post. You're also going to need images. You will need a main featured image. You'll understand more about what that means in the next few lessons, but that's a big image that features at the top of your post. Normally, about 600 pixels wide is roughly right, but it's going to depend on the layout off your block. Now, with my layouts, I might need a wider image because I've decided to make a very wide layout off 1920 as well as the main featured image. Longer Post should have images in the body of the content as well to break the post up. So we've got subheadings breaking the post up, but we can also have images as well. Breaking the post up next step is to write the first paragraph. The first paragraph is always the hardest, and it should be designed to hook the reader. The person has already decided to start reading because the title has grabbed their attention. But if they start reading on the first paragraph is completely boarding. They're not going to continue. Despite the fact that the title has grabbed their interest on the first paragraph, should also a reinforce the subject off the post, so it should reinforce the title. Whatever the title of the Post is, the first paragraph should reinforce that. That way you are delivering on the promise off the title you've got congruence. See, that's what readers want. They want to know for sure that the body off the post, what they are about to read is delivering on the promise of the title. Once you've written the first paragraph again, the hardest part. Then write the rest of the post using the subheadings to guide you on what to write. You might need to add more subheadings because once you start writing, you might think of other things other things might come into your head on. You might think, Oh, I need to include this So you might need to add more subheadings. Do that ask necessary. If you're still feeling a bit unsure about this, the best thing to do is go to Google Andi, typing the most obvious search term for the subject off the post that you are writing. Let's go back to the five unusual ways to cook potatoes. If I was wanting to see other blawg posts about cooking potatoes, other good block posts about cooking potatoes, I would type in something like ways to cook potatoes into Google in the search bar. And what you're looking for is the results on page one that are relevant so you might get our result from Amazon some kind of device for cooking potatoes, that kind of thing. Those things won't be relevant. You're looking for the relevant results. So other blog's or websites that have articles are about ways to cook potatoes. And you want the results on page warn because they are the best ones to look at unprecedentedly higher up the page, the higher up the page on page warn the better. So go ahead and take a look at those articles or posts on that's going to help you even mawr. Okay, See you in a minute. 31. Adding Your First Post Part 1: her low. Everybody, let's at the first post to the Blawg. To do that, go to posts. First of all, go to all posts because sometimes there's a default post there on. There is hello world. If you've got that, just go ahead and click on Ben Onda. Then go to add new. Okay, now I have written out the post here on Here's my title Now this title here is another type of title that works pretty well. It's a like, ah, hopeless toe hopeful Santo happy kind of title. So it starts off. Our frogs are disappearing, which is all hopeless doom and gloom. But then, but you can save them. So hopeless, too hopeful. I'm going to show you another couple of examples off that kind of title. I know we're going off on a tangent a bit here, but I think this is important. This first example here, this for gotten dog lived seven years on a chain. Now that's pretty depressing. And if the title on Lee said that Ah, lot of people wouldn't read it because people don't want their day ruined, but then we get this next bit. But then look what happened so everybody knows this post has a happy ending. It's sad toe happy. Here's another one. Eating chocolate makes you fact nobody wants to read that, and everybody knows that. Anyway, on it's a bit depressing, but then we've got but this chocolate might actually help you get slim. So now we've got hopeless. Too hopeful, sad toe happy. All right, You're probably getting the point here. I'm trying to make. This is another type of title that works Well, okay, I'm going to take this title. Andi paste in right here and now I'm going to take the body off this post. Now I like to write my post out on a text file first. If you're going to do that, make sure that you format it with no word wrap. So if you've got word drop like that on ticket, and then you can just take the whole lot copy and pasted in. All right? Now where I have my subheadings, I've just put a little ass tricks here. That's just to tell me this is a subheading. So what I'm going to do here with these subheadings is I'm going to change these from regular paragraph text to heading Now this is too big. Maybe I'll go for 84 That's probably about right. Andi, I have a few more subheadings here. Here's one heading H four again. Same here, aunt here, Andi here as well. All right, so you can see I've got quite a few subheadings throughout the post Now the next thing I'm going to do here is over here. Document going to add a category four days at you category. Andi, I'm going to call it Amphibians are new category. I'm also going to add another cat. Agree for this post because it's about gardening. For wildlife, it's about creating a pond for frogs. So I'm going to call this category Gardens add new category because we can have posts in multiple categories, and then we can select a primary category for the post. In this case, I think I'll leave the primary category as amphibians. We can add some tags, no tags, a really useful when we have a lot of content on the site, and it helps users to search through the content so they can type in the search, a particular search term on bring up the results related to that search term. I've just started three taxi frogs, amphibians on pond and no to set a featured image. So this is the big image that shows at the top of the post on the block page. I've already downloaded a couple of images from picks. Obey, Andi. I've cropped them so that they're not too deep. But I've made them pretty wide because I know that I have a wide layout of my block. All right, so this here is going to be the featured image. Andi, it's 1 to 8. A white well is, in fact, 1 to 79 But it was 12 Aito when I downloaded it. So basically from picks obey here under free download. I chose this 1 to 80 Now, depending on your blog's layout, 6 40 maybe wide enough. So you'll need to try it. Let's see if this was going to work well for this particular layout I have here for this block. Okay, Now what else am I going to do here before I publish it, I'm going to add one more image, So I think I'll add it here between this subheading here, help frogs by giving them a home on the first paragraph below it. No, to do that, I want to add another block. It's going to be an image. Andi, I don't have it already uploaded to the media library, so I'm going to click on Upload on, uploaded from my device. All right, here we go. So here's the image I want on this in the place. I wanted to be between this subheading here on this paragraph Here, have a quick look through. Just going to click on the paragraphs on just to see if the garam early extension is going to tell me I've got any mistakes. Something here. Oh, misspelled. There we go. So really useful extension. Jenny, like, should have a hyphen. All right, now here it's correcting something that doesn't need to be corrected. Sometimes that happens. So ignore on here's Woan. I need a comma there. Okay, Now, one thing I need to do it here is I have a link going out to unauthorized ET website right here, which is a pretty good idea to do that in your posts. In your longer posts, especially have a link going out to unauthorized ET on the subject So in this case, I'm Winterling cut to the artist PP website, which is an authority on British wildlife. Now how we do that is I'm just going to so let the text that I want to link and then click on the little pay per click and to the u r l apply. Now I want to make sure this is opening in a new window because I don't want people to be taken away from my blawg when they click on that link open in a new tab. Yes, Onda, apply again. Okay. Now we are going to do something down here for the Yost s CEO snippet Preview on focus. Keyword this kind of thing. We're going to do that, but we're not going to do that yet. First of all, we want to check and see what the block postal looks like. Andi, work on the layout off the blood post page to make sure everything looks ok. I'm going to go ahead and publish this now on. We'll continue in the next lesson. 32. Adding Your First Post Part 2: Okay, let's head over to the customization panel right now. The first thing I see here is the font is very small, on very pale on. The excerpt could be longer. So let's see what we can do about that main body design post settings. First of all, I'm going to remove this header. Just going to toggle this toe off Andi for the excerpt is only 34 words. I'm going to change it. I think I'll try 100. That's fine, but we need to do something about this font. So design options, font and colors. So the font here is by default 16 pixels. I preferred it to be 18. Let's try putting it up. Yes, the problem is it also increases the size off the title, which I don't really want. So probably what's going to be needed here is some kind off code. We've used a bit of CSS code already. It's no big deal. Same with the color of the font, because we don't have an option here with this theme to change the color off the font on the excerpts. Now Onley actual post itself is easy to change the color of the phone because we can do that in the editor. When we're adding the post, I'll show you how to do that as well. But first of all, we need to figure this out. So I'm going to pause the video and find the CSS code. I need to fix this. All right, here we go. Under advanced options on additional C. S s. Here's the code. We need to make the text bigger. Andi also make it black. Two bits of code here, the 1st 1 to make it black on the 2nd 1 to make it 18 pixels instead of 16. But keeping the title the same size on There we go. Now. What about the single post pages to see what they look like? I'm going to go ahead on colic on the title on here is a single post page. Maybe we could play around with the font, See if something different looks a bit better. General design options. We could try a different font on. We can check that out on the block pages. Well, the home page. I'm going to stick with this one, Which is you. Bon to I like that one for this particular Blawg style and layout, so you can choose your own phone. Usually you will have an option to choose font, although some themes in the customization panel there is no option to do that. But usually there is. Okay, so we know what the Post looks like on the home page. So the block page, in other words, on we know what it looks like on the single post page. I'd like to see a little more space between these icons here on the text in the first paragraph. Here we can go over to the social icons plugging on. Just have a law conceive. It's possible to have a bit more padding below these icons here. Other than that, I'm happy enough with the look of this post. So I'm going to publish. Let's just check and see if we can do anything about the partying here. Saucy social share. I am not seeing anything a toll here. All right, let me pause the recording here for a moment and let's see if I can find a way to do this and I'll be right back. Okay, I figured it out. Took a while because I couldn't find anything. That was what we needed. So I had to basically create the code. Anyhow, here is how you add it. Go to miscellaneous scuttle Down Do custom CSS. Here is the code right here. Of course, you'll be getting these codes on a hand date. Enter here, save changes on now. Let's go and check it out. Let's go to customize again. Let's go to this single post page. And now we've got space. Whereas before this paragraph here, the first paragraph was squashed right up against the social sharing buttons. Looks a lot better now with a little bit of space in between. Okay, now, in the next lesson, we're going to do the CEO on the post that we just added, I'll see you there. 33. Adding Your First Post Part 3: here we are back in the post. Andi, if we score all the way down here to the bottom of the post, this is where we have the Yoast Seo settings. So your Stasio, that's the plug in that we installed earlier. Now, here's what will show up in the results on Google and other search engines. This here is the title. This here is the U. R l or the Perma link on right here. We need to provide a meta description. So that little description that shows up in the Google search results when you do a search , what shall we use for that will? Normally, we're just going to use the first sentence or two sentences off the post. I'm going to copy that. And when a click here, this is going to open up and we cannot a little bit more. You see the green line here? We cannot text until the Green Line gets to the end. Now, anything we add over that is not going to show up or probably not going to show up in the search results. All right, that's fine. I have gone over Andi. All it means is that it will show so much in the search results on the words that are cut off, it will just show what? Dot, dot dot instead. But that's OK. I'm fine with that. Now here is the slug on the slug is the part off the U. R L. The appears after the domain in this case, do it for wildlife dot co dot UK is telling me here that my title is a little long, meaning that some of it might get cut off in the search results. But we're still going to be able to see this part. Here are frogs are disappearing, but you can save them. Doesn't really matter if this last bit is cut off, even if your titles are a bit too long and part of it's cut off well, as long as you're generating enough interest in the title anyway, it's not such a big deal. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a focus key phrase. The focus key phrase is the main search term that a person would search on. The person would typing to Google or another search engine if there were looking for information like this is In this case, it will be frogs disappearing on. In fact, that is a popular search term. People do tight that in a lot. So that's what this post is about. Is about frogs disappearing on what can be done to help them on all you need to do when thinking off our focus? Key phrases. Think about what is this post really about? All right, so we're going to click on edit snippet. Focus key phrase. Enter it here and now Yost is going to give us some ideas off what we need to do to improve this post for Seo. In other words, search engine optimization for getting free traffic from Google and the other search engines. We need to add internal links, but we can't add internal links when we only have one piece of content. Internal links is a link from one piece of content on your block to another, so we can't do that until we've added only two posts. Now, here. Key phrase density. The focus key phrase was found one time, but here's the thing. Yoast Seo. It's a just a plugging. It's not as clever as Google on what it's saying is that frocks disappearing Onley appears one time in this post, but the word frocks on the world disappearing appears quite a few times now. I might need to up the word disappearing one more time, I think, in this post. But the word frogs appears many, many times. S E O title with the CEO title is wider than the viewable limit. Try to make it shorter. While I mentioned that already we could make the title a little shorter here. But I'm not going to because, as mentioned, I'm not really worried about this part of my title not being viewable in the search results Meta description length Orange is saying is okay, but it's saying to ensure the entire description is visible in the search results on Google . I should reduce it a little bait. But as I did mention already, I'm not worried about a bit of it being cut off there. It still looks fine. As you see we've got the dot, dot dot that's okay. Image. Old attributes. Images on this page do not have old attributes that reflect the topic off your text. Now let's see. Let's click on this image. Edit the cult attributes. Well, I've got known it all, so I should add one here. So I just put in their help disappearing frogs by creating a garden pond. Because, remember, I mentioned earlier that Google can't read images, but it can't read the all text on everything else. Here, as you see, is green green green outbound links. Because I did put warn outbound link here to the artist PB guide Key phrases in the introduction key phrase length Gord key phrases in the meta description. You've no used his key phrase before. Very good. Well, I haven't, obviously, because this is the first post on this blawg. But as you get more than more posts on your blawg, you might start to forget on start to repeat yourself on create post that are very similar to post you've already created using the same key phrases that kind of thing on. In that case, your S e O. Is going to alert you to that Texas length. The text contains 628 words. So this post is 628 words. Key phrase in the slug near the slog is we looked at this already The part of the U. L. That comes after the domain name. Now, even though I've got a word between frogs and disappearing, that's OK. It doesn't matter. All right. So the things that I will do to improve days as I add more content to the block is I will add At least one internal link is all in going from this post to another page or post on this block, I will need to do something. Maybe about the key word density because perhaps disappearing or disappear is not in this post enough. I'll need to just add it may be one more time I could if I wanted to try and reduce the title with, but I'm not going to. Okay, so that is a run through off the Yost s yo plug in. Once it's installed, you will be able to do this on every post on page that you add to your block. Now, after a while, you will get so used to doing this the right way that the Yost s yo plug in will become more or less redundant to you. But in the beginning is a really handy guide. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 34. Adding Your First Post Clarifying SEO: No, I just wanted to talk for a moment about something I have given you. Ah, crash course on S E O in your blood posts on using the Yoast Seo plugging. But you shouldn't be getting too hung up on Seo. There's a lot of technical aspects to S e O. But the main thing to remember here you are blogging. You're supposed to be enjoying what you're doing. You're supposed to be creating interesting and relevant content on Google favors interesting and relevant content because the whole thing is about user experience. If users have a good experience when they click through to a page on your website or a block post on your website, those users will stay longer on your website on not signals to Google that they are having , ah, good experience. They are getting what they expected when they click through from that search result. Really, that's what you should be focusing on when you're blogging. You should be focusing on creating interesting and highly relevant content content that delivers on the promise of the title content. That's easy to read, like this broken up into sub headings, maybe with some highlights and images so easy on the eye. Easy for the user to read. That should be your main focus. If you do want to learn more about the technical aspects off search engine optimization, then Yost itself. So the years plug in does have quite a bit off free information and free guides. But I I highly recommend that you're going to be focusing on your content and on producing interesting, relevant and easy to read content. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 35. Adding Your First Post Part 4: on. One last thing I'd like to show you here at just quickly before we move on is you can change. The font colors and sizes are right here from the Post Edit page, but this will only change it on the single post pages. And that's why we needed the code to change it elsewhere. What you can do is just put your cursor on any block on. Then we've got text settings over here. You can change to medium large huge, or you could just type the pixel size in the box. So let's try this medium. It goes bigger and that's 20. We can make you bigger still or smaller now. We can also from here, change the color under color settings so we can change the text color I like. So we could also if we wanted to change the background color. And that's quite good. If we want to highlight something, Les do that. This could look pretty good to help you break up along post so you can highlight one particular part off the post. Now I'm just going to put this back to the way it waas, but I think I will highlight something in this post to get rid of it. Just click clear on. I'm going to put this back to what it waas, which is normal. Now let's see what I can highlight here, perhaps this year on update. Now that just as a little bit of color on something else to break up the post. All right, so that's how you change the font size color. Andi, if you want to add a highlight, you can also do things like add quotes as well. Let me just show you how to do that. Change this quote and now we have a quote, and that's not a quote. So I'm going to put it back. But yet you cannot quotes as well. I encourage you really to check out all the options you have here, different sizes of headings. I'll put that back to paragraph. You've also got list so you can create lists. You can send a text if you want to like that, so just spend a few minutes checking out the options here. Andi, if you want to delete a block of text or a block, anything at all on image, anything you want to delete, click the dot, dot dot more options and remove block. All right, I'll see you in a minute 36. Adding Pages and Categories to the Menu: Hi, everyone. I've shown you how to add posts. But now let me show you how to add pages. Normally, we will have a few static pages on our block. Started pages are pages that are no blocked pages and we can have these in the menu. On. It helps to add extra content, especially if we want to make the menu look busy, which is a really good idea. If you're using a white layout like I am, there's going to be a lot off space in the menu. Andi, I want to make sure that I have enough links in that menu so that it doesn't look empty. All right, go to pages on all pages. We just want to check that we don't have a sample page here. No, we don't. We've only got the pages we are did already. So the pages that are really required by law, like privacy policy terms and conditions on DWI also added, I get in touch page sometimes when you install were oppressed, there's a sample page and you can delete that just by going to been on Get rid of it like that. No, In this case, there aren't any sample pages just going to go ahead here on click on add New adding pages is very, very similar to adding posts, except that we don't out them two categories. No, I have just written out three titles here for three different pages. I don't have any content for them yet. I'm just going to put coming soon on them. But I wanted to show you how to do it. I'm going to start out with this one here on on this page. What I intend to do is list links off various wildlife groups and societies around the UK adding the title. Andi, I'm just going to put coming soon here as mentioned Andi, as with posts, you can use Yost s CEO here to create a snippet for the meta description to enter a focus key phrase as well, if you want to. Now the slugs empty here. But that's only because I have not click publish yet. I'm going to go ahead and do that now, Aunt, here's the slug because the title always becomes the slug. Now we don't set featured images either Four pages so we don't set featured images on. We don't have categories, either. No, I'm just going to go ahead on add new here to add the other two pages. Okay, Now that I've I did these pages, I'm going to add them to the navigation menu on also going to show you how toe ad categories to the navigation menu as well. Appearance menus. No, this is my foot, a menu. But I want to select one of my top menus. I've got the head of menu on the top bar. So I think in this case, what I will do is I will use the top bar to add categories. So I will list the categories in the top bar. Andi in the main menu. I'll put the main pages select at thes three pages that I just created at two menu. I'm going to remove, Get in touch. And I think, how have that in the top bar instead? So already moved that on to save the menu. And now I am going to go to the top menu, the top bar select on. I'm going to add categories. I've only got two categories right now, I've only got one post on. I've only got two categories at two menu. I'm going to move them up so I'm going to have home at the top, and then I'm going to have all the categories a listed next Andi, then get in touch. Now, as I add more categories, the menu will start to fill up. At the moment, it's still going to look pretty bare. Save menu now What if you wanted a specific post to show in the menu for that? We use custom links, and we need to create the link in order to create the link. We need to know the U. R L or the Perma link off the post. Let's go over to the website now Here's the Post right here on here is the You ought L The whole thing. I'm going to copy that when they create the custom link. So here's the U. R L. And then we need to create the link text. And this is what will show in the menu on just for this example. All right, frogs disappearing or disappearing Frogs Arte menu under there is I'm going to delete this , But first of all, let's say the menu on Go and check it out all right now, you can see the menu starting to take shape. Or both these men, You starting to take shape here. So down here, I'm going to have the main pages. I'm going to add a home. Linkous. Well, up here, I'm going to have the categories I might even add Get in touch to this menu instead. I might swap it around instead of having it up here of it here. But I would have it the furthest over to the right. Now the thing to remember about menus as you always put the most important links to the left. So going from left to right, you want the most important links of the left, Andi the least important links at the right. And the reason for that is because people read from left to right. All right, so let me delete this to remove allowing you just click on remove. You've got to remember to save the menu. I'm going to remove, get in touch on, put it in the other menu, save menu. I'm going to go back to the main menu on I'm going toe ard Get in touch, unsaved the menu, do a quick re fresh on. There we go. Now, in the next, a lesser I'm going to show you how to fix it if you do not have Ah, home page. So you do not have a link to go back to the home page of your website. Sometimes themes are missing that, but there is a fix for it. I will see you there in a minute. 37. Fix Missing Home Page: Okay, let's look at this potential issue off a missing home page link. The home page is the front page off your blogged Andi, in this case, Andi, in the case off almost all blog's The home page is the postpaid, the page where your posts are listed. So here this is the home page. Now count, we've only got one post. But as we get mawr, these posts will be going down the page in a list. On the home page is the main U R L So whether nothing after it, no forward slash or whatever. If we go to any page on the site other than the home page, like, for example, this one we've got forward slash, and then we've got the title of the page or the post. But the home page is always adjust the domain https and then your domain. Now it seems to be quite a common issue among certain themes. I have no idea why developers do this, but sometimes there is just no home page link on the menu on no easy way or no way. That's really obvious. If you're a novice to create one now, First of all, for this theme human. I will show you how to add the home page to the menu. This is very simple. We can do return to the customization panel, so let's go there. Appearance, customize menus, Main menu. Our items on home Custom link. So that's how we add it here in this theme, we want to move it up to the top because I was mentioned in the last lesson. The most important menu items should be on the left, and home should always be the first items or the furthest to the left publish and now you to show you how to do it. If you have a different theme on, do you have a missing HomeLink on your menu? Goto Appearance on menus. Select the menu that you want to add the home page link to a. Normally this will be your main menu. Go to custom links on for link text. It's home on the U. R. L is simply the U. R l off your front page off your block. In this case, https. Do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. Add to menu. No, I've already got one, so I don't want this here. But let's just put it up here. Quick. Safe menu and refresh the website. Andi, there is now I'm going to go back on. Delete it because I already had a home link here. Remove. Okay, so that is how to fix the issue off. Missing home page link on the menu. If your theme has that problem. So you in the next lesson. 38. Drop Down Menus: What if you want to create sub menus or drop down menus? So, for example, what if I wanted to create a drop down menu for all the posts in the category amphibians? Now, here's how we do that. Over to appearance on menus. Now, here is my menu structure here for my top bar menu. I've got these two categories right now, so maybe I want to add ah, post or all the post I have, which I only have one right now. But if I had several as a drop down menu for this menu item here, amphibians, we can go to posts. Just got the one here, select it, add to menu. And now I moved up here as a sub item off amphibians. Save the menu. Go back to the blawg on refresh it. And now you see the little drop down here on here is now. We can do this not just with posts, but with other pages. So let me demonstrate that I'm going to delete this for now. Andi, for this demonstration. Let's go to the main menu. Andi, I will just move this page over. It now becomes a sub item of getting involved on this page over Now it becomes also a sub I to safe menu refresh. Andi under getting involved. Now we have these two drop down menu items. So it's that simple to create drop down sub menus. Once you start to get a lot of content on your site, you're probably going to want to do that. And I'll just move these back and saved the menu. Okay, so you in a minute. 39. Post Scheduling and Post Frequency: hi, everybody. And what you should be doing now is creating some posts on getting them on your block. But what if you want to schedule post in advance so it could be that you want to create several posts at the same time, but schedule them to be published on your blawg a date in the future? This is a really simple to dough, so if you go over to posts on at New now here, I'm just going to create a demo post aunt. How we would do this instead of clicking on publish Weaken, go to publish, Click the Link that says immediately and then choose a time and date in the future for the Post to be published. So right now it's May 4th. Let's say I want to publish this post on Monday, May 6. I can just use the calendar here to choose the date, and then I can set a time here that I want the Post to be published. It doesn't normally matter which time you publish it, but when you've got followers who are waiting for post to come out, it could be a good idea to publish them during the daytime as opposed to during the night time. So this is 3 40 p. N. Maybe I want to change this to 11 a.m. or something like that. I'm going to say 10:40 a.m. On now we have it here publishing on May the sick 2019 at 10. 48 a. And then you just hit the schedule button on that. Say your post is scheduled to be published at that time, and you could schedule us many posts in advance like this as you want to. Now, you might be wondering, How often should you post? How often should you publish block posts? Well, there are no riel set rules for days, but in the beginning, when you're a blogger is new and you don't have much content on it, You're probably going to want to publish post more often, even twice a week. As you get more and more content on your blawg, you don't need to publish is often is that you couldn't go down to once a week and then once every two weeks. Many blocks only post new articles, a new posts about what's a month on? Then there are other blog's that post every single day. They're usually those blocks of got other people writing for them. So they have people employed either on a freelance basis or even full time employees who are writing for that block. Of course, you're no at that stage yet, and maybe you don't ever want to be at that stage. But you do need to provide a certain amount of new content, even if, as I say, you get that down to eventually just one post a month. But again, in the beginning, you're going to need to post more often than that. Otherwise, it's going to take a long time for your block to build up and have a decent amount of content on it. Okay, see you in a minute. 40. Creating Sliders Part 1: All right, let's create a slider for the block on. To do that, we're going to install a plug in called Meta slider, so over to plug ins on add new Do A search for meta slider on this here is the one you want . It's not this one with the counter sell on Lightbox is the one that's just called meta slider on. It has at this time almost a 1,000,000 installations. So go ahead and install and activate that one. I've already just installed it prior to recording this lesson, and once you've installed and activated it on the menu, you will have met a slider. So just go ahead and click on it. No, the way I always do. This is I just ignored all this down here on Click on add a new slideshow. You can give a name for your own reference. I'm just going to call this first slide show. All right, now we comport a slider in a widget area so that could be a sidebar or a footer, or if your theme has witchy areas elsewhere. Some themes have which areas below the header. We don't have one with this theme, but some themes do or you comport a cider in a post or on a page, so I'll show you the different options. But first of all, we need to create one now. What we normally do here is we add images on. We link them to particular posts or pages on the block. Now. Often we need to do a bit of experimenting to get the size off the image. Correct. So by default, the with the 700 the height of 300. But if we're going to put a widget in a sidebar, we're going to need another worked with. Normally, though, the theme will resize any images that are in widgets, especially sidebar widgets to fit the widget area. But we still need to experiment on, see what's going to work. Now. What I've done here with the block is I've added two more posts so we can see down here now on the home page, starting to really take shape. So I'm going to create a asada that links to each of these three posts. The individual post pages Andi. Normally, when we're creating a slider to link to individual posts, we can just use the same images that we've already used. So the featured images that we have here, but because I only have thes three posts right now on the block on their all at the top of the page here, I don't want to use the exact same images for the slider. So I grab some other images from picks, obey and uploaded them to the media library. First thing to do is click at a slide. You can either no upload from your device or choose from the media library. There's also a library here on Splash. Some pretty good images there. Oh, there's a really nice image of a fox. Anyhow, I've already got minor loaded here. Media library. Andi, I'm going to out this one first. I'm going to add a 2nd 1 on the 3rd 1 You can have as many slides as you like. Normandy are Slider wouldn't have any more than six or seven images anyway. But I've only got three posts, so I'm just going to act three. And now we can add a caption. So two other capture and untech the box for used the image caption untied your caption in here. Now my captain is going to be the title off the post on this post here is about destroying but roosts. So I'm going to go ahead and take this title here on for S E O in here. Make sure you've got your all text crop the best way to have guys center center, all right. And I'm going to do the same for the other two slides on. Now we need the U RL's. So when somebody clicks on one of the images on the slider is going to take them to that particular page, just going to grab the U RL's of each post. We don't want to open in a new window because we're not taking the user away from our own website, so there's no need to take that. Okay, I've got the three you RL's in here. Andi, here we can choose the theme. I'm going to leave it as this one here, but you can click on this and you can choose different themes here. If you want to select a different one, just select it and click select. I'm going to leave it as it is now. We can also hide the Adel's on It depends on where the slider is positioned. Sometimes the adults are a bit intrusive. I'll lead them, tick for now on. Then we can see what this all looks like. So I'm going to just go ahead and save it without doing anything else at the moment. All right, No two ways to add this slider to a widget. The first is just two ab the meta slider widget to the widget area. I'll show you that, but that doesn't always work. The second way is to use the short code, so let's take the short code on will try both ways. Okay, let's go over to appearance on Customize. I want to put this slider right here in this left onside widget. I'm going to go to the widget areas. It's the primary. Which area so far just the search box in there at a widget on the first way we can try is finally met. A slider widget that is so let the slide show currently only have one. It's called first sideshow on right away. I can tell that this is not working because it's not displaying. It should be displaying now, but it's not depending on your theme. It may work. It just really is theme dependent. I'm going to delete that. Which it on I'm going to at this time a text widget, scrolling on down text in the text widget body. All we need to do is paste that short code, and now it's working. We might need to do a little bit off customization on it yet, but let's just publish this Andi. Then go and see what it looks like on the website. No, we need to do something with it. It's a bit of a mess. It's working, but it definitely doesn't look right on. We can't even see the captions. Okay, let's come out of here. I'm go back to the dashboard on back to meta slider. I'm going to change the with 300 on the height to 200. I'm going to try Nevo Slider. Let's see, I'm going to delete these arrows because, as we can see, it doesn't work here in the small. Which area it would work if the slider was bigger, like in a post or on a page. But it's not working here. Now let's try that. Refresh the page. Okay, Is better. That's probably the best we're going to get unless we upgraded to the paid version of meta cider where we could doom or but it's good enough. I'm happy enough with that on. Let's just click on one of these on. We go to the post. You can play around with this. We've got advanced settings here, a swell, but that's not going to make any difference. Let's try Central line, but I don't think is going to make any difference at all with an heights. We could play around with that. Let's just save it for a moment here. No change for central lining. How about we play with this number off squares with on height? I don't think it's going to do anything. No, it's not doing anything at all. All right, now, if you want to delete a slider or you need to do is scroll down to the bottom here, Andi, click delete. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to insert a slider into a post or page. I'll see you in a minute 41. Creating Sliders Part 2: Okay, I'm going to show you how to add a slider to a post or a page. But first of all, I want to show you that I did manage to make a couple of changes to this sidebar. Slider on It looks a lot better. So here is now Onda. We haven't got the black overlay. So how did you do this? I swapped the theme. I'm now using the bubble theme. And then I changed the type of cider. So we had new evokes cider before. I've now got our slides. Andi, I also made the with 100 pixels wider. Andi, I increase the height by 100 pixels as well. So that Waas what gave me this effect? If you're using this theme on and you are trying to help you exactly what I'm doing As far as this sliders concern, these are the settings that you need. Okay, Now let's create another slide show, Have you? I will call it second, Andi, this time because it's going to go in a post or page. I'm going to go with the standard with which is 700 wide by 300 high. Start off by using flex. I'll keep the same theme for now. Let's add a couple of slides When the media library. I want to make sure I've got big enough images here. I'm just going to select these. I'm going to delete this afterwards. It's just for a demonstration at at a 2nd 1 Okay, Now you don't need me to go over how to add a caption. We've already done that on dure relus. Well, you know how to do that. I will have the Ottos for this. And now let's try it out. Save it. We need the short code here, and let's go to any Post Allied here in this post just for the demonstration. Short code Onda update. I know. Let's take a look at that. All right? And here it is. Now, for some reason, we've got the autos away up here on. They should be time here, So let's see. Going back to Meta slider. Let's try a different option. Along the top are slides and safe. Refresh the page on. There we go. All right, so that is looking OK on. If you want to add one to a page, you just do the same thing you take the short code, you go to your pages and you add it. Whatever you want it to go. Okay. I'm going to delete this one, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 42. Customizing Sidebars: Okay, let's do some work on the side bars now. As you see, I've added a few more social icons here, but I'm not convinced that I actually even like thes here he had in here. We can change the colors, but we can also get rid of them completely as well. And I might do that. But first of all, let's just look at what we can add to the sidebars. We need some content in them on at the moment. They're looking pretty bare. So let's go to widgets here in the customization panel. So first of all, in the primary widget here, that's this side bar. I've got the search, Andi, I've got the meta slider. We could also add to this neither. We have a few posts and hopefully you have a few posts as well. We can add recent posts. Number opposed to display five. I only have three posts, but five is usually about right anyway, Now you can reorder widgets as well by dragging them up or down. But in this particular theme, we need toe click on reorder and then use the auto buttons for up or down Andi for the other side bar, because with this play out, I'm using, I have to. Now you may only have one, in which case you could, perhaps in this same sidebar at a list of categories. But here I'm going to add the categories to the right hand side bar and in this case is the secondary sidebar at a widget categories I'm going to display as a list as opposed to a drop down. No. As your block develops, there are going to be other things that you can add to the sidebar so you can out banners. You cannot images, videos, all kinds of things. But at this point in time, because we haven't really got any more content, that's about all we can at now. One thing that is a really good idea, if your theme has the option, is to make the sidebar sticky. Otherwise, as you get mawr content on the home page and people scrolling down and down, they're going to see on empty space in the sidebar or the sidebars. No, to do that on this theme, we're going to go to main body design. Sidebars Make sidebar sticky on scroll desktop and will do it for Mobile as well. Now, when we do that, as we scroll down, the sidebar stays in place. And that means the user isn't scrolling down and seeing a big space with nothing in it on the side bars. So that's a pretty handy feature to use if you have it on your theme now, what about changing the color off these links in the sidebar? Currently they're very pale looking. It's very pale looking. Color off text. Andi. I would prefer that to be darker, perhaps not black but a dark gray. For that, we need some CSS. So let's go to CSS now here. We already have the codes where we change the color on the sizes off the font in the body, but it doesn't work for the site bars on. These are links, so it's not a regular text, and that means the CSS we need to use is just a little bit different Now. Here is right here. I'm going to show you how to choose your own color for these, and that's a dark gray. It's not the black, but it's a dark great you can go over to Google typing hex color picker on. You should get this result here. Now. What you can do is just choose any color on when you get the color you want. You just copy and paste the hex code right here. Andi inserted right here. So the hex code I've got there is for a dark grey. If you want a different color, just grab your code from the color picker. Andi, replace this with your code. That's all you need to do. All right? No, to change the colors off. These were going to be changing the primary and secondary colors off the theme. Now, this color here is also the color off. Any links on the blogged web page Design, General design options. So here the colors. Here, we can select anything we want for the primary and secondary color. But changing this color and this color, don't forget that's going to change any other colors as well. So this is the secondary color right here on this is the primary color. Anything you change here will change everything wherever those colors show up on your block . Now, in this case, I haven't decided whether I even want these here or not. If you want to remove them completely. Here's the CSS right here. So let's go back to CSS and they're gone. I'm going to leave them right now because I haven't made up my mind. But if you're using this theme and you want to get rid of them, this is the code on, as always, I'll be giving you this code on a handout to go with the lesson. All right? No, we already know that things are looking pretty good on mobile. We could just double check. That's on top lit. Andi, As you see scrolling down, the sidebar is moving along with the content. It's not quite such a smooth scroll is on desktop, but that's OK. Let's just check. It s well on phone now on phone. We don't see the sidebars until we scroll right down. Anyway, don't worry about this text looking squashed right up to the edge. It doesn't look like that. When you actually look at it on your phone. You can go and check out your block on your phone. Andi, you'll see that it looks absolutely fine. All right now, we haven't worked on the footer yet. A few more things to do, but not too many. So next up, let's work on the footer. I'll see you in a minute 43. Customizing the Footer: Hello, everybody. Let's do some work on the Footer. Currently, we've got nothing in it. Too tall. It's looking completely bare. So for this particular for sure, if you remember earlier on, I set it to three columns with, so I can put three different widgets in the Footer. I've got three different widget areas now. You can, in fact change that on that is under footer design. Here you can select the number of columns for the foot, so you can, in fact, even disable it completely like that. But it's really good to have a footer now. What can look good in a photo? Great in a photo is videos, YouTube videos. But first of all, let's just go ahead and add some normal things like menus on that kind of thing. Going to the widgets. Andi Photo won't. So let's add a navigation menu. I'll select main menu on a very Tae's. However, I'm going to add three videos to this photo area, so I'm not going to have any menus a tall in the footer, so I'll delete that NATO out videos is very easy. First of all, we are the video widget video and then we select our video un insert from U R l So we can insert any YouTube share you r l Here. Let's go over to YouTube. I will get up this one here, share on. This is the U R l that you need Paste it there. Add widget. All right, Andi, I'm going to do the same here with the other two. So going back to footer to at widget video again Add video. You ought l on with the third photo widget on. There we are now. Earlier on in the course, I mentioned that you could have a full with widget as well with this theme. Andi, I said I wasn't going to do that because by doing that, I wouldn't be able tohave three, which is going across. However, with this theme, the way it works is if you decide to have the full with which it it displays above thes which areas? Here. I'll show you what I mean for to design display a full with which it area in your footer. And now we have this area here. Now, this could be really useful for placing something like an advertisement. I'm not going to use it, so I'll talk wit to off. But you do have the option to do that now. Other things that will want to do here is we want to get rid off the photo credit text powered by WordPress designed by Get rid of that. Now we can change the color off the background of the bottom part of the footer, but there's no option here to change the background of this part of the falter if we wanted to. But I've got some CSS code for that now. If you want to change this year, you could just change it to any color you want. That is, in fact, the same color as the second D color off the theme. I think I'll leave it something like that, something not white, but very light. What would probably work well is toe have this bottom part of the footer, the same color as the background off the sidebars. But for now, I'll leave it like that. Now let's publish that and just take a look at what it looks like on the site, so that looks pretty good. Let's just see what it's like on smaller screens, so going back to the customization panel. We'll check it on tablet on, Of course, because their YouTube videos they're going to be fully responsive. Looks great on tablet phone. Looks great on phone as well. Maybe we have a little bit too much space at the bottom just here. Perhaps we could do with a little bit less padding. So let's take a look at the C, I say. So I've got for the footer. First of all, if you want to change the foot of background color, so this part of the footer this part, you can change right here. But this part here, you can't go to see essays. Now that's clearly the wrong color. It's a bright blue, but it's just to demonstrate it. And again, you can go to the hex color picker on pick any color that you want so we could have something like that. I'm going to get rid of thought for now and just put it back to white. But I will give you that code. Of course, Andi, if you want to remove a bit of white space from the bottom here, this is the one let's hit Publish on. Check that out. All right now we've got less space there at the bottom. I also have want to remove a bit of the partying as well from the top if you want to. This one here just removed a little bit of the padding. Let's check that out, Okay? It doesn't really look much different, but as you saw here, it did make a slight difference. I'll just remove it and you'll see and put it back. Let's once again check this out on a mobile looking good there. Phone looking good on phone as well. Okay, so that's the footer Andi Again, as with the sidebars as you start to get a mortar more content on your blawg, you're going to have more options for different things that you comport in the footer. When you start out, though, you can do just what I've done here. Go to YouTube and grab some short, relevant videos relevant to the subject of your blog's on Put those in the footer. One point to make is that you do need to have thes pages here in the footer, so your terms and conditions and privacy policy now with this theme, the way it Works says, Have a navigation bar in the Footer, and I don't need to use one of my foot or widgets to put that menu in because it's already here. But if you don't have that, you would need to use one of your foot or widgets to put these pages into, just to make sure that they are somewhere in your footer. Okay, I'll see you in a minute. 44. Tidying up the Blog: All right, let's finish up here by just tidying things up. Andi polishing things to make everything look the way we want it to look. Now the thing that to me doesn't look right. Is this white space here? So if we look at the site, we can see we've got too much white space between the featured post Onda the header. The only way that I've been able to get rid of these or to reduce it is to use some CSS again. So let's just head over to the sea. Essays Onda, we need to use all of these. All right? If we don't use all of these, we end up with too little space on the other pages. So, for example, we could end up with too little space between the title here, Andi, the header or the navigation bar. So we need to do it a like base. Let's go back to home. We will put all of the's three a and now the space has been reduced on. It looks fine here on the home page, but it also looks fine on the other pages. So we still got space above and below the title on the other pages as well. I'll go ahead and hit, publish, refresh the site. And now we've got just enough space here checking on the other pages and we still have enough space. And that looks better because it was just a bit unbalanced with the amount of white space that was here. Okay, next I changed the padding in the sidebars. Let me show you what I mean by that main body design Sidebars. No. Right here you have a choice of 30 pixels padding like that or 20. Another thing we can do here is we con change the sidebar background colors to match the foot of color so we could have them both the same color. Let's take a look at doing that Sidebar, background color. So let's decide. First of all, a color for the background of the sidebars going to hex color picker. I'll try this warm. Just paste in here. Maybe go a little bit darker. Andi, I can use the exact same color now for the bottom part of the footer. I will take this code here, Go to footer, footer, Background on. Just paste the pain on. And now they're both the same color hit publish to save the changes. And at this point we could take another look at the fonts that we're using and just make sure that we're happy with the form that we've got the main vaunt on the block. In this case, I am going to change this because even though I do like this font, it's no as easy to read us some forms now. What's really popular now and really made a comeback is the serif fonts, so let's go and check that out, fonts Andi, Let's see what they have here. PT Serif. I think I'm going to leave it like that. It's very, very easy to read. Very easy on the eye on. We can also take a look and see whether or no we're happy with the colors off the navigation menu bars. So we've got a top bar here is well, we could look at changing the color of that. Same with the navigation bar are usually you can restore the colors to default if you don't like what you've done when you change them. So, for example, in header design, head of colors. So here the background colors here on. If you want to tarai any different colors and then change back to default, just hit default. So anyway, I'm going to leave us default for now. I may change this at some point, but that's really about eight. You can play around with the different options in your customization panel used the CSS that I've provided on the downloadable handouts that go with the lessons. If anybody's interested at all in learning CSS for themselves, there are plenty of online resources that you can tap into loss of three online resources as well. I really only know some basic CSS Andi. Most of it I have to figure it was a go along. It's actually not that difficulty. It looks difficult and complicated when you don't know what you're looking at, but it really isn't that difficult once you start to understand exactly how it works. But anyway, that's only if anybody happens to be interested. All right, so I hope that by this state that you have at least made a start on your block. Or maybe you're up the stage that I am up now on. You've got your blawg looking pretty much the way you want it to on it. Just a case now, off adding more content. Either way, I hope that you've learned a lot on its Made the process off. Setting up your blawg Easier on hopefully more enjoyable. All right, speak too soon.