Create a Website: Hosting, WordPress Setup, and Blog Design

1. Create a Website: Welcome!: Hey there, my name is Lauren and I'm so excited that you're here and that you choose me to help you on this journey. Here's a quick background about myself. I have started and grown at multiple online businesses from scratch in various niches. I've grown Pinterest accounts, YouTube accounts, email lists, you name it to over 100,000 subscribers and followers. I've also started a podcast. I have earned a full-time income. This allowed me to quit my full-time job. And through all of that, I have traveled the world and work from cafes, from South America to Europe, to Asia, to Africa all while working on my online business. And just so you know that I'm not some internet unicorn, I actually used to be a tax accountant before I started exploring the online business world. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I first started. So it's totally okay if you're also brand new to this, I'm going to walk you through everything in this class. Now this course is gonna be perfect for you if you want to create your very first websites, even if you have no technical experience whatsoever. I had absolutely no technical or coding experience when I first started. And still don't much if I'm being honest, and I've probably started six or seven WordPress websites by now. So I'm going to walk you through how to do this in this class step-by-step so that you can beat most of this learning curve and only really bother with what is most important. In this class, you're going to learn how to decide what kind of website you want and what kind of platform might be best for you. Get a domain name and website hosting plan to take your website online, navigate WordPress, and install a theme on your website. Design your homepage and the most important other pages on your website. Add the right plug-ins for additional tools and customizations. Create a blog page and write your first blog post. And honestly you so much more. As you can see, we have a lot to cover. So let's get started. 2. What Kind of Website Do You Want?: Hey, there, let's get right down to business. I have a question for you. What kind of website do you want to create? I asked because the type of website you want to create can impact the platform you use to get started. You probably heard about some of the options like Wix and Squarespace and WordPress. While there are some similarities between these platforms, and they will also allow you to create a beautiful and functional website. There are also some major differences. The main one being the functionality as it relates to the type of website you want to create. E.g. if you want to create a website for more static business like a hair salon or dentist's office or an online store. Wix or Squarespace might be just fine for you. But if you want to create a website with more content, like a blog, and you want to share that content on other platforms like social media channels. Or maybe you want to have an email list and grow your audience. You might want to sell some products on your website. Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress are all capable of doing these things to some extent. But if you want the most features, the most customizations, WordPress is really the only way to go. It's honestly what all online creators are using to grow content-based businesses. That's because there are tens of thousands of plugins that come with WordPress that provide almost unlimited customizations for everything that you could possibly think of. Everything from content, email, analytics, security and backups, marketing, sales, like literally everything. And we're going to talk more about plugins and all of that later on in this course. But for now I just want to explain why WordPress is superior to these other platforms and why we're gonna be using it in this class. And plug-ins aside, there are also thousands of themes that you can choose from when you're designing your website, when you use WordPress, thousands more anyway, there really isn't much cost difference between any of these platforms either. By the way. All of them have both free and comparable paid plans. And even if you want to create a simple website for a static business, like a hair salon or a dentist's office. You can still set that up on WordPress just as easily. There is a slightly larger learning curve with WordPress, but it's really not bad at all and it's so worth what you get for it. And I'm gonna walk you through how to do this in this class step-by-step. So you can beat most this learning curve and really only bother yourself with what's most important anyway. 3. Ideas and Choosing a Niche: Hey, if you're taking a course already on how to create a website and assuming that you already probably have some idea on what your website is going to be about and what the purpose is. But in case you don't or you haven't narrowed this down, your ideas down enough yet. I want to give you some things to think about. Also because it's going to help you choose your domain name, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. Now consider the answers to these questions. What do you have personal or professional experience in? You don't have to be an expert to create a website and talk about a subject. But at the very least, you should know what you're talking about and have some experience in it. I have personal experience and health, wellness and fitness, and I have professional experience in business as well as a Masters in Business. And I have personally started websites on both of these different topics. So hobbies, passions, careers, whatever you want to call them, This is probably the best starting point. Okay, Next, what problems have you personally overcome? This can literally be anything from mental illness to gardening and to training dogs, to acne, to online gaming, to knitting. Heavy struggled in any of these areas or just picked up any of these activities for a period of time. I have some experience in it or desire to learn more. Then lastly, one of my favorites, what topics would your friends or family go to you for advice for or what would they say that you can't shut up about? I was definitely that friend that give unsolicited advice over the dinner table and gave my friends judgmental looks when they ordered pizza instead of salad. And I've also consulted countless friends on many different online business topics. This should be a pretty natural and definitely not forced kind of thing. And that's just how you generate some basic ideas for what you would start your website on. From there, you want to actually narrow down this topic and really think about who you're trying to reach with this website. Is it men fathers, young fathers, single young fathers, working young fathers, working young fathers with a pug. Note, that's a step too far, it's too narrow, but I think that you get the idea. Now let's take this a step further and answer this question for me or for yourself rather, who is your ideal customer? Because really narrowing in on this and who this person is and what they are feeling. That is going to be the secret sauce to your success. So think about this person. How old are they? Are they working or they money conscious and on a budget? What problems are they struggling with when it comes to the topic that you're talking about? What obstacles are they facing when trying to achieve their goals. This is important to note that you can focus your website, your content, your communication, and your marketing on this particular person. It's totally okay if you don't know this right away. But it can be helpful to try to have this in mind from the beginning and you're generally going to be more successful faster if you do know this already. So either way, just think about it. I didn't know this right away. And I took the opposite approach. I threw everything up at the wall and saw what stock it did work eventually, but it took me one fail blog and a few months of trial and error in the red to figure it out. 4. Domain Name and Hosting Plan: Okay, got your topic, got your idea. Hopefully you were able to narrow that down a little bit based on some of those questions that I provided. The next step is to create your website. And this also happens to be your class project. I want to see what you come up with. So whenever you're finished with this lesson, please do share your domain name or your website in the project area. I would love to see it and I'm also happy to give you feedback on it. Okay, in this lesson, you're gonna get your domain name and hosting plan, which is really the first part of your website setup. Let's talk about that domain name first. This is the name of your website and the URL that people type in their browsers to find your website. Your domain name can be anything you want it to be, including something fun and descriptive about your topic or even just your name or combination of those two. But no matter what, it should be, easy to spell, easy to pronounce and easy to remember. Here's an example of using your name as your business name. My friend Natalie Bacon is a Mindfulness Coach for moms and she is very much the center of her business as a coach. So it makes sense for her domain name to be her name. And who doesn't remember a name like bacon, right? It is also allowed her to be flexible and pivot her business over the years because she used to teach about personal finance and online business. Now if she wanted to name it something more descriptive, she could have called it something more like mindfulness for moms. I chose the descriptive route with my business and call it discover your creator because I'm teaching others how to build their own online business and discover their inner creator. Now you shouldn't spend too much time here because your name ultimately doesn't matter that much. It's more about the content that you're sharing. My first website name was so clever and so great. And ultimately that website amounted to nothing. My second website name was awful. It was hard to pronounce, hard to remember and hard to spell. But despite that, the website was earning $20,000 a month back into say day. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think of a domain name for your website. And if you aren't totally sure, that's okay too. You can also get started without the domain name and you can decide on it later. When you're ready, it's time to purchase this domain name and hosting, which is what takes her website online and makes it visible to others and able to be accessed. Thankfully, your domain name is usually free when you purchase hosting. But let's talk for a second about creating free and paid websites. Now when you start a website for free, you generally do not own your domain name. Your website could be something like Jessica smith.blogspot.com rather than Jessica smith.com. And that means that anybody else can buy that domain name, Jessica smith.com. So having the dot blogspot or adopt blogger or a dot wordpress or whatever and your domain name looks unprofessional and just generally is not going to work in the long term. Free website hosting also limits you on how you can customize and how you can monetize your website. Instead, you should opt for a low-cost plan and get started because you can start as low as just a couple of bucks a month. You can always upgrade later on when your business grows or you need more bandwidth. Now most plans advertised very low monthly rates, but you generally have to pay annually if you want the best deal. Now from here, I want to direct you to my tutorial on my website for the exact steps to create your website, it's just a few steps to get started and I'm going to show you my different hosting options and my recommended choice that I personally use. I'll also walk you through step-by-step on how to get your hosting plan all set up on your website. Now these steps do change from time to time when hosting plans change or set up options change. So I keep this tutorial up-to-date all the time. Once you get your websites set up, head back over here and we're going to install a theme on your website. But I do say on the tutorial page because it also has the links to the themes that we're about to start talking about. 5. Your Hosting Dashboard: Hello, Hello. In this lesson, we're gonna go over your hosting dashboard. Now it's important to remember that if you ever have any problems with your website, if you're unable to login or if something is wrong with your website, you can always come back to your hosting dashboard and login to your website. That way, we're contact customer service for help getting your website backup again, you can always come back to this hosting dashboard. Now, this of course is the Bluehost hosting dashboard. So if you have Bluehost hosting, and you can see there's a button over here to log into WordPress, so it can always log into my site that way. You can also do things like customize your site or update your plugins. I personally never do this within my hosting dashboard. I always log into WordPress into my site directly to do this. But it is here. If you want to, you can click these links and that will take you directly to your site. Now I'm just gonna go through a few of the different settings here and what's available in your dashboard. So the myocytes tab here just shows you any and all websites that you have. You can host multiple sites with Bluehost. You may have to upgrade your plan to do so, but you can host more than one website and you can login to more than one website with your hosting dashboard. Now, in the marketplace area, I've personally never used this area at all. It's just a bunch of different add-ons and other plugins and services and things that you can buy for your site. I've never personally use this, so you probably don't need to go through any of this stuff. Next is email and office. So you can actually set up an email address with your Bluehost account, which is pretty great and it's free. So rather than using a Gmail account, you can actually create a domain e-mail, which really just means that you're attaching your name to your domain name. So e.g. Lauren at discovery or creator.com is an e-mail address that I've created for my personal website. You could do that over here using this Bluehost email for free. And then of course there's also Google and Microsoft 365, which are going to be paid solutions for this that gives you a lot more options, but I would recommend just setting up a basic one for free with the Bluehost free domain email. Okay, Next on the domains tab, this is going to be where any and all domains that you purchased live because you can purchase more than one domain. And again, if you haven't upgraded hosting account, you can also host multiple websites. But you can also purchase multiple domains and not even actually use them if you want to purchase a domain name for later use, or if you want to purchase your personal name as a domain name as well. Your domains are all going to live in this domains area. You can purchase new domains here. You can also assign these to certain websites. You can also set up redirects. So I don't have any redirect setup at the moment to show you. But when you set up a redirect, it basically just means that you are redirecting a post or page on your website to a new post or page. And you want to do this anytime that you ever publish something and then change the URL. Because if you send traffic to an old URL and that page or post no longer exists, then a 404 error is going to come up on your website. So you would set up a redirect to do this. I don't usually actually set these up within my hosting dashboard. I usually set these up with a plugin within WordPress as well, but it is here if you need it. The other thing with domains is that you can transfer them. So you can transfer a domain into Bluehost. You can transfer a domain out of Bluehost if you wanted to change your hosting company, and then you also have subdomains. So if you ever wanted to create a sub-domain, let's say Courses dot discover your creator.com. I could set that up in subdomains. Next you have marketing tools. I've also never personally use this tab either. There are links to things like Google ads and SEO and to whatever Google My Business is Business listing. I've never actually used these. If I ever need any marketing tools or plug-ins, I just go directly to the site or find recommendations elsewhere. But if you want to cruise through it that is there as well. Then lastly, we have the Advanced tab. This tab is going to bring you to your cPanel. And this is really where you're going to be able to make changes to your website if it were to ever break, or if you need to actually go in and edit certain coding and where certain pages live on your website. This is something that I'm not gonna go into detail about because I don't actually know how to do it myself. I let my web developer do this for me. Or I asked Bluehost customer service to help me out with things. You know, a lot about building websites. You're already going to be familiar with this. And if you don't, don't really worry about it, what you might want to use here is the email accounts tab and forwarders. This is gonna be all related to your domain email, perhaps email routing. But a lot of this stuff, file manager images, this usage, this is stuff that you're not really going to want to pay a whole lot of attention to because it's really just the back end storage and files of your website and you're not going to want to go in there and edit any of these things within Bluehost because that's how you can mess stuff up. So only use those things if you really know what you're doing. Otherwise, you want to generally just update stuff within WordPress. Because then you're editing the outside pages, not the actual coding and you can't break your website that way. So again, you can look through some of this, but you're rarely ever going to need a lot of this stuff unless you have a problem with your website. And that's pretty much it you all for your hosting dashboard against once you get this setup, you don't really need to visit this area much. I rarely, ever, ever, ever login to my hosting dashboard, really only if there is ever a problem which is very rare. And in that case, I just contact customer service. But it is here if you want to look through some of the settings. 6. Install a Website Theme: Hey there, it's time for the fun part. In this lesson, we're going to install a theme on your websites that you can start designing it. Now this is also where the learning curve is going to start. Website themes are pre-coded software that you can add to your website to make it look really nice. Things like just uploading a logo and having it appear in exactly the right place. Being able to change the color of your menu, which is two clicks, without having to code the entire thing from scratch. Which let's be honest, ain't nobody but web developers got time for. But here's the thing. Some website themes are a lot more customizable than others. You can find almost any kind of layout or design that you're looking for. But something to allow you to make a lot of changes to that pre-coded design. E.g. some themes don't even let you change the color of your menu. Some themes are free and some themes costs money. Some of these are either a onetime fee or they can even be a yearly basis as well. In this class, I'm going to walk you through how to set up your website with my favorite free theme that also happens to be the most customizable. You'll be able to change the colors, the font, the overall layer of your entire website. You'll be able to add images and banners exactly where you want and even create entire landing pages with this free theme. It's also the theme that I use on my own website. Okay, so go ahead and open up that tutorial on how to create a website that we've talked about in the last lesson because it has the links for the themes that we're going to use in just a couple of options for you. You can also find these resources on my website in the additional resources that is linked below this video. From here, you'll want to download this theme that I recommend or any other theme that you want to use, an upload it to your website. Throughout the rest of this class, I'm gonna be using this specific theme that I recommend in this guide. But don't worry if you decide to use a different theme, the rest of this course is still going to be 98% applicable to you because I'll still be covering all of the elements and a structure that you want to include with your website on all of the different pages that we're going to talk about. So it's okay if you want to use a different theme. 7. Your WordPress Dashboard: Okay, In this lesson, we are going to talk about your WordPress dashboard. Now, not to be confused with your hosting dashboard. Your WordPress dashboard is going to be where your website really lives and where all the content can be found, can be edited, can be customized. So again, if there's ever a problem with your website, you know, being completely broken or not being able to access it, you're going to want to go to your hosting dashboard. But whenever you're actually editing content or making changes or customizing, you'll come into your WordPress dashboard. And it's really just the back end of your site where a lot of that coding lives. But of course all in a very easy to use and user friendly format. So I'm just gonna go through a few of the settings here and the WordPress Dashboard. The first thing that I want to say is that your dashboard and settings may look a bit different than mine because you're going to get different options over here on the left based on the different plugins and themes that you're using on your site. So if you're not using the same SEO plugin, then you're not going to have a link to edit it over here on the left, just e.g. but everyone that's going to have, first and foremost, your post section, when you click on your posts that this is going to be where all of your blog posts or articles live. So anytime that you want to add a new one, you're going to just click Add New, and you'll be able to add a new post to your website. And all the different posts are going to live here. And you can quickly click them and edit them anytime you want. You can also click view to view them in a new tab. So your posts are gonna be there. Your categories are going to live here as well. So you can create different categories to categorize your blog posts. We'll talk more about that in a different lesson. Your media library is where all of your images on your website are going to live. So you can upload any new images directly to your media library. Or generally when you're editing a new posts, you're going to click here to add an image. And this will also upload it to your media library. So that's the usual way you're going to want to add those elements and add those images. But you can also visit your media library to see any of the images that you have. Next, we have pages. And pages are gonna be different from posts and that they're gonna be more of your static pages like your legal pages, your homepage, your About Me page. For the content that's not constantly changing, that would be your articles. So your pages can all be accessed here and very similar to the post. The editors are very similar. You can click Edit, you can view it. You can make any changes here. Next you're going to have your comments. Any comments that you have on your website are gonna show up here. You can also create settings to make sure that the go-to pending first before they're approved. That way you can look and see all of your comments before you approve them. Now, next I have Rank Math SEO plugin that I'm using. So I'm not gonna go into detail here. But again, some of the plug-ins that you're using are going to show up in your dashboard. So you may or may not have this yet. So any the Rank Math settings are in here. Elementor is the page builder that I'm using on this site so I can go in and make changes to Elementor here, you'd see when you click on these, there's often some additional settings down here that you can also click through. Templates is also part of Elementor, so I'm not gonna go into detail there. I don't have any template set up on this website currently. Wordpress forms is my contact forums. So I can create new contact forms in here and display them on my website. Pretty links down here is another one that I'm using as well. I'm going to click over to Appearance next. Now, this is going to be where you actually activate and install any themes that you want to use. So you can only have one active theme at a time. And if you want to deactivate or delete any old themes, or you want to upload any new themes. It's going to be over here in appearance. You're also going to be able to customize your website here using the Customize button. And I will talk about this in a different lesson. So I'm just going to click back now. And let's see. So you also have here your widgets and your menus. So you can set up your widgets here for your sidebar. There's mine. In menus can also be accessed here and appearance. So whenever you're setting up your main menu or your footer menu, Astra options, That's just the theme I'm using. So you may or may not have that depending on your theme. You can go in here and set additional settings back there. Your plugins can always be accessed from the WordPress area so you can scroll through any of your plugins. Whenever plugins need to be updated, you'll see a number next to it here. So number one means I do have one plug-in that needs to be updated. You can just click Update now to update any of your plugins. You can also click Add New to add a new plugin. And from here you can search through popular plugins or you can use the search bar here. You can also click Upload to actually upload an external plugin that you've downloaded from a website. Now, settings you definitely are going to use. And a lot of these default settings that you have with WordPress are generally going to be fine and you don't really want to update any of these. You know, it's a lot of stuff like the formatting of your posts, how stuff is displayed, but it usually is set to be good already without any updating. If we go here to writing under settings, this is where some of your posts settings are going to be. If we click reading, this is also going to be where some posts settings are. You can change your homepage and your blog page right here. You can change how many blog posts are going to display on your blog page. How they're going to display, whether it's a bunch of text or just a short exit. So just things like that. The Discussion tab over here is gonna be aware a lot of your comments settings are so users ability to comment on your website. Again, these are worth looking over. You're probably going to want to leave most of these settings the way that they already were. They generally default to be pretty good for what most users want, but you could definitely glance over those as well. The media tab here just has some suggested dimensions for images that you can change here. I love to all these as default as well. Okay, and I'm not gonna go through absolutely every single one of these because a lot of these again, I didn't change my permalink at all. You can go in here to privacy anti-spam. Both of those are based on a plug-in that I have, as well as the rest of these settings down here. So you're just going to look a little bit different if you have different plugins installed, but these are just different settings for other plugins that I have as well. And same with the bottom stuff down here. That's pretty much it for your WordPress dashboard. You're mostly going to be living in your posts area, your page's area, and maybe your appearance here and there when you're setting things up. But again, once you have a lot of these settings in place, you're not really going to have to edit a lot of these things going forward. You're mainly just gonna be in here to create new content and edit content and non-content. Alright, so that is it for your WordPress dashboard. 8. Customize Theme Settings: Now we are going to be in our theme settings. So to access this, you're gonna go to appearance and customize. This is really the first place that you're going to come to when you start designing and just setting up the main settings, the main global settings of your website. Now, if you are using a different theme that I am, you're going to have different theme settings. Some of them are gonna be the same in that you can access your main blog settings, your main footer settings, your main header settings. These are all generally going to always live in the customizer, but the specific settings underneath these different elements are going to be a bit different if you're using a different theme, I'm using Astra theme, as I mentioned in the Resources Guide. So let's just click through some of these just so you can see what can be changed here. Now we're in the global settings here, and this is where you're going to change your typography. So where you can change the different fonts for your headings and the body of your website. So you can change all of these, you can even edit the margins. What you might want to do here is actually put a little bit of text on your website that way that you can see how things change when you change them right here, it'll actually show you how they change in real time. So that can be helpful if you already have a few elements on the page already. Otherwise, you can scroll through and usually just leave these as default unless you do want to change them. Next you have colors, so you can change the accent colors, the hyperlinks, the heading colors, all of that with this theme, which is one of the reasons why I love this theme. It's a free theme and you can change it and customize it so much. So you'll be able to change site background content, background, body texts, all that kinds of stuff in the color areas. You can also create a global color palettes. That way you can access these colors quickly from other settings and areas on your website. Next you have container, so that's just gonna be how content is displayed. You can create a box layout which would have basically a border around your content. I personally use a full-width layout for my website. You have buttons. You can change the button colors throughout your website to all be uniform and you can change the styling of them, the padding around them, the padding is just gonna be the excess spacing around your buttons. You can add borders, all kinds of stuff. Next you have the header builder. So within here I have added my site title and my logo so you can upload your logo there. I can change the sizing of it as well. You can also add a site title if you want. You can edit and configure your menu from here if you want to. And you can also just change some other stuff about your headings. So that stuff is all here in your head or Boulder. I'm going to skip breadcrumbs just because I don't have anything set up. That's just some extra texts that you can have displaying about your posts. Blog is where you can edit your blog page. You can change the layout of your blog page if you want to, and also how single posts are displayed. There's some extra design features in there. Then the same thing with your pages. You're also just going to have different layouts that you can select for your pages. The same width sidebar also changing the way out. This is something that I just left. Honestly, I left all of these pages. I'm just the default settings here. Footer builder is where you can edit your footer. Of course, you can edit the amount of columns that you have. You can edit the content that goes in here. You can add different menus, images, email, opt-in, all kinds of stuff. We will talk more about footers later on in the course, but you're able to edit all of your foot or stuff right in here in your customizer. And I'm going to skip performance because there's nothing here really. And let's see you next. We have site identity. So this is where I uploaded my favicon. The favicon is that little icon that shows at the top of your website. I created that in Canva, which is linked in the resources guides, and I've uploaded that as well. Then we have our menus. So from here you can edit your Footer Menu, your main menu, any other menus that you want to set up. Some themes allow a secondary menu that is on top of the navbar. So you have two different menus. So you can go in and change your menus here. And there are some homepage settings. So here I can set my homepage for my blog page to be whatever page I want on my website. Um, so you can change that. Then. Lastly, CSS is going to be additional coding that you can add to also customize stuff on top of this. And this is gonna be extra coding. For instance, there are a few things that I've added here. I do know a little bit of CSS, more like I know how to google CSS when I need it. But for instance, if there is a spacing element on your website that you just aren't really happy about. So for instance, your posts don't have as much space up here at the top as you'd like. You can Google something like that and say how to add space on top of my posts, css, and you can find actual CSS coding to add here. I don't recommend doing this at all unless you are somewhat familiar with it. Or again, you already have some experience underneath your belt because you just don't want to get bogged down with trying to search for CSS elements and help at the very beginning, it's more of like when you want to try start perfecting things. I've done it because I have created multiple websites and I'm a bit more familiar with it and I had the time. But you don't want to worry about this stuff here, but it is there if you ever need it or of course, if you know CSS, there's always gonna be a place to add CSS here. And really it's actually a safe place to add coding, knowing that it's not really going to break much in your website because you can always come back here and just remove it. Now if you were to go in and change the coding within your theme files, that can actually break your websites. You never wanna do that. So it's just a safe place to add that additional coding. And that is pretty much it for our theme settings. Remember just to come back in here whenever you need to update stuff with your site. And as you saw, I clicked on different things so you could click on your homepage and you can edit settings here. You can also click on a post of yours or a page or any other element or any other page on your website to be able to see these changes that you're making in real time as you're editing. 9. Logo and Brand Colors: Okay, now let's talk about the pretty things like your branding and your logo. I'm going to let you in on a little secret of mine. I really don't think that these things are that important at this stage. Rather I will say that it's important to choose a logo and a couple of brand colors. But there's a good chance that they won't end up being the logo or the brand colors, the ones that you stick with in the long term. Because the thing is that you're just getting started. You haven't really found your group yet and you likely don't have a complete idea of what you want all of this to look like as a final product. And honestly you shouldn't at this stage because it shouldn't be a flexible and fluid thing, but it's open to evolution and change. Now I know this because my logos and branding changed several times on my first few websites. They really only got more static after the first few months or so. And I spent way more time than I should have on those logos that I really didn't end up keeping anyway. So here's what I think that you should do. Comp with two to four brand colors that you like because it is important that you remain consistent with your branding. Even if you decide to change this entirely, at some point, there are different color wheels and websites that will help you generate brand colors that go well together if you want them, get some ideas and then create a simple text-based logo for your website. It looks really great and trust me, it just works. We often think that we need to be super creative here and add little designs and extra touches to our logo. When a reality we really don't this logos when we placed in your website, well, you're going to have a bunch of other photos and things that take people's attention away anyway, your logo isn't actually the star of the show, and you can also get fancier and fancier with it later on. I mean, if you already have some grand ideas here, please do run with those. I don't want to discourage anyone. I just want to put things into the right perspective here. And I don't want you spending 5 h on this when it's likely to change at some point in the next few days or few weeks. Anyway. I personally use Canva to create my logos, but I do have the pro version which is necessary to create images with transparent backgrounds. This is necessary so that your logo will show up on whichever background you place it on. But you can also just Google free logo creators to find an online tool to create your logo. I'll link some resources for you in my resources page linked below this course, all you need to do is choose the right color and the right font. And you're good to go here. Just keep this logo super simple for now. Now, once you've picked those branding colors and you've created a logo, it's gonna be timed to upload those in your theme settings, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. 10. Recommended Plugins: Hey, there. In this lesson we're going to talk about plug-ins. A plugin is just an add-on software for WordPress. They can enhance your options for customization. It's pretty awesome because if your theme doesn't allow you to do certain things, like have a cool author box or add a neat social widget to your article or sidebar. There are plugins that can allow you to do this. As with themes, there are tons of free plugins and tons of paid ones. Thankfully, many paid plugin to also offer a free version with limited features. Now in this lesson, I'm not going to tell you the specific names or brands of my favorite plug-ins right now, just because these do change from time to time. And the other thing here is that not all plugins play nice together. Some of them are not compatible with others and you may not know this until you install it and something goes wrong with your site. Now this doesn't happen too often, but it does happen. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna tell you all the different types of plug-ins that I think that you should consider adding to your website. And then I will link all of my favorite options on my resources page linked below this video. So that way I can easily update this from time to time as my recommendations change or as pricing may change. And I'm also going to try to give you a couple of alternatives for each of them so that you can choose for yourself in case you do have conflicts on your website. Before we get into those recommended plugins. One other thing that I want to say here is that you want to make sure that you exercise some caution with installing plugins, because plugins do contain extra coding that has added to your website and installing too many plugins with too many features and too many customizations can also unfortunately slow down your site. So here's a good rule of thumb to follow here. If your theme provides a feature or a setting that you're looking for it, try to stick to your theme settings for it. Even if it's not perfect, if it does the job well enough, just stick with it. Avoid plugins unless you really need them. And in many cases there will be ones that you do need. And on that note here, the types of plug-ins that I recommend that you do install on your website. Number one is for site speed and performance. There are tons of free plugins that will help things run a little bit smoother behind the scenes. A couple of the biggest areas of these are effective in is with your images in your page caching. Sometimes you can find site speed and performance plugins that handle all of these things and more, mostly the paid versions. Or you can install a free plugin for images and a free one for caching. When it comes to images, a good plugin can compress your images more and even delay the loading of images on the page until a person reaches that image, rather than taking longer to load the entire page at once. This is called lazy loading. But no matter what, getting a plug-in or two to increase your speed and performance is super important. Number two is an SEO plugin. This is another really important one. Seo stands for search engine optimization, and it just means optimizing your website to be found in search results. A good SEO plugin will help you make sure that your posts are optimized for SEO, it will check things like how often you use your main keyword in your content. Where you used your main keyword in your content. The readability of your content, your content length, how many internal and external links to you used, how your title reads. And honestly so much more, even if you aren't pointing to spend a lot of time on an SEO strategy using a plugin like this is one of the easiest ways to spend an extra 2 min making a post more SEO friendly. It's honestly the easiest way just to get the basics down. Number three is a contact form plugin. Now you may not need this depending on your theme, but most people do end up needing one. This is just a plugin that creates a really nice contact form on your website. It's always a better idea to have a contact form that someone else can fill out to contact to you rather than putting your personal email on your contact page for all the world and the spammers to see. You can set these up to forward the entries to your email address. Number four is a plugin to help you save backups of your site. This is another really important one. Your hosting company may do this for you, but the backups are usually pretty limited. And there's a really great free option for this anyway. I hope that your website never crashes or breaks. Mine has unfortunately, I've tinkered with some coding they shouldn't have, or I installed a plug-in that didn't play nice with other existing plug-ins. Your website goes down and you'll likely need some help from your hosting company or your web developer to get it up and running again. Sometimes it's a simple fix and that's really good. But sometimes your site has to be restored from a previous version. This is when taking regular backups of your website will be a lifesaver. All of those design changes that you make, the posts that you write, all of that can be wiped out if you don't have a backup of your site. Now I would recommend backing up your site on at least a weekly basis or maybe twice a month. But really depending on how frequently you make changes. Also, you probably want to keep at least two backups at any given time in case you need to resort to an earlier version for some reason. Now the good news is that you can entirely automate this process and set these backups so that they're downloaded automatically and they even replace older backups. Okay, number five is a link clicker or this geyser. This can be used to create better looking links on your website or just to create ones that you remember it easier. E.g. you can create custom links for all the various links to your social channels. So instead of looking like this, a long string of characters that you may or may not remember. It may look more like this, much cleaner and simpler. Now this might not be as important at first, but if you decide to partner with some brands or companies and other links to your website, this plugin will come in handy. You will also have one single link that you can use. And don't have a hard time remembering when you're sharing content with others. Number six is an anti-spam plugin. This one also may not be super important right from the beginning, but it will become more so once you start getting traffic and visitors to your website, anti-spam plugin will help you manage the comments on your blog. You will undoubtedly get spam comments at some point, it happens to everyone. Maybe it'd be happy that someone is finally noticing you. But obviously we don't want that kind of attention. And anti-spam plugins will help you manage bam contents and the time that you spend dealing with them. You can set up filters to automatically send certain comments or spam, or to restrict comments with links. And also set approval for commas before they're published. Okay, And finally, the last plugin that you should consider is an accessibility plug-in. An accessibility plug-in as extra features and display characteristics to your website that allows people with disabilities to better consume your content. It's essentially an added layer of coding that goes over your website for anyone that should need it. E.g. people who have vision impairments can change the colors of certain elements on your website so that they can read it better. People who suffered from seizures can turn off any potentially triggering elements of your website like flashing or quickly changing images. This is becoming more and more important after waves of lawsuits have cropped up targeting websites that weren't previously accessible. There are free options for this plug-in, so it's a no-brainer for me to have this added protection, especially because one of my websites was hit with one of these lawsuits. Thankfully, I was able to get it dismissed, but I still had to pay $1,500 and lawyer fees to help me do that. That's pretty much it for the most basic and important plug-ins that I think you should install. You may also want some social sharing plugins or some other plug-ins for design-related things. That's totally okay to just do some due diligence and research your plugins before you install them, so that you know that you're downloading the best plugin with the least impact on site performance. Take a look at my recommended plug-ins that I have linked in the resources page below this course. Install a few of the most important plug-ins I'm, I mentioned in this lesson and I'll see you on the next lesson to start working on some of that design stuff. 11. Adding and Optimizing Images: Hey, let's talk about adding images to your website. I wanted to cover this before you really start adding images and designing your homepage and a few of the other pages in the next few lessons. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about where you can find great photos to use on your website and the best practices for uploading those photos to your website with minimal impact on site speed and performance. So first of all, you might be wondering, where can I find professional photos or whether you might be able to take them on your own, or whether you should even take them on your own? Well, best-case scenario would be to take them on your own if you're skilled enough to do so, they will certainly be more unique and personal and can save you time hunting down the perfect images. But for everyone else who doesn't have the time or the skills to do this, like myself. Thankfully, there are a lot of options these days to get free professional stock photos. Too many options really, it can be a little bit overwhelming. The key is to find a site or two that has the largest selections that you don't have to look through five different sites to find what you're looking for. Trying to find the perfect stock photo to illustrate what you're trying to convey can be really difficult, especially if you're really picky like I am. And this isn't just for your website, you'll probably need images for other things like social media marketing, email marketing, sales marketing, etc. I won't go to my favorite couple of websites for images on my resources page linked below this video. And if you're going to stock photo route, like most people just try to remember to take care with the images that you choose. Tried to find photos that look and feel more natural and less artificial. We tend to want to show photos of people smiling to illustrate happiness. But sometimes showing basis of strangers just comes off as a bit unreliable. They can often have an unfamiliar or clinical field to them, like the images that you would see in doctors offices or in ads or inserts for prescription drugs. But there's also depends on your niche and what your website is about. If you're creating a website that's in the medical field, that might make sense for you. It's just a tip that I've come across in my business and my Nietzsche's. Okay, once you found your photos, it's time to prep them to upload it to your website. They need to do two things here before you ever upload any photo to your website. Number one is to resize the image to the smallest possible file size that you need. Really large, high resolution photos that take up a lot of space and take a lot of time to load. This can cause your entire page to load slower and cause people to balance before they ever get a chance to read your content. Try to play around with the sizes and go only as large as you need to for the space provided on your website. The second step after you've resized the image is to compress that image to further reduce the file size. This takes up less storage space on your website and helps the image load faster. On the page. I'll include my favorite free tools and the additional resources linked below the video to help you resize and optimize your images before adding them to WordPress. And my last tip here is to remember that fewer images are sometimes better. You don't want to go overboard here and type your images, take away from your written content, or of course, slow down your page. Only add as many as you think that you need to break up the text, illustrate a concept or evoke some kind of feeling. And one more thing, make sure to add a description of the image in the alt-text field of your images when you upload them, this is really important for SEO. 12. Design Your Homepage: Hey, there, are you ready to start designing? The overall design and structure of your website is really up to your discretion and ultimately boils down to personal preference, especially when it comes to your homepage. But that being said, I want to give you a few pointers on what I think that you should consider adding to your page. Your homepage is important. It's the facade of your business, but it's not important to get it 100% perfect right now, most people will likely be viewing your website on a mobile device or finding you through search or links directly to your content, not your homepage specifically. But we still want it to look good, right? Here are a few basic elements to have on your homepage. And keep in mind that we're going to dive deeper into some of these elements later on in the next few lessons. Also, everything that I'm showing you now was created with a free Astra Theme and Elementor plug-in that I recommend in this course. And all of the images that you see here were created in Canva. First, you start with a nice navigation bar. You may or may not want this to be colored in on that navbar. You have a menu with important links to your About page, your content, perhaps a blog page, and at some point a link to sign up for an email list or a paid product. The next alma that you should consider is a header or a banner. This one is optional, but I think they look nice. This could be a photo of you or some other photo that depicts something about your business. On my first health blog, I didn't have my face anywhere on it. So I opted for an image with healthy food and my tagline at the time. It can also just be a couple of sentences about your website. Or you can skip this part entirely if you don't want a banner. But if you are going to be featured on your website somewhere, your homepage is a pretty good place for it. You can share a photo of yourself until your audience a little bit about yourself and your background. Who have you worked with? What are your credentials? Have you been featured anywhere? You can include anything else here this helpful to build your credibility. Next, I think it's always a good idea to share some type of content on your homepage, blog content, videos, podcasts, episodes. This should be regularly updated content or just your most popular content. By the way. Some more image focused websites like photography, it travel or food or recipe blogs often have their featured content first, no banner or intro or anything. That's totally okay too, and a good place to start if you're ready to dive into content and don't care as much about your homepage design at first. Then lastly, is an email opt-in. This is really important. There should be somewhere that a user can opt in to learn more and become a subscriber could be on your homepage or your footer, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. 13. Design Your Footer: Hey there. I hope you've made some headway on designing your homepage, or at least have some placeholder content there. In the meantime, let's move on to designing your footer area. Your footer is obviously at the bottom of your page and generally where you're gonna find your less important links. Or should I say maybe less exciting links like your legal pages, which are definitely very much still important. Some other common elements you'll find on footers, our email sign-ups and social links. Your footer is really that last part of your page. Some people will see if they make it down that far. So I think that having an email opt-in or social links or both is a really great idea. Your photo can be really simple, as simple as you want it to be. But in the very least, you should include a copyright statement and links to your legal pages, which we'll discuss later. You can set this up in one column or two columns, or even three or more, depending on what kind of information that you want to put it in here. Make sure to make it a color that's going to stand out against the rest of your content. We haven't discussed email forums or legal pages yet. So for now, just put placeholders for these items or just leave your footers super simple until you can add those other elements, which we'll talk about soon. 14. Create Your About Page: Okay, it's time to create an about page. You might not think that this is super important. If like me, you included a good bit of information about yourself on your homepage. But an About page is still really important. For one Google likes to see your about page. It gets signals to them that someone or some organization is managing your website. They like to see that credibility, which is good because there's often too much bad content on the Internet these days. So let's be honest. It's time to create your about page. This can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. If you have a big, interesting story to tell, you can absolutely do that here. I've had an About page like this on my website in the past and it was a hit with all of my audience. They used to leave tons of comments on it. Just make sure that, that content is relevant to your audience. For now, we're just going to keep things simple because you can and should add this page over time as your website or your business grows, just add an image of yourself and write some information about your background and some of the other areas that are discussed on your homepage. But you can get into a bit more detail here if you want. At the bottom of your page, you can leave it blank or you can add some relevant content or resources to it. Something for your audience to checkout when they're finished reading. The other thing here is that if you don't want your face to be on your website, that's okay too. I didn't have mine and my first health blog for the first six months or so. Instead it had more of an organization feel to it. I use phrases like this website was started because rather than I started this website because this is your website and it can be personalized or not personalized as much as you want. I personally prefer personalization because I think it's better when you're selling products. There's a lot more to trust there. But there are tons of websites out there that have more of a media publisher vibe. And when you're creating this page, you can simply call it about, about me, about us, meet the team, whatever floats your boat. 15. Create Your Contact Page: Hey there, Let's create your contact page. This one is really simple and it's not going to take long. I keep my contact page very brief and just explain that if someone has a question, they can use the form below and I or a member of my team will get back to them as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's helpful to add within 24 to 48 h or whatever you see fit. Next, you want to add this contact form to your page using whatever plug-in that you have for this, Most of them offer a short code to add to your page. If you haven't set your contact form up yet, you could do that. Now, I usually include fields for it name, email, website in a message with a website field being optional. But feel free to add whatever fields you feel are necessary here. And that's it. That's probably the easiest page to set up on your entire website. But somebody else I want to add here is that this was so easiest that up because we didn't use any custom landing page builders or other design elements. Generally, you should always tell pages with landing page builders and fancy elements for your most important pages like your homepage, your About page is okay too. And also resources page which we'll talk about later. But any blog articles, legal pages, or any other random pages, you just want to add these using the normal WordPress editor. The thing is, if you ever change the names for any reason, your pages are gonna be a mess of coding without those landing page builders. Whereas anything that you created with a native WordPress editor will look relatively the same with any theme. Also adding a bunch of elements and bells and whistles can also slow down your pages. So you generally don't want to create fancy pages for every single page on your website. Just the most important ones. Okay, moving on. Let's talk next about legal pages. 16. Create Your Legal Pages: Hey, there, Let's talk about the illegal pages on your website. This topic is a bit of a bore, and I'll admit that these pages kind of suck to create the continents boring. And it makes you think of all those what-if scenarios that you have to protect yourself against. But alas, these are necessary. They're necessary to protect yourself and to deter people from taking legal action against you if something happens. Even websites that aren't monetized or making money in any way need these legal pages. Because if you're gonna put any kind of information out there on your website that can be read or interpreted in any way by someone else, you could be liable. So let's make sure that you take these basic steps to protect yourself. Here are the three basic legal pages that you need to get started. Number one is a disclaimer page. This protects you against legal liability and really just explains that to your users that you aren't responsible for their actions after consuming your content. Now there are general disclaimers and more specific disclaimers. Everyone in the very least needs a general disclaimer. This reads something like this. The information and material provided on this website is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be taken as professional advice. Name or business name is not responsible for any liability or damages that result from the information provided. That's the absolute bare minimum. And as you can see, it's pretty vague. So you may also want to consider whether you need a more specific disclaimer in addition to your general disclaimer. E.g. if you're in the financial nice, you probably want to include an earnings disclaimer that states that you aren't responsible for anyone's financial gains or losses. So if you provide some tips on investing and then someone in their life savings into the stock market and loses all of it. They can't sue you for bad information. Or if he published workouts or exercise tutorials, you aren't responsible if someone breaks their leg doing your workout. I know that seems pretty self-explanatory and even a bit ridiculous at times, but unfortunately, that's the world that we live in. It's definitely more important in some niches like the medical and financial spaces than others. But honestly, even food and recipe bloggers need these because of the handling and potential consumption of certain food products like raw eggs. So please do some due diligence and research here and research this yourself to see what you think that your website needs. Okay, the second page that you need is a privacy policy page. Really just explains what kind of data that you collect about users and what you do with that data, data privacy and protection and all that jazz. It's important to specify how this information is collected and why. What do you do with that information and who has access to it? Privacy policy pages can get a bit complicated pretty quickly. So you probably want to start off with one. It's just a bit more general. And keep us a little information about people who visit your website as possible. Then number three is a Terms and Conditions page which covers things like transactions between you and users, copyrights and other things. This is where you include information about governing law and arbitration. If an issue were to arise, you should definitely mention your copyright and intellectual rights to protect the work that you create. Then it goes deeper into how people use your website, what information they can't use, etc. Then finally, if that wasn't enough, there's one last page that you should consider adding that is called an accessibility page, is becoming more and more important on websites as lawsuits have cropped up from people who are unable to use a website due to a certain disability, having an accessibility plug-in, like I mentioned earlier in the class, it goes along way to protect yourself from this. But it also doesn't hurt to include an accessibility statement up on your website either. Just basically states that you endeavor to keep it your website as accessible as possible within the reasonable resources and limitations that you have. E.g. as a single person, website owner, you probably won't have the time or money to spend on making your website 100% accessible for everyone. It's very difficult and it's a moving target. If you install an accessibility plug-in for your website, you can mention it in your accessibility statement and explain how it can be accessed and used. I know that this sounds like a lot, but these aren't too difficult to set up. Just try not to get too bogged down in to many of the specifics right away because you're just getting started and you don't have any content to even put up on your website yet. The best thing that you can do right now, short of hiring a lawyer to write all of these for you, of course, is to find a good online template to get started with. There are some free options, some of limitations or required branding, but you should be able to find some options to get your legal pages started. Now, of course, I'm not a lawyer and it can't actually give you any professional advice or legal proof advice on this subject. So there is my disclaimer. 17. Create Your Resources Page: Hey there, moving on a better topics in this lesson, let's talk about creating a resources page. You may or may not have a need for this page in your website, especially now. But it's a pretty important page for me on my website and multiple websites that I've had. So I wanted to make sure to cover it in this class. Resources page is just what it sounds like. A page dedicated to your favorite resources and recommendations. This could include software or other online tools like I have on my resources page, or it could be physical goods or products. In the past on my health blog, I've linked to Amazon products on my resources page, yoga straps, protein powder, etc. Many gardening blogs link their favorite gardening tools or resources. This could also be non-profits that you support or any other resource that you support two or partner with or recommend to your audience. This is another page that I used a landing page builder to create so I could organize it exactly as I want. You can check out my resources page link below this class for inspiration. 18. Menu Setup: Okay, Now that we have most of the basic pages created, let's make sure that your menu is totally set up and everything is in the right place. Maybe you've already done this as you were setting up your pages so you can move on to the next lesson if that's the case. But I'm going to mention what I think are the most important pages to be linked to in both your navigation bar and on your footer. The most common pages to include on your navbar and MainMenu include your About page, your blog, which we haven't created yet, a resources page. If you have one, those are a good place to start off with. As you grow your website or your business, you'll likely want to add more. E.g. I have a link to my courses page in my menu. If you have a paid product, usually want to add it here as well just to make it found as easily as possible. And if you don't have a paid product yet or you don't have plans for one, an email opt-in is a great thing to put in your menu. If you have any kind of free lead magnet to share with your audience, you can provide a link here, like a button that says free planner or whatever. We'll talk about that more in the next lesson. I've linked a specific article and my main menu because it's really important article that I want my people to see right away. If you have other more important links to put here, you can also consider moving your About page, the footer menu. Instead. It's not totally necessary to have it in your main bar. Now let's talk about your footer menu. This is actually a separate menu that you can create in WordPress and you can display it on your footer. The most important links for your footer are generally your legal pages. You don't want those front and center on your navbar because most people are not going to want to read them, but you do need to have them somewhere, so we leave them at the bottom of the page. This is also generally where you want to put a link to your contact page. And I also include another link to my resources. Again, adding your menus to your website is usually pretty straightforward. You need to first create the menus in WordPress. Your main menu will likely show up or you need to without any adjustment, but you may need to go into your settings to make sure that your footer menu shows up where you want it to. And that's it for menus. 19. Add an Email Opt-In Form: Okay. Let's talk about how to put an e-mail subscriber form on your website. I personally believe in trying to prioritize building an email list right away. Alongside creating content and driving traffic to your website. Connecting with your audience is really important, especially if you're going to offer content products or services to them, an e-mail. This is one of the best ways to start turning those people that visit your website into an audience that you can build relationships with. Here's my building an email list right away is important. Number one is it's a great way to get more content in front of your audience. Again. Otherwise, they read and they watch, or they listen, and then they balance, maybe never to return again. Number two, and email list is an asset that you own. You don't own your TikTok followers on TikTok does and they can shut your account down at anytime. Your e-mail lists can withstand any major business evolution, algorithm upsets or any other expected changes. Then number three, back to those relationships. Your most loyal people are gonna be on your email list and they're gonna love getting your content on the rag. It provides you a place to get more real with their people and form a deeper connection with them. It's important to build an email list from the very beginning, as soon as you're publishing your first pieces of content. To do this, you're going to need an e-mail marketing service, one that will store your subscriber information and have the capacity to send thousands and even tens of thousands of emails a day. And then there's also on subscribers data protection to consider. So you really don't wanna do this all yourself within Gmail. Trust me, there are some really great options for free email marketing services as well. So there's really no reason not to use one. So step number one is to sign up for an e-mail marketing service. My two favorite choices for this are all my resources page links in the description and also below the video. For peer, you just want to create a simple form. Now in this course, because we're focusing more on creating your website, I will just create a very quick form offering for people to subscribe for updates. That's because I want you to get this up as quickly as possible and then just move on. But what you will want to start to do when you're creating content and you're preparing to send traffic to your website is to create a free offer for your email list. This is called a lead magnet, and it's basically just some free information that you can compile in the form of free worksheets planners, or even just your best tips to accomplish something. This will make people more likely to sign up for your email list and allow you to start providing them with great value, right from day one. Now I have an entire course on email marketing that walks you through the steps to create this lead magnet and design it, as well as create the whole funnel, the emails to send after that. So do check out that course when you're ready to move into that direction. But for now, let's just get a simple form up. Now you might need to install a free plugin on your website for your e-mail marketing service that you can add your short code to your website and display it wherever you want on your website. And then don't forget to write at least one e-mail sequence that someone receives after signing up in this e-mail. Tell them, thank you for signing up and that you're so excited that they're here and then they can stay tuned for additional updates from you. And really whatever else you want to say here. And that's it. Starting your email list as, as simple as that. 20. Blog or Articles Page: Hey there, let's create a blog page for your website or an archives page for your article, whatever you want to call it, you don't have to call it a blog. This step is optional because you may not want a blog or have any desire to write articles. That's okay too. But even if you don't want to write new content regularly, having even just a few blog articles on your website, it can be beneficial for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it's good for SEO and can help your website get found in search results. Even if you're creating a website for consultation services that are booked for in-person and city specific. Even having a few blog articles here about your services and wire services are necessary can be incredibly helpful. E.g. when I was looking for some answers on some tax implications for Americans living in Germany. I came across some articles that were very helpful and also written on the website of German tax accountants that provided those services. So even if you're in a non-traditional space, a blog could still be very helpful for your website. Which was point number two, is that it's a way to educate people on the content products or services that you offer them and why people need those in the first place. Some people will check out your website to learn more about who you are or what you're offering. And a few blog posts or articles is a great way to showcase that. So anyway, that's why I think you should consider adding a blog or article or archive page. Now let's talk about how to do this. Now this will differ a bit from theme to theme, but here are the general steps. Step one is usually to create a dedicated page in WordPress. I always use the title blog. But if you're more partial to articles, that works too. Once you set that page up and set your URL, you want to go into your theme settings and set that page that you just created as your blog or your archives page. Again, this may differ from theme to theme, but it's usually located within your theme settings. One other thing that you may want to do here is set blog categories. If you think that you're gonna have multiple categories on your website, It's a good idea to separate these out. And it's also, of course good for SEO. E.g. on my health blog, I had the following categories on my blog posts. I had weight-loss recipes, fitness, general health, and yoga. And you can set these up in your posts area of WordPress by clicking the links two categories. Once that's done, you can add the blog page to your menu if you want, or you can wait until you write your first post, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. 21. Write Your First Post: Hey, there. Now that you've created your blog and your articles page, Let's write your first post so you have something to put up there. This first post can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to write an article about yourself and why you started your website, you can certainly do that. If your website is gonna have a lot more personal content about you, that might make sense. But you also do or do you have a lot of information in your About page anyway? So I personally prefer to start out with an article that I think that is super relevant to my business or my audience. E.g. the first piece of content that I wrote for my website that I've shown you in this class, is how to create a website, is that my students have a place that they can visit for step-by-step instructions and a guide to follow. It was the most relevant piece of content that I could think of. So I started with that. Now the first post doesn't have to be too long and you can always add content to it later on. I personally like to write my articles in a Word document using Google Docs first because I think it provides a better and distraction free writing environment. I then copy and paste that content into WordPress when I'm finished and I want to make my final edits including adding images there. So in this lesson, I just want you to think about what you want to write and start putting your thoughts down on paper or computer screen. Don't feel too much pressure here to get a perfect product. You can always add to this content later on. But when you're finished writing your content and adding it to Wordpress, makes sure to set your category and permalink for this post. While the permalink can be changed pretty easily at any given time, it will have impacts on the page. If you've linked the old URL somewhere and don't set up the right redirects for it. This will cause for 0 for errors and you don't want that. So try to keep your permalink short and sweet and keep in mind that you won't want to change this again, if you've installed an SEO plugin, like I mentioned before, you can also add your keywords that plug-in and work through some of those SEO recommendations. After that, you can hit that Publish button whenever you're ready. 22. Launch and Get Visitors: Okay, first of all, I just wanted to say congratulations, your website is live and ready to go. You can share it with your friends, your family, or any other online communities or networking groups you have. But beyond that, if you don't have any other business circles or connections to reach out to getting visitors to a new website can be tough. So if you're interested in this, I want to first ask you, which direction do you want to go in here? Are you creating an online business that is focused around content? If so, what content do you want to create? Do you want to be an influencer, or a podcast or a YouTuber? Or would you rather work a bit more behind the scenes writing articles and working on getting search traffic. Think about that because if you absolutely hate the thought of getting on camera or feel that you'd be really bad at it. You probably don't want to dive straight headfirst into YouTube. I personally don't like the thought of being an influencer and I know that I'm not good at it. I've tried a few times, so I prefer personally to focus more on searchable traffic. Once you've thought about that for a few minutes, I have another question for you. What kind of content should you create? Because this website probably isn't just about you. I don't know why you're creating it. Maybe it is, but most websites are built around the people that they serve, the content, the products, and the services for their audience. That would actually make this website not so much about you and more about your audience. That's why I talked earlier in the course about your target market and ideal customer. If you're going to create any kind of content and drive traffic to your website. You want this to be done with your audience in mind. First and foremost, always. If you want to be an influencer with a beauty brand aimed at young people, you're probably going to have to be more on a video-based platform to be successful. So really think about who you're trying to reach with your website and content and where those people hang out at which platforms do they use and what kind of content do they like to consume? This is the first step before you think about creating any content to drive traffic to your website. Also, if you're interested in reading more articles for your website, make sure to check out my class on content writing. It has a lot more instruction on content planning, keyword research, SCO, and more. 23. Key Takeaways: Alright, y'all, we have covered so much in this course. I know that getting a new website setup can both be a super exciting and super daunting task, because it does take a bit of getting used to. But I promise that so much of this can become second nature to you. The more that you practice with your theme, creating posts, pages, et cetera. It's fun. This is your website. So remember to enjoy this process. I usually have several key takeaways from my classes that I like to summarize in this lesson. But this time I think I just have one big giant takeaway. Create a symbol and professional looking design. Clean simplicity on your website is your friend right now. There is a reason why I moved pretty quickly through a lot of the page setup in this course. It's because you can easily spend hours on any given one of these pages if you wanted to extend maybe your contact page, that one's pretty much a no brainer, no matter which way you slice it. But all of the rest of them, especially your homepage in your About page, your legal pages. Just remember that you're doing the best that you can with what you have right now and perhaps with no prior website or skills or knowledge whatsoever. I can't tell you how much time I wasted in the beginning when I created my first website. But I will tell you that with every website I've created and it's been like five or six, maybe seven now, I've gotten faster with everyone. The first one took about a month, the second one took about two weeks. The third one took about a week, and the last couple took just a couple of days to build my entire website, including some content. But my point is I learned about what to focus on and what was really important here and what just wasn't in the beginning. I didn't waste too much time over analyzing the content or searching for the perfect design. I just threw up a symbol, a nice design quickly, and then I moved on to other things in my business. Because for me, starting, building and growing a business, speed is everything here. The worst thing that you can do is just spend too much time on something highly likely to change pretty soon anyway. That's wasted time. So I'm gonna leave you with that. I just want to say thank you so much for being here and choosing me to help you on this journey. And if you do want to continue your journey into creating content, email marketing, or any other areas of online business, please do check out all my other courses. If you like this course, please consider taking a moment to just leave me a positive review or fall means that you get notified when I release the next course. And I really appreciate it from one small business owner to the next. And that's it, guys. I will see you on the next one.