Transcripts
1. Introduction: Back when I started
creating websites, it was incredibly
time-intensive, scale intensive, and
to be honest, boring. It was the domain of
people like me are nerds, as we're called affectionately. I hope. Of course, nowadays thanks to nerds, much smarter than me, there are a plethora
of platforms that you can use to create
your own website. And one that we're gonna
be talking about today, wordpress is
extremely easy to use and will allow you to build whatever type of
website you want. And that's exactly
what we're gonna do in this Skillshare class. We're going to set
up a very basic blog or magazine style website. And then once that's over, I'm going to sprinkle on top some simple
tips that you can use to ensure that not only does your website
show up on Google, but also people can get
in touch and it's secure. So we're gonna do
that. Well, now let's jump on to the next video.
2. Getting a Domain Name: Now, in order for someone
to find your website, you're going to, first of all, before we start building it, decide on something
called a domain name. And essentially this is just an address that
people can type into their browser in order to allow them to find your website. Think of google.com,
wordpress.com or well, skillshare.com that
I think about it. There are plenty of different domain name types
you can buy such as.com.net, dot orgs or e.g. if you're advertising
or building a website for the UK market, you'd buy a Dakota UK, and you generally buy
these on a one-year lease, which I guess means you're
not really buying them. There's plenty of websites
where you can find them. One I like to use
is named cheap. And that's exactly what you're seeing on
screen right now. That's named cheap.com. Now all you do is type
in on this website, or if you would like to
use a different service, go to Google and type
in domain names. Perhaps you're looking
for a specific country code domain
name that is not sold, unnamed cheap and you can
just search on Google. It's great thing about
the Internet these days. You can find things in moments. So let's say e.g. we
are going to call our website skillshare
website.com. Now, I doubt this is available because it has the
word Skillshare in it. But e.g. Skillshare
website.com is available, not going to buy that. But you could buy Skillshare
website dot site. You can buy Skillshare website.loc.net.org,
all available. How interesting. Anyway. So basically these are the
addresses that you'll need in order to build your website, as you can build your
website without it, but without a domain name, no one's going to
be able to find it. Now, one piece of advice
I'd like to give you before we move on to
the next section, is that wherever you're buying your domain name by your
hosting from there as well. Especially if this is your
first time doing this. And that's why I bring up
something like named cheap. There's also GoDaddy,
Black Knight, there's hundreds of services. Now the reason I say to buy them both from the same place, if at all possible, is just because if you
buy a domain name in one place and then hosting
in a different place, you're going to have to set up something called DNS entries. And they're not
complicated to do. And in fact, most
hosting services and most Domain Name Sales providers will actually help you do this. But because this is a
quick course on setting up your own website, we're
not going to cover it. So basically, my advice, if you want to follow
along with this, is to buy your domain name
and you're hosting in the same service makes life
easier for you anyway. So let's move on to hosting.
3. Hosting Your Website: Now, hosting isn't as
complex as it may sound. Basically all you're doing is buying access to a computer. Now, you can build a website on your computer that you're
watching this on right now. In fact, even if you're
watching this on a smartphone, surprisingly, you would
be able to set up a website on a smartphone. The problem with doing it on
your local computer though, is that if you go to sleep and you turn
your computer off, or if you have big
files on your website, as soon as someone
goes to access this while you're asleep
and your computer is off, your website is going to
show up as nonexistent. So essentially what a
hosting service is, is you're paying for space
on someone else's computer. And these are computers in companies that are
basically always on, connected to incredibly fast internet services and
are behind firewalls and other security measures to
try and stop you from getting hacked and help with those
general security problems. Basically, these are
experts on keeping those computers on your website
for that monitor online. And therefore, the
price that they will charge you for your
new simple website, it's definitely a lot
less than it would cost you to get not only high-speed Internet
access that has the kind of upload speeds you'd
need to host a website. But also the power that you
need to keep the computers alive and all the scaling
and everything else. It's incredibly complex
and therefore it's just easier to get a shared
hosting service. Now, there are plenty of these, much like the domain names. And again, named cheap is one of the services that I use
that has this built-in. And like I said,
if you're buying your domain name or name cheap, it's probably just
as easy to get your hosting their, likewise, if you're buying your
domain name on GoDaddy, just as easy to get
your hosting there. Now, there's a few
different types of hosting. You can buy theirs. As you can see, there is WordPress hosting
and shared hosting. Now, if this is
your first website and you've never
set one up before, then my advice would be to either go with the
cheapest stellar hosting, which you can see is
$1.68 a month or go over too easy wp.com if you feel like
doing even less work. And basically that is a
name cheap own service. And they will allow you to set up a website for free
for the first month, and then it's around
$5 a month after that, but it has even less options
for you to tweak with. So when we go into the next part which is
installing WordPress, you won't have to do
that because they will have already
done that for you. So basically what I
would say is when it comes to building
your website, deciding on your hosting, a lot of it comes down to, are you willing to pay
an extra few dollars and save yourself
an extra few hours? Or would you prefer to
maintain things yourself have a little bit more control and
save a few dollars as well. That's your decision. If you want to save time, but spend a little bit more, I would definitely
consider going to easy wp.com and just using one or they're simple and
easy to use setups. And then you can skip
ahead basically to the theme part of
this, this class. Or if you are the type of person wants to
have more control, save a little bit of money, and also host your email service and all that sort
of stuff on this. Then you can go
with something like stellar hosting and basically
scale those up over time. So actually, you don't even need to do that on name cheaper. You can see easy WP starter
688 a month, free to try. That is hosting. And when you set
up your hosting, you're gonna get an email
from the hosting supplier, or you'll be able
to just log in and directly access what's
called the C panel. So basically, I'm
not going to go from here to the C panel. The next class we're just
going to be in the C panel. So the reason I'm not
gonna do that is because if you're using GoDaddy
or a different service, then the C panel will be in a different location and therefore it would
confuse people. So basically what you do is once you've set up your hosting, just check the e-mail or
your dashboard on your host, and look for the word see panel. Every single shared
host has one. If you buy something like easy WP that doesn't
have a C panel, then basically what
you want to do is just go to WP admin. And in that case, you can
actually skip all the way ahead to theme and forget about
the installation section.
4. Installing Wordpress: Okay, so now you've
bought your hosting, or at the very least your
setup on a hosting service. And now we can go ahead
and install WordPress. Now, like I said,
if you've gotten a hosting service like easy WP, that doesn't have
a C panel and just directly brings
you to WordPress. You can skip this class
and go to the next one, because in this class
we're just going to be installing
WordPress and you're not actually going to
need that if you've already got a service that
just does not for you. So if you're one
of those people, I'll see you in the next class if you're not stick around. So now we're in our C panel and this is
what cPanel looks like. If it's an older version of C panel which some
hosts do still run, It's going to look exactly
the same, just older. I'm what I mean by
that is basically all of the functions
will still be there. So if you can't find
something I'm looking for, they usually have a
nice search function at the top and you can
just look through that. So in that case, we could type in WordPress, which
isn't here. Actually. We type in software. And you'll see things like
soft delicious ops installer, which may be the only
option you have. And underneath that on this
particular seat panel, there's the WordPress shortcuts. So on most of these there
will be a WordPress shortcut. If there's not, just go into the soft delicious
App Installer. And in there you'll
find WordPress. Then we click on
WordPress itself. We're going to install
a new instance. So as you can see, I've
got quite a few here, but I'm going to click
Install up the top. And in fact I'm going
to click quick install because you don't need to
do anything else right now. Now, what you're gonna do is if you've already bought
your domain name, which I would advise doing. Because if you haven't, you're gonna have to link
that up, like I said earlier. But once you've got
your domain name setup, then we can go and
basically just install WordPress
wherever we want. So in this case,
I'm going to pick, let's see, stats dot
we'll sports.com, which is just one
of my domain names. And I'm gonna put this as
Skillshare's that directory. Now where it says
directory there. I wouldn't fill that in if I was you because if you're
filling it in, then basically what
you're going to do is put it inside a folder
on your domain name. Whereas if this is your main website for that domain name, if you bought
Skillshare website.com and you just want that
to be the address. Then you don't need
to fill in directory. So then you can
basically go ahead and have a look at a couple
of these little settings. You don't really need to
mess with any of them. But you can change your admin
username and password here. So I'm going to
change this to admin and he'll share password. Extremely secure. And I'm going to leave these. So this is limit
login backup leap. I would say put that on, but I don't need it
because I'm going to delete this after I
finished the course. This is just for
you fine people. And then we're just going
to go and click Install. But before you do
that, if you do want the installation details that
have the logins and so on, or if you're doing
this for someone else, you can e-mail the
installation details so that the person has a link to login with the
details to login and so on. So now that's going to
go ahead and install and it'll take a
couple of moments. And then once it's done, it's going to give me
an address where I can login to the website, as you see here. So next, we're going to
go over to the login, the administrative
URL, which is here. And then you're just
going to login. Now, usually, if you've clicked that link from the install page, it'll bring you to the login
without needing to login. Basically. However, if it doesn't do that, just use the admin password and username that
you setup before. And now we're going
to get started. But what we're going to do
to make sure those people who skipped ahead
don't get left behind. We're going to stop this
particular section and go to the next one where
we decide on a theme. So hint, hint. I'll see you over there.
5. Designing the Website: So now we're gonna go ahead
and style are Bar website. And you should be in a
location that looks like this. Now, if you did go
through the W are easy WP root and decide not to go with
the shared hosting. And you skipped over
the last section. Basically, once you've set
up your account with them, you should see something
called WP admin or admin panel and that should bring you to the same location. If you can't find
this, just look on the email they sent you a link, or basically just type
in your domain name slash WP, WP hyphen admin. And it'll bring you to the
same location and you can login with the details
that they gave you. So now what we need to
do is install a theme. Basically, all the theme is, is the design of your website. Basically look and feel
of how it's going to be. And thankfully for
us by going to appearance on the
left-hand side here. And then themes, you're
going to find hundreds of themes by just
going up to the top here and hitting
that add new book. I'm once we hit Add New, you'll see that
there is a plethora of different designs that
you can choose from. But for the simplicity
of this and knowing that we're going to
set up a blog or magazine, I'm going to type
in Sinatra here. I'm going to click Install
on this Sinatra theme. Once it's installed,
I'm going to activate it because the natural
is just a really simple, easy one to use. Now, you can just
click customize on this and jump into the segment I'm
going to talk about. But in case you don't know
where to find this in future, if you click on the
name of your website, open the top-left corner, it will bring you
to your website which were more or
less look like this. It'll have nothing
on it at the moment. And then click
Customize from there. So those are the two locations
you can go to get to the customized menu
just in case you don't see one or you get lost. You can always just go
to your website while you're logged in and customize. And then we're going to change the settings and
look of our website and make it look a
little bit nicer because it doesn't look
great at the moment. So we can go into
General Settings and go through
things like layout. We can stretch out the look if you want
it to be full screen, you can box everything if you
want it to look more boxy. But we're going to leave it
with full-width contained because I think that looks nice. You can play around with it. You can also change
the container with. But don't worry about this looking too short
if you're thinking, Oh, I needed to look
good on my phone. Because the theme Sinatra automatically scales to
someone on a phone anyway. And you can see
that Bush, just by clicking down the bottom here, you'll see a little phone
icon and you can actually see what your website
will look on a phone. You could do that at any
time just by kicking those little icons down on the bottom left
there receive phone, web, and on tablet. So we're going to
leave that alone along with base
colors and so on, because I'll let you
play around with the colors for your own website. You'll see here you can see
things like the accent color, which is obviously this kind of color here, the highlights. And then you've got text,
color, background color. You can change all of
that and go crazy. But for the moment, we're just
going to set up the simple and easy to follow steps
to get you rockin. And then you can go nuts and
experiment all you want. Now the rest of these
things here are again, these are just about looks. And you can change these
to your heart's content. But instead, let's set up the
main things that you want. So e.g. you can
come into logos and Site Title and you can
click on Select logo. And if you have a logo, that is where you
will upload it. Now because this
isn't a design class. I'm not going to do that because while we haven't
designed a logo, but if you want a free
one, you can head over to canva.com, build one there. But let's just say the
site title that you set up when you're setting
up your website was wrong. And therefore we need
to change where it says my blog to Skill Share website. You can also display a tagline
under that if you want, just by switching this on. And you can switch them
around so you see that dropping and pumping up the top. And if you're wondering what site icon is underneath that, That's just the icon
that you see in the tub. So if you look up on the
different tabs here, as I'm clicking
through them, you'll see there's little icons. That's where you
would add your logo. If you want to change that, then you can go back
on go-to header. So this is one of the key areas that we need to change because the header is gonna be the same. All across your website. There's a thing called top bar, which basically is
just if you want to put like an announcement
at the top, That's just this
section up here. We don't need to do that for the moment, so
let's just skip on. And then we can go into groups, then we can go into main header. And then main header. You can basically just change it around the layout of where the menu buttons are on
the search button is. Or you can put it in
the middle like this. But I kinda like
the original style. I think it's nice and clean menu on the right with
the search icon, website title on the left. Obviously, if you don't want to search icon, if you're
building something else, you can just remove that from here on the left-hand
side as well. Then we want to go to
the main navigation. These are just
different menu items. Basically this here you can
set up the style of that, so that looks fine
for the moment. So we'll leave that alone. Page header. That is
just literally if you want to have like Well,
why would I explain that? That's if you want to have like a background image or title or something across
the top of each page. Again, I don't think we
need to do any of that. So in fact our title, our header is done. Now we just want to look at
one last section before we go to changing the way the
entire homepage looks. And that is the hero section
because this in Sinatra, it looks really, really cool. So all you need to do is
enable the hero section. And you can also specify a category which
I'll get to in a few and decide how many
posts you want here. So we can have up to four
posts that'll show up in this Hero category
in this block. And basically what that'll
do is have them as like the main articles or news items that people will see when they come
to your website. And I think it looks
really, really cool. We're going to turn that on. Then everything else
like sidebar and so on. We'll get to in a little
while and footer. Let's keep the foot or simple. So what we're gonna do
is we're going to turn off the main footer because we're going to
assume we don't need that. And that just gets rid of
that bar at the bottom. And the copyright bar, you can just put
whatever you want here. So e.g. we can get rid of the Sinatra theme part
on just that way. Now we have a nice clean looking
site with nothing on it. And the last thing we
need to do is go to homepage settings and
click either static page, which will give you
something like this, or your latest posts. So if you're going
to be just posting a normal blog,
then you're doing, you can basically just
change whatever you want and start posting
your different posts, which we'll get to
the next section. However, if you want
to specifically designed this page to
look however you want, that's where you would
change it to a static page. You can add a new page, e.g. we could call this
new page home. And that way you've
got a static page that shows up instead. And now we've got this
section here blank, as you can see,
which basically is where we're going to
fill everything in. But if you do that static page and you want to get
rid of the sidebar, that's where we would go
back to the sidebar section, go down to page
and we would say, I don't want any
sidebar on page. And now we have a
nice blank section. I think now our website
is ready to fill up with content, which is great. Now we have this nice,
simple and sleek, clean design with nothing on it. And obviously you can change
the colors, the logo, and everything as
you've just seen, which you've already
got just this nice clean blog setup,
which is great. So we're going to hit
publish on that because we want to save all the stuff
that we've just done. Next, we're going to set
up some posts and pages, which are basically where
you fill in all the content. So let's do that.
6. Building Your Website: Then we're gonna fill
in some posts pages. So what we're gonna do
is go to the backend, once again the dashboard, and we're gonna go to posts and wait a minute, you
might be asking, what is the difference between
a post on a page that's important just to distinguish before we go on to this section, because they are two
very different things, but actually when you're
creating them in WordPress, they look very similar. So essentially the
difference is a post is like an article or a
blog post, a piece of news, something that you
create very quickly with no styling or no editing to it because they
all look the same. The only thing that
changes is perhaps the images and the writing
that you put into them. A page is something more static. So a page would be
where you'd put your contact
information, your e.g. your about us, or if you're writing something
that's going to stay the same. So pages are for static
information that doesn't change. Whereas posts are your articles, blog posts and news. So just remember that a page is one piece of static information
that you'd never change. And a post is an article that you add to a group
of other posts. So that's the only
difference there. So let's jump back in. And in the back here, you'll
actually see posts pages. Now there's already
this hello world post. So let's add a couple more. So let's call this
one Skillshare. Welcome. And in here, I'm just
going to write blah, blah, blah, blah, because
it doesn't really matter. I'm going to copy this. Almost copied my
Skillshare password. I'm just going to
copy this repeatedly. So we get this nice article that is just blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. But what we need to do now is
decide on an image for it. Let's see, maybe we'll just use a nice simple image
like this one, which is just the
cover for this course. Of course, if you're posting a post yourself posting a post, then you'll have your own image. And this is where you add. It. Might take a minute
because that skill share over that I
have is quite big, but it's not even a coverts, a screenshot of the course. Anyway, I'm very
prepared, as you can see, now that your featured
images there, you can also decide any author which is likely going to be you. And it finally, you're
going to want to select a category for your post. Now when you're creating a page, you won't have a category
or a featured image. These are only four posts. So we're going to add a new
category and I'm going to call this latest news. And I'm going to
add that category. And you know what? I
know, I'm going to do some stuff about Skillshare. So I'm going to call another
category Skillshare. Add up. I know I'm going to do some
stuff about WordPress. I'm going to create another
category called WordPress. And I also know that
I'm going to write some articles about
hosting on domains. So I'm going to create
another category called hosting and domains. But now this particular article
is only about Skillshare. So I'm going to
uncheck all of these. And I think this is ready, this looks really, really good. So let's publish this article. And now I can view that post and it will come
up on my website. Well, cool look. And here's my really slow
to load cover image, which is, as it turns out, absolutely enormous
of me looking shocked at how enormous it is. And then underneath
you can see my blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a
comment section for people to comment
and leave a reply. So now we can go back to my Skillshare website and
you'll see that look, wow, see where this
hero page is coming up. And this looks
really, really cool, but there should
be more to this. And also this menu doesn't
make sense now because, well, I've added some categories of different types of
posts I'm gonna be doing. So what we're gonna do
instead is hover over the Skillshare website at
the top and hit menus. Now we've got the menu
that was installed by Sinatra on this sample page. Well, this can go away. The homepage, I want
to be linked up there. But instead they can
click on my categories. You all, and then put in the categories that I'm
going to be writing about. So now we're going
to put latest news first because that's where
the latest news is gonna go. Skillshare second,
WordPress third, and hosting and domains last. And you know what? Because I like
Skillshare so much. I'm going to put in
something like join Skillshare and a link
to Skillshare itself. And we're going to
add that to the menu. And they all that's
there as well. And we can create that menu. Or if you've already created
it, you can hit Save. And we just want to
make sure that this is the primary navigation
going forward. So now when we go
back to our website, we've got this lovely menu of the tub full of all of
the different things. And if I click
Skillshare, I'll look, there's my one post
on Skillshare. So the other problem is
there's nothing down here. So we can click edit page
because the homepage is a page. Now interestingly, in Sinatra, you can actually hit a
featured image for a page, but it doesn't do anything. So I wouldn't bother. The only reason it's
there is if you're to share a specific page on say, Facebook or Twitter, it will display that image
as the preview. Otherwise, it'll just pull whatever images inside the page. But I want to add some text to my page
on my homepage here. And I'm gonna say
welcome to my new blog, all about things
to do with stuff. And I'm going to pop that
in there and we're going to maybe Center that as well. I'm going to update that. So we've just fixed our page. Now we can see on our homepage, we've got welcomed new blog, all the things to do with stuff. So now we can add three
more posts if you want to, and we'd have a full
four posts across here. But then what happens
if we hit a fifth post? Well, the fifth posts
will be in these pages, but we wanted on our homepage. And we could do that by very simply just going back into Edit of the homepage and clicking this plug-in or
this plus button. And hitting something
like, I don't know, posts and put it in
a list of posts. And we can decide on these ones. We can change it to
a grid like this. It doesn't look great, does it? We could, you know, whatever way we do it That's
just doesn't look brilliant. So what we're gonna do
instead is we're going to go over to Plugins back
on our dashboard here. And we're going to go to add. Add plugins are essentially
just ways of adding new functionality to
your WordPress website to allow you to do things that the website can't do already. We're gonna use
something called post x. So these are called
post-tax Gutenberg post, and this is a free plugin. Again, there are pro options
but we don't need them. And we're going to activate. What's great about this is we go through and basically
we can say, Yeah, that's fine next, don't want any of these things go away. Next. Next, we don't need
any of these features. No, thank you. And don't nail that's installed. And we can go back to our pages. We can go to edit
page of our homepage. Once again. Now when we hit the Plus, we can type in posts
and nothing comes up, so we hit Browse all. And here we have these
lovely posX designs. We can hit say, e.g. post grid and we
can pop that in. And as you can see, it will allow you to put
cool different designs in. And we can add
another post grid, let's say underneath
perhaps this one. So now we've got these
different post grids and we can go into the first one and we can just change
some simple items here. So I don't want that heading
that says post grid six. I also don't want the excerpt which shows the
blah, blah, blah. And I don't want it to
show the category either. So I just want it nice
and clean like this. I also only want in this
piece to show the category, let's say Latest News. Oh, I need to add
posts for that, sorry. So I only want this one
to show Skillshare hosts. So the uncategorized has gone. Now as you add more posts, you can obviously in your
next one's, decide to e.g. going to query builder and add, I don't know, like
Latest News here, e.g. once you've added some posts, you can also decide on
how many posts you want. You can have up to 100. And as the page scrolls down, it'll automatically
put in a next, next, next so people
can scroll through. So you can change
that however you want and play with
the Query Builder here to basically put in whatever types
of posts you want. Then when you go back
to your homepage, it's all nicely set up. So now we've got our
homepage where all of our posts are going to be as
we build out our website. Perhaps some texts, some pictures that we want
just on the homepage. And on top of that, we've now got our menus
as well that we can hit Skillshare and
come into these. And finally, if
you do want to add stuff to this right-hand
side sidebar, instead of just turning it off, like I showed you in Customizer, all you do is go up to the
top here, click widgets. And you can decide what
you want on the left here. So I don't want this
recent comments section. I think it looks tacky. We're gonna remove that. I also don't all
leave recent posts, so I'm happy enough with that. Let's just go back to our
website now click into one of the posts or as
clicking the Skillshare. As you can see, it's gone so you can edit that to your
heart's content. So now you actually have
a website that works. And if you wanted to, you
could just start adding posts and tweaking those
customizer settings. And you're done,
you're ready to go. However, there are
a few other things you can add to your website to make it even flashier,
better, like contacts. And including things
like allowing people to find it on Google easier
as well as security. And we're gonna go through
those in the next sections. So if you want to add
those to your website, then follow along on the
next piece of the class.
7. Extra - Contact Forms: So one of the other
things that you'll probably want to add
to your website is a way for people to get in
touch with you because that is something that most businesses
and most portfolios, even news sites have the way
for someone to contact you. And it makes sense because
if you're going to be publicly putting
yourself out there, it's usually because you want to get some inbound marketing or perhaps you just
want people to contact you to write
for them or otherwise. So in order to do that, we're going to add a new
plugin called contact forms. And if we're on our
website here we go back into our dashboard by just
clicking up the top there. We want to go to plugins and
we wanted to go to Add New. And then we go to the
search box over on the right-hand side and
we're going to type in contact and you'll
find contact form. So first of all, you install contact form seven and then you
want to activate it. And before you do
anything else, go back to Add New again. And this is something
you don't have to do, but I highly recommend it is to type in contact form database. Once that loads up, you'll find this one here. Contact Form seven database
add on CBD, be CFD B7. And you're going
to want to install and activate that as well. And then you can basically
just forget about that piece. The reason you do that is if your email address ever goes down or if there's a problem
between the hosting, connecting to your
email or sending an email and someone fills in a contact form and they say they've sent you
something. I needed to get it. Basically on the
left-hand side here, you'll be able to click
into contact forms and find all of the submissions
on their details. And that way you'll
never lose anything. You don't have to do it. But
I would highly recommend. Then we're gonna go to Contact up on the left-hand side there, and there's already
a contact form here. Obviously, you can add
a new one anytime, but for our purposes, we're
just going to use this one. And we're gonna go into edit. I have a quick look and
see what it looks like. So you can see that it has name, e-mail, subject, a message. You know what, that's fine. Obviously, you can
change this around and you can add in things like phone number and so on. There's phone number, email, an additional e-mails, sorry, a URL to their website, maybe a date if you want them to put in something
that they're booking, all those types of things. And then basically that's what it's gonna do is
it's going to mail to whatever email address
you setup at the start of your website if you
want to change that to, I don't know, admin
Skill Share website.com. Then you fill that
in there and that way it'll email whatever they fill in on the form
to that new address. Once you've done that,
you just basically save the form and then
you go to pages. What you're going to want to
do then is click Add New. And we're going to type in, Contact Us at the top. Or this could be get in touch or whatever
you want it to be, then you're going to have plus
and type in contact form. Here it is, Contact
Form seven kilometer. And then I'm going
to hit Contact Form one because that's the
only contact form I have. And then we're going
to hit publish them. So now we can view that page. And there we go. That's it done. But how does someone
find that page? Well, we're just
gonna go to menus. And once menu loads, then we can find here most recent under pages
get in touch page. And we're going to
pop that up here. I don't want the page to be called get and
touch on the menu. I just wanted to
be called contact. I'm gonna change
that name, hit Save. Then want to go back to
my shiny new website. He contacts. And there you have
your contact form. And obviously if you want
to change any of this, you can hit the Edit page and you can add maybe
a paragraph here. Or if you want to have that to one side and maybe some
information on the other, you can hit column 5050. And we can drag this into here. So that's on one side
and on the other side with a paragraph, blah, blah. And we'll update that again. Go back to View page. And now you have your contact
or your information on the left and your website
contact form on the right. Couldn't be simpler. Well, it could be, but it isn't. So that's as simple
as it gets moving on.
8. Extra - Google SEO Made Easy: Now the next thing you're going to want to do at your website is likely allow people to
find you in Google. And there are services that
will charge you anywhere from hundreds to thousands
of dollars a month to do all of this for you. The good news is
though, that you don't actually need to do
that if you're just setting up a news website or a blog like we've
just discussed. And the reason for
that is Google, his very, very good
at indexing stuff. As long as you give it
the base information, you'll be ahead of 90%
of the competition. So if you're setting up your
proper business and you want to get that edge over a
really competitive niche, then sure, you could use
one of those services. But for most of us,
it's unnecessary. And instead we're just going
to like our contact form. Use a nice simple plugin
to allow us to do it. So we're going to hop
back over to our website, go back into our dashboard, and go down to plug-ins. Here, we're going to go
and look for something called toast with a y or Yost. And once we get Yoast, we'll see adhere Yoast SEO. And we're going to just do
an install and activate. Then once that happens, we're going to go
back to our posts. And we'll go into my
Skillshare welcome post. And you'll see that
now there will be a couple of new
little bits in here that tell us what's going
on with this in terms of it being good for Google. So we've got first of all, these traffic lights at the
top and at the side here. And it tells me that the
readability analysis is good. Basically this is
quite readable. I imagine it is because
it just says blah, blah. But more importantly,
our SEO is red. And that's probably because I'm going to assume that they're
looking at this and saying, Well, he said Skillshare, unwelcome, and then
his whole article just says, blah, blah, blah. So instead what we're gonna
do is type in our key phrase. And all that is is if you're
writing an article e.g. about pottery, and then your
key phrase could be pottery. If you're writing something about gardening, there
could be gardening. If you're writing something
specifically about palm trees in gardening, then you could put in
palm tree gardening, e.g. the idea is whatever
you think roughly, someone will search for the
main keywords of that search or if they type in how
to garden effectively, your key phrase would
be effective gardening. So basically you want
to fill that in. And then Yoast SEO
is going to give you some tips around
what you should do. So first things first,
you're going to want to just make sure
this looks okay here. And obviously it
doesn't look okay because there's no
meta-description. So as you can see, this is
what someone will see in Google and it says please
provide a meta-description. So in here I'm just going
to put blah, blah, blah. Because that's what
this post is about. Now it says it's too long, so I'm going to cut
this down as best I can until it gives
me a nice green bar. So it's a little bit happier now it's not red, it's orange, but it seems to have a lot of different things
that it wants me to do. Right here. If you click on SEO analysis, it'll tell you what
it wants to change. So it will say you haven't got any links to other websites
which Google loves. You haven't got any links to anywhere else on your website, your own website
which Google loves. So I can easily add those. The key phrase, the Skillshare welcome or Skillshare key
phrase that I put in. It doesn't seem to be in my first paragraph because my paragraph is just
blah, blah, blah. What I could do is
just go as baba, blah, blah, blah,
blah, Skillshare. Or I could spell
Skillshare correctly. First of all, Skillshare,
blah-blah-blah. And on top of that, I
can put that in here. Now it's decided, okay, well, there you go. Those two things are gone. And it's going to be
a little bit happier, but it's still saying
there's a few issues. So I've only got 123
words and it's saying google likes things that
are 300 words and above. So instead we're going
to continue on here. And now we're got
300 words or above. So we're up, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. Now a key phrase density
that seems like Skillshare can only be found one
time in this post. And it says that posts around this size generally
have a twice. So I'll just pop
it in there twice. And now we have
everything we need. And as you can see,
it's now green. Of course, our readability
analysis has now gone down because our poster says blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. But you can also look
through why your readability is down in these
different sections. Further down the page, you'll find everything
you need in terms of readability because we haven't
got subheading Paragraph, land, land, our sentence
length and so on. But basically all your objective is try and get as
many of your posts. It'd be green on SEO and at
least orange on readability, if not green as well. I'm by following that, if you literally
just make sure that your posts are green, in terms of SEO, you'll be better off than
90% of your competitors. And trust me on this, I didn't believe it until I made a few different
websites that now rank on the first page of Google without any more SEO than that, all I did was add my
post every week and just make sure that the SEO
analysis is green. And it's a simple way
for you to be an expert in your field without being
an expert in your field. Moving on.
9. Extra - Security & Cookies: Now one last thing that
you're going to want to look at when it comes to your
website is security. And the reason for that
is there are a lot of bad people out there who
like to hike websites. And especially if
you do later on, add say a shop to this website, or you're getting contact information
from anybody important, it's a good idea
to have some sort of security on your website. That doesn't need to
be rocket science. Now, if you're making
a website with government information
and so on, then you're going to
want to make sure that you have more security. Don't we just talked about but let's go through a couple of things that will
just make sure that your website is secure. Not only from hackers, but also from legal
problems as well. Just by doing a couple
of simple things. Now, obviously, when
I say legal problems, this isn't going to cover
you over everything. If you need legal advice, go get proper legal advice. I'm not offering that. But what I am saying is there
are things like GDPR and cookies that you
just need to install a couple of plug-ins
and make sure that people are aware of. So let's jump into
the backend once again and install those plugins. So obviously, as you're
probably aware by now, we're going to go to
plug-ins here on the left. And whenever it loads and I
stop having this itchy nose, we're gonna go to Add New. And first things. First, we need to just make sure if anyone
visits the website, their privacy and cookies
aren't a problem. Because as you may be aware in certain places like Europe, well the EU specifically
and California, you do need to have some sort of cookie policy acceptance
on your website. And this just means that
people can basically say yes to any sort of tracking. Now luckily, we haven't added any sort of tracking
into our website. But we do need to have these
bars in just a standard. So we're better off just
adding them right now. So we've installed GDPR. And I just realized if you
just search GDPR here in this, we can install one
of these plugins. And the one that I just
installed there is this cookie. Yes. There are a tone of these, but basically that's
the one that I use, the easiest one to set up. Then we go over to
the left-hand side here we'll see cookie
yes, on the left. And all basically we
want to do now is we can customize the banner and
just make sure it's active. And click Banner preview and
you'll see it come up here. Now this is worldwide
so we can hit EU countries and select different countries
if you pay for the for the pro version. But for right now we can just
use this content template. And depending on if you're
targeting primarily America are primarily
the you decide on CCPA, which is for California, and then GDPR, which
is for all of you. And then you get
this nice bar here. And you can obviously
then go through an ad policies and so on if you want to
go more into that, but this just covers
you for cookies. But cookie, yes, those have
things like privacy policy, cookie policy
generator if you don't have one and all those
sorts of things, I'm not gonna go
through that in this, but basically you can
do it on all there. But that's just basically
means now that when we go to our website or anyone
goes to our website, you will see this nice
little cookie privacy up here and someone
can hit accept all, and they can obviously
change it at any point. And not only will it
cover you from just making sure you have that
simple thing in place? It's also going to make your website just let that
little bit more professional, give people that little
bit of an ease of mind that you know what
you're talking about, you know what you're doing. So it's a nice way to add value. Now, the next thing
we're gonna wanna do, and this is more for
actual security, is go back to plugins
and hit Add New. And then you're going
to go into go to word fence and hit Install Now. And then finally activate. And then you can get
your WordPress license, which is absolutely free. It's going to take
you to wordpress.com and basically just give
you a free license. Now I don't want that. And you can put in your admin at Skill Share website.com,
blah, blah, blah. And basically what they're
going to do then is give you access to a licensed
they'll email you, base your license code. And then once you go
back to WordPress here on the left-hand side,
back on your website. You'll be able to resume
the installation. Once you've done that,
then you're done. All it is doing
basically is it installs a scanner that checks for any
malicious files that people might somehow get into your
website and also sets up a firewall to block
people from e.g. trying to guess your password
and that kind of thing. So that is just some
simple additions that will make sure that your
website is not only secure, but also has a cookie
policy which like I said, adds professionalism,
but it's also a requirement in both
California and the EU. So make sure you have
that setup correctly. And well now we can move on.
10. Project & My Thanks!: Congratulations, you've
finished the class. How epic is that? If you've gone through this
class, you will have seen, you'd be able to set
up your website for everything you basically
need in around 30 min. Less if you just follow the basic steps and
possibly a little bit more if you decided to go through the sprinkled extras at the end. And I would advise that you go through those
anyway because they only take a few minutes
and they'll take away infinite amounts
of headaches, as well as just gives you some nice extra features including making sure
you show up in Google. But thank you so much for
watching this course, this class here on Skillshare. And you can of
course, head over to the project for this class. And basically in there, you're going to send
a link if you'd like, to your website or send us a
screenshot of your website. And I'll try and give feedback on as many of them as I can. Thank you so much for
watching this class. I've really enjoyed
being your instructor, which is a strange word.
Jason Hassett, Entrepreneur, Author & Developer
