Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, My name's Rob Coven. I've been running a Web and graphic design business for 10 years, specializing in content marketing, WordPress and email marketing. WordPress is the most successful content management system for websites out there today. With WordPress, you can build a site in for five minutes with no prior experience, and WordPress could be scaled to power some of the biggest websites in the world. Now I want to take you back over 10 years ago to 2005 where I was working in London in an office for somebody else doing very menial type setting work. This is what I thought I had to do from the age of 18 to the age of 65 or whatever work for somebody else in an office. Somebody came up to me in that office and suggested that I use WordPress on my website. He knew I'd been struggling, creating Web pages with static. HTML. I did so on that one piece of advice from that guy in that office in London in 2005 set me on a path where I created my own business, left work two years later, and now it's a six figure business, which I run from anywhere around the world. I'm actually in Thailand at the moment, looking at some beautiful green hills, with some shining on them in Chiang Mai. But it's not just me who's created a business from WordPress. WordPress is free and open source. Nobody has actually been paid for creating it directly. However, it's spawned literally tens and thousands of viable businesses. People who create plug ins and themes for WordPress, people who use WordPress as a Web design and development toe, or people who power their website with WordPress, which contributes to their new business. Now WordPress is running over 25% of Web sites on the Web. We think that's an amazing number of people who use WordPress, so it's very important to get to know it. It's very easy on Dive started these lectures at a very, very basic level, where I'm going through the administration section and the links on the left hand side in WordPress. Very easy stuff. Later on, I'm just creating a website in front of your eyes. You can do it with me, create pages, menus, sidebars, footers, changing the theme, changing the look of the website, adding plug ins to add functionality. WordPress could be used for just about any type of website where press really is a great one simple tool with an incredibly supportive and helpful community around it. My name's Rob Coven. I'll see in the next video, huh?
2. Wordpress Intro With PDF: Hello, This is Rob coming here. Welcome to my introductory course on WordPress. This is the free pdf that I'm giving away with the course, which contains some basic information and resources and definitions about WordPress. So let's start by talking about what we're not going to talk about in the course. We're not gonna talk about the free hosting service at wordpress dot com. That is not a great way of using WordPress. It's free, but you don't get hardly any of the functionality that WordPress can give you. So the whole of the course is about having a self hosted wordpress dot org's installation. And I'll tell you how to do that now. In order to do that, you need a domain name. Now, if you haven't done this already, then you can go to services like Leaned. A main search dot com on Go find some dot coms that haven't been taken yet on here. Some suggestions of places where you can register a domain name, name cheap. 123 Reg and Go Daddy. Those links in this pdf are affiliate links moving on. You also need web hosting, and if you're just starting out, you haven't got Web hosting. I would recommend companies like Blue Host or hosts Gator for some shared hosting plans. You can use a coupon rob cup in 25 there to get 25% off. These are affiliate links. Going forward, you may want to have a virtual private server or a managed hosting set up, and you can do that at sites like Site, Ground or Liquid Web. So you need domain name registration and hosting to get WordPress to work. One point here, if you haven't done it already, is to point in the name servers at the domain name registrar to your hosting service that connects the two up. And once you've done that, you're ready to install WordPress. I show you in the course houses. Install WordPress with one click, but also how to install it manually, which is the process I would recommend for installation. In order to do this, you need to remember to do three things at your host. You have to create a my sequel database on my sequel, user name and password, and add the user to the database and copy all those details and then you're ready to install WordPress manually, but I'll be showing you this in a later video. So quick. Definition of WordPress. What is WordPress? It's a content management system, or it's an easy way to create websites. Now WordPress has its fair share off. Technical terminology is first of all, widget. What is a WordPress? Widget? Widgets add content and features two sidebars and other widget sized areas to bring a drag and drop functionality to website building plug ins. One of plug ins plug ins are ways to extend the functionality off WordPress. It's just about anything that you want to do with. The website will probably exist in the form of a plug in, so it adds the ability to do something to the WordPress core software and themes. What a WordPress themes. Well, a theme is a collection of files that produced the design or the skin of the website, so it's really about design. It can include a little bit of functionality as well, especially when you go on to the commercial themes. So great places to find free plug ins and free themes are at wordpress dot org's slash plug ins or slash themes. I advocate using premium themes Noel the time in the course, I'll be only using free themes, but if you use any sort of theme, it's always good to create a child theme. A child theme would sit on top off a framework on, then it doesn't have to be updated. You can update the theme framework when WordPress updates, but you can leave your child theme untouched, which really future proves your installation. And the way I do that is with magazine pro on my website, which sits up on top off the Genesis theme framework, which is a really good, solid, cheap option. I'm not saying that you must use it this way. Far from it, there are plenty of other free and premium themes available. I'm just saying this is the best solution I found. And here us, um, other premium theme shops for WordPress thesis. Elegant themes on GWU themes. Okay, go to gravitate our dot com onda. Upload your photo, then you'll see your photo. Are any comment you leave on your website or anyone Else's website Now one of WordPress is many advantages. Its its ability to attract search engine traffic because it's quite well optimized for search engines straight out of the box. And there other things you can do to improve this. Now what a keywords. Keywords of what people type into Google when they're looking for something. So we talk a lot about keywords in the course, as this is an important part off Web publishing. And further to this, what is S E O S e o stands for search engine optimization on what people are talking about when something is good or bad for ASIO, it's good or bad for Google. Basically, there's two parts of S E O on site search engine optimization. An off site search engine optimization will be concentrating in the on site S CEO in this course. Now, your theme will be used to make your website look great. But you really have to think about design all the way through Using your website and an important part of design is to use great large images. And here are some suggestions of free and played places where you can get good images for your Web articles. An important part off using images is toe optimize them correctly for the web when you use them. This is good for s e o good for Google and good for your visitors so they don't have to wait ages for the pages to load. Andi. Here are some websites where you can optimize and edit images. Now, in the course, I basically tell you how to do everything yourself, but as ever were all very busy. So it's good idea sometimes to outsource some work that you don't do very well yourself. Now, design might be an example of this. So if you want to outsource design work, you can goto up work or 99 designs. If you want to outsource development work, you can try up work or any of the other freelancers sites. But if you're doing your logo, here is some text that I provide that you should paste into the brief to your designer That will help you with that. Lastly, a word on WordPress security. There's lots to talk about here, but two of the best pieces of advice where, as far as security is concerned, is to remember to regularly change a strong, hard to remember password and keep your WordPress install the WordPress theme and the WordPress plug ins you're using all updated regularly to their most recent versions. OK, my name's Rob. Come and I really hope you enjoy the course. If you have any questions, just put by and say hello to me. I could be found at Rob Covenant all the places around the Web. And if you want copies of my free e books and MP threes, you can go to rob. Come on dot com slash free and find them there. Hope you enjoy this course I'll see in the next video, huh?
3. A WordPress Hosting Environment: Hello, It's Rob coming here. I'm first going to show you a little bit about the hosting environment we have for a WordPress site. Have a client here who has a domain. Some alvarez dot com. She has that domain pointing towards her blue host hosting account. Andi, At the moment, this is what we can see. It's a just a holding page. So it's just been set up on DNA. Things been done to it. I'll show you the hosting in the back end. Now it doesn't matter what host you use, whether it's blue, host, host, gator or whatever. So we've looked in and all hosts will look a little bit different. But one way that they are similar is that many hosts use the sea power. So here is the C panel. There will be similarities. So you have the headings here for website email domains files statistics. Now it might look a little bit overwhelming, but the good news is there's very little we need to do here. But let me show you something. If we scroll down a bit, I'm gonna go to file manager. And if you go too far manager on your C panel, you may see something very similar. It will also be the same if you're using an FTP program to access your files remotely. This is your folder on the hosting provider that you've paid for its very often that all your website Fars are stored in the public HTML folder. So we'll open that on in there if you see folders like WP ADMIN WP content WP includes these air the WordPress files that make WordPress work, and there's WP hyphen dot PHP files as well. That usually means that you have installed WordPress. Now the reason for this is because there is already ready a website on this hosting and we're actually going to set up the sam alvarez dot com sites in an ad on domain and that has a folder here. So that's where the files for this website will go. So that's what we've got at the moment. Andi thes fars are only the fars used to set up this holding page at the moment, So basically, we're starting with a clean slate here, but the first thing I'm gonna do is go back to see panel Andi set up WordPress with a one click in store, huh?
4. Installing Wordpress With One Click Through Cpanel: Okay, so we're in Blue House now, and we're going Teoh, install WordPress The easy way, the one click way, which is not the way I recommend. But if you want to do it like this, it's perfectly fine. So that's log in and know we're logged into our account. Blue Host. Let's never gate towards see panel. And here is the sea pedal on our blue host hosting account. It's very likely that you'll have a C panel on your hosting account. If you do, it might look different to this. It will have icons and different sections for the icons. But what I want you to look for is WordPress one click install. But on this particular case, it's right at the top. Here, we've got one click installs. We've also got install WordPress. I shouldn't think it matters Which one you click. Okay, so we've gone into one click installs, and here you can see you can install all sorts of content management systems, not just WordPress, but we're going to click on WordPress. And version 4.5 is the most recent your offered services that will cost you money to do it . But of course, we're not gonna do that. We're going to install for free here. Now you have to select the domain you want to install WordPress on. And obviously that will depend on the domains that you have pointing to the hosting account you have. You have, ah option to put that into a directory so you could push it into your domain dot com forward slash blawg if you wanted to. But we're gonna leave that blank because we're going. Teoh, install WordPress on the domain. So WordPress does everything when you arrive at that home page on the domain. Okay, so we've checked the domain. Everything's already to go. We've read the terms and conditions. I wanna check. Show advanced options there. Now, here. You don't need to name this here at the moment. You can if you want, but you'll be able to change that in the WordPress settings. Anyway, Now, this user name and password, they've generated the user name of Gmail. I would advice you very definitely to change that into something the only you would remember. And there's the password. This information, the use made man password is incredibly important. This is some information that you don't want anyone getting their hands on in the password on the user name should be very difficult to remember. I'm showing you these because I am going to delete this install after I finished installing it and start again. If you see the admin user name and password, then you must take a copy off them. So I've copied those Andi install now. Now it says the install is underway there and along goes that green Progress bar and it really shouldn't take too long. They're trying to sell you themes here. I would ignore all of that because we'll be showing you how, sir Add your themes and how to use free themes later on in the course. And now it's saying the installers complete. So here is the website that we installed WordPress on. And remember, we had a Blue Host holding page. Let's refresh and it's actually installed. Ah, holding page. This is another reason why I don't like doing one click installs. They installed all sorts of stuff that you don't need. I'm gonna commercial control, click on admin, log in and this is logging into the back end. You can always look into the WordPress back end by adding WP log in dot PHP onto the end of your remained. You can also go WP hyphen admin. But in the user name and password, we're gonna paste the user name and password that we specified just before we did the one click install. We've just pasted them in. That's log in. Andi, this is the back end off the WordPress website and a wordpress websites will look similar to this right at the top. There, you can see you are currently displaying a coming soon page. Once you're ready to launch your site, click here. Well, I'm gonna do that now so I can show you what wordpress looks like properly when you install it manually. So now we'll refresh this page again. And this is more what you're likely to see when you first install WordPress on your site. And it's as you can see, a very blank template with one post called Hello World. And there's one page as well, which we can't see at the moment. But it is very little on it, but this is the basics of WordPress, and we've got a task bar at the top here, which I'll talk to you about as well. But the point is, it's a very empty sites. Now many people get hung up about putting a holding page for their sights, thinking that it's unprofessional to show a site like this that's half finished or not even started. I disagree, because the point of website says that nobody will ever come to this website until it starts toe have some decent content on it. So I really don't worry about putting up holding pages. But if you wanted to put up a holding page, you could find a plug in to do it for you. Now we'll be talking about plug ins later. But let's just go straight to plug ins now because there's a few things I want to show you . First, let me explain what a plug in is. A plug in is another piece of software that somebody has written toe. Add functionality to WordPress on WordPress has tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of plug hints that people have written. Most of them are free to use, and some of them are incredibly helpful, and some of them you have to pay to use. But the to plug ins that come with WordPress are only the top two, a kismet, which protects you against Spam and Hello, Dolly! Which actually doesn't do anything particularly useful. It just generates some lyrics from a famous song sung by Louis Armstrong on the back end. But then the creators of WordPress were big jazz fans. However, the next to plug ins, you see these air to plug ins that blue hosts has added. One is murder Marketplace, which is something that will get you to buy widgets and themes and plug ins, which you don't really need. You can quite easily make your mind up on that sort of thing yourself by googling them or going to the WordPress site, where you'll find plug ins and themes, and Jake Pack by wordpress dot com, which is a very powerful plug in and a very useful plug in. But it also might make your site work slower because it's very memory intensive, so I'm gonna get rid of those two by selecting them both with the check boxes to the left. There. Andi, you can't delete an activated part in, so you'll have to deactivate them first and now you see there deactivated, they've got a sort of white background instead of the blue background, and now we're going toe delete the plug ins. So if you did want toe install WordPress with one click, I would advise you to delete extra plug ins that added with it. The whole problem with one click installs is that they do tend to add little extras that may well be a security weakness in your sights. Going forward, WordPress is a very solid system. It's updated four times a year on average, and it has a huge great community testing the newest versions to make sure that they are as secure as they can be. However, the plug ins and themes that you add onto it if they are less common and less famous than they will, of course, be less secure. So I would be very careful with one click installs. For that reason. In the next video, I will show you how to install WordPress manually. My name's Rob Coven. I'll look forward to that
5. How To Manually Install WordPress – Recommended: Oh, this is Rob coming here today. We're going to do something amazing. We're gonna install WordPress manually on ah, host. It's very easy. It's free. You only need to pay for the host in the domain name, so let's get going Here we are on C panel and I want you to look for my SQL or my sequel databases because there are three or four things you need to do in order to install WordPress manually. And it's very easy. You have to create a my SQL or my sequel database a user name and password and add the user to the database. That's all you need to do. Onda WordPress will do the rest. So here we are on the scene panel on. We're looking for data basis on here. We have database tools on Remember, we're looking for my SQL was in my sq a wizard here on my SQL databases. I'm gonna click on my SQL databases on Dhere. We can clearly see how we can create a new database. You simply put a name in there and click, create database. But remember, you've got to keep a record of all of this. So let's put in a name. And again, this information is extremely sensitive. So really be careful with it. Now have a look there. There is a prefix to this database. You need to copy that as well, because the name of this new database will be this prefix followed by the name we've given it. So I've copied that, and I'm gonna click, create database. Okay, that's all done. And there's the name of the database there, so we'll go back now. We need to create a user with a password, and here I'm gonna paste in the password that has upper another case and numbers in it. And it's very strong, Which is good. Said no. I'm ready to create that user. And I have copied down the password and the user name with the prefix, create a user. So we've created that user. We go back. One more thing to do. Add user to database. There's the user. There's the database ad. All privileges make changes. And now we've done it. That's all we need to do on the my SQL databases section off the sea paddle. But now we need to download WordPress files and upload them to the server. So we go to work, press the AWG, and here you will find lots of useful information that themes repository or repo the plug ins repository or reap her support. Absolutely amazing support forums. As long as you are detailed with your explanation for the issue you're having, then it's fantastic. But we're just gonna download the software now. Andi, it's eight make. So we're gonna download the most recent version of WordPress. Okay, so WordPress has finished downloading. This is the far we get. It's wordpress hyphen 4.5 dot zip, And that will be if you're watching this video later on, It may be WordPress 4.5 point $5 it or something like that. But don't worry, it's all the same. We open that zip, and that's double click on the Mac. You might have to right click and open or extract on a PC. And in WordPress here, you'll see the files we've seen them before. In another video, they are WP content. WP includes WP admin folders and a lot of PHP files, starting with WP hyphen. Also index dot PHP file. Now all of this needs to go up onto the folder where your hostess. And to do that, we need to go back on to see panel on on C panel. We need to look for file manager and there it is, under files. Now what you can do is go into FTP manager and set up an FTP account, which then you may access via an FTP client Such a xfiles illah. Now, if you're uploading a lot of Fars a lot of times, then that's quite a good idea to do that. It's a little bit quicker, and it means you don't have to go into see panel the time toe upload and download files to your website, however, were probably only going to be doing this the one time Andi. After this point, WordPress will handle or file uploads and downloads for us, so I'm gonna do it by a final manager. And here is the file manager that you will see for your website. It will probably be quite similar, although you won't see exactly the same folders, but usually the files of your website could be found in public. Underscore html. Sometimes it's called html docks or something like that. If you go in there, you will then see the files off your website. And if you have wordpress install, you'll see those far folders. There's free folders that we talked about another, those other files as well. Now, that's because we already have WordPress installed on this particular server. But the add on domain we have we want to add WordPress to is this folder. So if we go into their double click, you'll see the default foils that go to make up this holding page that Blue Host has put there. So what we need to do is put WordPress there, So let's go up close and choose file. Now. Unfortunately, we can only choose one file at a time if we do it like that. So we're gonna choose the WordPress Zip, which is only one file, and upload that. Okay, now it says, the WordPress tip has completed just over eight megabytes there, so we'll go back. Andi, there is the WordPress VIP. It's not much good to us because we need it to be unzipped or extracted. So with that selected, I'll click here extract and we'll extract files into that folder, and there's a lot of files. It needs to extract. So I only need to wait a minute or so on and we'll click. Reload. And there you can see there's a new folder called WordPress in the directory on. That's no good to us either, because we need the files on the route of the directory that we're using for the domain. So we need toe. Go inside WordPress, select, although files there and put them back one level into that folder. So we'll click on the plus next to public HTML. Onda will drag all of that, having selected all into the folder where we put the files for our domain. So we'll click back on that folder there. Andi. Now we have a WordPress files and we're ready to install WordPress. Just gonna delete that empty folder. There's keep things tidy. We can either click on a folder and click deletes here, or you can actually right click and delete there. We also have that zip file that we don't need, either. From what I'm about it, I might as well delete all those blue house falls that were there as well. So now we've done all that. All we need to do is go to sam alvarez dot com, Our domain where we have created the My SQL database. The user Andi uploaded the WordPress files and click Refresh on its automatically Gone to the WordPress set up configuration tool. So we're on the right lines will choose English is our language and continue, and it's reminding us there that we need the database. Name use known. Passed word host on the table. Perfect. I'll talk about the table prefix later, but it's not important. Let's just click. Let's go. Okay, so remember we copied our name used name and password when we were setting up the my SQL databases in the sea poll. Okay, now you can change. Your table prefix is here on that adds a little bit of extra security. If you do that now, the database host usually is local host. We don't know if it is this time. If not, then you should be able to get this info from your host. So let's try looking good. So that's run the install. Great. This is working. So site title. As I explained earlier, we can change this later. User name and password. This is really important. You need to write these down. Copy these on. The user name needs to be hard to remember Name and your email really important that you add an email that you check very often there, and I will be changing that for the clients email at a later date. So that's install WordPress. So there we go. WordPress is installed. Let's log into the back end and well into the user name and password that we just copy it there. So here we are again in the back end on if we go to the front end the home page with sites there is the WordPress simple install with a simple theme that we saw last time. So very important. It's not difficult to do it this way. And I would advise you to install WordPress this way manually over doing a one click install. But if you do one click install, no need to worry. But this lecture would have helped you a little bit in understanding the back end of WordPress. But we're ready to get going now. Andi, start creating publishing editing websites with WordPress. My name's Rob Coven. I'll see you in the next video, huh?
6. Introduction To The WordPress Admin Area – Posts, Pages, Media And Comments: Hello. This is Rob coming here. So we've got our site set up. We have WordPress set up, and this is what it looks like straight out of the books. WordPress is a content management system, i e. It makes it easy for you to publish content on the World Wide Web through our website. So you don't have to know html, CSS, PHP or Java script or any other confusing computer language in order to do it. That's what wordpress does. It does it very well now. It was originally conceived as blogging software, but it really can be used as software to power any sort of websites. A membership site of e commerce site, a new site of magazine site, any sort of website. And let's start by explaining the administration area. This is what we're looking at now. The administration area also referred to as the back end. And this is what you see. When you first installed WordPress, you see the dashboard. I'm gonna go straight into the 1st 4 elements down the left here. Now, as I say, WordPress was conceived as blogging software. So this go to the home page now, and this is what you see, it's a little bit confusing. You got your site title, They subtitle there, Hello World, you click on it and you see the same thing. Bit confusing is a comment there. There's my face there. There's an a funny adman named there were going to get rid off, but don't worry about that. Down the right hand side, you've got something that's called the Sidebar, and it has recent posts as a search bar. It has recent comments, archives categories, meta and down the bottom. You've got something there, and that's called the Footer. So this is the blogging side of WordPress and bite. If all the blawg appears on the home page when you first arrive now, you might not like that, and we can change that later. But that's what posts are now. You might think that. Why don't you just use pages? Well, pages are static pages. They're more like the about us page, the Contact US page, the start here page or some important single pages that you have on your Web site posts. A different they are the dynamic, regularly created latest articles off the block, and that's what this is. Hello, world is a post. It's not a page. So if we wanted to create a new blood post, we would add new. And I suggest you do this with me. Make new blawg Post. Let's do capital letters there. I always think that's a good idea and we'll have put some content in there. And there we are, Will publish that over on the right hand side. And we've gone back to the home page now and we're going to refresh. And there, of course, you see the new block post. So now we have to block posts instead of just one. But the pages are different and they're a little hidden away. Here we have ah, sample page or click on that now. And here is some sample text that they've put in for us just to show us how you do it. And you've got a Perma link there will talk about what that means, But if you command or control, click that that will open up another tab in your browser and you can see up here from the your l. The sample page has the URL sample hyphen page, and there it is in the website looking more or less like a post, although, however underneath it you don't have that option to comment. Usually you don't have the option to comment on a page, so I hope you understand the difference between posts and pages. Post to the most recent blogged articles. Pages are more static pages like the about US page on the Contact US page, the media section that's for uploading images, PDFs, Excel files, PowerPoint files or anything you want to serve on your Web pages that people can download. But you can access thes from the pages or post area. You go to the sample page. You can add media there, so that's what the media library is and comments as you'll remember. We saw a comment underneath the first WordPress blob post, which was called Hello World. And there it is. You can reply to that comment there. Weaken spam it. You can trash it, you can even edit it. And if we go back to the home page and scroll down to that one post that has a comment Hello, world click on that. There is the comment so we could edit that in the back end, and we could reply to it there or we could reply to it here. So I hope that's demystified WordPress a little bit for you. It really is a simple way of creating Web content. Andi, the currency online, is content. And if you can produce it quickly, easily and make sure it's of good quality, then you really are winning online. And this is why WordPress is so powerful. I hope you enjoyed that. The 1st 4 elements down there on the right hand side, my name's Rob Carbon in the next video will be going further down this left hand side sidebar in the Wordpress administration area, huh?
7. Changing Your Website's Appearance Using WordPress: Hello, This is Rob here from real carbon dot com. Now we're gonna talk about the appearance section off the WordPress back end. So if you go to the left of your WordPress administration area, aunt hover over appearance, you'll notice the first sub item is themes, so we'll click on that. The easiest way to describe a WordPress theme is to say, it's like a skin. It's like changing the look off your website, although themes also can change the functionality of the website. But for the time being, let's just think of them as a skin. So as you can see here in appearance themes in our WordPress back end, we have the theme. 2016 activated WordPress supply Ah, free theme every year, and it's named after the year. They've been doing that since 2010. So, as you can see, there's two other options we have here. Andi, I'm going toe. Activate 2015. Now that's activated. 2015 is now on the top row on the left now, and 2016 has gone all the way over there. If we know, go back to the home page or any page of the site and refresh you'll now see that the site it looks completely different. In fact, the sidebar is on the left hand side rather than the right hand side. I'll just change that back and activate 2016. Now themes are extremely important. There are a lot of them. You may have your favorites already if you go to wordpress dot or you have a repository off themes here, and you can search by the niche of your website. Or there are features like colors, layouts and other features that you can apply as filters with inner search. However, I don't recommend you do it this way. That's because there are tens of thousands of three themes out there. Know all of them are great. Some of them may look good but may produce some HTML. That's not fantastic. Maybe it'll work against you in the search engines. They don't include premium themes that you pay for on. I would always tend toe use a premium theme with my commercial WordPress work. There is a section called Commercial Seems here. However, I would advise you to look around at the commercial themes that available on DSI what people are saying about certain themes and use that to inform your decision. So the theme is extremely important, but at the moment we're sticking with 2016. If you could customise the second subheading under appearance in the WordPress back end, you'll see some more ways to edit the appearance off your website and you can do it in a very easy user friendly way. I must also say that all of these various areas of the website, firstly, there will be different depending on the theme that you have. Some themes allow this functionality to change these things this way. Some don't. But you can also always change any of these elements in other ways at the WordPress back end that I'll be telling you about. So that's going to cite identity first. And as you can see, we can change the site title. So that's cool it Sam Alvarez, and we actually can see what it looks like before we've saved that change. So you get a really time idea of how you're changing the site. That's the tagline, obviously, and if you, instead of wanting the site title in the tagline, is text up here and you want a logo up here you can do that here. And if you do that, that's not the only way These words appear on a Web page. Let's just go back to the site. And if we have a look up here a window in chrome, you'll see that that site title is actually there in the HTML. This is actually a very good place to change. The site icon site icon is this favor icon here at the top off the Web browser, and you can change that here, and it's a very good idea for you to do so. So that's saving. Published that change we made to the site title. If we go back now to the customizing section, I'm gonna leave all of these. They're fairly obvious what they do anyway, or maybe a couple of the Mount obvious. But I will come back to that. I'm gonna click that cross there and make that disappear. So that was themes customized. Now we're going to themes widgets. So the best way to explain widgets is that they are little bits off code or functionality that you can drag and drop into various areas of your website. Here, we've got a side by area content. Bottom one and a content bottom, too. So these of what's called Wichita sized areas and these are what's called widgets and you can reorder your widgets. Let's put recent posts at the possum and let's delete the matter. There it goes. No need to save anything. Those changes are already in effect. Will now refresh. We're back on the other theme. Remember, the recent posts have gone to the bottom, That widget and the meta widget has now disappeared. So we, you know, got search, recent comments, archives categories, recent posts. And that's the order. We have the widgets here so very easy to see what the widgets do, and it's very easy to see how user friendly they are. Now you can get more widgets from other plug ins. Other themes will have different widget ized areas. You can have a home page with digitized areas, and then you can drag and drop whatever functionality you want on the home page. So there's a great user friendly ways to change your website, so we'll be coming back to widgets later in the course. Menus will be coming back to this later in the course, but As you might imagine, this is a great way to create a menu just beneath the logo or the header area off your website. Talking about the header. This theme, if you click through there, will allow you to add a header 2000 pixels by 280 pixels. That's roughly the size of this top bit here. Similarly background that does the same thing. You can click on that and it will open the customized theme section and you'll be able Teoh load on image for the background. The last section in appearance. I wouldn't advise you using appearance editor. This shows you the PHP code for a lot of files off the website. In fact, the one it's starts with is the style CSS. So that's not PHP it CSS, which is a file you may want to edit if you're conversant in CSS. However, if you do want to edit this file, I wouldn't advise you to do it through the appearance editor in the WordPress administration section because these fires are very long and you would want to edit them using a proper code editor, which will make things much easier for you this is not a good way to edit code or text in any way. So I hope you enjoyed that little bit about how you can change the appearance using really user friendly areas off the WordPress back end. My name's Rob Coven I'll see in the next video.
8. An Introduction To WordPress Plugins: Hello. This is Rob coming here. I'm gonna talk about plug ins in WordPress. So what are plug ins? Plug ins are little bits of code that add extra functionality to your WordPress sites. Now, we're going to go into the plug in section and you'll see we have to plug ins. And these are the two plug ins that come with WordPress on the default installation. The 1st 1 is a kismet. On the 2nd 1 is Hello, Dolly. The 1st 1 kids Mitt is to stop you getting spam comments on your WordPress blogged posts. Hello. Dolly isn't so useful. Neither of them are activated at the moment. And that means that they're not doing anything. Andi, if you have plug ins that are not doing anything, it's really good idea to delete them. In fact, I'm gonna delete hello, Dolly now, because it's not a plug in that I think either of us will find useful. And it's saying you're about to remove the following plug in. Are you sure you want to delete the files? Yes. Delete these files. So there you go. That's how you delete a plug in Andi in order to get a plug in tow work, you just click, activate, and then it will ask you to activate your kismet account. This will only happen with a kismet, by the way, and in order to do that, you need a wordpress dot com log in and you'll be able to use a kismet to stop spam comments on your WordPress blawg posts. So those the plug ins we have at the moment we don't have many of them. But as I say, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of them, both three and paid again, and you concerts the free ones here at plug ins, wordpress dot or you may be looking for something that you've heard about like jetpack, for example, or WP super cash, something that will speed up your website buddy. Press that some adding a forum to your WordPress website. Or maybe you just want to search for some sort of functionality that you want so that search for contact form and then you will have a baffling array of plug ins that give you a contact form. Contact port form with PayPal, for example. The way you narrow these down is to look at the store rating that they're given. And look how recently it was updated. Remember, we've just had an update of WordPress to 4.5, and there's a couple here that have been updated, and there's many here that have been updated in the last week. Not to say that something that's been updated a few months ago is a poorly maintained plug in. They may have been nothing wrong with it. You don't know, but you do know what people think about it by having a look at the star rating. So we've got 210 good ratings and 80,000 activists installs on on that one called contact form Builder. There are a lot of great plug ins there that are useful, but you usually find yourself looking for plug ins. If you want something done to your website that you're unable to do with WordPress and you're looking for a little bit of extra functionality, that would be when you use a plug in back to the plug ins page. Now, very important that you don't use to many plug ins. You can get a bit sort of plug in, happy and installed 30 or 40 or more. Some plug ins will slow you down. For example, Jetpack is famous for slowing down. WordPress installs, depending on their complexity. So you have to be quite careful with plug ins and keep an eye on your site speed to see if it's not slowing you down. If you want to add a plug in, just simply go to add new here or add new there and here you'll see a page. It's exactly the same as the WordPress. Plug in re Pro at wordpress dot org's slash plug ins. So under a search for a plug in called Contact Form seven. And that's because I know that this is a plug and I've used many times, and I know it's very good. As you can see, it's got over a 1,000,000 that isn't bad. It's been used over a 1,000,000 times. Over 900 people have given it a usually very good rating. It's been updated recently, so they're looking good for contact Form seven Song, then still, that one. Now, one thing you've got to do after you install the planet's activate it. It won't do anything unless you activate the plug it. So now we have two activated plug ins, Kismet and contact from seven. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that introduction to plug ins on WordPress. My name's Rob. Come on. I'll see in the next video, huh?
9. The Users and Tools Sections of the WordPress "Back End": Hello. This is Rob Coven moving down the WordPress dashboard, left hand side bar links. I'm gonna go and tell you about users and tools now, so we'll start with users on. And as you might imagine, this is you. When you install WordPress, you have to give a user name and password andan email address on That is what this is. Now I'm going to show you how to create a new user. You can create a Zeman AEA's you want if you're setting up a site that you have lots of people adding to an editing, or you may just want one user. If it's your own site, however, it's always a good security precaution to add a new admin user and get rid of the one that you used when you installed WordPress. So we'll go up here at New or we could also go and new there, and we'll go for a hard to remember user name. Andan email address. You can never choose an email address that is the same as any other users. They have to be unique email addresses. I usually get WordPress to make up the password there, and as you can see, it's quite a strong one, and I usually send the new use an email about their account. Now the roles are subscriber contributor, author, editor, administrator. That goes in order of importance, with a subscriber having the least privileges on the administrator being the most important person or people on the site who have the power to make all the changes in between. There are other roles that have varying degrees of privileges so you can add uses and give them their role accordingly. But we're creating another administrator here, and we're gonna add new user. And what we're gonna do now is log out as this user log in is this user and delete the old user. So we go up to the top right hand corner, Andi log outs, and now I'm going to get the new user name and password and log in. So I'm logged in as the new user. You can see it says up here. Howdy. Rob Coven didn't say that before because I hadn't entered the first and last name, and it's always good idea to enter your first and last name off a user and I'll show you why later so we go into users again, All users and we're gonna delete this one because this was the one that we used to create the WordPress install. When you do this, you've got two choices. If the user has created content, you can either delete that content or keep it. Andi, attribute it to another user. In this case, there's only one other users, so we'll attribute it to that one. So there you go. And, of course, don't worry. I've shown you the user name and password for this user. I will be performing this precaution again. Only this time I want video so quickly will go on to the next section tools because I got very little to tell you about this section. I actually never used it. Of course, if you're moving a WordPress site, you can export it and import it to another location. When I move where press sites, I use a different technique. I copy the my SQL database in the files and do it that way. The available to a section doesn't have anything off importance as far as I'm concerned, although the only time I do ever use this section is when a plug in has added a tool like the redirection plug in. But that's all for this video. I hope you enjoyed that about the Users and Tools section on the WordPress back end. I'll see you in the next video where I'll be talking about the settings, huh?
10. WordPress "Back End" Settings: Oh, this is Rob Coven were logged into the WordPress back end, and now we're going to discuss the settings area so we're into settings on the first sub link is General, and that's where we are now. General settings on the first field. Their site title is very important, but these are the most important words on your website. As faras. The search engines are concerned, so you want to put keywords into this field. What a keywords. Keywords are what people key into a search engine Google in order to find something. So what will people key in to a search engine in order to find your size? Now, if you have a name, your name of your company or your personal name, then that isn't a great keyword unless you're incredibly famous. But it's better to put keywords like business coach in there. But business coaches much to general because, let's face it, you're not going to appear at the top of the first page off Google just by putting business coach into your site title. Because, of course, business coach is very general and very competitive, so you want to choose some specific words. Maybe your business coach for real tours in the specific Northwest region of America or something like that. But I'm putting business coach there. For now. Tagline is important as well. I would recommend you change this, and I'll just save that now. Because, of course, if we look at the home page or any page here that will change these words. Hear the site title in the tagline. However, that's know why we're changing them always because we could have a logo there and we probably will at some point. But even so, these words will be in the HTML. That's why they keep their importance so very important that you think about the site title and less so the tagline so moving down there. These will pre populate with the website address, so definitely don't touch those. This email address is very important. This is the email address. You get notified of any updates or any comment span, or just about anything that happens to your website and new user that will come through to this address. So it's very important that you use an address that, you know, you look out very regularly. Membership. I definitely wouldn't check that because that's a security concerns. Leave that blank, then it doesn't matter what the new user default role is, and then time zone on bond date formats. I'll leave that up to you next section writing Now this isn't so important the Blawg Post categories, but you should choose many categories, and you should never have just one that's uncapped. Surprised, but we'll come back to that on the blood post. Former. That's only for specific themes that has a different format for an image or a quote. I would always only use one former, anyway standard format for a block article, and then you can post PFI email if you want. That's here, and these services are for feed readers and not many people read. Blog's for Feed Read is these days, so I would just leave all these settings as default going to reading Now. Now, this is an important set of settings, but only at the top here at the top. Here you can determine what shows on your front page. Remember on our front page, or should we say home page? We have the latest blood posts in reverse chronological order so you can see the new blood post. We created Andi, the one that was there when we set up WordPress. But if you want it just a normal page, they're introducing who you are or introducing a website instead of your most recent 10 blood posts. Then you can change that. Here you can set a static page. Jews that and created, brought page for your post. But I'll be showing you that later. And there you can determine how many posts he actually show. The rest of this page isn't so important. Now we're on discussion. I would leave these alone as default. I think maybe you might want to change these two here. Remember, it's the sign of a blogger with great engagement and great traffic if every post has a lot of comments. So in order to encourage comments you might want, make sure people's comments gets seen the moment they make them. So you uncheck these two. However, if you do that, you might get a lot of spam, and there are a lot of plug ins that you can get to handle. The spam is a section on advertise here. The image that shows up next to your comment you can see at the top right up here. We have Sam's avatar. If you want your avatar to show up, you must set it here at Gravitate our dot com and you sign in with your email address. And then that email address will determine the image you show and what it's saying here. If you don't want that ugly, boring avatar showing up for the people who don't have an avatar, then you can change it to one of these slightly more interesting avatars, but quite important to get your own avatar set up at gravitas dot com. But that's discussion settings. I wouldn't leave them most at default. So now we're onto media settings, and I would leave thes as default as well will be coming onto image size later. It's very important, but it all depends on what theme you're using, and I would keep that checked. Permal Ing's permanence are extremely important. I'll show you what they are if we go to this new block post now click on that. Here it is. You can see the euro. It's at the domain, then slash 2006 slash 04 slash 20 slash The name off the block posts separated by hyphens. That's the Perma link. Or that's the permanent former. So I don't like that. I prefer the post name structure, so it doesn't have that 2006 0 for 01 and it certainly doesn't have that plane one. And the reason that this is best is it's best for S E. O. So I saved changes there. We'll go back to this block post, and now you have sam alvarez dot com slash new blood post separated by hyphens Much cleaner . Much better for the search engines as well. Toe have keywords in the block post your l's or permanent X. So that's the Perma links. And after that, you have the kismet settings that will help you combat comment spam a little bit. So I hope you enjoyed that. We've finished now. The introduction to the WordPress back end. Now it's time to create content on the Web. I'll see in the next video, huh?
11. Creating A Menu: OK, my name's Rob. Come on, we're gonna create a menu. A menu is usually seen beneath the header or the logo section, a main navigation bar that gives you the most important links on a website. Now there different ways. You can create a menu in WordPress. Usually it's appearance menus. However, you can also go to customize. But first we're going to go to appearance menus, right? We don't have any menus here, so we're going to create a new menu, and there's a link here to create a new menu. Or we could just put a menu name in here and create menu. So I'm gonna call this menu naff bar, create menu. Now, this menu doesn't have any pages in it yet, so let's add some. We've got all the pages on the left hand side here, and we want each one of these pages in the menu, so I'm gonna check them all, and I'm gonna add to menu there. They are now traditionally on Web sites. You usually see the home page first, and usually the contact pages last on the right side, but you can drag and drop the order of your menu. here. So let's put home first. Let's go about us. Second hopes. That's a sub item. That's for when you want a drop down in your menu. But we not having a drop down now. We're just gonna have a normal menu. Contact me is gonna be last, and courses is gonna be third. So now we've got the menu in the right order. Now, if you want a menu toe automatically add pages, then you can check that box there. I don't think that's a very good idea, because you should be creating more pages. But you don't want more than five links 678 at the very most in your top navigation menu, So we're gonna leave that unchecked. Okay, well, let's check this primary menu box here on day. We'll see where the menu turns up, so we'll save menu. And now let's refresh this page, and there it is. It's on the right hand side because we've got space up there, you know, which paid your own because its in bold, we can now click to the about US page. We can now reach the about US page from any other page. We can click on the home page That's blank. At the moment, we can kick on the courses page. So we've created the menu. I'm just gonna do something else. Now I've seen I've done something really stupid. I've got an about us on a contact me, obviously, why they want and about us in a contact us or about me and contact me. But you don't want to confuse us and me on as this is a personal blawg. I'm gonna change the about us page. And in order to do that, you can go through the back end the WordPress administration section and click pages on Define the about us page. But if you're logged in, you can always click edit at the bottom here, and that will take you straight to the page where you can edit it. So I'm gonna change this title me on. And while I'm about it, I must change the URL because this Perma link should reflect the title. It doesn't have to be the same as the title, but it will look pretty stupid if you have a page that's called about me on the Perma link is about hyphen us someone. Okay, that's the updates. And now let's go back to the site and it's about me. Now click on that page on There is the permanence, so you can see that the menu will update itself if you change any of thes pages that you added to the menu. And this is the great thing about WordPress, everything. It's very user friendly, if you again. If you had to do that in HTML, it will take you forever in a day. But this is a content management system that does all the heavy lifting for you. You've just got to learn how it works in the back end. My name's Rob Coven I'll see in the next video.
12. Creating Your First Web Page In WordPress: Okay, so we understand what's going on in the administration area. But now we're gonna start, went publishing. We're gonna create pages. So we're going to pages. And remember, wordpress gave us a sample page. We're gonna ignore that. We're gonna delete it later. But now we're gonna add new. So let's do about us. So we'll type in the title off the page at the top here, remember, that's very important for search engines. And here we put the content. But before we do nicest, the permanent the u R l that has been created. That is where you'll find this web page. So I'm just gonna get Cem text for this page, and here it is. I'm gonna paste it in here so you could type that in. You could paste it in. So what you can do if you're editing a page, is click here, save draft, and then WordPress will save that as a draft, but it won't publish it. You can have a look to see what it will look like when it is published by clicking on preview here on the rise that will open a new window. And there it is. There is the about US page with all the text in it bus. If we go back to that Perma link and copy that and paste it into a browser, we'll see that that page can't be found on. That's because it isn't published, but we're gonna publish it now. Then we go back to this page that can't be found. Reload this page or a fresh, and there it is. Now we have a published Web page at our domaine dot com slash about hyphen us. This is what really excited me about WordPress when I first got started. I remember about 10 years ago I was creating pages with HTML and having to copy and paste loads of HTML markup on every page, even though it was always the same. Andi, it would take me a long time to create a new page. Then I read an article about how to get found on Google, as Google was becoming of increasing importance. At that time in 2005. On, Did the Oscar said you should create loads of great new content, lots of Web pages with lots of content on it. Andi, I discovered WordPress on I discovered the ability to create pages so easily. We've created a page in five seconds there on. That would take a considerably long time if we were to write the HTML. And if you want to have a look at the HTML go in chrome developer view source. When there is is so, imagine having Teoh create all that. HTML. We didn't always had to do Waas right a title and Paste in some content and click publish Andi. Now we've published a Web page on the World Wide Web and is viewable by millions of people . My name's Rowe Coven. I'll see you in the next video, huh?
13. Creating More Pages and a Page For Your Blog Posts And A Static Home Page edited: Okay, so we've created our first Web page, but we're not gonna stop there. We're going to create three more Web pages, So let's go into pages on. Remember that sample page now? I think that's time we got rid of that. Because it's nice to keep your WordPress back end tidy so you could just go ahead and click on trash there. Or you could check this page, go upto bulk actions and moved to trash. Either is fine. So now we have just the one page, which is the about us. I say we have one page, but obviously the website has more than one page because if we go to it here, you can see it's got the home page, which is the latest vlog posts. And we've got this block post page with actually got archive pages for April 2006. So we do have pages, and that is the blogged that wordpress is set up for you. But now we're setting up really static pages for our new website on like any new website, we're gonna have a contact page on. This website is going to have a separate home page on a separate Blawg page on about US page courses. Page Onda, a contact us page. So let's get going and create those pages. So add new home. We won't put any text here on Don't worry about that Perma link slash home. I'll come to that later. Let's publish back to the pages at new courses. Publish back to a webpages at New Blawg. Publish one more back to old pages. I knew calls that may publish. Okay, so now let's have a look at our pages bit confusing there. We got home on blawg, we go to the home and of course, that is the Blawg there. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna put the block on a separate page and have a home page saying something else at an introduction to the website. Andi, remember how we set that up? We go settings reading the front page. We want to display a static page on that one is going to be the home page. The Post's page in other words, the page that displays your latest 10 posts. In other words, your blawg we're gonna select block and will save changes. So now when we go back to the domain. Go back to the website, the dot com with nothing after its and hit refresh. We get the home page and we're gonna end twosome content in here, and we're gonna have a separate blocked page. So if I type in here blawg, that shows you what was previously on the home page on will be your 10 most recent blood posts. OK, well, we've created four pages, but we can't get to them in any way. We need a menu on will be doing that in the next lesson. My name's Rob Coven. I'll see you there, huh?
14. Formatting Text And Adding Images To Pages In WordPress: Hello? No, we're going to improve the look of a page in WordPress. So we're going to improve the about me page. So we're gonna go to pages on We could click on about me there or edit there. It's the same link. So there it is. I always think it's best to look at the page in another tab on the browser. It kind of speeds things up. So there it is, always good to have a lot of text on your pages. When we get to get doing block posts, I'm gonna say about 1000 2500 words, But for an about me page, we have a word count here. Actually, 603 506 100 words plus is okay for an about me page, but it's looking fairly dull, So you've got the word processing icons that you will recognize from word processing applications such as word we got bold, italic crossed through bulleted lists, numbered lists. That is for a block quote. That's just if you're quoting someone or something like that, that's for a line. And then you got left a line centered right aligned the style for these pages left online, so you probably won't bother with that. Links unlinked us Onda read more tag. Anyway, on this one, I would ask you to click this because this gives you a second line of options, which is quite important, especially the first menu here. And that's what we're gonna use straight away. Now we're going to get rid of it where it says tagline. Because obviously we don't want to publish something saying Tagline. Andi, I don't even have to select the whole of this text. I just need to have my cursor blinking along that line somewhere and I'm gonna choose heading to the about me. There is the heading one. So updates. On day, I'm going to refresh this page and they see the heading one style and the heading to style . And already this page is looking a little bit more interesting. I'm gonna highlight all of that on make that italic. That looks like another heading. So we'll give that heading to we've got heading there and another one there and here at the bottom. We have a contact me link and that should be a link, of course. So we'll go to the contact me Page here in the menu will select that your l at the top Commander Control Seafood. Copy on and there will highlight this text here. Click the in certain link icon and then paste the link there and we can either flick return or just click that apply button there. And there's the link. Actually gonna go to the top now and I'm gonna change that into heading three. That was a bit too big on. Um, maybe these two headings are too close together, so we'll make those two heading freeze as well. Now we've made lots of changes. So that's updates. Go back to the about me page and there we are. That's the heading three. Looking a little bit better there. There's the heading to Rather heading to in the two hitting threes there. And there's the link that's test that link and it goes to the Contact me page. Great. So everything's looking great. We can see there's an error there. Couple of commerce get rid of one of those, and every page like this needs an image, and a large image needs to be either right at the top or very nearly at the top, certainly, so you can see an image when you first go to that page. Makes the page look 10 times better. So we have an image here. Nice image, and also it's it's horizontal format. It's a landscape format, which works well with a Web page. If it was a vertical format, it would take up too much. Space wasn't with images. It's the file size. This is really important, and this one is 246 K B on that is over 1000 pixels wide. This is far too big. It's far too big size. No image should really be bigger than 70 or 80 k b. It's too large and dimensions. Anyway, if I go back to the about me page, if you right click on the paragraph here, Andi, inspect and then hover over the nearest div class. And don't worry if this is too technical for you. You don't have to do this, but you can see there that the space here is actually 840 pixels on. Remember that the size of the image is over 1000 pixels wide, so it's too big at the moment. I would recommend you go to a website like J peg optimizer dot com. Choose file. Compress the image to around about 50. That's like a percentage. So it's gonna be half the quality, but half the compression, right? We're going to resize it, Teoh, Let's put it 750 pixels with and now we're gonna optimize the photo. There it is, and you'll see that the new file size now is 73 k B. So I'm happy with that, which saved 68% with cut off 2/3 off. The size of that image is so important because large image sizes really slow down the speed that your Web pages load and you lose loads off visitors and Google doesn't like it. So now that's our downloaded, optimized, smaller image. And sure enough, it's 74 or something. K b. We can live with that fire size, and I'm gonna change the name of the image now going to cool it at keywords into it on, give it a good description of what the image is. But now we're gonna upload the new one, get rid of the title and put it in the old text we can keep these display settings as they are, it's gonna be centered. It's not gonna be linked to anything, and it's full size. It's the size that we created it at the website. J peg optimized dot com in certain to page update. OK, now that's a little bit smaller than the width of that section. But I still think that looks good and it's loading a lot quicker. Looks like I've left a space. Yeah, I've left a space in there, which I'll delete, but the Web page is looking absolutely great. Now there's subheadings heading to his bolds italics. There's a link down the bottom. There's a great image that looks fantastic on loads quickly. This is how to edit Web pages in WordPress. You gotta think about the words. Are they attractive? The title, The subheadings and the text are all rich with keywords and helpful to the people who are reading it. That makes sense. The image. It's got one at least one main image, which looks great, and the formatting is good, so it looks good as well. It's refresh, and we've got rid of that space there. OK, my name's Rob cabin very important video, this one about formatting and photos on Web pages with WordPress. I'll see in the next video, huh?
15. Adding A New Theme And A Logo To The Website: Hello, So I'm going to change the theme again. But before I do, I'm going to talk a little bit about how your website is viewed on different devices such as smartphones and tablets, as well as laptops and desktop PC's. As you will know, many people access the Web these days by a hand held device such as a mobile phone, and it's always very important to check if your site is working well on these smaller devices. Now go a little bookmarklet loaded here where I can check this in this theme. Now the theme 2016 is responsive, so let's have a look at it in a tablet. And as you can see, the menu has changed. Do you access the menu like that now, which is more of the way many is work on tablets and especially phones. Nice to see that the social links and more prominent on this view. Then you get the content off the page, and then you get the content of this right hand sidebar. You get more links, and then the footer, so that's the tablets, and you can have a look at a small tablet. It's pretty much the same. It's just narrower. And a phone, of course, will be very much narrower again. But it's still the same sort of thing. You've got the site title, and you access the menu links like that. So that's good. Very important. You view the site on all sorts of different devices, and you can do that by just narrowing the window in your browser as well. But always make sure that your theme is responsive, which means it looks good on tablets and Mobil's. So we're going to get another theme now, So we'll go appearance themes. And remember, we got the three free WordPress themes 2015 2014 and 2016 that we're using. I had a new theme here, and I'm going to search for its because I know what a theme that I'm looking for. I'm not necessarily recommending this theme to you, but it's a an example off a responsive theme, which can be customized much more than the 2016 theme, and it's free, and it's called customize spelt like that. Andi There it is. It's the 1st 1 in the search results. This is searching the wordpress dot or GTA themes repository. I'm gonna click on details and preview and remember to always look at the star rating. We've had over 700 ratings of this theme. Andi, if you were to go to the wordpress dot org's theme repository and search for the same theme , you have even Mawr info about it, so you actually see the active installs and the last updated date. Both of these are very good signals. It's been updated within the last month over 100,000 websites. Air using it is obviously quite a solid theme. Well supported Andi well reviewed. Most of the stars. As you can see, most of the reviewers have positive things to say about the theme. So always be looking at these signals when you choose your theme. But we're back to the theme installer, and I'm gonna instill the theme, and it successfully installed the theme. So now if we go to appearance, themes will see that there is a new theme. It's installed it, but it hasn't activated it, so the site will still look the same. So we go back and we activate. You can do a live preview, but we might as well do this with the theme activated, so it's activated. Nothing much has changed about the back end. Actually, as you can see, there's an about customizer link there. There's also a help button there, which is who was good. But all the action happens for customizer on the customized link in appearance at the WordPress back end. And as you can see, our home page now looks completely different. Let's go back to the home page and refresh the site looks absolutely nothing like it did before. The content is there on the home page, but there's very little else that is similar. We've lost the menu. This menu comes out from the right hand side, and it doesn't have the correct links in it. So we've lost the menu that we set up for the previous theme, and this is something that can happen When you change themes. You need to set up some of the widgets menus, headers that you had done on previous themes. But I'm going to get into the customizing here, and you see a live preview of what you're doing. First of all, there's a sign from the developer, as I say, this is a free theme. So you are asked for a donation, but I'll just get rid of that. I'll just go back to the home page and I'm gonna actually remove the slider because I think that will think that will drive us mad if I leave it there. So I'm gonna remove that demo slider there. But if you wanted a slider, you could just click through that and set it up in the same way as we're setting up the other customization. So now that we don't have to look at the slider anymore, so we're going to global settings and title and tagline. As you can see, that is the same as the settings that we set in WordPress Generals. So we'll leave those as they are logo and favor icon. I've created a logo here. Andi, I think if you are serious about website, it's probably a good idea to design the logo, have it properly designed and have an image there instead of text. Exists will look much more professional as long as you really choose a good designer. Look at this designer's work, see if they have done some great stuff. See what they're feedback is like on up work and 99 designs. I don't actually like the competitions on 99 designs. They've never worked for me. But I find if I invest time in finding the right people on up work and 99 designs, I find that I will get some good results from them. Now. I've written down some text here for what you need to say to the designer. You want to give them a good brief. Give them examples off logos that you like. Tell them the website it's coming from. Tell them the sort of niche the website is in other websites and logos that you like the look off in that niche so the logo designer can use that as reference for the work they will do for you. You also need to say some specific details. You want the logo at the end of the day to be a a maximum width of something like 250 pixels and a maximum height of something like 100 pixels to supply. It is a PNG owner. Transparent background Andi, also with the logo. It should also be supplied as either a high rez PSD that's Photoshopped document or on a ay file. That's an adobe illustrator file. You should also ask for the Hexi decimal color references in the logo. That's so you could have the same colors and of your logo in some of the text off the websites of the links, for example. And that's why you need to ask for the hex Mestel color references. You also need to ask for a favor icon, which is a square version of the logo, and that needs to be 112 pixels square, at least and again. It should be a PNG on a transparent background. So with that said, we're gonna select the logo image that I have had designed. We'll even put some all text in there. I'm not sure if that's necessary, but better to do it than not OK, we don't want to crop it because that group won't look very good. And there you are is put the logo in there for you, and you don't have to mess around with CSS and get rid of the title. The title is still there in the HTML. Remember, it's there is the site title, so you'll still have the S E o benefits. It will still have the benefit for the search engines, but you have changed it now to a much more attractive logo, and this has gotten option for a sticky logo. A sticky logo is one that stays at the top there when you scroll down, and I think that's quite good. It's asking us for another logo for that. And we'll just use the same one, of course, in the same way and site icon. This is the favor icon that is in the top left of the browser tab in Chrome and will appear in various places on other devices as well. So I'm gonna select that. Upload the favor icon that we got designed. Remember, it's a square version of the logo, something like 550 pixels square that was. Select that, and we have to crop it into that square shape. And there it goes, and you'll see already we have that icon there, which is much better than a default icon makes. Look, the site looks so much more professional, so we'll save and publish that, and now we can go back to our sites. Seven. Look at another page. Let's look at the about me Page. So they your see, we have the cyber on the left hand side this time. Onda, we have a design for the about me Page looks completely different, but it still looks good. In fact, I think it looks a little bit better than the 2016 theme already because we got less wasted space than we had up here. Okay, so I've only really made a started customizing this theme with the new theme that we're using free from WordPress. But as you can see, you can already do a great deal with it. I'm going, Teoh, stop this video now and I'm going to carry on. And the next few videos will be further customization with this customizer theme. My name's Rob Coven. I'll hopefully see you in the next videos because you will be amazed at what you can do with a few clicks, huh?
16. Adding A Home Page And Changing A Navigation Label On The Menu: I rob coming here. So we've got a functioning menu over onto the right here of home about me courses. Blawg. Contact me. So let's edit and add content to the home page. So in order to edit the home page with course, go to the pages link on the left hand side here at the WordPress dashboard and then find the home page and click on that. So we're gonna paste in some text here for the home page title, reclaim your life by setting and achieving meaningful girls. Okay, so I've pasted in a paragraph off text and then added on image by going at media. Given the image a good keyword rich title Onda a keyword rich full text, the images centered. And then we've got three more paragraphs, so I'm gonna update that a No, let's refresh the home page. Okay, So the text and paragraphs in the image of coming okay and the title we don't have any subheadings. It's probably a good idea to put in some subheadings as well. However, the home page has changed its name and therefore the link in the menu is now this very long title and doesn't say home anymore, so we need to change that. So we go into appearance menus on, and here is the menu that we put in the header to the right of the site title on There is the home page that we change the title off. If we click on their error there, we need to change the navigation able so the navigation able should just be home, even though the title of that page is a much longer title. So we've done that will save menu, and then we'll go back to the sites and refresh. And there we've got a good looking home page, and we make sure the navigation label in the top navigation bar or menu is still home.
17. How To Create A Contact Form On The Contact Page: Oh, this is Rob Coven. And on this page, contact me. We have nothing whatsoever. So I'm gonna show you how to create a contact page. We go into the dashboard and plug ins. You'll remember. In a previous lesson, I searched for and installed and activated a plug in called Contact Form seven and we're gonna use that plug ins functionality now. Now you'll notice in the left hand side that there is a link here that says contact Now that wasn't there before we activated that plug in. So you will find that often plug ins that add functionality to WordPress will actually add links along here somewhere. No, always. But usually they do. Sometimes you find them in setting. Sometimes you find the intel's sometimes their main headings. But this is an example off a functionality that can be added to WordPress. Buy a plug in and remember these plug ins can be written by anyone, so you have to be quite careful in the ones that you choose, and I would recommend this particular plug it. So we'll click here contact, and you could make a lot of forms with the Contact form seven. Plug in but this particular one, they create one for you and they give you this short code. What you gotta do is copy that Commander Control, see? And it actually works exactly how you want it to, and I'll show you now how it works. Goel pages on. We obviously want to edit that. Contact me page and we paste in the contact form seven short code and updates And now, on the contact page, I'm gonna refresh, and there you'll see a form. But it still looks more professional to give. People have formed fill out in order to contact you than just supplying your email address . So if people fill out this form and send it, they get a thank you message. You'll also get error messages if they make a mistake with any of these fields. On, that email will go to the email that you have in settings general there. However, if you wanted to change anything, then you can go into the contact form and it's a little bit confusing. But there's more short codes here that you can get by clicking these buttons. You can specify where you want the mail to go. If you don't want it to go to that email address that's in the settings. Andi. All sorts of other things like that. You can send the success message and the error messages. Contact form even has the ability to use different languages. Also, if you go into the contact me page, you're probably better off writings and text here. You may want to write your telephone number if you really want to put your number on the contact page. So I've written there. If you have any questions or you would just like to say hi, please fill out the form below. I will answer within 24 hours. So update that. And now we look at the Contact Me page, and it looks a little bit better to see that text above the form. Okay, so that's how to create a contact form on the contact page. My name's Rob Coven. I'll see you in the next video
18. Adding Social Profile Links To Every Page: Theo WordPress is allowing you the ability to add functionality to your sites and create Web pages in a very user friendly way. And you could add to that functionality with plug ins and themes. Now the theme we're using is called 2016. It comes for free with WordPress Andi. It's not one of the most amazingly complicated themes, with lots of bells and whistles, but even this themes allows us to add social profile links. Now, I'm sure you're aware. You see, on many websites links to the social profiles that belong to this websites of their Facebook page, their Twitter there, Google plus that sort of thing. And we can even do this in this theme. So if we're going to the dashboard appearance menus, you'd have noticed when we created the primary menu the navigation bar in the header that there was an option to add it to the social links menu location. So what we're gonna do is create a new menu with social links in it, and we're going to call this menu social. We can call it anything you want, and we're gonna add custom links. These other links are pages, posts and even categories off block posts. But of course, as we adding external links here, we need to put them in as custom Ning's. So I'm gonna paste in the Facebook they're placed in. The Facebook page is much better than a personal profile. Add to menu. So we've done one pasting in the Twitter. No link text is Twitter, and the your l is the link to the Twitter profile YouTube Shadow and Google plus. Okay, there's the menu. Weaken Dragon, Drop the order as we wish and we're going to give it the social links menu theme location. We're gonna save that menu and refresh. And the social links theme location is actually down here on the bottom in the footer. So there is the Facebook link, the YouTube link, the Twitter link on the Google plus link. So another example of how wordpress makes things easy for you. Whatever you want to do it in a websites. If you've seen a lot of other people do it, it's likely that that is some sort of functionality that is provided either by WordPress, the core software or by a theme, or buy a plug in. My name's Rod Coven will be coming onto further customization in the following videos, huh?
19. Adding An Email Optin Form To A WordPress Site With A Plugin: Okay, so a very important part of Web publishing is email marketing. This is because when you have visitors to a website, you need to hang on to them in some way. That's because you need to grow an audience. You need Teoh widen a customer base, and usually this is for business reasons. IE. It's a business website, and you want to sell more of whatever you're selling. So the best way to do that is through email marketing On the first step in email marketing is getting those visitors to your website to give you their email address, because once they do that, then you have a stronger tie to them. You can send them emails with offers or information and build a relationship with that visitor to then turn them into a customer. Strengthen the relationship. So in order to start with email marketing, we need to add a form on a website to collect email addresses, and I'm gonna show you how to do that now. And the way you connect your website with an email marketing platform such as a Weber Mail chimp or active campaign is usually through a plug in all of the free plug ins here at wordpress dot or if you go to WordPress toward slash plug ins and then we're going to search for a Weber because that's the name of them email marketing campaign. And as as ever, we're looking at the active in still numbers, the positive reviews and the recent updates. You see that A. Weber made their own plug in Andi. It hasn't bean very well received a total by the community, which is a great shame. So I'm gonna go for this one, which has more reasonable reviews. It's been updated more recently, even though it hasn't actually been used many times, and he just over 1000 so we will copy that name. There a weather forms by opt in cats go to the dashboard, go plug ins, add new. And now we're going to search plug ins with that plug in title. And the first thing that comes up on the left here is the one we want. So we'll click install now, and you can do this with any sort of plug in providing any sort of functionality. So we're gonna go activate plug in now, and there it is. It's activated And as you will usually find with plug ins, it's added another item to the left hand side bar menu in the WordPress back end, which is usually the case. But anyway, we're going to go into Upton Cat. We're gonna add new and we want a sidebar. Widgets will enter a name. Call it sidebar. Sign up. We'll go for that layout and they're the opt in form has changed. Course. We got to connect this with a Weber. So we're going Teoh, get my A weather app authorization code link there, and that will hopefully open a Weber and I'll log in and there I'll get the code there, paste that in after we pasted in the authorization code that connected WordPress to a Weber . And here a Weber. This client has three lists, and we've got to choose the correct list to send the email addresses to so there. It's given us an option to go to a thank you page when somebody has submitted the form and we will choose one that I made earlier. So we're gonna save that helped inform. But nothing's gonna happen yet because, as you see, it says you can publish this up tin box, my going to appearance widgets. So let's go to appearance widgets And here in the right side bar, Remember, I added those on the customized page, which is part of the customizer theme. No, I see that this is now tallies with what we put there so you could either goes to customize and edit the widgets there. Or you can edit the widgets in appearance widgets. And as you'll see, we have a new widget on the left hand side that we can drag over now, and that's from the plug in. So we got to select form, and that's the only one we made the side by side up form and safe. So let's go back to the site and go to one of the pages. And there we have our form. Weaken, Go Rob and my email joined now, and it goes to that Thank you page. Now, if this is a double opt in form, which I think it is, the user would now receive an email. But it won't be joined to the list, and that's because most lists when you start out, our double opt in. So somebody has to click on Authorization link on a subsequent email that they receive, which confirms their email address and confirms their desire to join the list. I just have a look a team, my emails and see if I've got that. Yes, so that is the confirmation email that you get for me a weapon. So it would be an idea to say in this page you're not subscribe yet. You're going to get any mail, Please click a link in that email. So when I click this link now, now I have joined the list and we can confirm that by going into a Weber and you already see there's one subscriber today and we'll go to the list and subscribers manage subscribers, and you see at the end there, there. I've subscribed today. So this opt in box that we set up with just about five seconds, and it's on every page. This is, Ah, very powerful plug in, or widgets or marketing technique that you must use on every website, basically, because it turns visitors into customers, you get their email address, you have a much better chance of converting that visitor. Then you have if they just arrive at a website and read a page for one minute and leave. You should get them to arrive at the websites, consume your content and leave their email address. Because if you do that and you get a large email list off a few 1000 subscribers, then you can guarantee sales. It's extremely powerful side of Web marketing, and I think you'll agree that a video about email collection is a good thing to include in a course about WordPress. Because WordPress is all about publishing on the Web. And many, many commercially viable businesses use WordPress precisely for this reason, for this reason of its ability to use thes sort of marketing techniques very easily with free software. My name's rock covered. I'll see in the next video, huh?
20. Changing A Featured Image: Okay, so we want to just improve this page now because this image cuts off her head. So we're not so happy about that. But what we need to do is change the featured image in that page. So I'll show you how to change that. If we go to pages and that one is the about me page, then we should set featured image, and I'm gonna upload one now that will crop into a circle a lot better and look, look a lot better. Set featured image and updates. So now when we refresh, the image looks a lot better there. And remember, these featured images tend to be the ones that are published with thumbnails in widgets in WordPress. They also tend to be the image that comes into social sharing platforms like Facebook. When you paste in a link of that page into Facebook, my name's Rowe Coven. I'll see in the next video, huh?
21. How To Create And Format A Blog Post: how it's recovered. Now we know how to create pages in a wordpress website. Very easy. Now we're gonna add a new block post. Now, remember creating regular, relevant quality content online, whether it's video, text or whatever. The best way to do that is in a blawg because it's all set up. This is the way to do it. So in the dashboard, remember, If you're creating a static page like the contact us page, then you go to pages and new. But we're creating a new block post. So we're going toe posts add new. So you know immediately what to do here. This is the block post I'm gonna enter, so we'll copy it all and paste it in. And of course, that is the title. So will command or control X that to cut that and paste it into the title. Remember, it automatically creates a permanent for you. Now, if you want, you can then edit this Perma link to maybe take out some off the stop words and stop words . Their words like off the to very smooth propositions articles, things like that. And what that does is it leaves the keywords the important words. Now we've pasted in the text and as it is always the case, people have done double returns for their paragraphs. So you want to take all of those out. Okay, so I've taken out all of those extra returns as several at the bottom there, So all the paragraphs have one return in between them. You can see that by putting the cursor from one paragraph to the other. And if I select all you'll see, it's all in that paragraph style. That's how you want. If you can't see this drop down, just click this toolbar toggle button there. Now what's happened here? This is very common. Somebody's just used bold for a heading. Do you want to mark up those words to show everyone? No, just the people who are reading it, but the search engine robots as well that this is a subheading, and the way you do that is choosing heading to from that drop down. And there it is. It's actually still bold ID, so we'll get rid of the bold. So it's just heading to Don't worry too much about getting rid of bold, but definitely make your subheadings. If you've got maybe three headings in a broad post or even 10. Then you should definitely maketh, um, heading to. So I've done that. Now, you'd only publish when you're absolutely ready. So we're gonna save draft now, and WordPress will save aversion off that and you will never lose it. You'll never lose any information with WordPress. We're gonna click preview here on the right hand side, and that will open a new tab in your browser. And that will give you a preview of how the Post will look. So there we are. It's a little bit dull and you know why. And that's because we need to add an image. A very good website to find images. Free images is picks obey dot com p i X, a b a why dot com and I'm gonna search hard work woman. If it's an attractive image and usually with a person not not an image of a machine or something, then the post will always do better. This image is pretty good on. We've got freak for commercial use no attribution required. It's a creative comes public. Two main image. Absolutely OK to download that. Andi, I'm gonna down there this version the medium sized version, because we're gonna put it in it about 750 pixels wide. We're gonna download that. Now you notice that ladies looking to our left and Bob Post is actually kind of centered. It's a little bit of a new design this in the 2016 theme, but you're likely to change your theme as you go along, and the blood post is likely to be on the left. So it's a good idea to get the person looking into the Plage in. If she's on the left of the screen, she should be looking to the right. So we're gonna flip that image and I'm not too sure how to do that. But I'm gonna Google is flip image online tool and something called Luna Pictures. Come up. Ah, there we are. It's flipped. It already Isn't the Internet amazing? So I'm gonna save that image. So that was Luna Pick. If you need that again, I'll provide a pdf of useful websites with this and other videos. So let's go to J peg optimizer here J p e g hyphen optimizer dot com So we're gonna choose file and get that flips version and we're going to compress it by 55. Always compress them by about 50. You may be able to get away with 45 that's very compressed. You start losing quality beneath 50 and the file will be too big when you're using 70 or 80 . So 55 is just about right. We're gonna make it 750 pixels wide. She's a good width for a horizontal image on a block post. So that's optimized photo. So it's 24 kilobytes. Huge grey image like that, Only 24 kilobytes. So we're going to go save image as and we must will now give it a good s CEO title. So Okay, I've called it younger businesswoman with good productivity. So we're gonna save that. And now in the WordPress text editor, we go add media upload files, select files get their image. And remember, WordPress always puts the file name in the title. You don't need that. You need it in the whole text, or you need all text that similar to that. Okay, I put in businesswoman wresting control. Overheard to do list. So put the keywords in the old text. And remember, scroll down here. We've got alignment center on. We've chosen the full size insert into post. There it is. Let's save draft and have a look. Okay, there we go. Here is our block Post the pages looking great. The block post is looking excellent. The personal rights, it did very well has short paragraphs. That's very good for the Web. But the sub headings are even best that they stick out and people can skim, read it and know what they're coming up against. Remember, you conduce bolds italics. So you know, you might want to do that sentence in metallic. Always good to have links. It's always good to link to your own websites, but this websites very new. We can't link to very many pages in it because there are none. So what, we can link out to other blog's and other pages. And this is always good because people appreciate links. So his a reference to an app. So I'm gonna google that and get the website address. Do you linger dot com and you can even write to these people and say, Look, we've linked to you and that starts up a conversation. So what you do is you select the word or words you want to have as your anchor text for the link, and then you click the Link icon in the tools at the top there, paste in the link and just press return. And there you've made the link. The preview is looking OK, There's the link. That looks good. Everything's OK. Do we press publish? No, we don't. There's still a lot more to do. And I'm gonna tell you that in the next video. My name's rock covered. I'll see you there, huh?
22. Further Customizations Of The Header And The Sticky Logo And Menu: Okay, so it's rock coming here. I'm gonna continue customizing this theme called Customizer in WordPress, and we'll go to appearance. Customize. Okay, so we're starting at the top, remember? And we've done the cycle intact. Line the logo and favor icon the skin There we can choose a color for all the links and the buttons, and I'm gonna choose a color that's similar to the colors were using in the logo. It's not perfect, but I think maybe the red will be better. And Google funds we can choose from these Drop down both a fund for the headings and a front for the body text. So all sorts of different feeling you get from these front groups, you can have very traditional fonts there, the web safe front pairs. I mean, I I wouldn't worry about using any of these Google fonts. Google fonts are extremely well supported, and you can increase the default font size in pixels if you want. If you think your readers maybe prefer slightly larger font size, think 16 pixels for our default text sizes is quite good social links, so you'll see again we lost our social links that we put in originally, so we're gonna have to put them in again. First of all, I'll explain this one. If you set up WordPress, you will automatically have an RSS feed. The RSS feed if you go to your sites dot com slash feed is this. It's just the latest blood posts, basically, and this is what is used for people who want to read Blog's on feed readers. Feed readers aren't as common as they used to be. Andi, you don't see this link. This RSS feed icons around the Web so much these days, so I'm gonna get rid of that because I don't think it's very useful and that icon has now disappeared. But I will re enter the social profiles. Okay, I've done that. There's YouTube, Google plus Facebook Twitter, and you'll see all these profiles and now at the top there by the logo. And they are also down at the bottom here in the footer. Let's go back global settings so you can change the links. There's a fade effect on the hover. There, as you see you hover over is a fade effect. You can change that, and there's other settings that you can change their global settings. Not so important. I'll leave those ones for now. Now we'll go back into the header design and layout so you can choose if you want the logo on the left or notes. There's a border there. We can get rid of that. If you want, we can choose to get rid of the tagline, get rid of the social links in the head. I think that's very important because I don't think they look very good right next to this logo. So I'm gonna take them off. They're still in the first of their. Of course, we like the sticky heading setter. That means if you scroll down the header and the menu is still visible, so we're gonna keep that. And there's all sorts of settings here. You can decide not to display the menu in the sticky header, and you can change the transparency of the sticky head us that everything is extremely customizable. We haven't finished. There's navigation menu is very important. So here we're in the main menu. We can select the one that we already used so we can select never, but we haven't lost that. So now if we look at the menu. We click on that. I come there. There is our old menu, so even better than I thought. We have saved that work. After we've changed the theme and the menus on the rights and still in the navigation menus , we can choose for the menu to be horizontal, so this is more similar to the way we had it before. You can see the menu at this particular width on the menu stays when you scroll down as well. I think that's a little bit better at this. With now. Customizer gives you even better on option here to have a look at the tablet on the mobile view. If you look into the tablet view, then the menu goes back to this more traditional three line icon, which I think is better in the tablet view. It's OK in the tablet view, but not in the desktop. You I think it's better like that. So let's go back to the about me page and refresh now, and it's already looking better. It's much cleaner. We got the sticky header. The naff bar is nice and clean, and it's how we want it. And we got the social links back in the footer. Okay, we'll come onto more customization in the next video
23. More Customization Of The Home Page The Blog Page And The Blog Posts: Okay, so coming here. Now we're gonna do further customization of the home page with Customizer three theme on WordPress. So I'm in content, home and posts. Andi, I'm going to go into front page. And this is this page. Remember, this is got this information here from the WordPress reading settings. Remember, we set a static front page and we have a blood post page as well, so that we've already done. I'm giving the front page of right side bar. That's so this information here doesn't go across the full width. It's very bad toe have text that falls across the full width of a page. Here, we can have a cider. Remember, there was a slider when we first added the theme, but we're not gonna do that. But here the featured pages options. So that's what we've got here. So we want to set Cem featured pages, so I'm gonna set wonders about me. Another one is the courses page, and then another one is the contact me page. And then the theme will get the featured image, the title and a little extract from that page. Of course, the contact me page doesn't have an image for it, but we can add an image or a featured image later. Also, this image doesn't crop very well. The about me page image doesn't crop very well in that circle, but we can change their image as well, so you can even change the text here. It's all fully customizable. You can change the text on these buttons instead of saying Read more, it can say something else. So that's how we've customized the home page. We can customize the pages and post layouts, and I would like a right side bar on there, and I'm going to go right. Sidebar for everything. So, no, If we refresh the about me page, we have the sidebar here instead of on the Left because it doesn't have the widgets that we had put their before. When they click here, add widgets to this side bar, and it's taking us to the right side bar place where we can add widgets. So let's put in our search widgets and recent posts. So back to the customization, wherein pages and posts we've done that down here we have breadcrumb, and as you can see on about me, Page, you've got this breadcrumb. That's what you call this where it shows you how you arrived at the page for a small sites . I don't think that's helpful information. We have a home link here on the logo. We have a home link here in that menu, so we don't need another one here, So I don't find the breadcrumbs important on this particular sites. I'm getting rid of them. I'm gonna save and publish their. And now, if we refresh the about me page, those breadcrumbs have disappeared. Now, that's all looking much cleaner, post metres. This is really important. Let's go to the block page so we can see what we're doing there. And as you can see, we've already got a very different blocked page design. It's taken the featured image, the headline and these are the meta information down here on. We've got the other two dummy posts, which of course, don't have featured images and don't look so good. But we can customize this back here so we won't want to get rid of the author from the meta because the author will always be the same. So that's unnecessary. But we've got the date which I think is quite important. You might want to take the data off the matters, but let's save that and refresh the block page. And as you can see, the author has disappeared from the main blood page. It's much better to have just extracts from your blog's posts on your main blawg page. Remember in 2016 that showed the whole of the post on the archive blogged page much better . If you just see a little bit of the post, the headline and the image and then you can click through to the post, it's it's much better way of doing it. So here's the meta You've got the date and the category and the tags. You can edit those to show which ones you want, but this is all looking much better again. So a lot of more customization you can do You can add more widgets to the footer. You can customize the sidebar further, and there really is so much you can do. But I'm gonna leave it there for now. I hope you enjoyed that. This is just showing you what you can do on a different theme in WordPress. Now. If you were to change the theme back again or change the theme again to another. A lot of these customization is will be lost. But what won't be lost is the content, the meta information, the titles, the images and all the basics off what you have published that will still be there. But with the theme you can customize the logo, the header, the menus, the featured images where you see them, what goes on the home page, what goes on the block page and a variety of things. I hope that's helpful for you. That really is a lot to cover in there. But I just wanted to give you an idea of what is possible with different WordPress themes. My name's Rob. Come on. I'll see you in the next video, huh?
24. What To Remember To Do Before You Publish A Blog Post (1): Okay, so we've written the block post. We haven't published it yet. We've formatted all the text and images on we're happy with the way it's looking in the preview. So I will explain what is happening here on the right hand side bar. We're aware of this box here. We know we can save drafts here and published. We can also turn things from public to private, from public to draft. There's also something called revisions here, and I'm gonna come back to that later. We've also got an option to Hsieh jal a publish. So if you just click the button there, it'll publish it immediately. However, you can set a time in the future if you want to stagger your posts. For some reason now the former, I would only ever choose standard for this box. This box won't always appear depending on the theme you're using for me. As a content marketer, I would always like to produce a block post with more than 1000 words, because those are the ones that tend to get shared socially and also tend to do better in the search engines. But if you wanted to use these options you could do very easily. Now. Categories are very important at the moment. We've only got one category. You should have at least 10 or 20 categories in a mature blawg. So, for example, I have sections on email marketing, WORDPRESS website design, design, business. These are my categories. So if you add a new category here that's called this one productivity and then you would uncheck, uncap categorized. And now this blood post is in productivity. However, that isn't actually sufficient for categories. You need to edit the categories here by clicking on posts categories and I'm gonna come under control. Click this now to open that categories Editor in a new window on what we have here is the ability to put in a description for our category edits under productivity on Dhere, you need to enter a keyword rich description in there as well. Let's go back to our post and we should also delete the uncapped terrorized category because obviously that is not gonna help anybody in tags. These don't carry any particular s CEO bank. There's very little benefit in doing them. There we go as a couple attacks there now featured image again. You may not see this, but it really helps. If you do. Featured images tend to appear as thumbnails next to your blogged post in social media. Andi in your block itself. So maybe when you see the 10 most recent book Post they all come with a little thumbnail image, and that would be your featured image. So I'm gonna set featured image now, and I'm gonna choose the one that we used as the main image and set featured image. So that will be the image that is used as a thumbnail for this particular block post. Now, we're not finished here because you can actually customize the boxes that you can see in this right hand side bar. If you go up here to screen options, I'm gonna check revisions and I'm gonna check. Author, You can also check any of these which will show you other boxes, which will give you options to change functionality in your WordPress Post editor. But if we scroll down now, we now have two boxes at the bottom that we didn't have before. This is the revisions, and remember, you can access them by the published box as well. But the revisions of quite useful if you need to go back to a version you saved earlier. So basically all the versions you've saved as draft are saved in the database, and you can go back to them at any time. And also author, if you have a multiple author Blawg Onda person who entered the text wasn't the person who wrote it. Then you can change the author there. So once you have done all these things and specifically the category and the featured image is very important, then you can publish. So I have published and it's live on the World Wide Web now. So now we're gonna go back to the Blawg page and refresh, and there is our most recent blood post and look at it. It's looking a bit daft. We've got a huge grey image here, and then we've got that image repeated there. That is because we chose that image as the featured image. Now, normally, that will be featured as a either a small or a large image, but you'd only ever get an excerpt with us. But in 2016 this free theme you get with WordPress. Unfortunately, they show the whole of the block post on the block page. So we'll go back to the post and we'll edit that post and down the bottom here, removed, featured image and then updates. And now, if we look at the blood page, you only see the image once, and you can read the whole of the article there and then beneath that one, you've got the two old articles, dummy articles that we have put in. So I hope you enjoyed that. That's how to publish a new block post whilst remembering all of the metadata like the keywords categories and featured images. If you want to use them, my name's Rod Coven. I'll see in the next video, huh?
25. Conclusion: Hello, This is Rob Coven. Thank you so much for watching the course. Thank you for investing your time with me. The first thing I want to say. Even though WordPress is a secure and mature software, it's been around for 13 years and, as you know, supported by a huge community, it is the target of hackers because all content management systems are so a couple of pieces of security advice going forward. First of all, remember your user name and password for the WordPress back end. Andi, for the database is extremely sensitive information. Change it regularly and do not share it with anyone. If you create a new user for a freelancer who's doing some work on your site, do remember to delete that user once they've finished. So change your passwords regularly, keep them secret and keep them hard to make up. Next piece of advice is very important, and that's toe. Always keep updating WordPress and the themes and plug ins. WordPress itself is updated many times through the year. Four major updates on other smaller updates. All the plug ins and themes might need to be updated to run with the new version of WordPress, and it's very important that you do these updates as soon as they are available. WordPress may update itself automatically, but none of the themes and the plug ins do. So you really need to keep an eye on the WordPress back end to see if anything needs updating. Then if it needs updating, you should copy the site, the files on the database and then do the update, because that will keep your WordPress install secure. Okay, so another point I want to make to you is that I don't want to give you the impression that WordPress is just a dragon drop user friendly interface for people who don't understand code and mark up. That couldn't be further from the truth. With knowledge of HTML. You can use that and put that into WordPress pages. You can put it into text widgets so you can put your knowledge of HTML to good use in WordPress. If you have knowledge of CSS very important, of course, you can use that in the theme you're using. An important point to make here is that you should use a child theme on a theme framework or a theme that is being updated regularly. I use Genesis theme, which is a premium theme used by millions of websites on extremely well supported by a huge company. They sell their framework for $60 I create a child theme on that. Now, when you've created a child theme on a theme framework that's regularly updated it almost future proofs your installation. And you can use your CSS knowledge in that child thing. Even better, with knowledge of PHP on my sequel, you can create plug ins and themes for yourself. You could also use PHP in the back end. So here are a couple small examples of how you can use PHP in WordPress with the help of a couple of plug ins. So here I have widget logic activated, which means you can add WordPress is conditional tags to widgets. So here I have some PHP in this widget saying that it can display on certain pages but no on others and another plug in this time exact PHP. This allows you to execute any sort of PHP code in posts, pages or text widgets, and here I have it in ahead of widgets displaying information depending on whether somebody is logged in or not and addressing people if they are locked in by their first name. So as WordPress powers over 25% of the world's websites, knowledge of WordPress on maybe html CSS PHP in my sequel databases on JavaScript give you a huge benefit. In today's online business. You'll be able to help many people out there who have websites and you'll be able to create new websites for over four figures. I hope you've enjoyed these set of videos, and I hope you can see ways where WordPress can help your business or how you could use WordPress to set up a new business. My name's Rob Coven. I'll see in the next video, huh?
Rob Cubbon, An entrepreneur who wants to help you
