Are you finally to start the blog you've been thinking about
for years? Well great! In this article, I'll walk you through how to start the
blog and how to get up and running quickly. I'll take you through the step by
step process of getting your blog up and running so you can get started
First, we'll talk
about getting hosting, then we'll talk about the domain name and what you want
to call your blog. Next, we'll install WordPress and then we'll choose the theme for your blog.
We'll set up the different pages that your blog needs and then we'll add
plugins to extend the functionality of your website. Make it do the things that
you want it to do.
Finally, we'll write our first blog post and then you're
ready to go. So, first let's talk a little bit about hosting. When you're
building a site it's very similar to what's happening when you build a house.
You have the land that you need to use to put the house on, that's the same the
hosting provider. The hosting provider has the servers that all of your files
all of your files and folders will go on. Next you have an address and that's
so people know where to find you and the address is your domain name or your
web address. You want to start building your website and your website is your
home. That's what houses all of your files, all of your images, the color
structure, the way that it looks, the functionality of it via the plugins.
Finally you have your mailbox which is your email address
and that's how people can contact you and all of these come together to make up
your whole website on the web. After you've chosen which setup you want, go
ahead and sign up with a new domain name that you want since it comes free and
click next. From here you want to go ahead and create your account by filling
in all of this information and then down here you want to verify the package
information. I would say that your domain privacy you don't need, we normally
just turn that off. Things like backup site and site locker, there are a lot of
great plugins and features available within WordPress so you don't need that
either. Now just fill in your payment information and you'll have your hosting
account set up.
Now that we've signed
up, we'll get a congratulations message screen and we'll just need to click on
the next screen where we can create our password. This password will be used to
manage our hosting account. Once you create the password, they will start
setting up the account for you. One of the great things about BlueHost is now
they've made installing WordPress even easier. From here you can select a theme
that you might like to go with your site. Since I'll be walking you through the
whole process, let's go ahead and skip this step. And now that they
automatically set up WordPress for you, you no longer have to go into your
BlueHost account and install WordPress and go through that process. Once we get
everything set up, you can click start building and we'll be taken to the back
end of our WordPress dashboard where we can start customizing it. Great, now
that WordPress is installed, this is the back end of our website where you
could go in, make changes to it. Yours might look just a little bit different
but this is the overall feel of it. This is our dashboard area where you'll see
things at a glance. Most of the things that we'll work on are from these tabs
on the left and you see already we have some notifications here that if you
need to, you can address those. They're simply for updating.
Let's take a look at
some of the main areas of our website. The posts area, that's where you'll be
using a lot of your time, you'll be
spending a lot of your time writing your blog posts for your site and this is
where you'll go to do that. The media area is where you upload your images and
your photos that will be housed on your site. Pages are very similar to posts,
pages are the things that don't need a date timestamp on them and its for things
like your about page, maybe a contact us page. Comments, if you start to get a
lot of comments, this is where you can go to approve or edit those and the bulk
of what we're gonna do next will be under Appearance and Plugins. The
Appearance is where we can go to set our theme for our site or what the site
looks like, and then the plugins are where we go to add the different bits of
functionality that we want our site to do. For instance if you wanted to add a
ecommerce shop on here we would go into the plugins area and add a plugin that
would allow us to sell on our site. And then if you wanted more users you could
go in here to setup new users. Tools are for importing and exporting things and
as you add more plugins you may see this expand a little bit more depending on
the plugin. And then finally we have some settings and just real quick, we're
going to go into a couple of settings right now. This is where just all of the
general back end stuff is. But, the one thing we want to do is we want to change
our permalinks. The permalinks are describing your url for your website.
Some blogs prefer to
have their whole date structure up here where its like by the year, by the
month, by the day and under permalinks is where this is changed or updated.
You'll want to set this in the beginning and you'll want to stick with this
throughout and that's simply because once you've set this up, you don't want to
keep changing the permalink structure so you really want to get that from the
get go. But here are some other examples of what you could use and if you are
doing like a true blog where its very important to you to showcase the time and
date then you can keep that. I will say that even for any blog posts that I do,
my favorite will always be just doing the title of the post as my url structure
behind my domain name. Its simple, its easy for readers to possibly remember
because its shorter, and its also better for search engines. So for me, I
prefer that. But, once you figure out which one you want, go ahead and set it
now and then really try not to ever change it again. So, once we're done there,
let's click save changes and now that permalink structure will be on all of our
posts. Let's go ahead and change the look and feel of our site by picking a
theme. I'm gonna show you real quick what it currently looks like. Yours might
look a little differently but by default, WordPress installs with the latest
theme that they have and this the twenty nineteen theme for the site. You see
its very nice big and bold typogrophy. A lot of white space and it really
drives the user to read the blog posts. That may be, it might be a little bit
plain for some people so let's go in and look at some changes that we can do.
To do that we'll go to our Appearance and we'll go to themes. Now right now for
my site, these are all of the themes that are currently installed on my
WordPress website and this one is the only active one. You can only have one
theme active at any time but you can have multiples installed. You can click on
the add new and this will pull in all the available themes from the WordPress
repository where they house all the themes. If you want a premium theme you'll
simply go to the premium theme's website and you would have to download the
theme from there and then upload it separately. For this we're simply going to
use the repository and we'll look for a theme that we want.
Now because this can take quite a while, what I would
probably recommend you do is Go ahead and go to WPBeginner and do a search,
we'll link for this in the description but we've coordinated several of the
best free blog themes for the latest year and so do that for yourself. That
just kind of pairs it down a little bit more because there are just thousands
upon thousands of them and so you can go through and see which ones you like.
Once you see one that you like. you can go back to the add a theme area and you
can search for it. For example I know that for this tutorial I want to install
the Nisarg. Its just a very clean theme and I like the way that it looks. So
I'm going to install this and once it's installed you'll also want to make sure
that you go ahead and activate it and then once we activate it, it will become
our default theme. Great, now I can go to my site on the front end.
Let me refresh so that you see this is what it looks like,
and this already looks like what I'm envisioning my blog to look like so let's
just go in and we'll make some changes. To do that we'll go back to the
dashboard. Let's go under customize and from here we can customize the look and
feel of the theme for our site. Now, yours might look a little bit different
because all of these customizations are driven by the theme file so yours might
look a little bit different so don't worry if you don't see what I see. Let's
quickly go through a couple of these. This is where the start my website is and
just another blog is right here so we'll be changing that. Whatever you want
that to be and you can decide if you want that even displayed or not. Now the
site icon, that is this little guy up here and so we'll want to select an image
for that. You want to upload that from your desktop and bring it up into your
media library. For your site icon you want to make sure that it is a square at
least 512 by 512 for this to work the best and you see mine's a little bit
larger so it will ask me to crop it. It gives you a preview of what it will
look like, we like that so let's go ahead and crop and use that and it
immediately gets updated here. You can do the same for yours, again it's under site
icon. Okay, the next thing we want to do is change what color we might want,
you see whatever that's doing, that changes here. If you don't like any of them
you can also just go back to default. You can also add a header image. For
that, we can do that if I use an image. and I'm actually going to go back up to
my site identity and I don't want to use my site title. So go through that and
you'll want to play with the look and feel of your site and just go through
each of these items, I'm not going to go through all of them simply because
your theme might be a little bit different and I also like to setup widgets and
menus under a different area so I'll show you how to could do that as well. Now
the beauty about the customization is everything that we're doing, we're seeing
a preview over here but nothing has officially changed until we hit publish. So
if I go back over to my area and click refresh, none of those changes that I've
done are actually on my site yet. So, do remember to hit publish for all the
changes that you make and then once you do hit publish now everything will be
updated and so now our site looks like this. Great, now that we have our theme
set up, let's go ahead and setup a few pages. When we setup a few pages then
we'll be able to create a menu structure and that will make it easy for people
to find things on our site. So I'm gonna go to Pages All Pages so I can create
some. By default you'll have a couple of pages here and we'll go to add new and
here we want to give it a title. This one we can do About. Most websites have
an about page, maybe a blog page and a contact page so we'll do a couple of
those. You'll want to write out your about page here, give them some
introductory about you and now let's come over here and click publish. I want
to do that a couple of more times for a few other pages. I'm gonna go over here
and click add new again This time I want to set up a blog page so I'll put that
as the title. Make sure that we click publish on that and then I want to do one
more and that would be our contact page. So let me click add new one last time,
call it contact and we'll set this up in a bit. So we'll click publish on that.
So we created three new pages and now we can go and create a menu structure for
our site. To do that let's go over to appearance, go down to menus, and let's
create a new menu. We want this to be our main menu so I'm gonna click main. So
let's create menu and now that we hit create menu, we have these available. So
these are all the pages that are available to us. I'm gonna select the ones
that I want and I'm gonna click add to menu and then you'll see they're over
here. And what I can do here is I can rearrange these for the order. I can even
make this a submenu of that so that it'll become a dropdown. I don't want that
so I'm gonna put it back over. So I have three parts of our menu, you could
even do custom links here that just means if you wanted to add say your, your
social media profiles you could do that. If there was a particular post that
you really wanted to bring over to your menu, you could do that as well. We're
happy with these three for our menu and I want to click save menu. Once you
save that, that will create the main menu and now we can choose where to put
it. This is theme related so the manage locations for you might be different
than what you're seeing here. My top primary menu will likely be up at the top
but you could have several different ones, maybe a footer or something like
that. So this is where I want to use mine. Let's click save changes and now I
just want to show you what that looks like. I'll go back to my site, let me
refresh. Great, and now you see my menu up here. So that's the menu.
Now you also see,
yours might not have this, but most, most blogs usually have a sidebar area. That's
what this area is called, you have your main content and then you have
information over on the side and each of these are their own widgets. Little
pieces of code that you don't have to write but they're just little widget
areas that we can put over here. Let me show you how to do that, and yours
probably has a sidebar or a footer area, some themes will have footer area
widgets. So let's go back and fix that. Under Appearance, Widgets is where you
can find these widgets and this is my sidebar. You see all of those items are
right here. I'll go back, there's my meta, there's the meta and then these are
all the other widget areas. So you can adjust this however you want. I'm gonna
take quite a bit of these off because I like to have recent posts and I like
search. You could also add new widget areas here. Depending on what you want to
showcase, maybe if you have a lot of photos that you want to showcase, you
could put a gallery there. So that's a real quick and and easy way to use
widgets on your sidebar area. Okay, now that we have most of the look and the
feel of our site done, let's start looking at plugins and we'll do a brief
overview of that. So plugins are basically like these little apps that you can
add to your website that will make your site do whatever you want it to do. For
instance you could do a contact form, you can integrate popups, you can create
a forum, you can do ecommerce. There's almost nothing you can't do with a
plugin that's probably already on the market. Either free or a premium version.
So, and this is where all of the plugins are stored. You see by default there
are a few that are automatically installed. These are not activated but they
are installed and you can choose whether or not you want to use them. To add a
new one you simply click add new and its very similar to the themes section.
Where you'll be taken to the plugins repository and that's where WordPress
verifies to make sure that these plugins do what they say they do and that
there's nothing malicious added to them and then these are all the plugins that
you can do. Your best bet is to know what you want your site to do and know
what type of plugin you're looking for in order to install that. So I'm just
going to show you the process of installing one and searching for it. For SEO
purposes we always recommend Yoast SEO plugin and that's this one right here.
It simply helps you keep SEO under control, that the search engine optimization
that you want to do for your site to make sure that search engines like Google
or Bing or Yahoo can find your site. Just like with the theme, once you install
it you'll want to make sure that you activate it as well and with each plugin
that you activate, they may show a different area as you see this one, now we
have an area up here and we also have a tab over here to configure. Now that
was just to show you how to install one. Let me show you how to work with one,
because we want to create a contact form. The WPForms lite was automatically
installed with your WordPress site and that was by BlueHost. So we're gonna go
ahead and activate this and once its activated then I'll show you how easy it
is to add a form on your site. Great, now that we have it we can create our
first form and we'll do that here and this WPForms lite. If you ever get your
site to the point where you're wanting to make even more money or you're
wanting to charge things or you want to do a survey, things like that then the
WPForms pro version would work really well for that. Since we're just starting
out, let's go ahead and create a simple contact form, so I'm gonna click on
this and what it does is it will just automatically create a very simple form
for us and we don't have to do very much. So this is great, we can click and
drag and drop if we want any of these forms to move around. I'm going to click
on the title of this form and just say 'Contact Us' and I'm gonna head back
over and then under notifications I want to make sure that it's being sent to
the right email address. You can put in an email address right here or this is
pulling in from my WordPress admin email which is mine and I'm okay with that
but you could change that here if you wanted and you can also change when you
get the email, when you get the emails this is what the subject line will say
and what all will come over. So we're pretty happy with all of that, same thing
with under confirmation. When somebody fills out a form they will get a quick
little message right here and that all looks good so then we're gonna go back
to fields and the only other thing I like to do is I'm gonna click on the name.
I like to make this simple but you can keep first and last or you can even do
first, middle, and last. So I'm gonna click save here and now I'm done with the
WPForms so I'm gonna exit out there and now that we have this form, we need to
add it to our contact page. So let's go back to our pages and remember we did
set up a contact page so I'm gonna go down over here. Once I hover over this I
can click edit and we haven't really written anything here but what we can do
is once I hover, you see this little plus sign. I'm gonna click on that and
there's WPForms here that I can use. If you don't see it you can also start
typing it in and it will pop up. So we want to add the WPForms contact us form
here and now we see a bit of a preview of what that will look like and so I'm
happy with that so let's update that. So now we have a contact form, we used
the plugin and our contact page is ready to go and that's also a real quick
update on how to use plugins. Now you see that this notification here, we have
a red notification. You can click on all plugins and you a quick update on what
each of them are say, there's an update available meaning part of the
maintenance process we need to make sure that our site is updated so I'm going
to update the OptinMonster plugin even though I'm not using it right now, I
still want to update that and then whenever I am ready to use it then I can
activate it and connect it. So there's a lot that you can do with plugins.
Again, it really just depends on what you're wanting your site to do but
whatever it is that you think you want your site to do, there's probably a
plugin either free or paid that you can use to make your site do whatever it is
that you want and that's the power of the plugins with WordPress. Okay, now
that we've got our theme set up , we've added some plugins to make our site do
what we want. We've changed our widget area a little bit over here.
Now you really want to concentrate on the bulk of what
you're probably going to do with your blog and that's create posts. So let's go
in and, and kind of take a overview look of how to handle that. I'm gonna go
back over to my dashboard area and let's go to our posts, let's go to all
posts, I'll show you everything about it. By default you'll get a hello world
post and that is the first one that you can do. But this is the power of what
you're doing for your site. You're setting up a blog so you want to set up the
posts and start writing. So let's go in and we'll just set up a quick blog post
and I'll show you what you'll be doing. The title is the url structure that we
talked about. so you'll want to make sure that whatever title you is a very
descriptive thing for search engines as well as for users and I'm just going to
show you what I mean. then you can just start typing. Now, you can also click
on these little blocks and this is if you want to add certain things like a
list, bullet points, or numbers, you
want to add images, these blocks are here to help you with all of that. So you
can start typing stuff in, I'm just going to insert some information here. So
right here I want to add an image to break up some of this content. I'm gonna
click add block and I want to add an image. You can either bring it in from a
url so if you already know an image location you can do that here, but we need
to upload because we don't have any images yet. So I'm gonna click upload and I
want to add this one. So I'm gonna upload that and that's getting uploaded to
my website and it will be in under Media and then here I can decide how I want
the image to display. You could do Alt left or right, let's do none or align
center. When you're working with images you also want to make sure that you add
alternative text for the image. This lets search engines know what the image is
about but more importantly its for accessibility. It lets people who are using
a browser reader tell them what the site is about. You definitely want to make
sure that you always add alternative text and that helps both people who can't
see who are on your site and also help search engines know as well. So we've
just added an image, you see here is a hyperlink. I'll show you how you can do
that as well. So I'm going to highlight this area and once you highlight
something you see a little toolbar come up, we want to add a link to that,
you'll want to know what the link is and then I'm going to just paste that
here. Once I click apply, that will add in the link for me.
0 Comments