WordPress In 1 Hour Course
by: Tina Fletcher
Introduction: Create a WordPress Website in 1 Hour!
Here is what you are going to learn today in this completely free video course!
- What is a Domain Name?
- How to find the right Domain Name for you
- What is Hosting?
- Buying Hosting and Domain Names
- Setting up WordPress
- What exactly are Plugins and why they are so important?
- How to add those Plugins to your site
- Setting up Themes and Customizers
- Setting up your Menu, Blog, Pages & Side Widgets
- As well as a few cheeky bonuses !
This training will create your WordPress website which is an integral part of creating your online business.
LESSON 1:
What is a Domain Name?
A Domain Name is the first part of the system you’ll be learning today and without it you cannot have your own address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) online.
A Domain Name is your virtual or online address and it is the information you give to someone to find you on the web.
When selecting a Domain Name always try, where possible, to make it a dot com address instead a dot net or something else. Yes, this is getting harder and harder to find these, but there are still ones out there and I have an amazing tool to help you not only find your domain name but also see if the social media names are available for it also.
You can also use country specific ones if that works with your target audience ie here in Australia it is .com.au in UK it is .com.uk and in Canada it is .ca
LESSON 1:
VIDEO: Finding Your Domain Name!
Now the fun part! We can start deciding on your name.
Good ways to start are:
- Are you trading under your own Name?
- Do you have a business name? (I always check this before buying new business name)
- What about using Keywords in the name?
- What about a job title?
Buying a Domain
I am not going to buy the domain here as I want hosting as well. Watch the video (Buying hosting & domain) where I will buy a domain and hosting together.
Links Used in Video
NAMECHK – https://namechk.com/
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZW987Oz5SK4″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 2:
What is Hosting?
The second part of this training is getting Hosting.
Hosting is where your domain name can be found on the world wide web. (Hence the ‘www’ at the beginning of web addresses.)
When you buy hosting you purchase space on a server (like a really, really large desktop computer tower) and this server has been setup to connect your domain to the web.
Having a good server / host ensures that your website can be accessed and visited from people all over the world. When looking for a good hosting provider you need to make sure that you can do a couple of things.
You need a good amount of Bandwidth, Disk Space, Uptime, Cpanel and Support is a great place to start.
When you start off you can start with a shared server and I try to get unmetered bandwidth, if possible (of course if it is an inexpensive one they will say something if you use massive amounts, but when you get to that stage always just upgrade).
Disk Space over 50 GB, 99% Uptime, cPanel and great support (very important when things go wrong) and the ability to add more domains (great if you want to have a product url or members area are separate) will make sure that wherever your website is hosted, it will stay up for a long time.
LESSON 4:
VIDEO: Buying Hosting and Domain Name.
We use a couple of different hosting companies, and have tried so very many over the years, but we have found that NameCheap is a reliable service and has great support for both for newbies and troubleshooting with more complicated issues. It was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall and as the name stated, it is all about cheap but reliable hosting.
We don’t promote it because it gives us the most affiliate money. In fact it is pretty low in comparison to other such as Bluehost, but we like the hosting and the support so that’s why we recommend it over others.
Links Used in Video
NAMECHEAP – https://www.namecheap.com
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZW987Oz5SK4″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 5:
VIDEO: Setting Up WordPress
Now you have hosting and a domain, you will need to setup WordPress on your site. We will set this up through cPanel (that is why we ensured that the hosting had cPanel, there are others way but this is the easiest).
You will have a couple of emails from your Hosting Provider. Make sure to keep these!
If you followed along with buying hosting and domain through Namecheap you will have 4 emails. Watch the video below and follow along as I install the SSL and WordPress.
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/9BnvyGOZv1E” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 6:
What are Plugins and do I need them?
A plugin is a software addition that adds extra benefits and features to your website. Some plugins add advertising, and monetizing to your website. Others add links and feeds and other special features. Plugins allow you to do extra things without the stress or complication of creating the feature via coding or php.
Plugin can be categorises as such (plus and example of each):
- Administration – spell check, seo
- Business and Monetizing – eCommerce
- Design, Layout and Styles – wyswyg editors
- Graphics, Video and Sound – audio player
- Links – blog links, link checkers
- Odds and Ends – weather apps
- Outside Information – export from Amazon
- Posts – outside posts
Plugins allow you to add more features to your site, do things in the back-end like SEO, backups and monterize your site with call to action buttons, PayPal buttons and List building benefits.
LESSON 7:
VIDEO: Adding Plugins
Follow along with this video as we install a couple of important Plugins. Through further videos I will show you additional plugins that you can use and at that time we will install them as well.
Plugins Used in Video
- Contact Form 7
- W3 Total Cache
- Yoast SEO
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/QSGZT81rc2w” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 8:
VIDEO: Setting Up Themes and Customising
These days WordPress comes with thousands of themes, many free and many paid. For this course, we are going to install a free theme and the video below will show you how. Today when you install themes you will find that most have a “Customizer’ component as this is now an integral part of WordPress and was part of the 3.4 update.
This allows you to tweak theme settings using a WYSIWYG interface and customise the theme so it includes the colours, fonts, text — and pretty much anything else that you want. It makes it easier to adjust as you go along.
So follow along in the video and install your theme and set up your customizer.
Agama Theme – https://wordpress.org/themes/agama/
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/glMufa1coaQ” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
PLEASE NOTE: There are 2 additional lessons for using different free themes here.
The themes used are:
Astra Theme – https://wordpress.org/themes/astra/
<iframe width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/xQ0BOpTictA” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
Ryan Theme – https://wordpress.org/themes/ryan/
<iframe width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/plzVyff5nko” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
The plugins used are:
Beaver Builder Lite
https://wordpress.org/plugins/beaver-builder-lite-version/
LESSON 9:
VIDEO: Setting Up Menus
Even though we setup the Menus as part of the customizer, I wanted to show you how to add more and change them because you will use this when you want to add new pages etc.
You don’t really need to follow along and do much, but you may as well to start feeling comfortable navigating the back-end.
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/PlwYC-tmN3M” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 10:
VIDEO: Setting Up A Blog
Your Blog Posts usually contains new information (i.e topical articles) and are listed from most recent to oldest. They should be categorised and should have feature images. These are dynamic and the list should always be added to.
This is an especially important part of SEO and the search engines crawling your content. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc all love content that is added to, changed and grows. The bots that crawl and list your site will check for additional content and if there are any, they class your site as more relevant and searchable.
Your blog contains several elements and setting them all up right from the beginning will allow you to grow without having to go back and do more work.
The components are:
- The blog page where your list of blogs sit (this can be a separate blog page or your home page)
- Categories
- Posts
Watch the video and follow along as we set up each of these components.
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/yGi6c0xRx1c” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 11:
VIDEO: Setting Up Pages
The difference between pages and posts are that pages are usually reserved for static pages, such as an About Me and Contact Us pages. They are not listed by date and are easier to place on the menu.
Plugins Used in Video
TinyMCE Advanced
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/L1__0DQ4zrU” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
LESSON 11:
VIDEO: Setting Up Side Widgets
The side widgets are important real estate on your website and you can add things like search bars, lists of posts, CTA (call to action), social media feeds and so much more.
Sometimes you may set them up on your blog and post only and not on your pages, the choice is yours.
<iframe width=”744″ height=”418″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/BrwjVoswgOc” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
When I first starting using Page Builders and specifically Beaver Builder, I used the free version and was really happy with it. However, as time went on I wanted more and more features so I moved to the Beaver Builder Pro and now I have an Agency Version as I use it on many of my client’s sites.
Let’s look at the Free vs Standard/Pro Versions options by both function and features.
| Beaver Builder Free | Beaver Builder Standard / Pro |
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The Pro Version also has the Beaver Builder Theme included.
So which one is right for you? I think that depends on your needs, try the free, then check out the demo of the Pro and see if you want the additional features. It’s really up to you and for a simple site, you can definitely get away with using the free version.
You can download the free version from here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/beaver-builder-lite-version/
Or over at Beaver Builder Website – https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/
You can check out the demo of the Pro Version here – demo.wpbeaverbuilder.com/?new (or link on homepage)
Here is my video of using Beaver Builder in action.
<iframe width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/A9BMTh_w4K0″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
Congratulations!
You now have up a Basic WordPress Website and this is your start to having an online business that engages your audience and creates you an online income.
Tips to Grow: Try to each week add a blog post and grow your website, website these days should always be evolving and growing, the search engines love this and it boosts your site in ranking, but more importantly your audience wants to engage and hear from you. Build on this to create a successful online business.
Tutorial Author:
Tina Fletcher – I am offering this tutorial as I am now moving to another niche and thought it may help. Feel free to connect with me if you need any advice. 🙂
Author: