Hi everyone, I'm Latasha from websitesetup.org, and today we're bringing you a step-by-step guide for setting up your
own blog. Before we hop into that, here's a little bit more about us. Websitesetup.org is a free online resource for learning web development,
design, and WordPress. Our goal is to help beginners create their own websites,
blogs, and online stores using the right tools and platforms. So to learn more
about our review policies and processes, be sure to click the link in our
description box, or you can go ahead and visit websitesetup.org. Now, into the
tutorial! Nowadays it's easier than ever to start a blog even if you are a
complete beginner who doesn't understand anything about coding or web design. With
a little bit of guidance and the right tools, you can have your very own
personal or professional blog up and running in less than 30 minutes.
The
very first thing you need to do is choose a topic for your blog. Most
successful blogs focus on one thing, like food, fashion, travel, or current events for example. We recommend choosing a topic that you feel
passionate about or are interested in. So some questions that you might want to
ask yourself during this step include: Are you an expert in something?Are you
passionate about something? And are you learning something new and maybe want to write about your process? Next you need to find the right blogging platform.
You'll need to choose between a free or self-hosted platform. So anyone can sign
up with a free blogging site or platform such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, tumblr.com, etcetera, however if you're serious about blogging, the free blogging
platform is really not the way to go. There are many cons and downsides of a
free blogging service like limited monetization, customization, and traffic,
but most importantly you'll have no control over your own blog and if you
want to upgrade, you'll need to pay more than you really should.
The solution for
this is to self-host your own blog. That way, you'll have no limitations related
to your blog content such as images and videos, and your blog will look
more professional, better-looking, and can be improved later on. Plus, you actually
own your blog which is really important. Now of course, if you don't plan to blog
for more than a few weeks or so, a free blog might totally make sense for you
but in most every other case we recommend the self-hosted route.
Most
recent statistics show that WordPress, which is a free open-source blog
platform, is the most commonly used blogging platform in today's day and age.
We've tried dozens of different blogging platforms but none of them really quite
compare to WordPress. So here's why self- hosted WordPress is likely your best
option: well it's free to use, open source, it's very flexible with hundreds of free
and premium blog themes. And it has a large developer community! WordPress is
constantly being updated and improved regularly. You'll also have full control
over your blog and, lucky for you: it doesn't cost much to self-host a
WordPress blog. All you'll really need is a domain name which can be as low as
$10 a year and web hosting – around $4 a month. Next, you'll need to set up your
blog through web hosting. To get started with a self-hosted WordPress blog, you're
going to need a domain name and web hosting. We've been recommending Bluehost as a blog, web, hosting, and domain registrar for years.
From Bluehost, you'll
get a custom domain name with an SSL certificate, you'll get affordable
website hosting, simple one-click install for WordPress, and free email accounts
like "your name" at "your domain.com". Now of course you don't need to use Bluehost,
especially when you already have a web host, or you prefer to use something else,
whichever hosting company that you choose, just make sure that it has
1-click installs for blogging platforms such as WordPress. This will make your
setup process much easier. Once you have signed up with Bluehost,
you're able to install your WordPress blog! Now here's what you need to do to
get WordPress on Bluehost: just log in to your user profile at Bluehost, on the
home page click on the blue button (WordPress) and then the WordPress
installation should start. We should note that your domain name activation might
take 10 or 15 minutes, so don't freak out about the weird looking temporary domain name, that will fix itself. Bluehost will allow you to choose your admin login and password for WordPress
when it's done installing.
Once your hosting is set up, you'll need to
configure your WordPress blog. Even though WordPress will not be 100%
operational there are still some settings that you should go through.
General settings: now this is where you can set site title, effectively the name
of your site. The title is particularly important since it's what every visitor
sees first and is also a big part of how search engines determine your rankings,
so make sure that you have your business name there. Tagline: you can think of this
as the summary of what your blog is about in one short sentence, for example:
"recipes that even a beginner cook can handle." In this section, you can also
check to see if your blog address or URL is in order, you can set the time zone
you're in, and your preferred language.
Another important thing to note is that
Bluehost has a coming soon feature in the last section of general settings and
once you're ready to go live with your blog, make sure to turn this feature off.
So the next super important thing that you must make sure to do is make sure
that search engines such as Google can actually index your blog. To do that, just
go to settings and then reading again from the main sidebar and make sure that
the field labeled 'discourage search engines from indexing this site' remains
unchecked. If you don't do that, your blog might end up literally invisible to
Google which helps nobody! And permalinks: so permalink settings – this setting
defines how WordPress will go about creating individual URLs and website
addresses for each of your individual blog posts or sub pages.
This idea, it may
sound a little bit advanced, I know, but setting this is actually very very
simple. Just go to settings and then permalinks. Once there, just set your
permalinks to the post name variant – this is the most optimal setting of the ones
available, and also the one preferred by Google and other search engines.
Step 5: you'll want to design your blog by choosing a theme. Now another great
thing about WordPress is that even though you might not be a skilled
designer yourself, you can still get a really top-shelf look for your blog. How?
Well thanks to thousands of WordPress themes that are
available out there on the web! Best of all, many of them are free and you can
customize them pretty easily without any coding knowledge.
So go back to your
WordPress dashboard and navigate to appearance and then themes.
Once you're there, just click on add new then switch the tab to popular. What
you're going to see are the most popular free WordPress themes in the market, and
the best part is that you can install any of them with just one click! So go
ahead and spend awhile browsing through this list to find something that really
suits your business and the main purpose behind your new blog. Once you do see a
theme that you like you can get it installed onto your blog by clicking on
install next to the themes name, followed by activate. Step 6: add logo, change colors, and structure. So even though the WordPress theme that
you've decided to use already comes with a specific pre-configured design, you can
still change parts of it to your liking which is really great.
This can all be
done by going to appearance, customize and what you'll see is the WordPress
customizer. Depending on your current theme you'll get a different set of
options in the sidebar menu, but the most common ones will include site identity –
so this is where you can set your blog title again plus add a logo, image, and a
site icon, colors which is for adjusting the basic colors used throughout the
design, header for setting your header graphic, or image background for setting
your background graphic, image, or color menus, which helps visitors navigate
through your site, and widgets which give additional functionality to your site. We
have detailed info on each of these elements over on our blog which I'm
going to leave a link to down below, so definitely check that out, but we'll go
through a little bit of that in this video too.
Now step 7 is to write new
blog posts and pages. With all of the above
already done, you're ready to start creating content for your new blog! So if
you are building a blog, you'll likely need at least some of the following
pages. Blog: this is the section that WordPress creates for you automatically.
By default all your latest posts are going to be listed right on
the homepage, an about page to tell your visitors what the blog is about and
who's behind it, contact to let people contact you directly, services or
products to solicit your products and/or services and tell people why they should
buy them, testimonials from your previous customers, and portfolio which is your
body of work presented in an attractive way.
Luckily the process of creating a
new page in WordPress is the same no matter what sort of page you need to
create. To do that just go to your WordPress dashboard and then to pages,
add new. What you'll see is the main page editing screen of WordPress. As you would
imagine, once you click the publish button your page becomes visible to the
public. The blog functionality is one of the core elements of the WordPress CMS
and that's why WordPress has a whole separate section devoted to creating and
publishing blog posts.
You can find it if you go to posts from the main WordPress
dashboard sidebar, and creating new posts works exactly the same as creating new
pages. The only difference is that your posts are going to be displayed
automatically on your home page while your pages need to be added to a menu if
you want anyone to find them, and menus have a very special task in WordPress.
Basically they are your best tool for making sure that the pages you've
created can be found by your readers. Typically your blog should have one main
menu that's placed in the main navigation bar, so most visitors will expect to find something like that on your site.
To
create a new menu go to appearance and then menus, and once there just look
through the list of the available pages, all the pages that you've created so far
and click the checkboxes next to the ones that you want to have in your new
menu. Then click on add to menu. You'll then see your pages listed in the
section on the right. Depending on the theme that you're using you might have
anywhere from zero to a handful of sidebars available and maybe a
customizable footer as well. To tune up what's displayed in all of those areas
we're going to use WordPress widgets.
In simple terms, widgets are small blocks of
content that can be displayed in various places throughout a WordPress blog. To
see what this is all about, just go to appearance and then widgets. What you see
here are all of the different widgets that WordPress gives you. Just to name a
few, there's archives which is a list of all of your past blog posts, image – an
image of your choice, category is a list of all of your blog categories, recent
posts, search, text – a piece of custom text, and so many more. So what you can do with
all of those widgets is place them in one of the predefined widget areas,
usually within a sidebar or a footer.
You can do the same with any of the other
available widgets so just grab them from the section on the left and drag and
drop them on to any of the widget areas that your theme gives you. And there you
have it! You can now launch your new blog! Wasn't
so difficult was it? Keep in mind that every blog you create with WordPress is
different – you can always change WordPress themes or even buy premium
ones to really make your blog look professional and unique. We have some
additional guides that should help to kick off your blogging journey linked on
our website, just open up the description box down below to check it out or type
websitesetup.org into your browser! And if you get stuck or have any questions
about this step-by-step guide, leave us a comment down below and we'll help you
out.
And of course don't forget to subscribe to our channel and leave a
like if this was helpful for you. Until next time, thanks for watching!.
