- So Nealey, I kind of have a confession to make.
- Okay. - I have this new blog up,
but all I'm really doing is posting.
I mean, I see all these things up
on my WordPress dashboard, I have no idea what they mean.
I just kind of ignore them.
- Yeah, and you're not alone.
Well, let me give you and the audience at home
a little crash course on the WordPress dashboard
here on "The Journey."
So I'll be honest, the first time I was in WordPress too
the dashboard was just overwhelming.
There are so many options on the left hand side,
at the top, and then you go through there,
and there's even more of a rabbit hole to go through.
- Exactly.
- And like most people, especially you at home
if you're just getting started, we go with what we know.
We go to how to add a page and how to make posts.
- [Alex] Right!
- We don't really touch much else.
We might have a developer do all of it,
but it's really important to understand
some of the aspects so you can really manage it yourself.
In the event that something happens,
you don't have to rely on someone else to go
and make some quick fixes.
So, are you up for my little crash course
in the WordPress dashboard?
- Yes, please!
- Cool, let's go check it out.
So I'm going to take you through
some of the most important elements.
With WordPress the sky is the limit
of all the options that you have,
but we'll kind of take it step by step
to go over the most important parts.
So, let's go through Posts since
that's what you're most comfortable with.
The Post is where you can go and add different
blog type posts to your website,
super popular with blogs.
Let me show you the page editor.
So, right here we have basically a default little page editor.
Add a title does exactly that,
can add your title,
title of the blog post.
Then right here is, what was pretty new with
WordPress 5.0 and up, it's called The Gutenberg Editor.
So what this did is made the whole editing experience
a lot easier especially for first time users.
It was named Gutenberg after the Gutenberg Press,
kind of like the printing block, what not.
Kind of the same principle.
You had different little printing blocks
of content on your website.
So, if you hit the plus right here
and search through it all,
you can start typing, or a little shortcut,
you do slash and then it'll give you that little quick list.
So if you want to start with Image you can do that here,
or you can just start typing.
Now on the right hand side under the Document tab,
this is some of the different elements of Post.
Most people don't even look at this,
which is why I want to show you, just in case,
'cause I know you're here a lot but it's good to know.
So you can set basically when you want this post
to publish, you can set a featured image
that'll show up right on top of
the blog post itself.
Whether it's like on your blog post Overview page
or on blog single post itself.
You could set up an Excerpt
if you want a specific excerpt there.
There is Discussion if you want to allow comments or not.
And then Post Attributes.
Some templates have different,
basically styles of how you want the page.
Maybe you want this blog post to have a right sidebar.
Some of the themes have that.
Maybe you want it left or not at all.
And this theme has its own separate section for sidebar.
So that's Post in a nutshell.
Really it's all about just writing content
whether its video content or blog content
like a blog post with words.
And then when you're done you can publish it,
you can preview it, you can do all the good stuff.
- [Alex] Good to know.
- All right, so that was really Post
but let me take a step back
and show you really the overview
of WordPress and really the structure.
So the left hand menu is going to be
basically all your different settings and functions
that you do on the WordPress site,
like your Posts, Media, Pages, Comments,
all that good stuff.
The top usually has a quick link to your website.
You can see some comments, quick links to add a new post,
and then usually plugins will start to add
their own little widgets up here, just for quick access.
And then there's Screen Options in the top right
where some pages you can add and remove
different content if you don't wanna see it there,
just by checking the box.
And then if you're stuck, there is help.
Basically this goes to the WordPress codex.
There's lots of different help articles and blog posts
around WordPress to help those newbies out.
- [Alex] Okay, and I see Pages, what is that for?
- [Nealey] You really have stuck to Post, have you (laughs)?
- [Alex] I really have.
- [Nealey] Yes, you have.
You have a Privacy Policy and a Sample Page.
So let me tell you about Pages.
It's got the same format as a blog post itself.
As you see here we have the title and the content.
But this is really like creating a home page
or an about page or a contact page.
These are actual pages on the site that aren't blog posts.
- [Alex] Okay, I've been wanting
to create an About Me page.
- [Nealey] Yeah, so you would do About Me.
You would add your stuff.
Maybe you have an image here.
I'm going to pretend this is
a picture of you. - I'm a burger.
(both laughing)
- [Nealey] (laughs) Burger.
And then you'd add your bio and all that good stuff
and any other elements that you want
on this website here.
Then when you're done, you would Publish.
Publish.
Then you'd view the page.
Obviously it's just gonna be a big picture
of a burger and some
random text. - That about sums me up.
- That's about it.
So that's a page.
I would highly recommend you have something,
especially an About Me page, a Contact Us page.
You're a blog so you don't really need to have
any services unless you go that route in the long run.
All right, so next up on our list is Appearance menu.
So the Appearance menu has a lot of different stuff
around really the style of your website.
What I would like to do,
especially on a brand new website build
is find a new theme.
I'm one of those people that tries not
to stick with the same theme on every website,
which is not the normal.
I would usually recommend is find anything
that you love and stick with it.
Make it easy on yourself.
I don't like making on easy myself,
but when you go to Themes,
you can see some of the featured themes.
You can go to popular, and kind of just scroll through,
and there is literally hundreds and hundreds of themes.
The power of WordPress is it's an open source platform,
which means anyone and everyone can contribute to it.
So if I actually knew how to code,
I can make my own theme and add it
to the WordPress repository,
and literally anyone can use it.
It's all open source, it's free to use,
so you really just go through
and if you like a theme you can install it
absolutely free here.
And then moving on to Customize.
This is basically how most themes let you customize
the look and feel of your site.
So it'll actually give you a preview of your website,
how it looks.
We got Alex Eats Food, All My Adventures,
and all your reviews so far.
And then on the left hand side you can kind of just
go through each of the options and see what they are.
So you have general settings,
what typography you want to use,
and with this your customize may not look the same as this.
It really depends on the theme you use.
Actually, most themes will use the Customize,
but some themes may have a separate theme options.
It'll usually be somewhere around here for theme options.
It really just depends on the theme that you've chosen.
It's kind of the good and bad thing with WordPress,
like anyone can make a theme,
but anyone can make a theme their way,
so you have to end up learning their way of the theme.
- Okay.
- Next up we have Widgets.
Widgets are basically the things on your sidebar,
like right now I see you have Search and Recent Posts,
which is pretty common for a blog like you.
But you have a Subscribe option,
you have a WooCommerce Sidebar if you ever
wanted to sell stuff.
You have a Very Top Bar.
And your theme gives you a lot different
widgets options and sidebars to use, just super helpful.
You can add so much to it
or just random text, whatever you want really.
All right, so next up we have menus.
- Okay, I've used that before.
That's where I setup the link
to my homepage and my menu bar?
- Perfect, yep.
As you see you have the Home link here.
You can add any more pages like your About Me
that we just created with a picture of your burger.
(Alex laughs)
It's basically you, it's your new profile photo.
It adds right there.
You can go ahead and Save Menu.
You can create multiple menus
depending on your theme.
This one gives the option to have
your Primary Menu at the top of your page,
also one for your Footer Menu,
and then a Very Top Bar Menu,
but basically it's just your links
on the top of the menu bar.
And then I told you a little bit
about plugins, recently, right?
- Yeah, plugins solve everything, right?
- Literally everything.
So I do see here
you have lots of plugins installed,
About nine, seven are active,
but those plugins let you basically add
extra functionality onto WordPress.
WordPress by itself, pretty solid,
but these plugins make it even better.
Again, open source so there's tons
of plugins to choose from.
Say you wanted to, I don't know,
add a slider on your website.
You can go to Plugins, Add New.
- [Alex] And what's a slider?
- [Nealey] So you see those websites that have
the content there and it'll just slide through
and have different piece of content?
- [Alex] Right.
- So that's basically what that is.
So if I search slider,
I can't type today (laughs)
If I search slider, basically it will give me
different plugins that'll help me create those sliders.
Like there is a Video Slider here,
Slide Anything, then you can easily install it.
Literally just search whatever your looking for
and it's a search engine if you will.
It'll search WordPress and give you
all the responses based on that search result.
And then you'd choose Install Now
and then Activate, and then it's there.
And again, with plugins every plugin is different
so you have to learn their settings,
but it's not too difficult.
- Cool.
- All right Alex, so are you going to have
any other users on your website
or is it just going to be you?
- I'll be the only contributor,
but I do want to get some subscribers on this website.
- Perfect, so the user section basically lets you manage
all the users on your website.
I see here your name is rt1xrx.
- [Alex] That's me.
- [Nealey] Probably should change that,
but you can also set up different users
so if you ever did want to have maybe
a web developer manage it or things like that,
or if you want to have your people to subscribe,
they can setup their own profiles on your website
and be subscribers. - Okay.
- [Nealey] All that is managed right here.
And then let me take you through some
of the different user levels,
because there are a few to choose from.
Now say you wanted to have different users on your website,
but maybe you don't want them to have all the power.
- [Alex] Right.
- [Nealey] That's the power of WordPress.
There's different user roles that they can use and set up.
Like by default there is a Subscriber,
they can basically adjust, edit their profile,
and add comments to your website.
And then there's Contributors who can contribute
to your website, make their own blog post.
There's Authors, kind of the same principle.
Each of these levels have different permission sets.
Now Administrator basically has the same
amount of access that you have as a site owner.
So only give someone access as an administrator
if you absolutely trust them or if they absolutely have to.
- [Alex] So don't give my subscribers administrator access.
- [Nealey] Highly wouldn't recommend that.
- [Alex] Good to know.
- [Nealey] 'Cause they can literally just destroy
your whole site with a click of a button.
- Yeah. - Real bad.
And the next up, let's move on to Tools.
Now with Tools there's not a whole lot
that you will have to really do here.
The biggest use that people use with Tools
are the import and export.
So say your coming from wordpress.com
on to your own self-hosted WordPress site,
you can use the Export feature on wordpress.com
to export all of your content to a file,
and then come down here to Tools and then Import,
and then import your WordPress file
and add all your content.
Making it so that transition is nice and smooth.
All right, so let's talk about Settings.
Now there is a lot of different options under Settings.
We'll kind of break them down one by one.
So General Settings, this is going to let you
set your Site Title and your Tagline.
I see here it's perfect.
You have Alex Eats Food,
and All my adventures for the tagline,
the WordPress address URL, and site address URL.
Basically, if you want to change your domain name
at any point or update it,
maybe you don't want the www, you would do so here.
For most people, I wouldn't recommend changing this
'cause it can break your website.
I've done it myself quite a few times,
highly wouldn't recommend it.
But you can down here, there's different things.
If you wanna update your Email Address,
I see it's something super random,
you probably want to update that (laughs).
Membership, anyone can register.
So if you do want subscribers on your site
make sure you check this box.
If you don't, if maybe your just a small business site,
you probably don't want anyone to register on your site,
leave that unchecked.
And then you have some date and time
formats here on General.
All right, so we're gonna skip over Writing
and just go into the Reading settings.
This one is super important
if you don't want your page to just be a blog.
Maybe you created a brand new home page
that's super tailored to your foodie experience
or your business, you set that here.
So you would choose a static homepage,
you'd choose About Me.
We're gonna pretend that's your Homepage (laughs).
And then your Post page, we'll make that Sample.
So now your blog's actually on the Sample Page,
and your Homepage is actually the About Me
that's gonna show up.
- [Alex] Okay.
- [Nealey] Blog posts to show at most.
So on your blog page now, your new one,
it's only going to show 10 posts
and then there's going to be a Read More
that they can choose there.
As always Save Changes.
If you don't, none of that stuff stays
and you have to go back later on.
Moving on to Discussion.
Real quick here, just Discussion goes over
different comment settings.
You can go through and check the list
of what you want and what you don't want.
And then last but not least, on the Settings one
that I really wanted to talk about are Permalinks.
- What are permalinks?
- Permalinks are basically just a fancy way of saying
the stuff that comes after your domain and the URL.
So by default, WordPress makes it plain,
so it would be, maybe your blog post
is alexeatsfood.com/?p=123,
doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- [Alex] Nope.
- [Nealey] It's definitely not pretty.
It's kind of ugly.
(Alex laughs)
So you have different options depending on your style.
Maybe if you do post all the time,
you maybe want that day and name
or month and name in that URL there.
For the most part, most small businesses
will just use the post name.
It's the one I recommend usually.
But if you want to make it really custom
you can actually add your own down here.
So maybe I want the category to show up first
and then the post name,
I would click those buttons and then save.
So now if I go to one of your blog posts,
it's alexeatsfood.com/recipes/ and then the blog title.
- [Alex] Okay.
- It makes it a little prettier and better for SEO.
All right so that's the overview
of the WordPress dashboard,
but there's really another portion of WordPress
that I really want to talk to all of you about,
and those are WordPress updates like
core, plugins and themes.
Now Alex, how often do you update those?
- Well, I did update them yesterday
'cause I knew we were making this video,
but before that it was probably about a year.
- Okay, that's that's not good (laughs).
- Yeah.
- So these plugins, themes and just WordPress in general
has updates that they do for performance issues,
for security issues, and just new features too,
so its super important to constantly update these.
I'll probably check on your site at least
once every maybe one or two weeks
to see if there's there.
'Cause if there is like a massive vulnerability
with a plugin and they sent out an update
and you did not update that,
the bad people out there go and check sites,
see that you have that older version of the plugin,
then they know, cool, that plugin is exploitable,
now I can get into your site and I've hacked it,
and then it's a whole other deal
that you don't wanna deal with.
- Okay, I'll definitely do a better job.
- Yeah, so make sure you just check on this every so often.
There are lots of tools out there that do
auto updates for you.
Maybe your hosting provider might.
Definitely something to check out.
- All right, cool. (upbeat music)
So now I can start taking full advantage
of every part of my WordPress dashboard.
Let us know in the comments down below
what kind of videos you wanna see in the future.
- Yeah, and while your there make sure
you smash that like button, as always
if you got some value out of this and you're now
a WordPress expert, subscribe to our channel
so you can get these videos first.
This is "The Journey."
We'll see you next time.