Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling a little bit satisfied with myself because I’m nearing the end of a big project
which was redesigning my website in WordPress which you see running right now.
We’re almost at the end of it and I thought maybe we could take a few minutes and talk
about WordPress design, how you go about building a website that for a lot of you this might
be your first kind of peek at the backend of websites, at the kind of the inner workings
and the control room behind the websites that we visit on a regular basis.
So today, a little look at WordPress on DottoTech.
WordPress is one of several different platforms that allow people to create websites.
Now people get confused with WordPress because there's WordPress that you install yourself
on a server and WordPress also has kind of a self-administered website that they host
and they manage all of the stuff for, for kind of entry level type stuff, more really
for blogging, for just creating blogs.
We’re going to be talking about the first instance where you’ve got a proper WordPress
installed, you have your own server and you are doing it and it’s set up for real business.
Now I have just finished redesigning my site, which I know I needed it desperately.
Like everything else, I just kind of rolled up my sleeves and dove right in head first
to see, not really too much worried about what I didn’t know, kind of more worried
about what I could learn.
I’m pretty pleased with the results.
Let’s just quickly look at it right now and then let’s jump into the backend of
it so that you can see all the different pieces and you can understand what goes into composing
a website and preparing it.
So this is the site.
So what I wanted is I wanted something that you know just created the energy and kind
of the confidence of what DottoTech is all about, maybe some competence, level of competence
attached.
So I talk about the fact that we’re going to teach you about productivity in the technology
solutions, promote my keynotes, my speaking a little bit and then we get into the actual
videos, all of the different videos that I’ve produced.
Now for my site, the main content are videos that I produced that we host here on YouTube
but that we present on our own site.
Most websites have a composition of pages and then posts.
Posts are kind of subpages within a larger infrastructure.
The overall hierarchy of your website is very important as you design them.
It’s something that you’re going to pay a lot of attention to and the more closely
you follow rules relating to the structure of your website, the more efficient your website
is going to be in a variety of different ways and the easier it’s going to be for you
to manage it.
So these are my posts and I’ve got posts in different areas.
I’ve got my regular demo post will be one.
I’ve got the Ask DottoTech post.
I’ve got my vlog which is Growing Your YouTube Channel.
You can see them all there.
Then there’s the marketing side of my website because we do have to make some money where
we promote our courses and let people know about our courses.
And then at the very bottom here, we see a little bit of what we call social proof.
This is a tool that talks about how often our blogs and our pages are being shared and
talked about in social media.
Because at the end of the day, people visiting your site on the internet are nothing but
lemmings.
Sorry to say it but it’s true.
We don’t look at something of value unless somebody else online tells us that it’s
valued.
We don’t trust our own eyes.
So this idea of social proof of having lots of tweets, lots of Facebook shares, lots of
likes attached to all of our content adds to the value of the content, regardless of
how good the content is.
If it’s got lots of likes and lots of shares, people think it’s good.
And if it is good and has lots of likes and shares, so much the better.
So this is what it looks like to you and me visiting the website.
What did it look to me like I was building it and how do I manage it?
Well, this is the WordPress Dashboard.
This is my site but from the back looking out.
And you see down the left-hand side here, all of the different tools that are within
WordPress that allow us to control it.
Now everybody’s basic set of tools are going to be different but most people have the same
sort of tools running.
When you install WordPress, you’re going to get a predefined set of different tools
available for you and they allow you to manage the pages and manage the posts.
But on top of all of this, you’re going to install what’s called a theme.
A theme sets all of the global settings for WordPress.
Now I use a theme called Themify.
Let me just call them up here because you should know about Themify because I quite
like Themify.
So Themify is actually good Canadian company as one would expect, coming from me.
Themify is a company that—they do Shopify.
They do the big shopping cart tool but they also have all of these different themes available.
They have Premium WordPress themes.
So you can sign up and you can purchase a license for individual theme or for a collection
of all of their themes which is what I did and it costs like $79 a year for me to access
all of their themes.
They’re constantly tweaking them because WordPress itself is constantly changing.
But this is just the beginning.
I think you can be fooled into thinking that when you look at something like this, you’re
there and you’ve got your site done but it’s not actually the case.
This is the theme that I do on my site.
It’s called Ultra.
If you take a look at how it looks when they show it, it looks quite a bit different if
you look at it.
It looks pretty good actually but it looks very different I would say than mine.
It’s got a lot of the same common elements.
What this is actually called a parallax type site which we have actually kind of two layers.
We have a background photo layer or image layer and then you have a foreground active
layer, which is pretty cool.
It creates this nice slide over which I think gives it a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain
elegance to it.
But at any rate, so I installed that theme and then you start poking around and changing
things within the theme.
I think if you’re a real website designer then you’ve got a strategy behind it all
and you know exactly what you’re doing going in.
Not so for Dotto.
I’m afraid to say.
Instead what happened was I basically cloned my whole site over onto a development site,
played around, tried to figure things out and learned how this theme worked, and basically
just cobbled it together myself.
I’m sure it’s not the most efficient way to do it.
Consequently, it took me a couple of months to do it but I got it done the way I wanted
it.
I got it done right and I learned a lot of things along the way.
So let me just take you through some of these different tools so you can understand exactly
what each piece is.
So within the WordPress itself, we’ve got the ability to have posts and pages as I mentioned
before.
So pages are the big things, the big things.
The home page is a page.
If we go in and we take a look at my speaking page where I promote my speaking business,
that is a page because this content is fairly static.
You can have dynamic content within it but it’s fairly static and it’s kind of almost
like chapters if you think about books.
Within the pages themselves, you can have different posts and the blog posts can be
in different categories.
So if we go in and we take a look back to the homepage, here we can see that I’ve
got a link here which will bring you into all of my vlogs.
This is what I call my posts.
So here are all my different demos that we’ve produced recently.
So you can go in and you can see each of these is what’s called a post.
They’re not a page but they are posts.
So if we go into it, it will look like a page when we’re into it but it’s actually got
some different features and some different way of being served and a different way of
being classified so that it automatically populates.
Here’s what I mean by that.
This is a big deal.
When I finish this video that we’re looking at right now, we will create a blog post based
around this video.
Once that blog post is created, we will create it as a post within the WordPress and then
once it’s published, it will automatically replace this one right here.
I don’t have to go in and manually say here’s the newest one, but instead because I will
have classified it as a Dotto Demo, which what I call my demo posts, it will automatically
populate in here.
And once this one here has been moved from here, it will get moved down to here because
I’ve got this second one in the series running here.
As soon as I create a new Ask DottoTech and we post it and we publish it, it will automatically
usurp this DottoTech Episode 18 here with Episode 19.
So you just create content and then it automatically flows onto the pages and it’s properly served
out to people.
If we want to take a look at all of the different Ask DottoTech shows, we can just go here into
the page that I created that has all of the posts collected and again, as those post get
published they’ll automatically be populated onto this page.
You’re more concerned once you’ve set up your WordPress site, about content than
you are about structure because you set all of the structure up in this initial design
phase, if that makes sense.
So going back to the WordPress install, we see that we have the posts available here
and down here are pages.
Now also pages can be used for things like landing pages and opt-in pages for webinars
and other things but we’ll get into that some other time.
Within the posts themselves though, there are some different features that we look for
because if you think about what you want in a WordPress site or any website, you want
to have the ability to communicate and convey the valuable information that you have and
you’re offering out there.
But then you’ll also want to create some sort of mechanism for engagement with your
audience.
Now that can be chat, that can be some sort of form where people will have a conversation,
which can be somewhat problematic.
I’ve never had a lot of success with allowing conversations to happen on my website because
it seems to be a very popular place for hackers and stuff to attack although there are some
systems that work very well for comments.
Instead, I leave my comments in Facebook and in YouTube and that’s where I have a dialogue.
So if I don’t have comments, what sort of interaction can I have on my site?
What I aim for is to get people to subscribe to my newsletter ultimately on my site.
Watch my videos, read my content and subscribe to my newsletter, that’s what I look for.
So I’ve created opt-ins on every page that again are automatically created.
So when we compose a post—let’s just go into a post here and here, I’ll bring up
a list of all of our posts—and when we go in and we actually edit the post itself—I’ll
click here on Edit—you’ll see here that we have a whole bunch of different tools.
This might look a little bit confusing to you on the surface but you will very quickly
learn what all of these different pieces are because there are a lot of moving parts on
a WordPress blog post.
There’s the content itself, there’s the engagement and then there’s also all of
the search engine optimization that has to happen so that it can be found and properly
classified on the internet.
So within this, because I’m using this Themify theme—typically speaking when you’re in
a WordPress, you would think you’d be entering your content here into the main text field
but there is a slightly different way that we enter information here as we go along—but
before we get to the content, let’s show you some of the extra interactive pieces and
then get back to the content if you’ll stay with me.
The first thing that we see here is something called a plug-in which I’ve installed which
is Social Warfare.
Now WordPress by itself is fairly vanilla.
It’ll allow you to post posts, create pages, have some interactivity in those pages, have
hyperlinks within them, graphics, maybe embed a video but it doesn’t allow for things
like pulling in all of the different social media markers that you have out there, automatically
creating a Like button say from Facebook.
All of that comes from something called plug-ins where we add and we extend the functionality
of WordPress.
This Social Warfare is just such a plug-in.
What Social Warfare does is it manages all of the different social networks that I want
to create connections to within a post.
So within this I’ve set Global Settings for WordPress and for all of my social networks
and the way that it resolves is if we go here—let’s just watch this and go into this blog post
here—is represented by those icons that were showing on the homepage.
They also appear here on the blog post pages themselves and if we scroll down, we’ll
see a representation of all of the different social networks that I’m currently active
in.
The encouragement and the idea here is I want people to click on those if they like the
post so that they can create that social proof.
So other people see that the people that have viewed this before them like it and have kind
of given it this seal of approval so everybody else is going to figure, this is great.
So when we go into the post we see here all the social icons coming from Social Warfare.
Now this is all created with a connection within WordPress where I tell them what my
Facebook page is, what my Twitter account is and you can see that there have been 38
actions with this in the last day or so.
So when somebody visits this page now, what will happen is they’ll see that there have
been 33 have liked it on Facebook, so immediately it’s got basically some credibility because
people are already saying that it’s valuable.
Now depending on how much traffic you have to your website this might be a miniscule
or a massive number of different likes and clicks and tweets and that sort of stuff.
For me, this is great.
38 in a day or so means that there is a lot of traffic on this as far as I’m concerned
and people like it and they’re giving me kind of kudos by clicking on it.
Now the nice thing about Social Warfare is I didn’t create this very cool thing of
having this stark background and then when you roll over it becomes color.
All of those are setting that I set within Social Warfare.
So I married that look to the overall look of my site and we came up with something that
I think really works well for my WordPress site.
This are the little things, these are the little touches that you can add to WordPress
that make it special for you.
So we’ll see that WordPress plug-in at the top and we’ll also see it down here at the
bottom of each and every post.
Now right beneath that is another plug-in and this is from a tool called Optin Monster.
This one here helps me create and generate people opting in and signing up for my newsletter.
Now again, when we create a post we don’t have to create this opt-in form on every post.
Oh no, no, no.
Instead, we’ve created a rule by using Optin Monster and plugging it into WordPress.
If we go over into WordPress back into WordPress, down here we will find Optin Monster right
there as a tool available to us.
We’ve created this rule so that it automatically goes into every post that we create and it’s
positioned where we want it to in each post.
Now this could also be a pop-up window that pops up.
You can set it up for 5 seconds after people visit a site and you’ll see it often.
It’ll say do you want to sign up for my newsletter?
Do you want some free information on this?
This always encourages people to sign up for some free give away or some newsletter so
that you can capture that information and then store it in your email autoresponder
so that you can then talk to the people later and kind of bring them into your community.
So these are the mechanisms that make WordPress work from a social media marketing perspective.
As I go through some of the other tools within here, we’ve go the ability to manage our
plug-ins here.
If we go down towards the bottom of it, I’ve got another tool here called Pretty Link—where’s
my Pretty Link?
There it is—which allows me to modify exactly what the URLs or what these addresses look
like and make them far more user friendly and also track what’s going on.
But the bottom line is WordPress is an environment that allows us to manage the user experience
down to the minute detail.
The more time you spend mastering each of the different aspects of WordPress, the better
off you’re going to be as far as making sure that your site is performing the way
you want.
Now one thing before I leave this is one of the things that I looked for before I chose
this particular theme, if we go back here to the themes within Themify, is I made sure
that this theme was something called responsive, meaning that it will resolve and it will work
well in a mobile environment.
Indeed, this site looks great in a mobile environment because probably as many as 50%
of our visits now to our website are coming from people on their smartphones.
So you’ve got to make sure that the site will convert itself and automatically modify
its display for the mobile environment.
WordPress is sort of like—I guess back in the day when you had Microsoft Word and we
had PageMaker and QuarkXPress, we had these page layout tools—it’s like the PageMaker
and QuarkXPress in the early desktop publishing days.
It’s an important skill for you to learn.
If you don’t learn how to manage all of WordPress yourself, you can still have somebody
else design your WordPress site and you can go into it on a regular basis and you can
simply edit all of the different posts yourself, which is quite simple.
It is, sort of like working with Word within that as an environment.
It’s like working with a word processor.
But I think the more you know about the inner working of WordPress, the better if you’re
going to be to be able to take advantage of those tools.
And for those of you who never had a website, understanding how they work in the background
I think helps you as well when you visit sites to understand why people are doing things
at different times and why something is suddenly popping up on your screen.
Understanding the mechanisms that it’s trying to address might be helpful as well.
Well, that’s it.
This was a little bit of a long ramble.
I hope you found it to be enlightening and entertaining and educational.
There are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
The second, as I was mentioning earlier, subscribe to our newsletter.
We’d love to get you there so that you can come and visit us when we give free tutorials,
webinars, seminars and courses.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded site.
It’s supported through the generosity of the people who watch this channel through
the crowdfunding site Patreon.
I would encourage you to drop by our Patreon page, have a look and discover what perks
are available to you, should you decide to support Dotto Tech.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!