Hi everyone. Welcome to this WordPress tutorial.
In this video,
I'm going to be showing you how to make a WordPress blog,
and have your first blog post written.
So, without further ado, let's get right into the computer.
The very first step is to click the link that's down in the description.
I make so many websites with WordPress,
and I use Bluehost to host these websites.
Bluehost actually gives me the best deals
whenever they're running promotions.
So, this link is actually my personal link,
and I can give it out to anyone, so they can get the same deals that I do.
So, go ahead and click that link, and what that's gonna do is,
bring you right to Bluehost website,
and it'll put the best promotion that they have going on right now.
As you can see, it's down from $7.99 down to $3.95 per month.
So, the very next step is, we're gonna go ahead
and just hit 'get started,' and then we have a couple of options here.
So, you have a $3.95 plan which we're ultimately going to use,
but if you do plan on making multiple blogs in the future,
you can use the $5.95 plan here, and that just allows you to have one host.
You only pay $5.95 per month, but you can have multiple blogs on that plan.
We're gonna go ahead and continue with the $3.95,
because we just need this for one blog here.
Now, we can go in,
and we can actually select what we want the name of this blog to be.
So, this is our domain name.
In this box right here,
you can type in what domain name you want for your website,
and it'll check if it's available or not.
So, if it is taken, you can either do one of two things;
One, you can come in and change a different ending,
or two, you can select a different name entirely,
with the '.com' at the end.
For this video, I'm gonna go ahead and do 'createablog123,'
and that's going to be the name of our website.
If it's available, it'll bring you right to this page.
If not, it'll let you know that you need to select a different name,
and then we'll go through this page,
and fill out the required information.
It's all basic things here.
It's just the information you need to create a new website.
Once we filled out that top portion, we come down to pick our package.
The first thing we're gonna do is,
actually turn off these added Features,
but we're gonna leave Domain Privacy Protection on.
What this is in short is,
when you register a new website,
you have to put in basic information, so you can see who the owner is,
but when you enable this for 99 cents a month,
it actually protects that information.
So, random people can't collect this information and start contacting you.
I think it's worth every bit of 99 cents per month.
Once we've turned off the other ones
that we really won't need, it's going to cut back our costs drastically.
Now, we can come up to this option up top here.
If you're going to have this blog live,
you're going to have to pay for hosting.
So, if you do a longer plan, it actually gives you a better plan.
You're locked in at this rate.
If you go with something shorter, for this example,
I'm gonna go with just 12 months, and we'll do it for $5.95.
Then after that 12 months is up, it will go up to that full $7.99
that we saw previously,
which is still a bargain for a website.
Once all this information is set,
we're just going to scroll down here
and continue to the payment information.
So, if you do prefer to pay with PayPal, like I do,
you can actually come right down here and select 'pay with PayPal.'
Then we'll just do agree down here to the Terms, and we can do submit.
Once you hit 'Submit,' if you chose PayPal,
it will bring you right over to PayPal
where you can fill in your information and continue with the payment,
and once you've gotten to this point,
you are confirmed,
and you've officially purchased your website.
Now, we need to create a password.
So, what we're going to do is, click this button right here
and create our password, and just go ahead and type in your password here.
Make sure it's confirmed, and just go ahead and hit
that you've read the Terms and continue.
Once that's set, you're just going to confirm it by logging in,
and it brings you to picking a theme.
So, the best part of WordPress is that
there are thousands of different themes to pick from,
and 99% of them are free.
So, what we're gonna do is actually skip this step for now.
This may take a minute, because it's just setting up your website for you.
But just hang tight here while this loads.
Once that's finished loading,
we'll get prompted with this 'Start Building' with the WordPress logo,
and we're gonna go ahead and hit that.
Congratulations, you have officially made your WordPress website.
First thing we're gonna do here is just click out of this,
and say that we do not need help,
because we are going to be walking through this manually here.
And the next thing we're gonna do is,
come over to this launch button over here.
Once we've hit that launch button,
we've done everything we need to do, to have a real WordPress website.
The next thing we're gonna do is come up to the top,
and hover over welcome and click 'Visit Site.'
Now, this is actually your website right here.
This is the template that it comes with,
and you can see that you have a blog made for you.
You have this nice big landing page right here.
We're gonna come back, hover over,
and go back to dashboard and create our first post.
So, what we're gonna do is, hover over posts right here,
and go right over to 'Add New.'
Now, we can enter the basic information for our post.
We have our title here, and I'm gonna go ahead and put first blog post,
and then, we have the actual content of the post here.
Once that's done, we're gonna go ahead and hit 'Publish,'
and we have our first blog post ready to go on our website.
So, if we come back over here, and we go to 'Visit Site.' If we scroll down,
we can see that we actually have our first blog post was just made
and published to our website right there.
So, a couple of housekeeping items
that'll make your WordPress blog a lot better.
We're gonna do those right now.
So, let's come back over to dashboard,
and we're gonna scroll down to settings,
and come over to Permalinks,
and then, we're going to make sure that it's set on 'Post Name.'
This is going to make sure that we have a short description up top
when someone's on a different page instead of a very lengthy description
that doesn't look very professional.
So, once that's set, scroll down and hit 'Save Changes' here,
and then, we're gonna come over to plugins,
and go to 'Installed Plugins.'
What happens here is, when you create a new WordPress website,
they actually, by default, install a bunch of plugins.
What we're going to do is,
we're actually going to remove these plugins.
So, the first thing we're gonna do is click this 'Select All' button up top,
and then, we'll come to 'Bulk Action,' and deactivate,
and then apply. Once all these plugins are deactivated,
we're going to select all of them again and delete,
and it'll go through and delete all these plugins for you.
Now, we're starting with a blank canvas.
We don't have anything extra on our site to slow it down,
and there's only one plugin that I absolutely recommend
that you add to your website,
and especially, if you're going to be using this for a blog,
and that is Yoast SEO.
It's spelt just like that, and once you type it in,
it'll auto-populate it up, and this is Yoast SEO right here.
All we have to do here is hit 'Install Now,'
and then hit 'Activate,' and now, we have this SEO tab down here.
So, the two things we can do with the Yoast SEO is,
one, we can go through the configuration wizard,
and this just sets the SEO for our general website,
what kind of keywords we want to be found for.
The second thing is, on all of our blog posts,
we can actually optimize the SEO.
As we go, and we're working on a post,
we can see the drop down at the bottom,
and this allows you to customize how it shows up in Google,
and really optimize your SEO right here,
so your blog posts do get found.
But that is Yoast SEO, and that's the only plug-in
that I really think you need to add to your website.
Now, I wanted to be sure not to leave out
how you adjust your website to change the look of it,
and all the nitty-gritty details that you'll get into after this tutorial.
So, to change all of your appearance,
all you have to do is come over to 'appearance and themes.'
In themes, you can change the theme out of the one that comes by default.
Just by clicking 'add new theme' over here,
and you can sort them by popular, favorites.
You can type in different themes over here.
You can sort by different features,
but a good rule of thumb is, if you come over to 'popular' here,
you can see what's really popular,
and the one that comes by default is a very popular theme.
It's actually number one.
So, you really can't go wrong with that one
if you don't want to start messing with things.
But, as you start to get into these,
you can really customize your site.
Once you have a theme selected, you can customize it even further,
by hitting the customize button along the side.
What this allows you to do is, actually change the images,
change the text, move things around, and make it exactly how you want.
So, everything you'll need will be right along the side here,
and you can start to change out photos and change text,
change the appearance of things,
and you can even see what it looks like on mobile, on a tablet.
So, this is where you can play around and start to change things in here.
And once you've done that, just make sure that you hit 'Publish'
before you leave, and then at any point,
you can hit the X and come right back to the dashboard.
So, another important step is, we need to alter the admin information here.
So if we come to the top and click 'Admin,'
we can scroll down here, and we can set the email address right here.
And then, we can come down and generate the password and reset that.
So, let's go through that right now.
Once your email is set, come down and do generate password.
This is going to be the crazy password,
but we're going to do is change that.
So, I'm just gonna hide this and type in the new one here.
Just remember that password and do update profile.
Now, you have a new email address and a new password,
so you can get back in when you need to.
In order to get back to this page to edit
and add more posts in the future,
we're going to open a new tab
and type in the name of the domain that you just registered,
and then, /wp-admin.
This is standard for all WordPress websites.
And this is what you actually type in to go to that dashboard
that we were just at, to add posts and edit your website.
So, go ahead and type this in and save this somewhere,
because you will need it for future reference,
to get back to that dashboard.
Once you've got that saved somewhere,
we're gonna do one more housekeeping item.
And this is the last thing.
We're gonna come back over to the Bluehost portal,
and this is our dashboard for Bluehost
where we're actually hosting the website,
making it live on the internet.
What we're going to do is scroll down right over here and hit 'My Products.'
And this part is actually left out of a lot of tutorials,
but I think it's very important.
That's why I want it to end on this.
What we're going to do is hit 'renew'
on both our hosting and our domain, and set it to manual renew.
This way, it will not auto renew without us knowing in the future.
So, we're going to hit 'renew' right here,
and switch it from 'auto renew' over to 'manual renew,'
and it will send us a notification, 15 days before anything expires.
So, you have the options to either go ahead and renew it,
or not renew and stop paying for it.
Once we've set that, we'll come down and hit 'continue,'
and then, we'll go back to 'Home' over here.
Scroll down once again. Go to 'My Products,'
and do the same for domain.
Now, it looks slightly different on the domain sections.
So, all we're going to do here is, find your domain right here,
hit when you registered it,
and then, you're prompted with the option again.
So, we'll just switch it over to 'manual renew.'
And again, it'll send you the notification before anything expires.
Once we've saved these changes here, everything is set.
Your WordPress blog is completely created,
and you've had your first post made.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
If you liked it, give it a thumbs Up.
If it helped you, you can subscribe for more videos like this.
Otherwise, I'll see you guys in the next one.