Ok today I want to talk about what is an important part of setting up a website, particularly
what I call a phase one website.
A phase one website is a website that has the foundations set up, nothing fancy, so
you have got a website that is solid, you have got a website that you can easily make
changes to, you have got a website that has the basis solid SEO and you have got a website
that is responsive which means it looks different on phones and tablets and on PCs, moulding
itself to fit the screen that it is currently on.
Well the question is, how do you make all of that actually happen, well step one is
to get yourself a word press installed and the great thing about word press is, you can
see it here as I hunt it down through Google, is that word press is free and it a contact
management system that pretty much everyone uses and most of the hosting websites, such
as like GoDaddy, which is the one I have all my websites on, allow you to install word
press in a single click.
So you don't even have to use this thing here called website builder which cost you something,
you can just do a free install of word press and you are ready to play.
So once you have got word press however, how do you make it SEO ready and responsive and
all of those other good things?
Well my little short cut website is this one here called ThemeForest I love these guys,
these guys have taken all the pain out of setting up your word press site to be responsive,
to be SEO friendly and to have that lovely design foundation and they have done this
by making their word press themes, and a theme can basically involve a design but also involves
the responsiveness and can involve SEO as well.
The theme is available here on ThemeForest for really just a couple of dollars.
Back in the day when I was doing this kind of development and I look here at popular
items just for a second, when I was doing this kind of development we would spend 20-30
thousand dollars trying to develop something like this and more and now you can get it
for 50 bucks, it is just insane.
So once you go to themeforest.net, you click on word press and in this case I have just
looked at popular items, you start to see all of these different templates that they
have available which are pretty flexible.
I have bought quite a few of these over time for different clients as they look through
and kind of spot one they like the look of.
They are happily specific to e-commerce or mobile or entertainment or non-profits, but
I just look at the best sellers usually and this one here called Avada I have actually
bought a couple of times.
So let's have a little look at what this one looks like, ok so just what I did there, I
right click on the link and opened it in a new tab.
Ok here I am and the first thing you can see by what I mean by responsive, it looks different
on a phone, different on a tablet and different on a pc, it moulds itself to take advantage
of the real estate, that is really important.
This particular one says 100% responsive and retina ready which means you can have a different
version of graphics that work on a retina or high resolution slate or tablet like the
iPads though a lot of them are now at that resolution or above, integrate with a shopping
site called woocommerce, so on and so forth.
What I like to do then is click live preview and this actually shows you this thing in
action so you actually start seeing the actual design of this thing and what you will see
it has got this thing up the top here called a slider so you can move images around and
this particular pull out that has this really nice design look, it has got various little
features, nifty things that become a look that then becomes available to you.
For example it has something called the portfolio, a lot of them have the portfolio which allows
you to list say clients maybe, let's have a look at their grid layout so you can see
here it has this nice roll over look where you can list in this case design portfolio
stuff.
You have got galleries so you can list products, you have got different versions of blogs and
headers lots of different things like contact pages lots of different options that are included
in the theme and come pretty much predesigned and of course it is flexible.
So if you wanted to, for example, change the colour of this thing from this green look
here, I am going to press this one button her, this blue one and straight away the things
sort of go blue.
All the highlights are blue, all the roll overs are blue, the titles are blue and so
on and so forth.
So it is a very flexible and easy to use, responsive ready, SEO ready in many cases
theme that you can buy from themeforest.net to upload to your wordpress site and have
this look and all of those features available to you in those first moments.
So I highly recommend ThemeForest, I am not affiliated with these guys, I do not get any
money every time someone buys this thing, I have just found it to be tremendously useful
to reduce the development costs of a website from thousands or tens of thousands down to
just like 50 bucks, 60 bucks some of the cheaper ones might be about 30 dollars that really
solve all of those coding problems for you.
I should give you a quick example I guess there is another one here called Silicon just
to show you how this one works out it's just a theme here that costs $40, again I am just
having a little look at how good it looks with their demo page here, so again it is
going to be responsive and all the other things like that, I am going to hit layout so we
can see it live and you can see all the design features and this one just a little bit different
it has got that slider up the top, design pull outs, it has got this roll over system
it is their portfolio roll over system, it has got special pull out buttons like this
again you can just change the colour like pressing this button and suddenly everything
goes green, the blog post layout and that is a portfolio layout as well.
Now how does this look in real life though, this is the particular theme that lives behind
my website if we have a little look here at timlevy.net and what you will see is there
is a real resemblance, instead of having the Silicon logo, you have got my logo.
Instead of having this green, I've set it to blue, very easy things to do instead of
for example having multi-purpose, retina ready blah, blah as the roll overs, my one we have
used the same thing to say coaching, writing, speaking.
So all I am doing is taking those design elements and I am making them into what is relevant
to my site, for example here is another portfolio roll over, in their case it is just demo stuff
in my case I use the same thing to roll over to my books and then when you click on them
it will go straight to one of those pages.
So that is how this thing looks in real life, you take one of these templates (in this case
it was a $40 one) you buy it and you upload it to your word press website and hey presto
you have got all of those design features, all of the responsiveness, in many cases SEO
as well built into your website with 0 cost well 40 bucks incredibly small costs and amazing
benefits I highly recommend ThemeForest.