How To Make A WordPress Blog 2022 _ WordPress Tutorial For Beginners

if you're new to the world of WordPress , but want to get a head start on building your first blog or if you're looking for a great overview of the free blocky theme and I think this video is going to be perfect for you .

Plus , we'll be doing all of this in around 90 minutes .

Now , I'm gonna take you step by step through the entire process of building a blog with WordPress .

I'll also show you how to purchase your hosting and domain name and add an SSL certificate for security and how to start adding your own content as well as the basics of SEO or search engine optimisation .

So by the time you finish this video , you should be ready and able to build your own WordPress blog .

If you want to learn more once you complete this video , there will be some useful links in the description below to help you get to know SEO in more detail , along with some other really useful things .

Plus , if you want to jump around or go back to a previous topic in this video , there's a full time stamps in the description below for your ease .

So you ready to get started ?

Great .

Let's take a look at the end result we're working towards in today's video .

So this is the kind of thing we're going to be creating .

It's a very simple , clean blog , all about living life .

It's a blog about food , about dieting , about exercise , those kinds of things .

So we've got a very clean , simple looking layout .

You can see we've got some animations bringing the different items onto our screen .

We've got various different navigation .

You can see we can jump through the various different sections .

So if we're interested in vegan , for example , we can click .

And again we have that animation .

We can go in and take a look at the individual post .

You can see there's all our nicely laid out post section .

We've got sharing icons , related posts , all those kinds of super useful things .

So this is what we're gonna be creating now .

Let's take a look at how we're going to do it now .

We've taken a quick look at the end results .

Let's start the tutorial by grabbing some hosting and a domain name .

Now , if you're not familiar with the term hosting or what it is .

The easiest way to understand it is , well , it's kind of like your own computer or laptop .

The files needed to view the Internet or use applications like Microsoft Word are stored on your computer , and when you click on the icon to launch that application , it loads the files in and opens the programme .

A hosting company does well , kind of the same thing for your website .

They have servers or big computers with loads of storage that hold the software required to store and deliver your website to anyone with a link or what's called the URL to the site or to a specific page .

So when someone types in the link to your website , those servers will send all the relevant files to display the page to the user's browser via the Internet , and they then see the webpage inside their browser .

So to be able to make your blog available to anyone interested , we need to have hosting and store all the website files there .

So for this tutorial , we'll be using site grant , but there are lots of great alternative hosting companies you could choose from for some suggestions .

Please take a look in the description of the video today for hosting , we're going to be using site ground , but there are lots of really good options available with site ground .

We're going to be choosing the managed WordPress hosting because it gives us some WordPress related features .

So we click on Get Started .

We can take a look at the different plans that they have now .

Currently , there are three key plans .

Startup Grow big and go Geek .

If all you're doing is hosting one single website , I would say the startup plan is going to be perfectly fine for most use cases .

If you want to have more than one website , though , grow big might be a better option .

And obviously , if you have more resources needed , I go geek .

The nice thing with this , though , is if you started with start up and then you found you outgrew it , you can easily upgrade to the grow big account very , very easily .

So that's one of the reasons why we're going to do using side ground .

So let's get the ball rolling by choosing the startup plan , and then we'll go through and see how easy it is to purchase everything Now , the first thing you're going to come across is Do you want to register a new domain ?

And your domain is just basically the W WW dot my website dot com That's what your domain basically is .

So we're gonna say we want to register one .

So the first thing I'm gonna need to do here is go through and search to find a domain that's going to be available and also in keeping with what I want to use for my website .

So I'm gonna pop in the domain that I'm looking for .

There's my domain , and then you can see we've got what's called the domain extension .

So we've got currently dot co dot UK because I'm based in the UK .

But you can still choose from a range of different options .

You could be looking for a dot com .

You could be looking for anything at dot org dot net .

Whatever is applicable to you .

I'm gonna choose the dot com at this point , and we're gonna see if that's available so you can see we've got the option to register this domain .

It's gonna cost us £11.95 per year , excluding any taxes Obviously , you need to check out what the price is going to be depending on what country you're in .

And we'll say proceed .

That's what I'm gonna check to see if that domain is available to me .

If it is , you can see it tells me congratulations that's available .

And now I can pop in the rest of my details .

So I'm gonna fill these out , and then we're gonna move on to the next stage .

So all you need to do is fill out your payment information , all those kinds of things , and you can see before we do move on , there's these hosting services .

Now just make sure that you only check the things that you want at this point , tells us the plan we're using , which is start up , tells us the data centre .

In other words , where all our files are going to reside where the server that has all of our files is going to be because I'm based in the UK .

It's thinking that the UK is gonna be the best option , but this is something worth bearing in mind if you're building a website and you target audiences in a different country to where you are .

It would make sense to change the data centre .

In other words , like I say , where all your files are going to to a location that's closer to your target audience .

So if your target audience is in the USA , you may want to choose some US based servers .

This just means they're going to find your website is gonna be faster , more responsive , and they're just gonna have a better experience using it .

So if you want to change that , you can hit the little refresh and it'll go through and you can choose things .

Then you've got the period .

How long do you want to take out the hosting plan ?

For now , As long as we take it over 12 months or more , we'll tend to get a better deal with sight ground .

And it's always worth checking out any deals that might be ongoing because they do run deals from time to time so you can see if we go for one month .

That's going to give us a much more expensive price of 16 99 per month , plus VA , T or taxes .

However , if we go for the 12 months , you can see that drops to five 99 a month , or if we go higher than that , you can see we can change that .

But at the moment , the best deal is most definitely going to be for the 12 months .

Then you've got extra services domain registration , because we chose to have a domain registered .

But obviously , if you didn't choose that , it won't be checked .

Then you've got domain privacy and you've got the site ground site scanner Now domain privacy basically means when you register a domain , you don't want any of the information associated with your company , your individual , your name , address anything like that to be made publicly available .

So domain privacy is something you can apply to the domain and that will then make all that information hidden from site .

It's very useful if you want to avoid having lots and lots of phone calls trying to sell you Web design services once you register a domain .

However , for our example today , I'm not going to select that , but think about whether you want it for something yourself and the site SG site scanner is just basically a service that runs on top of your website to check just to make sure that there's monitoring on your website to check for malware , all different kinds of things , viruses and so on again .

If you want that for peace of mind , you can use that here .

But there are plenty of other services you could use that will do a similar thing .

So you don't have to use that as part of Site Grant .

And for this example , I'm going to leave those two options disabled .

This gives me the running total , then any taxes that are applicable .

And then I can confirm this .

And if I want to receive any news or special offers from site ground by email , I can check that option .

So once that's done , we'll pay that , and then we're gonna move on .

Now , Once you've done that , you're gonna have a couple of emails .

You're gonna have to fill out your details , and you have to confirm your account .

Once all that is done and you're logged into your site ground home section .

This is where we can start working on our site .

So when you log into site ground , this is what you're going to see .

First of all , you can see we've got home where we are , which gives us some tips and some information and different things that site ground offers .

What we want , though , is basically to jump over to the website's option inside there .

It's going to give us any of the website services we have , including hosting all those different things you can see there's our website what plan we're currently using and then we have some options like site tools , WordPress kit , which is specific tools for WordPress and a lot of other options .

Now , we're not gonna go through all these because , well , there's a lot of options and I don't really think we need to cover them in this video .

I'd rather show you how you can get yourself up and running quickly and easily .

OK , so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our site tools and inside there , this is kind of like our dashboard , and this is where we can control lots of different things to do with our hosting plan , our domain , our websites , and so on and so forth .

Now the first thing we need to to do is apply an SSL certificate to our domain .

Now all an SSL certificate is is a way of the server where your site resides , encrypting any information that's sent via any kind of form .

So if someone uses your contact form or the comments as part of your website , this will encrypt that data , which means that it can't be viewed by anybody and intercepted by anybody just as an extra level of security .

This is where you see the little padlock symbol and all those kinds of things you used to when you're shopping online , we're going to do that .

And the nice thing with site ground is we have a totally free option .

So what we're gonna do is underneath the security section .

We're going to come into SSL manager and inside there we can set up where we want to apply this SSL certificate .

Now , I've got a couple of domains and sub domains and things inside my account , so don't worry .

Yours is gonna look a little different , but the process is exactly the same .

No matter how you've got your set up , first thing you need to do is select the domain you want to apply the SSL to .

So we're gonna choose our primary domain , which we just purchased .

Then it says , Select the SSL .

Now I've already done this online , but you'll see the same kind of thing .

First option you'll have will be , let's encrypt and any other options you can basically ignore .

All you want to do is choose .

Let's encrypt .

Once you've done that , click on .

Get This will take a couple of minutes to go through .

And once that's completed , you have an SSL certificate applied to your site .

We need to do one more thing , though , before this is all fully working , we just need to go to the next option , which is HTTP S in force .

And choose that and what this is going to do .

This is going to list any of the domains or sub domains that you have as part of your site .

So again , look for the domain that you have , which you've just purchased , and then you're gonna need to just flick this little switch on the right hand side that will then enforce secure connections .

So any links that may be part of the site that are not secure will be forced over .

So you don't have to worry about doing any of these technical kinds of things manually .

It's all catered for all as part of your site ground account .

And that's basically how we purchase set up basic hosting and the things that we need to do .

The next thing we're gonna look at is how we can use site grounds dashboard to install WordPress .

Now we have our domain registration and hosting set up .

We also have our security in place to protect any of our visitors .

When they post comments or use a contact form , we now need to install WordPress itself and start the exciting job of building our fresh new blog .

Installing WordPress with site ground is really , really easy .

All we need to do in our dashboard is come into the WordPress option and choose , install and manage .

So once we do that , we can choose between just a default WordPress or a WordPress and woocommerce install .

Now , for this example , we're only gonna be choosing the WordPress option .

So we're gonna say , Select that , Then we can go through and tell it exactly where and how we want to set things up .

Now we're going to use the primary domain , which is the pro website , one installation path .

We're gonna leave it exactly as it is .

All I want to do is change the language to my native language , which is English UK .

I don't want to install the starter site information , so we're gonna uncheck that option and then all we need to do is generate or create our password , our user name and our email .

So I'm gonna do that quickly .

Once I've done that , I can choose whether this is going to be a multi site , which in this example , we don't want .

So we're gonna click install , and we're going to let that do its job .

Takes a couple of seconds .

Once that's done , we've basically installed WordPress onto our server Really , really easy .

And there we go .

We've installed wordpress onto our domain .

Now we can simply log into the admin panel , or we can view the site itself .

So let's view the site first of all , so we can see where we're starting off .

As you can see , this is just basically an empty blank site in WordPress .

Pretty much nothing there .

Other than the default theme and the basic information that wordpress instals .

So let's come back over and let's just hop over into the admin panel .

And the nice thing with this is we're already logged in with the details we've just set up when we installed WordPress .

So this is now our clean copy of WordPress , ready for us to start working .

So there's a couple of things I want to do before we go any further , Some basic sort of housekeeping kinds of things .

When you install WordPress , it instals a couple of plugins and some posts and some different bits and pieces .

We don't want any of that , so I want to get rid of it .

So the first thing we're going to do is we're gonna come into our post section into all posts , and we're going to delete anything that's inside here .

So we're going to just drop down to the bin and we do exactly the same for the pages .

We're just going to get rid of both of these pages , and we're going to say , move to bin and apply .

So now we've got rid of those pages .

Let's hop over to the plug in section and take a look at install plugins now depending upon if you're using site ground or maybe a different hosting company , you may see different plugins inside here .

For this example , though , we deactivate this SG optimizer , which is part of site ground .

We can activate that later if you want to and benefit from what that does , which is effectively speeds up the site .

But it's better to switch that off when you're building your site because it basically caches things .

And cashing means that it uses the server to store files that change very infrequently or your browser .

And this can kind of lead to some frustrations where you may make changes to your site and you find they don't reflect on the front end .

And that's basically because those files may be cashed .

So by deactivating it , we stop that being a problem .

But like , say , when your site is ready to launch .

If you want to activate that , you can do that now .

The next thing I want to do is just come into the setting section and inside here we've got all the different things that allow us to set up the basics for our WordPress site .

So title , whether we want to allow people to add comments the Perma links , which is just how we can have the links on our site display , and we're going to go through and set those up .

So general is where we can choose the various different things , like the site title and the tagline .

So at the moment , by default , it says my WordPress .

So let's just change that to my cool blog , for example .

And if you want to put a tagline in , you can do , I'm just gonna take that out and leave that as it is , OK , so we can see the word press .

URL is set to the URL that we've created , and the address is the same .

But you'll notice that it's not using that HTTP S .

In other words , it's not enforcing that secure SSL we've just applied .

Dealing with that is really , really easy .

Need to just put the S at the end of that .

So it reads HTTP S .

That's it .

That's all we need to do .

Then you can choose different things , like what day of the week starts on any date format .

You might want to change if you want to set these up .

But really you can just leave them as they are now .

We hit , save changes , and this will log us back out to the site because we've changed the link to the admin and to the site itself .

But don't worry .

We can just simply click log in again with those details , and we're now back in and we're fully secure .

So next up on our house cleaning list , we just need to go in and check the discussion options .

So in the come to here and you can see there's a lot of options .

This is where we can control whether we want to allow comments on our blog .

Now a blog generally allows people to have comments , but you may not want that to be the case so you can enable or disable that feature inside you , and that will apply globally .

In other words , every single blog post or page you create on your site will follow that rule .

However , you can still override that when you create posts , you can set them to have comments , so you may want to have most of your pages and posts not having comments , but a couple of select ones .

You may want to have the option to enable those .

Well , you can do that on a post by post basis .

However , what I would recommend for most cases is to disable these .

If you don't want them to be able to comment on your post , it'll just cut back on the junk You might end up receiving .

All we need to do is click on , allow people to submit comments on new posts and check that , and we pretty much got rid of it .

You can see the other comment settings .

If you do want to allow comments , there's various different things inside you , so you can stop to a certain extent some of the junk that you may appear on .

Post that you post so you can see .

Users must be registered and logged in to comment where you might want to force registration so people have to be registered on your website before they can post a comment .

You can do that inside you .

So I would say read through these and see if anything you think is applicable to you and your particular use case for me .

I'm going to disable the comments option for now .

Let's just quickly come down and save those changes .

And the final thing I want to do is come into the Perma links option and depend upon who you use to host your website and how it's set up .

You might find that this is set to plain as default , and as you can see , this gives us a pretty ugly and not very useful URL to any of the pages or posts that we create .

Thankfully , site ground takes care of this for us , but like I said , that might not always be the case if you're not using sight ground .

But what I would generally recommend you do is simply choose Post name as the option , and then you can just set it and forget it .

Hit , save changes and you are done .

So other than that , we've done our housekeeping .

The next thing we need to do is take a look at the theme we're going to be using for our new blog Now .

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video for this tutor , we'll be using the free version of the blocky theme for WordPress .

Now , if you're not familiar with WordPress or the concept of themes in general .

They're basically really an easy way of installing a completely different design for your WordPress site , and they generally come with loads of really cool customization features .

OK , so let's hear how to install blocky and get started building our awesome looking new blog .

Now they've gone ahead and done the housekeeping on our site .

We're ready to choose the theme or the design we're going to use as the basis for our new blog .

So there are tonnes , if not thousands of different themes .

You can pick and choose from when it comes to WordPress , and it can kind of be a little bit overwhelming .

Today , though , I'm going to show you a free theme that has an absolute boatload of options .

There's a pro option as well if you want to use that , but you don't need it , and we're going to be using the free version for pretty much the entire video .

So don't worry about anything you might think you need .

In the pro version , the theme is called Blocky , so we hop over to their site .

You can see this is the theme we're going to be using , and the reason we're gonna be using .

This is because it has an absolute boatload of features included in the free version , including a custom header and footer designer , which is really , really easy to use , which I will be showing you as part of this video .

The reason I think that's really useful is because you can customise your header and footer to put exactly what you want in there and get a lot of control in a very easy visual fashion .

So now we've picked the theme Let's go ahead and install it .

All we need to do is come to appearance and into themes , and inside there we can pick and choose .

Now you can see there's already three themes installed as default as part of WordPress .

We're going to ignore those so completely we're gonna say add new and we're gonna come to the top , right , and we're going to search for a theme .

So we're gonna search for blocky .

And once that's found that we're just simply going to click on install , so that's going to download all the files and then allow us to install it , and then we can choose to activate it .

So let's choose activate and that's now applied that as our custom theme .

We also need to install the blocky companion .

And this is just a plug in which expands what you can do with blocky itself and gives us some more controls to get in and customise all the things we need .

All you need to do is click on Install the blocky companion and again let that download , and then we can activate it and we are pretty much good to go .

So this is saying you want to sign up to free , which is basically a way of making sure that the theme is kept up to date .

It's up to you what you want to do .

You can see exactly what permissions are going to be granted if you choose to do this .

But you'll just be notified that there's going to be an update to your theme .

It's up to you .

I'm gonna say Skip for this example , But please do read through that and choose whether you think this is something relevant to you .

OK , so once we've installed everything we now at the blocky companion section and this is broken down into various different sets , you can see if we want to .

We can choose to allow and continue to stay updated , which is basically the same as what we just saw in the last step .

So if you confirmed you want you're happy with that , you won't see this .

But if you want to come back and retrospectively do that where you can just click on the allow and continue and you are good to go across the top , we have home , which is what we're currently looking at .

Starter sites , which are pre designed sites using blocky with different kinds of styles and alerts for different sectors .

So business shops and so on , which you can easily just download and install .

And you have a ready made website all set up for you , which you can then just go in and make changes to They're great options , but for this we're not going to worry about that .

If we look at extensions , you can see we have extra extensions , which some are active , or we can activate them so we could be building a blog or a site where we want to do some affiliate marketing with it .

Well , we have a built in feature inside blocky for affiliate marketing .

So your blog might be about tech and you might be linking those through to , uh , Amazon affiliate items .

Well , you could use this as part of the theme to do just that .

So it's really cool that you have those options .

We're gonna gonna use it in this particular video .

But if you're interested , let me know and I'll take a look at create an affiliate based website using blocky and WordPress , and we'll take a look at that feature in a lot more detail .

We then have things like cookie consent .

Mailchimp if you want to link this up to Mailchimp to send out automatic emails trending , which is a way of seeing different topics on the site that are trending , which could be perfect for a blog .

And again , if you want to activate that , you simply click the activate option .

And it opens up some extra options inside the customizer where we can control exactly how our site works and how it looks .

And finally , you've got the widget .

So this is things like popular in recent posts , advertisements , contact , info , mail , subscribe and so on .

So we're gonna activate that option because there's some cool things inside there and you can see that's now active .

So we'll have access to those different things .

We'll click to activate the cookie consent .

And this means that we've got a cookie consent option that makes people consent to that before they view our site .

So this is something that you need to look into a little bit more detail if you're not familiar with cookie consents .

But this is built into blocky , useful plugins is just a link to other plugins that they think are useful .

So things like Gutenberg blocks , um stackable , get with Hubspot all different kinds of things up to you if you want to install anything on there , and we might come back and take a look at something like the Element or Brizzi page builders later to expand what you can do inside building your website with blocky change Log is just going to tell you all the updates , what was updated when it was updated and so on ?

Let's hop back to the home section and inside here you can see we've got customizer shortcuts .

This will allow us to jump straight to the section so if you want to set our colour options that we can jump straight to that from here .

Sidebars , footers , all those kinds of things .

If you want to use those , you can do .

But I'm going to show you the customise it in a lot more detail in a moment .

So now we've got everything installed and ready to go .

Let's take a look at how we can start designing the look of our site .

Now , before we start setting everything up , let me give you a very brief overview of what's called the WordPress customizer and how it's set up as we'll be spending a fair bit of time here , setting up tweaking and configuring our theme to get the most out of it .

Now , when you're using a theme as part of WordPress , you're going to do most of the editing , the design setting , the colours , the typography , all those kinds of things .

All we done inside the customizer customizer is a centralised location which gives you access to all of the theme options .

So to get to that , we're going to come to appearance and choose customise now , while the customizer will always look the same in WordPress .

The options are going to be different depending upon what theme you have installed and active .

So this is all to do with the blocky settings .

So what you have inside the customizer is the left hand side is going to show you all of the options .

The main section on the right hand side is going to show you the page that you're currently working on .

So as you can see , this is our home page .

We've got our little cookie consent .

We've got our header .

We've got a footer and we've got a sort of content area .

Now , at the moment , we have no content on our site .

In a moment I'm gonna put a little plug in onto this just so I can have some fake text , some fake images and so on so you can see how we can build things up .

OK , so what do we have inside the customise ?

Let's take a quick overview and then we'll take a look at how we start using the various different sections to build and customise our site .

In this example , we're broken down into a couple of different sections .

First of all , it tells us the active theme is blocky , and if you want to change that , we can click change , and we can hop over and choose a different theme .

You then have things broken down into general options your post types , which is to do with the blog itself pages , which is to do with static pages that are similar to a post but a little different .

Then you've got visitor engagement .

So things like your social networks and so on extensions .

So any of those extensions we chose to install when we were taking a look at activating and setting up blocky itself .

Then you've got the core option , which is core to the the actual theme .

So things like the site identity , the menus that are going to be used and so on .

Now , if we come into any of these by clicking on them , we then get extra options inside there .

So in this example , we've got the layout , breadcrumbs , buttons and so on .

We can enable and disable things like scroll to top and website frame .

And if we dig down a little deeper , for example , into layout , you can see inside there .

We've now got a set of options that are specific to the layout of your site .

So currently , we've got the maximum width set to 1290 pixels .

But we could adjust that if you wanted to .

And you'll see , as we adjust it , we get a live preview of the changes we're making inside the right hand side , which is the sort of overview of what the site looks like .

OK , so you can see that pretty much every section inside you has a little help section underneath to tell you what each of these does .

So if you're unfamiliar , which you probably will be at the beginning , take a little bit of time just to read those and see what they do .

So things like the content area spacing , the main content area top and bottom space in .

So this is just a space you can see above this little bit of text and the same in the footer so we could increase that .

If you want to , you can see again .

We got a live preview of that changing , or we can decrease it to make it a little tighter to the top .

We can also set these up based upon the different types of device .

So let's set that back to 60 and you might want to have different values on the desktop , on a tablet and on a mobile .

But we can use these little icons to switch between the different preview modes , and we can set different values .

Inside this you can see on a mobile we get 50 pixels top and bottom on a tablet and on a desktop 60 pixels .

So we can easily make changes to anything that relates to different kinds of devices that we're viewing things on .

And if you come back out of late and say into general and back out of here again , we come to something like the header , for example .

You can see this gives us slightly different options .

We've got the header and footer builder .

So this is the header section broken down into three different components .

So we're gonna come back to this in more detail when we create our custom header .

But what we've got inside here is the simple ability to choose what elements are going to be in any location and then we can choose those elements and we have extra options associated with them , so it's a really simple and intuitive way of working .

And again , you've got different sort of settings for different types of devices .

She can set one logo to be available on desktop and a different logo to be available on tablets and mobiles .

She might have a smaller version , lots of different reasons why they have different things and a design .

This is where you can choose things like colours that are going to be associated with various different parts of the site and also the font family , the size and the type of weight that the font has applied to it .

You can set these on individual design items , or you can set them globally by coming back out of all of this and going into typography .

And inside there we've got the base font , which is going to be the font that's gonna be the starting point for your site .

And then if you want to change those on the headings , for example , or the buttons , you can change those .

Or you can leave it set to default family , and it will pick up whatever is set inside the base font value .

And again , you've got the type of font you've got the size of font , and then you've got the weight of the font .

And if you click on the right hand side , you can see you've got a lot of really nice simple options , including some extra formatting like Capitalise and Upper case and line through and underline and so on .

So you really can get creative with how your fonts and your styling and all that kind of works .

Same kind of goes four colours if you want to count the colour section and we can pick from any of the predefined colour palettes or any of the global colours , or we can create and edit our own .

So we might want to choose Part three , for example , or we do that you can see the colours that are used in various different parts of the site or update accordingly .

Part two .

You can see now those links change to blue .

Back to part one , they change back to green .

All of these colours are totally editable , so you can choose part three , and you might think you don't like colour two .

For example , you can click and you can choose a different colour directly inside the customizer .

So it's all really simple , all really intuitive to work with .

And before we finish up taking a look at the customizer before we start getting in actually customising things , there's one more thing I want to show you .

We've seen on the left hand side how we can easily go through and choose various different parts of our site .

But what if you don't know the name of a particular part or where you choose to edit it ?

Well , the nice thing about blocky is and the customizer we can simply mouse over most things and you can see we get either main role .

We can click to edit that item or we get this little sort of pop out sideways teardrop , which we can choose to edit that element .

So we click on this , for example , you can see that now takes us straight to exactly where we need to make that change .

Inside the customizer , we come back out of there and we click on Main row , for example .

You can see that will take us to the main row .

So the word press customise it gives us lots of different ways in which we can interact with the design and make changes very quick and easy .

And we will come and take a look at doing all of this and you'll see how we can interact with various different things .

Make those changes as we go through .

One very , very final thing that I do like about blocky is we can change this to dark mode , which for me , I prefer dark mode because it means working with the actual page itself becomes a more focal point and it takes away the distraction of the actual interface .

But again , personal option .

So we gonna do is we're going to come back out of this .

We're not gonna worry about saving anything because we just been playing around for now .

And we have taken a quick look at the customizer .

So next up , we want to take a look at how you create posts and how you organise those posts .

This is not going to be an in depth tutorial on posts and so on .

I'm just gonna give you a quick overview , and then you can see how you can get started and get up to speed .

Now , before we start designing our site , we'll need just to have a little bit of content to see exactly how our changes impact the design of our blog .

So if you're new to WordPress and how to add content , this will be super useful for you .

However , if you're already comfortable with adding and organising posts where you can basically skip this section using the time stamps in the description below now before we can see how our site is going to look when we start customising it , we need some content added to it .

So if you're new to working with wordpress and you don't know how to create posts and how to organise posts , this section is going to be useful .

However , if you are accustomed to it , well , feel free to use the time stamps in the description below to hop over to the next step , which you can then carry on building and design our site .

OK , so we're gonna come into the post section and inside there you can see we've got the ability to use all posts , add new categories and tags .

Let me just quickly explain what categories and tags are they ?

What's called in the WordPress world Taxonomies , which sounds kind of confusing .

But all it really means is they are ways of grouping content or posts together so categories could be food .

It could be exercise .

It could be money saving anything you want to use to group your post together .

That's a taxonomy , and that's a category .

Now tags work in a very similar fashion to categories , but they're generally used as a second level of grouping things together so you could have an item that falls into multiple categories .

But you can also have an item that's in one category but also shares similar features with things that are in different categories .

So let's just say you had a nutrition blog and you wanted to have things to do with vegan , and you want to have things to do with vegetarian and so on .

Well , you might have recipes .

You might have general health information , different things that allow you to group different content together .

That could be in multiple different categories .

I'll explain that in a little bit more detail when we take a look at creating a post because it sounds more complicated and confusing than it actually is .

So Let's start off by creating a couple of categories , we're gonna click on categories and inside there we can just choose what we're gonna do .

So let's just say Let's just do that .

Let's say this is going to be a nutrition based website .

So we do vegan .

We'll do vegetarian and we'll do fitness and one final one , We'll just do exercise .

OK , so we've now created some categories .

You'll also notice there's one by default called UNC Categorised .

Now , once you've created some content , you put in your own categories .

You can remove and categorise , but if you want to do that , there's something you need to do .

First you need to come into the settings option and inside there we need to choose writing .

Now you can see it says default .

Post category is set to UNC categorised , and the default mail category , if you want to send these posts in via email , is also UNC categorised .

To be able to delete categories , we need to remove that dependency so you can change this and we'll say , Well , the default is going to be fitness and we do the same thing on on the next one now you could just put this under news , whatever kind of category you want to it save changes .

And now , when we come back into our posts and categories , we can now get rid of UNC Cat .

So we'll delete that and that's now gone .

And you can see the check box next to fitness is no longer available , like it is under vegan , vegetarian and so on .

That's because that's been set now as the default , so you can't delete the default .

OK , so with that being done , we've now created our categories .

Now we can come in and we can say we want to add a post .

So let's come to all posts , first of all , and this is where you're going to see a list of all the posts you create , including the title , the author , the categories , the tags , any comments and the date that this was posted .

You can also come in and do things like you can philtre this based upon the category .

So if you want to , you know , when you get a lot of content , you can easily philtre this down .

Now we're gonna do is we'll say we're gonna add a new post .

Once we do that , this will take you into the WordPress editor .

This is broken down into a couple of different sections across the top .

You can see we've got various different tools .

We can add blocks now blocks when it comes to wordpress .

If you consider a block to be things like heading , it could be a picture .

It could be a quote .

It could be a paragraph of text .

Each of those things is a block , and I'll show you how those blocks work and why it kind of puts those things into blocks in a moment .

But you can see there are a lot of options .

You've then got the option for modes which we can click and you can see we can choose between edit so we can edit the content and select where we can just select the various different blocks that we've created .

Undo redo information , and then you've got the stacking order of your blocks .

So this will only come into play and be available to you to actually use once you've got some content in there on the right hand side , you can see we can preview , we can publish .

We can switch between the settings we can take .

Take those on and off and when we can see , we've got post and we've got block .

Now we've got no blocks in set up .

We've got nothing on the page .

This will become evident as we choose things .

So let me just quickly show you how these work .

So first of all , we're going to put in a title and we're just going to call this my first post .

So now we've done that .

We can start adding blocks into our design for our page .

You can see once we click inside this area , we've got a couple of things we can do .

It opens up a tonne of options at the top because it thinks by default , we're going to start typing , which in most cases is probably going to be right .

So you can see we've got the option now for the undo and the redo and the information and the stacking order and all those kinds of things so you can make your text bowl .

You can set it italic .

You can add links in .

You can click the little drop arrow to get even more options and you can click on the little three dots to get more options again .

OK , so let's just simply just put in a little bit of text , and there's a couple of ways you could do this .

If it's just text ordinary text , you can simply click and start typing , or you can come up and click on the plus , and you can choose , for example , paragraph .

You can also click on the plus on the right hand side , and you can see that'll show you six different options .

Generally , this will show you the most recently used options .

You can also click browser and that will open up the left hand side , and you can choose to search for a block .

So you could be saying , I want to search for a paragraph .

Just put that again paragraph and you can see that will show us anything that matches our search criteria .

All pretty easy patterns are basically just predefined design styles , and you'll see you don't really get much in the way of prebuilt patterns as part of WordPress .

But there's lots of those options available , and you can create your own patterns should you want to .

We're gonna keep this really simple , though .

Let's go back to our blocks .

Let's gonna come into this first section and I'm going to paste in a little block of text that I've got .

So now I've got that inserted .

I can now do whatever I want with it .

If I want to insert a link on a particular little bit of section of text , I can click on that .

I can highlight it .

Click the Link icon and then I can just start typing the link in .

And if I've got pages or posts on my site , it'll automatically search through and find anything that matches when I start typing in .

Or I can just put in any kind of link that's external and we'll just put in the link to my website .

Once that's done , you can see I can press enter to add this link , and if I want to open it in a new tab , I can just choose that option and then we can just hit enter and we now have a link styled based upon whatever we set up inside the customizer .

Now we've also got some more options , so we might say we want to set this first little section for there and we want to make it bold or we can make it bold .

We can make it metallic if we want to .

If we want , we've got extra options .

Then on the block on the right hand side , now out of the box .

WordPress and Gutenberg , which is what this is using , doesn't really have a lot of options .

There are lots and lots of third party plugins that are completely free .

That will open up a lot more options .

I would check out on the channel and you'll see I've got videos covering some of the common , most popular ones , and you can see how they can really up the game of what you can do when it comes to working with WordPress and Gutenberg .

But for this video , we want to keep this really simple and straightforward , and you can still create great looking posts , all just using the normal default editor .

OK , so what we have on the right hand side , you can see we can change the font size and we've got a couple of different options inside there or we can put a custom value in .

We can choose colour settings so we can choose things like the test colour , the background colour .

We can choose custom colours .

We can clear if we set a colour so we can click on that .

You can see that puts a background colour in there .

We want a custom colour in .

We can do just that .

We can select that from there , and we can just adjust this to whatever we want .

And then we can come to our text and set that to be white , for example .

So now we've customised that particular text or paragraph block .

You've also got things like drop caps .

So if you want to put a drop cap in for the first letter , you can see we can do that .

And that will put that into that particular paragraph section under advanced .

We've got some more advanced features , things like adding HTML anchors and additional classes to style things that's way beyond what I want to cover in this video .

So I'm just gonna quickly clear these values to put everything back to the default .

Now , once we put the first paragraph in , we might think , Well , we want to put an image in now so I can press enter to go to the next section , and we can now insert another block .

Now you can do the same way I've shown you and click on the plus at the top .

Or you can click on the plus on the right hand side .

Or you can press the forward slash and that will pop up and show us a range of different things that we can insert so you can see there's a range of different things , like Spotify and Vimeo and Twitter and so on .

So there's various different ways in which you can add different content .

Let's get rid of that and let's just click on the plus and we're gonna just find exactly what we want , which is going to be the image option , and we'll click .

And now we've inserted an image placeholder so we can choose to upload a file from our computer .

We can choose the Media Library , which is our online resource inside our WordPress site , where all our images will show , or we can insert it directly from a URL somewhere else .

I'm going to choose the upload option and upload a file from my computer so I've navigated to where my files are , and I'm going to choose the image that I want .

And I'm going to click on Open and let that upload that's now uploaded and ready for us to start working on so you can see there's a preview of the image .

If you want to , we can drop a caption underneath .

We're gonna say Vegan meal , and we can set that .

If you want to , we can highlight it .

We can make it bold .

We can make it italic .

We can make it a link to something , or we can choose any of the other options so we can set things up directly inside the editor .

We've also got again more options on the right hand side underneath the block section , so I want to create a rounded looking at image .

I could do that .

I can apply styles to this if I want to .

I can apply all text or alternative text , which just basically means if someone doesn't see the image , it's going to give them some information about what the image would be if they saw it .

Great for screen readers , things like that which is always recommended to put this in because search engines like it screen readers like it and so on .

So again , we're gonna call this vegan meal , but you'd be a little bit more descriptive in yours .

Then we can choose the image size .

So at the moment , this is using large .

But we could change that to something different if we wanted to .

And you can pick and choose what you want .

I would recommend choosing the option that gives you the best viewing while not the largest file size if you want to , though , you can actually adjust the size and scale of these images by simply using these little dots and lines on the right hand side and also on the bottom of this and you can see everything is scaling proportionally .

So there's lots of ways in which you can set things up to display the images the way that you want .

OK , so we're gonna do one more thing underneath , so we're going to do the same thing again .

We're gonna click on the plus .

This time , though , I'm gonna say another paragraph and we're simply going to drop in a little bit more text .

We're just gonna break these up into two separate paragraphs .

And then there we go and we'll add one more image underneath .

Just so we've got what looks like a nice looking blog post .

So again we're going to just choose upload for this .

We're going to choose a different image this time .

Let that upload , and there's our second image placed inside there , and we're just going to say , this is a vegan meal again .

OK , so that's our post created .

As I said earlier on , we've got things like the outline option , which allows us to see exactly what's going on .

This we've got a paragraph , then an image , then two paragraphs , then an image , then another paragraph .

If you want to move this around , you can do that .

You can simply click on , for example , this paragraph or this image , and then we can use the arrows at the top to move up , and you can see that now repositions it inside the order of our design .

Once you're happy with that , we can click on publish .

If you want to make this available immediately or we can save it as a draught , I'm gonna say publish .

So we've got some content , and you can see this now says Are you sure you want to publish it ?

Just check everything to make sure you're happy with it .

And as you can see , the last thing it says is to put tags in .

So let's come back to those in a moment .

Let's hit publish on this and we've now created our first post , but at the moment it's not organised in any way .

We're not using any categories .

We're not using any tags or anything , So to get to those all we need to do on the right hand side is coming into the post option and inside there , we now have some options to work with the specific post so we can make things like sticky posts .

This will push those to the top of all the posts .

Normally , your posts are displayed in date .

Order the newest at the top , the oldest at the bottom .

However , you might have certain posts that you consider to be most important , and you can stick those and they will stick above any of those date related posts .

Obviously , use this sparingly because the last thing you want to do is have tonnes and tonnes of sticky posts .

And then no one can really get access to the new information on your site permanent where we saw how your permanents are created , and this allows us to tweak those if we should want to , I would generally say , if you're not comfortable with this , leave it alone .

WordPress is pretty good at dealing with these based upon the title of the actual content you create .

Then you've got your categories and your tags now categories .

As you can see , there's the four categories we created fitness , exercise , vegan and vegetarian .

Now , because fit fitness is set to be the default category , this post is automatically associated with that .

However , you can change that if you want to .

You can uncheck that and you can say this is vegan .

So now we've associated with a different category one step further .

We can actually associate it with more than one category , so we can say this is actually vegan and vegetarian , For example , if you want to add another category instead of having to go back through and show like I've just shown you to create them , you can do it directly inside here , so we can say , Let's add a new one in .

I want to call this meal planning If you want to , we can create a parent and child relationship .

So , in other words , underneath Vegan , we might have subsections of vegan or subcategories of vegan .

Well , all you need to do is choose the name of the category and then what the parent is going to be .

So we'll say in this example , is going to be vegan and we'll say , Add new category and you can see now we've got vegan underneath there , we've got meal planning is a sub section , subcategory and vegetarian is its own category .

Really , really easy .

On top of that tags , we can add tags inside you , and these tags could be basically anything .

It's just a second way of grouping information together inside WordPress .

So let's add a couple of tags in .

Let's just say this is going to be food .

We'll put a comma and you see that creates a tag and we'll say , Meal prep , put a comma .

So we've now created two tags .

Now we're just gonna update this , but before we do , we want to set a featured image .

Now featured image is what we're going to use when we create our blog to have a nice visual draw to make people want to actually click on this particular post .

So we'll say Set featured image .

This will take us straight through into our media library and show us any images we've already got uploaded .

Or you can switch over to upload files and you can upload a different image .

So you want to make these sort of images quite enticing .

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab this image of the food and we'll say , Set featured image that's now created a featured image for us .

You'll see where these come into play when we create the design for our blog section .

Now , next up , you've got excerpt .

If you want to put an excerpt in , you can do no .

An excerpt is just primarily a sort of taster of what this post is going to be about to draw people's attention in .

So a very brief synopsis of the actual post content now depend upon how you set the theme Ma inside the customizer or how the theme works .

Some will use the excerpt .

Some won't Some will use the excerpt if it's there , and if it's not , it'll just pull some information from the first paragraph of your post itself .

So it's up to you if you want to use that .

And as with most things , you've got help to tell you exactly how any of these features work .

Finally , we have discussion now discussion if you remember back when we look at setting things up and doing a little bit of housekeeping , I said , You can globally disable comments on your posts inside your blog .

But if you wanted to , you could make them available on a post by post basis .

Well , this is where you do it .

Underneath the discussion .

You can allow comments if you wanted to .

Now , ping backs and track backs sounds really complicated , and all it really means is if somebody on a different website links to your post on your blog , you'll be notified that someone's done that .

And then if you make changes to that post , your website will try to update those linking websites to tell them something has changed so it can be useful if you want to use it and you're expecting your site to be shared quite a lot .

So really good for blogs , so you can leave that enabled if you want to .

And generally I would say it doesn't do any harm to leave it enabled .

But the allow comments again is entirely up to you .

So now we've made some changes to things we can now simply hit the update option , and that will save those changes for us .

Now that we've finished creating our first post in WordPress , let's go back out of this and to get out .

All we need to do is click on this W in the top left hand corner , and that'll take us back into our post listing .

You can see that's now updated with the new post we've created , and it gives us some extra information , tells us the title of the Post like we saw earlier on who the author is .

So if you have multiple authors as part of your your blog , your site , whatever this will list who wrote this particular post , then you've got the categories this particular post is associated with .

So meal planning , vegan , vegetarian and so on , and also the tags .

So food and meal prep if you have comments that will list inside there , and it tells you the date this was actually published .

So as your blog grows , this will be a great way you able to see exactly what categories anything is inserted into any tags that are being used .

And then , if you want to , you can easily philtre that out by using these options at the top so you can see all our categories inside there , including the new category you created .

All date is available , so as your blog grows , you'll be able to philtre things down based upon the month and the year .

So it's really good to see exactly what was written , what was posted and so on .

OK , so that's the basics of creating posts .

I'm gonna quickly create a couple more posts .

We've got some more content to work with , but we're gonna hop back over now , and we're gonna see how we start setting up the design with the header and footer for our site .

Now we're ready to get stuck in and start realising our design idea .

Let's kick things off by designing and building our headers and footers for the entire website with the powerful header and footer builders built directly inside the blocky theme .

OK , so now that I've got some extra content inserted , we're ready to start doing some of the fun stuff , which is basically designing things so back into the customising now of WordPress .

And we're gonna start off with the Headroom footer sections .

And this is one of those areas that blocky really excels at .

Gives us a lot of control over , creating custom headers and footers .

To do that , all we need to do is choose either header or footer from the general option section .

So let's start off with the header section .

But before we do , we don't actually have any logo .

We don't have any navigation or anything else built , so we need to rectify that .

First , let's start off with the navigation .

As we saw earlier on , you can simply come over to the header section , come on to the navigation on the top , right , and just click on the little sideways teardrop , and that will open things up where we can style the actual design itself .

Before we do that , we need to actually create the menu you can see it tells us to select the menu .

We don't have anything created .

Easiest way to do that inside the customizer is to scroll down to core and come into menus .

Inside , they will say , create a new menu .

So we're just gonna call this main menu and we can then choose where we want this to be displayed .

So the footer , the Header menu 12 mobile menu and so on .

So we're gonna say we want this to be header menu one click on next .

And now we can start adding items in .

And we can always come back to any of these and change the settings at any point should we want to .

So if you want to add this to the foot up , we can do that .

Head a menu , too .

We can do that as well .

OK , so let's just say we're gonna add some items in .

Let's just start off by adding the home page , and what we're gonna do is we're gonna add a couple of categories in so expand categories , and there's all the categories we have as part of our site .

So let's just add those in .

So we've now created a navigation .

Once we've done that , we can simply finish this so we come back out of this .

And if we take a look at our design , there's all of our different headings all set up for us in our navigation .

So pretty cool .

Next up , we need to add in our logo .

So let's come back out of our menus Head back up and we're going to do is we're going to choose our header .

So once we're inside our header , you can see this is pre building things out , and what we have currently is three separate rows our top row , which isn't currently being used , our main row , which is holding our logo and our navigation .

And then we've got the bottom row , which again isn't being used .

So when there's nothing inside any of these , they're not being used at all , and therefore they won't display inside the design .

If you want to change any settings , change any of the widgets , you can do all that by simply using drag and drop or choosing the relevant options .

So at the moment you can see we've got the logo , the menu one and we've got search .

So if you want to get rid of search , for example , we can click on the X and you can see now inside the customizer preview window that's now been removed .

If you want to make any changes to things , so at the moment we don't actually have our logo inside .

There we can come down .

We can click on Logo and now , on the left hand side that opens up all of the settings for that particular widget .

So we're going to choose our logo .

We say Select logo , and I'm going to upload two different variations of the same logo .

So I've got a black version and a white version of our logo .

So because our heading section is currently light , we're going to choose the dark version and hit Select , and you see that now includes our logo .

But we're also showing the actual text underneath , which we don't want .

So we need to do is just uncheck this box .

It says site title , and that's now gone .

If you want to show your site type tagline if you have one , you can do that inside , but we haven't set one .

You can set one if you want to , but for this example , we're going to leave that off .

You can also choose different logos for different types of devices .

So at the moment this is going to be used on desktops .

Where if you wanted something different on a tablet and mobile , we can choose that on there .

We can also set different values for the logo height .

So at the moment , the logo is probably a little bit on the large side .

So let's just reduce that down to something like around 30 pixels .

That now looks a lot better when we're dealing with mobile devices .

Let's check that out on our tablets and you can see probably a little too big on there .

So let's set that in the 9 40 there we go looks pretty cool .

We can also come into the design option , and we can fine tune the margins inside there and again .

The margins are associated with the screen size that we're working with so we can have different margins for desktop , for tablets and for mobiles .

We can lock those values together so we could say we'll put five pixels and you can see because they're locked .

All of those have five pixels around them or we can unlock that and we can set different ones so we can say top and bottom .

We'll have 15 and left and right will stay as five .

You can also change from a fixed pixel value to percentages .

Ms .

Rams or points depend upon what kind of way you want to work .

So pretty cool to see you have all those controls and I reset things .

We can just simply come over and hit the little reset arrow and that will now reset it back .

So that's all looking pretty good .

I like the look of that .

If we want to take a look at editing anything to do with the menu , we can do that by coming out to the menu widget in the right hand side of our main row so we can click on there and you can see now we have all the options to do with setting everything up for the main menu section so we can choose different types of menus and currently we have four different variations so we can choose those different variations and you can see we get slightly different effects for whichever one we choose and everything is still fully editable .

So let's just say I like the look of this one , for example .

But what I can do now is I can hop over the design section and if I want to , I can change the font that's being used .

The colours that are being used , the active colours , any dropdowns .

If we're using multilevel menu structures , we can control all the design aspects of that , including the actual item hover effect .

So we have lots and lots of control to make sure that you can fine tune and get this exactly what you want .

You also see , we've got these font colours and the font , uh , sort of sizes and those kinds of things .

You see , we've got default font and the pixel values and so on .

We can set a lot of these things up , like the colours can actually be taken from our colour palette .

So at the moment you can see this is using the green colour .

So if we come back out of this , come all the way back up and we go into our colours option .

We are using colour palette one which is using the green as the sort of primary colours alongside the grey blues and a white Let's just say you want to set that to orange .

We can change that .

And you see now anywhere that uses those global colours inside blocky the theme that we're working with Now pick that up so you can use these colour palettes to easily create colour sets to design your site .

So if you're creating multiple different sites using this particular theme or with their own colour palettes , you can easily set that up inside here .

And then those colours become referenceable inside the various different parts of our site .

So we go back to our header back to our menu and we take a look at the design option you can see now the active colours change .

The font colour has changed , and so on the other global colours so really cool .

You see , that just means you can quickly and easily change things when you're using this by using those global colour settings .

So now that we've seen how easy it is to style the widgets inside any of our header sections , what about the row itself ?

Well , you can see when we take our mouse over .

We get this little cog icon on the left hand side .

We can click on that , and we can now control the actual row details .

So the design , the height , the full width , whether it's sticky and so on So you can see at the moment this is set to default , which means that it's going to kind of sit inside the overall size of our design .

But if you have a full width , if you have larger screens , this will kind of just default to the left and the right hand side of the entire screen width up to you which way you want to go .

I generally tend to go for the default because I think it looks a little nicer .

You can also then do things like adjust the row minimum height so you can see if we want a smaller navigation section at the top like this .

We can easily do that now .

If you want to make this sticky , you can do that by selecting this option so that'll make it sticky , and we can then choose the stickiness , the role , Max height and so on .

However , if we scroll up , you can see it does actually stick to the top of the screen .

That's because we need to globally enable the sticky option .

This just says whether this row is enabled to be sticky .

So to do that , we come back out to our headers .

Oops , sorry , could the headers into Global Header And then we can set the sticky functionality .

We'll select that and we now have a sticky header .

And again , we've got lots of different types of sticky .

So you want only the main row , which is what we currently have .

Do you want the top and main row ?

Do you want all rows ?

Do you want the main and bottom row tonnes of options , including the effect that you want for the sticky ?

So you could say you want fade , for example , and that will fade in and fade out .

So lots of controls on exactly how you want to do that .

I'll disable that for now .

And if you want transparent functionality , you can also enable that and then you can set up the conditions you want .

And this is one of those things that makes this for a free theme , incredibly powerful .

Now , at the moment it doesn't look very good , because this is just kind of overlapping .

But if you had a nice , big , strong header image in there , then you could easily have a nice , transparent header , and then you can set this up where you want .

So at the moment , this is going to apply to every single page , no matter what on the entire site .

But you might not want that .

You might only want this to be available on the home page , for example .

Well , you can use the add and edit condition to do just that .

Click and open that up .

You now have a set of simple conditions .

You can choose when to include it and when to exclude it , and now you can just simply set up whatever conditions that you want .

So at the moment , this is set to show on the entire website , except for the four or four the search and the archive pages .

But you can set this up the way that you want .

You can even set up user conditions , so there's lots of options .

For now , though , we're going to just leave this as it is and disable the sticky functionality and the transparent head and functionality .

So let's just say we want to put some nice little links at the top for all our social networks .

So our Facebook and Twitter and so on .

Well , this is really easy to do at the moment .

We've got just the main row is set up .

Let's just activate the top row and let's add some things inside there so we'll select the top row and we can choose the design options if we want to like the background .

So let's change the background over to this dark blue colour .

Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna add in some widgets .

So to do that , we're simply gonna click inside the first section , come back out of this and we're going to come into elements .

And now we can just choose socials , for example , and drop that into the top right hand corner click to open socials up .

And now we have a tonne of options inside there to choose what social network we want to include and all the designer styling options we want general and design .

So there's tonnes of options inside you .

So we're gonna do is let's just add in one more just to see how easy this is and we'll just say We'll add in YouTube , for example .

OK , so we'll add that and we'll reorder that .

We'll say YouTube is the most important and now you can see in the top right hand corner .

There's all of our social icons .

Want to adjust the size we adjust the size , make them smaller ?

No problem whatsoever .

I want to change the design aesthetic .

We can do that too .

So let's just say we want those to be white and they now stand out a lot more .

So pretty cool .

We've got our social icons at the top and we've customised how this all looks .

Next thing we need to do is set this up for our mobile header .

So let's click on Mobile and you can see there's our mobile header and we can make sure now if we want to make any changes to it .

So this time it changes a little bit .

We've still got those three rows and you can see only the main row is currently active .

Our social icons are not on there .

We've also got the off canvas menu , and if we click to open that up .

We can now control how that looks .

What this basically means is if we click on the little icon there , you can see there's our set up .

Now it's telling us we don't actually have a menu created for this yet , so we need to assign a menu for this .

That's really easy to do .

We're gonna do like we've done before , is come back out of this .

I'm gonna go right the way down and we're going to choose the option for menus and inside there , we're just going to say we want to edit this first menu and we're gonna say this is going to be a mobile menu as well .

So now we've set the same menu to be in the header menu and the mobile menu .

So we test that out .

You can see there's all of our different sections inside there , which replicates what we can see on the normal desktop version .

So we configured everything now for our header the way that we want .

Let's move on to our footer .

Now we can edit the footer in a very similar fashion to how we edit the header .

Obviously there's going to be slightly different options inside here so we can come down to the footer itself , Click Edit , or we can come to the left hand side and choose Footer From there .

Both will do pretty much the same thing .

OK , so now we've got the footer builder .

So as you can see , we've got top row .

We've got a middle row and we've got a bottom row so all those things are exactly the same .

Now we can come in and we can just find two things .

So , for example , the copyright that's in there at the moment we can click on that and we can change that to something else .

So we can just change that from powered by .

And we'll just put WPS in there and there we go .

So we've now changed our footer .

Really simple .

Want to change your alignment ?

You can do all those kinds of things .

Want to change those based upon the devices being used again Really easy to do .

We can simply make any changes .

We want to on any of those devices .

Pretty cool .

Same goes for vertical alignment .

Whether you want to make these visible on any of the devices .

So you might say that a particular section is only available on the desktop or only available on a mobile .

Well , you can do that by simply selecting it and then choosing the visibility based upon the device that's going to be viewed on .

And finally we have the design option as well , so we can easily fine tune this now .

That's just how we can edit the widget .

If you want to change the row , you can see all we do is the same as before .

We'll select the bottom row .

In this example , we can choose the number of columns we want in there , the vertical space in the vertical alignment .

All those things are there .

Create a design .

For example .

You can see the roll back to set this pale grey .

We can choose from any of our global colours , and we'll click on that .

Or we could choose a gradient .

We can choose any of the predefined gradients inside there , or we can create a custom gradient .

We can choose between linear and grey and radial , or we can even come in and set an image inside there .

So you've got lots of options to fine .

Tune this to get exactly what you want .

For this , though , we'll just set this to be this dark blue colour .

And then we're gonna do is we're going to come back to general going to come back into our copyright and inside there are going to a design and change our font colour to be white .

So that now looks a lot better .

So pretty cool .

If you want to add extra rows in , you can do just that .

So you can say you want to add a middle road where you can set up the different type of design , the number of columns , all those kinds of really useful things that they when you're ready to add any items into that , you can simply click inside and we can do come back out of this and we can say , Now we can agree and add any any of the items that we want .

So we might say that we want to put something like , Let's just choose this again .

We'll set that to be two , and we'll set this to be really , really simple , like come back into section , come back out of here and we're going to say We want to put the foot of menu inside there , drop that into that section and then we say We put socials on this side , click on our socials , for example , and again we can add anything we want inside there .

Choose in the alignment to set that to be right hand side .

You see , that's now set things up inside there looking pretty good .

We don't have a menu set up so we can do the same as we did before .

We can just check on that .

Come back out and we can say we could set this up to be whatever menu we want .

So again , let's come back out of this .

Go right the way back down to our menus and come in and just set up the options inside here .

And we're gonna say foot and men can use the same menu again and you can see now there's our footer menu inserted into there .

Click back , edit on there .

Come back in and we can say we'll set the roll back on colour and we'll choose this darker grey and we can do the same , then with our font colours into design change those colours over to White , for example , on the same for the socials .

Come back in to a design set , the colour set White .

You can see it's really quick and easy to do this , and if you want to set custom colours , so we might say We don't want that kind of grey there .

Come back into a design , choose our back on a colour .

We'll choose this dark blue so it kind of matches .

But then we're going to just tweak it a little bit , so it's not quite the same colour , just a slight difference in the shades there and you can see now we just created a custom foot , and it's as easy as that .

You can get as creative as you want .

You have tonnes of widgets available .

All of those little widgets have their own custom setting , so really get stuck in , get creative and create something pretty unique .

And probably the most important page on the entire website is the home page , and it needs to capture the message you want to convey to the intended audience .

And as we're working on a blog today , we want to entice people by letting them see either the latest blog posts or a selection of our most important ones .

So with that in mind , let's move on to setting up the design for our home page with a nice , strong visual design .

So now we've seen how easy it is to work on the headers and footers .

Let's just quickly publish this to save our changes and let's come back out and let's start working on the look of this home page .

Come right the way back out .

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna scroll until we find blog posts , because at the moment our home page is set up just to display our blog posts .

That's perfectly fine , because at the end of the day , this is a blog website .

So what we're gonna do is we're going to fine tune and tweak this .

At the moment , it looks OK , but it's not the nicest look , and there's also a couple of things I don't really like .

For example , we've got differing amounts of text being displayed , and that just looks a little bit rubbish .

So how do we deal with this ?

Well , as before , we can simply click on edit if we want to to open up all the options or we can just come in to the customise on the left hand side and choose what we want to control .

Now we have five different blog layouts we can pick and choose from , and then we can fine tune and customise each one of those as well .

So at the moment we're looking at this which is a grid set up with three by three showing however many posts we've got .

Well , that looks OK , but we can make it look a lot better .

So you could choose very simple option if you wanted to .

And this will put a very simple layer of stacking one on top of the other with a left right description , content and so on and a picture on the opposite side .

Or you can have nice big images like so .

So if you've got a very visual looking blog like this one where you've got food , it could be quite interesting to have that to be left , right , and centre as it were , it becomes the most important thing .

This one is the enhanced grid , which I kind of like .

What it'll do is it'll give you two , then three , then two , then three and so on .

I think that looks pretty cool .

And it's a little bit more visually interesting than just a typical stacked on top of each other .

Finally , we've got the Gutenberg layout , which uses the kind of Guttenberg editor to create this kind of layout , which is OK , but personally , I kind of prefer this enhanced grid option .

Now , once you set up on your blog structure , then you're ready to move on and start customising it .

So each one of these individual items is called a card , and the card in this example is going to show us things like the category is associated associated with the title , the featured image content and so on .

Well , we can come into the card options and we can fine tune and configure that .

So at the moment , we've got X number of posts per page where we might want to keep that a little bit more minimal .

So let's just say we want to set this to be five .

That will give us a nice layer where we have two larger images and three smaller ones underneath .

So enough to pique people's interest .

Now , if you look at each one of these cards , each one has a set of different card elements .

So we have things like post matter title featured image excerpt , post me and so on .

And don't worry too much if these terms don't mean a lot to you .

Because as you start configuring these , you will see exactly what's happening on screen , which will give you a good understanding of what each different card element actually relates to .

So these card elements are broken down to a couple of different things .

The little eyeball just allows us to enable and disable that particular item so you can see by disabling the Post Me that removes the categories this comes from by clicking back on the eye to enable it , you can see they come back .

We can also expand these out so we can click and you can see this is now going to show up additional information .

If you want to , we can stack more of these post meta items on top of each other .

Right now , we simply have categories , but we can add any of the other options .

So author comments publish date updated dates , tags and so on .

So let's just say we want to add the tags in .

We can click and we can just say add And there we go .

We've now added the tags in .

If you want to click on the X to remove those , you can do that , or you can click and expand them , and you can choose how they're going to be separated , whether they're gonna be simple , whether they're gonna be little buttons , whether they're going to be underlined , you can style these .

Configure them however you want .

Do you want to use simple ?

Do you want to use labels ?

For example , do you want to use underline buttons , lots and lots of different options on there ?

So let's just remove that one from there for now , so that's quite cool .

We can see how easy that is .

We'll close that down the title .

Well , that's pretty self explanatory .

That is the title of the particular post , and probably not the best idea to remove that .

Otherwise , no one really knows what it's called featured image .

I would also recommend keeping that on there and again .

We can expand that out , and you can see , we can change various different things , including the image ratio .

So at the moment this is showing a four by three style image .

But we could set that to be 16 by nine if we want to 1 to 1 .

So it's a square 2 to 1 .

So it's more of a sort of wide screen look , and you can also reverse these so you can flip them horizontally and vertically .

So you might want to do a 1 to 1 .

And you might want to do a 3 to 4 , for example , and you can flip that between horizontal and vertical .

So lots of options you can even set a custom value inside there and do whatever you want .

We're going to put this back to predefined , and we're going to set that and leave it as the four by three .

I think that looks pretty good .

You can also choose the medium large , full size thumbnail , and so on .

The different kinds of size images that were pressed by default sets up .

When you upload an image , I would suggest looking at the quality of the image on the screen and the number of posts you have and finding the smallest image size that you can get away with while still keeping good quality .

That's going to mean that your page is just going to load that a little bit quicker because you're not loading in really , really big images .

So the featured images that all set up if we come in and take a look at the excerpt , for example , you can see this is where we can control how many words are going to be used or you can just disable it completely .

So for me , I'm going to disable this because I think the visuals and the title are going to be strong enough to grab people's attention .

The other thing we can do is we can reorder any of these as well , so we might think that what I'd like to do is put the name of the post at the top .

But I want to take the things like the meta information .

I want to put that underneath alongside the author details , So we need to do drag that down .

There we go .

We've now created a custom set up .

We don't like that .

We can just change it if we don't want , for example , the date it was posted and so on .

Well , we can just get rid of it .

Simple as that really , really easy to do .

And you also have tonnes of options .

Then for the spacing and so on come to design and we can fine tune and configure the titles .

We can change the things like the font family and so on .

Just bear in mind where you have this title font is using default , family and default weight and so on .

Those are the values that you've set up at the beginning using the typography options .

So if you start to override those , you make changes to your global typography from the typography section .

They won't take effect inside there .

So just bear that in mind just to make sure that you don't update things in different places and then wonder why you're making changes and it doesn't necessarily work the way you expect it to .

So speaking of things like that , let's come back to our typography .

And let's just change the weight of these because at the moment I think Bold 700 is a little bit heavy weight , So let's just change that to something like 500 we'll do the same then for heading two .

We'll set that to 500 as well .

And you see now the heading to is what's being used for these and we do the same Then for heading three .

Just set that to medium 500 OK ?

And as you can see anywhere that uses that global font value will update accordingly and the same goes for your base font .

Let's just say you didn't want to use that system font .

You want to use something like I don't know .

Let's just say Monserrat .

We could start searching for that , find what we want and there we go .

Now everything that uses the fonts has updated to Monserrat .

You could say you want to use something like the and again , we'll do the same thing and there we go .

We now change it to NATO , and that will globally change all these headings unless you have a different font family set up inside there .

So it's really easy to make those changes globally to your entire site .

OK , so we've pretty much got our home page where we want it to be .

A couple of things we can take a look at before we leave this .

Some of these options , things like your page elements .

Now , at the moment , we have no sidebar on here .

But if you wanted to use a sidebar , you could do that so we can enable that and that will pull the sidebar in onto the right hand side , using the default values inside there now for me .

I don't think this looks particularly great where you've got this kind of layer .

So for this home page , I would generally tend to disable that option , so we'll take that off .

You also see , we've got page at the bottom , but you can if you want to disable that .

So you might say on the home page this is just going to have a certain list of posts the most recent , for example , and that's all that's gonna be on there .

If you want to dig in deeper , you go down and use the menu structure .

Well , you can enable or disable that directly from inside you .

You can even add in card reveal effects .

So if we enable that we'll now get a little bit of animation for each of these cards as they come onto the screen .

So you had a little bit of visual movement to the design , which is quite cool .

OK , so we're gonna say we're happy with the home page .

We'll hit Publish on that and we've now built out our home page .

So now we've got a couple more pages to take a look at editing before we're ready to launch our blog .

Now , what good would a blog be if we didn't have a great looking blog section ?

Let's move on now and set that up to mimic our homepage and provide a real sense of design continuity .

OK , so we've done the home page .

Now we want to do the single post in the category pages .

So what am I talking about ?

Let's start off with the categories .

So we know we've got vegetarian as a category .

Let's click and open that up and you see , this is what we're presented with .

So it's kind of fallen back to the original design that we had on the home page .

So we need to update this now so everything is consistent on our site .

So click edit on that and that will open up the category section and the blog .

If you didn't want to use that option , you can simply come over to the left hand side .

And underneath there you've got your post types .

Your blog posts and categories and single posts categories is what we're working on right now .

So what we're gonna do is set this up to look pretty much exactly the same as the home page .

So we'll choose the enhanced grid option .

We'll see .

We've got everything set up on there gonna come into our card options .

We're going to just drag this down or we disable it .

Whatever we want to do , we'll take off the excerpt so we'll just disable that and everything is looking pretty good there .

So that's not done .

Really , really simple , other than just changing the number of posts and we need to make sure that everything looks good .

So we've got five in each kind of block .

So if we set this to be , if we leave it at 10 , for example , as this grows , we then have 10 items on the page and it will balance out visually .

If you can make any changes to your card type your gaps and so on , like you've done in the previous one or any of the design options .

You can do that inside here in exactly the same way as we just done it with the home page .

This is just setting up for a category .

OK , so once that's done , we now want to come back out of this .

And now we're going to do the individual post so we can click on the individual post .

Open that up and this is now going to show us what our post will look like .

So , same again , we can simply come over and edit sections on here , or we can come over to the left hand side .

This time , choose single posts , click on there and again , we have those predefined layouts with additional options .

So we might say , we like this kind of thin looking layout or we want to have a normal , full width kind of layout .

It's up to you .

I kind of like this narrower layout looks pretty cool .

You can then choose whether you want your content area wide or boxed , so it's up to you , so you can see if you choose box .

We have this nice little sort of white background on it , whereas wide kind of gets rid of that .

It just sits on the background itself .

You could even control things like the content area , the vertical spacing and so on .

I would generally enable the featured image because I think it's a nice , strong image .

It just visually adds that little bit of impact when you land on the page .

That's pretty nice to see .

But again , we've got all these options .

We can enable disable any of them .

Where you have a little arrow like this , you can see featured image .

We can click to go in even deeper and see even more options inside there .

So again we can control things like the image width so we can do wide like so .

Or we can do full , which will give us a full width again , entirely up to you .

How you want to do it .

You can change the ratio .

You can change what size image is going to be used .

You can choose the visibility on the different kinds of devices , and you can choose where the actual image is displayed , whether it's above or below the title .

So there are an abundance of options to fine tune and configure exactly how this all looks to make sure it is unique to you .

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this back to because I think that looked just a little bit nicer .

And as you can see , everything looks pretty cool .

Let's come back out of this and we can make any more option changes that we want inside here .

So we might want to put the author information underneath if we've got a lot of authors or we can just simply enable the author box .

And once we do that , we get this little arrow popping at the side , at which point we can then make changes to how that looks .

So we've got different styles .

You can see that will show the different style the post count social icons where you want to make this visual visible .

Lots of different options , including , like I say , as we see the design options .

So we're just disable that because I don't want that on there and underneath we've got the options then for page elements .

This is kind of like a related post and If you've got comments enabled , they would sit underneath and again .

You can easily come in and fine tune this .

You might say You only want to put two posts in there or one post in there or 10 posts in there .

You have options for all these different things .

So now we've gone ahead , and we've configured how our individual blog post looks alongside various other parts of our blog , including the blog index and the home page .

So now we pretty much have a fully featured blog all set up , ready to go .

There's still tonnes more we can do .

And the nice thing with blogs is you have so many options that you can easily come in and create something truly unique just using it .

And like I said , this is the free version of the theme as well , so it's great to see .

So now we've done all this .

Let's have a little look at the front end and see where we are at the moment and how everything looks and works .

So let's just really quickly reload our site and we can see there's our animation effects for our home page .

We scroll down as we see the extra ones , they'll lazy , load in and load in quite nicely .

So that's what our home page is currently looking like .

We click and take a look at any of our posts .

We click and go in and we see there's our post play , which we just customised .

All the images are inside there the sharing options , related posts and so on .

That's looking pretty nice .

And then we can take a look at any of our sections and our categories .

And again , you can see there's our different categories all set up looking pretty awesome .

So I think we've already got a great looking blog put together , which we can continue to tweak and fine tune to get exactly what we want .

Now we not strictly a vital part of any kind of blog , it can be really useful to have a contact page to allow your growing fan base to be able to contact you if they need to .

So let's take a look at how we can easily add a contact page to our new blog .

So now we've built our blog .

What about if we want people to get in touch with us because they want to just tell us how amazing our blog is .

Well , to do that , we're gonna need to add in a form plug in .

Now we're gonna use a free one again .

But there are tonnes of paid options if you need those .

But for simple contact form , there's plenty of free options to do that .

We're gonna come into plugins and add new , and we're simply going to search for a plug in called WP forms .

We'll install that , and once that's installed , we'll activate it and we'll get started , create our contact form .

OK , so now that's all activated .

And we've got a little welcome screen that gives us a sort of step by step if you new to this .

So I would recommend taking a look at that if you are not too comfortable .

But let's create our first form .

OK , so once we've done that , we can now create any kind of form we want and you see , there's a couple of starter templates we can choose from , so we want a simple contact form .

Let's hit , create a simple contact form , and that will load in the editor .

Now you can see we've got our first and last name , email and comment or message .

If you want to add more , you can simply drag and drop anything you want .

And so you might want to put something I don't know , maybe like a phone number or something where you can simply drag that into your design .

Drop it in there and you can see that now put in a new entry , at which point we can easily just edit any of the information by selecting it .

And we could just change this label to telephone .

Put a description if you want to make it required if you need to .

So they have to fill that out any advanced options so you can set up some styling and things inside there .

But for the most people , you don't need to change anything .

You can just go with the default options for this example , though we don't need that so we'll just get rid of it .

And that's our simple contact form put together .

We change that and we'll change it from a simple contact form to contact me , and we'll leave that as it is .

OK , so and the notifications if you want to set any notifications .

You can do that inside there .

Same for confirmations .

As you can see , this will just send a message to someone that's actually contacted You saying thank you very much for contacting us , blah , blah , blah , which you can obviously adjust this to whatever you want inside there .

Now what ?

You've got everything set up in your form .

The next thing you need to do is set up where it gets sent to .

To do that , we kind of come into settings and from there underneath notifications , you can see there's your default notification and you see send to email , address , email , subject and so on so you can tweak these if you want to change it to whatever you want .

Admin email is the email address you use when you set up your account with WordPress .

But if you want to change that to something else , you can simply just insert your own email address inside there , and that's where the form will be sent to .

A smart tags are basically just little tags that could be used to prefill out information based upon info .

The stored as part of your WordPress site , such as the admin email .

But for most use cases what you're doing here , which is a simple blog , you can either just do the admin email inside there .

Or you can set up an insert type in your own email address .

Email subject .

Well , we don't want to change that .

We want to change that to something like message from my blog .

I can say from name .

Well , we can just say Bill's blog , whatever you want to do in there so you can change any of these fields .

And once you're happy with that and everything is set up , you can simply hit save option .

So we created that form .

Let's create the page that's going to display the form so we can come back out of this .

Now we can exit from WB forms .

There's our form .

There's our short code .

If we need to use it .

And what we can do is we can copy that from there , and I'll show you how you can use short codes .

So just copy that .

Gonna come to pages this time and say , Add new and this we're gonna call Contact me .

OK , so that's been done .

Now , underneath .

We're just gonna click inside there , we're gonna click to add a short code , or we can do a search for widget .

That's to do with WB forms .

And there we go .

There's our W forms widget .

However , if you didn't have something like this and you wanted to use just the short code , you can type in short code click to add that in there and then all we need to do is paste our short code in , and that has then inserted that contact form .

But I say with this particular item , it's easier just to use its native option .

So we're going to get rid of that .

Come back up , just type in WP , insert our WP forms , and then we can just simply select our contact form from there and bank .

There's our contact form .

Insert it into our page as simple as that .

We can publish this page .

We click publish on there , and what I can do now is we can come back out of this and we can go into appearance and into our menus , and we can add this into our navigation .

So there's our main menu and contact me or click and add that underneath there and we'll hit save menu .

And we've now added that into our site .

If we come back , go to our home page and we'll see .

We've got contact me now .

It has been added into our navigation .

Let's click and open that up and you see there's our contact form doesn't look great , so we can tidy that up in a moment , make it look a little bit more interesting .

But you can see the form is inserted in here , and we now have that as part of our navigation and also part of our site .

So let's take a look at how we can make that just look a little bit more in keeping with the rest of our design .

So what we're gonna do is we're going to select our form widget , and from there we're going to turn this into a column , and then we're just simply going to apply a different colour to the background .

So we'll say , transform to column just by using a little option at the top .

And then we're gonna choose our colour settings , and we're going to set the background colour to white and you see that now has put spacing around it , put a white background in , which kind of keeps this a little bit more in keeping with the sort of blocks that we have as part of our home page and our blog list and so on .

Let's just update that we'll hop back over , then to our page and we'll refresh this .

And now that already looks a lot better still , so much more we could do to this , but I think you kind of get the picture with where we're going with it .

And if you want to get more creative , get stuck in and really experiment and play about what you can do with both WordPress , Gutenberg and the blocky theme .

So you had lots of options on what you can do .

So what we have now is pretty much a full blog with everything that we kind of need to get everything up and running .

But there's so many more things you could do now that we've built the blog and it's ready for you to add in your awesome and life changing content .

We also need to help the search engines , like Google , be able to see our content and give us the best chance of getting it ranked for our chosen topic Now .

To do that , we need to add some more features to WordPress to allow us to add some extra information to help us show up more consistently in the search engine results .

For that , we'll be using another free plug in called ranked math .

Now , what I want to talk about next is basically SEO or search engine optimisation .

And if you don't know what SEO is , don't worry .

All it really means is applying certain little pieces of information to every single page or post that you create .

That helps you get found by search engines like Google .

We're going to be using another free tool called rank math .

Now rank math is a very well respected SEO plug in , like I say , completely free version , but it gives you tonnes and tonnes of options .

I've created a video on how to use this , which I will link to in the description below .

So if you're interested in finding out more and how to get more out of it , I would recommend checking out to get you up to speed .

This is only going to show you how to install it and just show you very quickly around the interface .

So as before , we're in the plug in section , we're gonna click , Add new .

I'm going to research for rank math .

Once we find that we're going to go through the same process , we'll install this and once installed , we'll activate it and then we'll take a look at what it does .

Now , once you install rank math , first thing you're gonna see is this wizard that's going to guide you through the basic set up .

First thing you want to do is connect to your account .

If you don't have an account , you can set one up .

It's totally free , and it helps you speed up the process of setting SEO up using rank Ma .

In the future , you can skip this if you want to , or you can connect to your account .

Now I've got an account , so I'm gonna choose the option to connect to my account .

Once I've done that , then I'm ready to carry on .

OK , I've connected that to my account and now I'm ready to move on to the next stage .

So I'm using the free version .

So the pro option is not going to be available .

I would recommend if you are new to this using the easy option because this is going to guide you through most of the things you're gonna need to do .

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna use easy and then we're gonna go through the Wizard to say Start the Wizard .

It's gonna ask us a couple of things and we just need to simply fill out the information or supply the relevant graphics and so on .

So my cool blog is a personal blog , but you can choose between various different things .

This is a personal blog , so that's perfectly fine .

It's already gone ahead and found my logo to use that for Google .

That's perfectly fine .

If you want to change it , you can just simply change that from there .

Default social share image .

If you want to set up a default image , could be your logo .

Could be a specific graphic .

Could be anything you want .

This will then , if you don't use a featured image .

For example , if someone shares your post , this will use the as a kind of fall back image .

So we're going to do it .

I'll just choose one of my images from there and say that one .

We do it .

We say , Use that and that's pretty cool .

Save and continue .

We've got the next step .

Connect it to the Google Services .

So if you have accounts to do with , you know , your Google analytics and so on , you can set that up and connect it up .

At this point , I'm gonna skip that step for now .

But I would recommend that you connect it .

If you're using those and you're comfortable with them , I'm gonna skip that .

And we're going to go on now .

And you see , we now come to the end of this .

So this just tells us , OK , you've done the wizard .

We're now ready to go .

So return to the dashboard .

Now , don't be overwhelmed by all this .

Like I say , I've got a tutorial that will take you through all of this .

If you're interested .

I just want to show you .

Now we've run through the setup wizard , how you add SEO options to the posts that you create or any post you've created in the past .

All we need to do is come into the post section , and we're going to take a look at our posts .

You can see we now have an extra column called SEO Details , and inside there we have some extra options .

The rating , which is currently said to N A because we haven't set any SEO options for any of our posts .

We set a keyword , which is what we want to rank for .

So if it's about , for example , vegan diet , then you can use vegan diet as your particular keyword .

Your schema .

Don't worry too much about that .

It just basically tells the search engines what type of post you've created .

So it could be a recipe .

It could be an article .

It could be multiple different things .

This allows you to set that up on a post by post basis and then things like links for internal and external links , you know , linking to other people's sites or sites linking back to you and so on .

OK , so let's open up a post out and take a look at what we can do for our SEO .

Now , if we take a look at the top right hand corner , you see there's our rank mouth rating for this particular post .

Now we're not going to get great ratings because we're just using filler text .

But obviously , if you are spending time to create content that has the right kind of keyword or keywords and phrases in there , what you want to rank for once you start to work through the SEO side of things and it's just a step by step process , once you kind of work through that , that score inherently will increase .

So don't take what I'm showing is indicative of what you will get .

Mine is just fill a text .

So what we can do is we click on this option .

You can see we now have a new section on the right hand side , which is all to do with rank math .

This will show us a preview of what our search result would look like in search engine like Google , for example , and these are just called snippets .

So what you can do is you can easily come in and edit this .

This is just going to pull in what it considers to be the right info .

So it's putting in the title The link and a brief overview of what this particular page is about , and that's just grabbing it from this first opening paragraph , which isn't always the best way to go about it .

So you can edit this snippet and now you can come in and you can fine tune this completely , which is what I would generally tend to recommend .

You want to set a good title that's catchy and interesting , and you want someone to grab their attention .

So we're just gonna say , This is amazing Vegan recipes for all .

If I can spell recipes , OK , so we've created a simple title , and as you can see , this is now ranking our title .

We're not getting a good ranking because we're not using enough characters , and we're not really giving enough information .

But you can see how easy it is to start changing this so amazing vegan recipes for all on a tight budget .

So that's increasing the word count , which means that we've get better scores on there plink .

I wouldn't worry too much about that that's being pulled in from your title last , that we've got the Description field .

Now .

What the Description Field is doing as default is just pulling in the 1st 150 160 characters from the first paragraph of your page , which is not necessarily the best way to go about it much better to craft something that grabs people's attention and makes them want to read your content .

So for that I've simply just created this little more interesting info .

And if we take a look at our preview at the top , you can see there's all of our new , updated information that we've manually put in to give us the best chance of ranking .

Now .

Next up , we've also got the social option we click on there .

This is how we'll see if someone shares this particular post on a social media site such examples as Facebook and Twitter .

This is gonna give us who it's from .

It's gonna give us the image that we've got set as our featured image and this little bit of information underneath it , and again , this is kind of using that same info .

But if you want to , we can change all this .

We can change the image to something completely different .

We could say we want to change it for this one , for example , and you can see that will update it on there .

We can change the title .

The description .

We can even add an icon overlay to the thumbnail , and we can set .

These have to be different based upon whether it's Facebook or Twitter .

So you can fine tune both your social sharing options and the general information you see in a search engine result all done inside this particular section .

So that's not done .

There's our snippet done .

Next up , you've got the focus , keyword .

So we're just gonna call this vegan meals Now you can see we've got some extra options .

This will suggest what it thinks are great options for us .

So vegan meals for beginners , for example .

Well , there's our first thing now .

Obviously , we're gonna get pretty poor scores on this because we haven't optimised our content and our title and so on for that particular key phrase .

But if we take a look underneath , you can see we now get four different sections .

That tells us how we can go about getting a much better chance of ranking our content if we work through these .

If they're relevant , if they don't think you've got to get 100% score on everything like this , because sometimes there are things that are not relevant .

Go through those fine tune configure your article , all the content that goes with it to give yourself the best chance and rank math is going to make that whole process a lot easier .

So once you've worked through all that , you're simply gonna hit update on your page .

And then we've set the SEO for this particular page , at which point we can come back and repeat that for every single page or post on our site .

And you see , if we take a look at the post listings , we now get this little overview on the top right hand side .

It's now been filled out .

There's our score .

There's our keyword .

There's our schema and any links and so on we've got .

So that's how you go about doing the basics of SEO .

But if you want to learn more , take a look at the link in the description that goes through rank math in a lot more detail .

So now you've got your feet wet building your own WordPress blog , you're probably ready to learn even more , so check out the playlist .

You can see on screen to help you get more out of your new website .

As always , all of the applicable links are in the description below .

And if you made it this far in the video , well , why not give that thumbs up button a click ?

It really does help me out .

Now why add it if you like the content , but or also click the subscribe button and slap the bell icon to be notified when new content is added .

However , if you didn't get any value from this video , while you can hit the thumbs down button twice , as that works pretty well , too .

My name is Paul C .

This is WP and until next time , take care .