Okay so I had wanted to put this final post out very quickly after the other two, but I ran up against a wall. I was a sponsor at the That’s Voiceover Career Expo in LA and with so many things to prepare, I simply ran out of time. My apologies if I left you hanging. But let’s go ahead and finish this puppy!
To this point, we have covered how to purchase and set up hosting and domain service through Bluehost.com for your new website; install WordPress; and select and install a theme. We are ready to move on to the final stages toward a complete, live website.
If you missed the first two articles of this series, you’ll definitely want to go back and catch up. Then bounce back here to finish it up!
6 FAST STEPS TO CREATE YOUR OWN WEBSITE! steps 1, 2 & 3
6 FAST STEPS TO CREATE YOUR OWN WEBSITE! step 4
Step 5: Create Pages
- In the WordPress Dashboard, mouse over the menu item “Pages” and you will see a popup menu with “All Pages” and “Add New.”
Click “Add New.”
- You are now in the page editor. Take a moment to notice how it has many similarities to Microsoft Word. If you have used that program, this will look somewhat familiar with the toolbar.
There is a title window at the top of the work area where you enter the headline of your page.
Click within the title window and type your page headline.
- Now click within the larger page editing window below the toolbar and you can simply start typing. But let’s cover some details first.
Your headline that you entered at the top is called Heading 1. It should be unique and have a focus specific to that page. Now when you add text in the main window of the page, you will never want to use that Heading 1 element again. In other words, notice in the toolbar just above the page window, you will see a box that says Paragraph. Click on it and you will see a number of options to format blocks of text. Your page headline (Heading 1) will appear the largest. Heading 2 would appear slightly smaller, Heading 3 slightly smaller and so on. And depending on the theme, they may have different color as well. It’s a good idea to have one or two subheadings (Heading 2) to help organize the page content. Everything else can just be a paragraph.
You can also see other tools in the toolbar that allow you to create bullet lists, ordered lists, indented blocks of text and even special characters. To figure out what each tool button does, leave your mouse cursor over each one to get the tool tip that tells you what it is.
- Once you get all your content entered, you can save the page as a Draft if you want to wait to make it live. Do this by going to the “Publish” box in the upper right of your work area and click the “Save Draft” button.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a break and read it later to see if you have errors. That Draft will be available even if you log out and come back another day. No one else can see it… yet. - To make your page live, simply click the blue “Publish” button in the Publish box.
If you publish your page and then find an error, don’t worry! Just open the page by going to the menu item “Pages” again and select “All Pages.” This will bring you to a list of all the pages you have created whether they are drafts or published. You can simply click on the page title to open it, edit it, and then click the blue “Publish” button again. Phew, right?!
There is just one other thing I’m going to mention here before we move on, and that is the menu.
If you did nothing else but create your pages, a menu should be automatically created for you (depending on the theme), and each menu item’s text would be the full page title. This can end up being way too much text in your menu – you only have so much space.
To make the menu have the exact wording you want (more concise) than the page headline, you can take care of this in the “Menu” area.
- In the dashboard menu, mouse over “Appearance” and click “Menus.”
It’s too much to go into the details of this area, but here you can create a new (replacement) menu, put the pages in the order you want, and give each page specific text that can be shorter to fit better.
Keep creating pages until you have everything you want. Now go through, check links to make sure they work, proofread your text and just make sure everything is functioning correctly and mistakes are corrected.
You now have a website that is live!
Step 6: Tell the World!
This is where your persistence will be required. You need to market the bejeebies out of your site. Methods for getting your site recognized by the folks:
- Search Engine Optimization.
- Post your link in all your social media accounts.
- Announce your new site in all your social media accounts.
- Put the web address on your business card and all your printed materials.
- Good ol’ networking. Just tell people to come visit your new website!
Search Engine Optimization is really a whole science unto itself. There are specialists in this field so you know there is a lot to it. If you keep following me and attend my webinars, I will cover this topic a lot. This is probably the NUMBER 1 topic people ask about. So look for information on this in the future. I don’t want your head to blow up with too much information now.
I think you can pretty well understand the other four methods for getting the word out. Electronically, by print, and by mouth.
There you have it! Now obviously there is so much more to finessing a website, but this will get you up and running. I follow so many top entrepreneurs and they all agree with this one point: don’t wait for perfect; just get it out there!
You can (and should) go back and tweak and fix and fuss with it after you go live. Actually Google likes when a website has frequent changes so that’s one in your favor! It should be a living entity in that you keep it alive by continually giving it attention. People can tell if a website hasn’t been touched for a long time. And then they go away.