 Excellent. Let's talk about today's agenda. There are some user questions that I'm going to use throughout, but we're going to do kind of a brief overview of blogging. They're going to be the key steps that you need to set up a blog, including like finding a host in a domain, picking a theme, writing content, maybe some helpful settings on posts that you may not know exist yet. There's going to be another resource on organizing your content. We'll talk about the fact that you can manage comments and a little bit on plugins, but I think we're going to, that's going to be about the first third. So it's going to be a very high level overview. And then we're going to talk about some like best blogging tips. And somebody asked about AI and what, like, should you use AI, chat GPT, some of these, these conversational bots to write blogs. And yeah, so we will explore that a little bit. So one thing that I did in preparation just because WordPress is very big in that you can, it can do basically anything that you can dream. If you know enough code, it can do a lot of things, even if you don't know any, any code. But what I have done is I've provided some resources because again, we're going to start with a really high level overview. You are welcome to use this, this Google Docs to learn more. And this is a kind of a weaving together of resources that we have over on learn.wordpress.org. So some of these are text-based courses that'll take you anywhere from 30 minutes to maybe two hours to complete. When some of them are short video tutorials, they are between five to 10 minutes. And then some of them are former sessions that I've run, like if you need help brainstorming. So as I mentioned, some of these things, I'm like, hey, this is over on learn.wordpress. Here are your resources so that you're like, oh, wow, I need to learn more about hosts and domains. Or I'd like to learn how to manage my comments in general. You have those resources so that you can use them as you start to build your blog. So you have that information when you need it. So yeah, so that's there for you. Yeah, so that was today's agenda. We talked about all of this. Here we go. Let's go ahead and get started. So the first things that you need to get started generally are what are known as a WordPress host and a domain name. And I'm actually going to do one quick thing here, slide show, present review. I gave myself notes this time. Yay. So that I can be a little less scattered. So when you first get started with WordPress, you need two things generally, a host, which is where you're, oh, bless you. This is where your writing, your images, your videos, your thoughts all live. So it's basically just a database where all of this lives together. And the second thing that you need is a domain name. So how people access your website, its address. So things like learn.wordpress.org, that is an example of a domain name. I have one of my blogs is I think it's birdie.blog. It's not meant to be like a plug, just an example of a domain name. It's how people access and find your website. So we had, I saw a lot of ones here. So I wanted to come prepared. Like what if you just want to experiment? Because hosts and domain names are essential for other people to be able to find and access your website. However, you may just want to play to get started and get familiar without spending any kind of money, right? And there are some resources for you as well. The first one that I'm going to show you is called WordPress Playground. So this is going to exist only in your browser. And everything that you do on it deletes when you close it. And this is a relatively new, this is a relatively new concept. Let me go ahead and drop this link for you in the chat. So this is in beta. But you'll notice that just right here, I have a simple website. It is running in my browser. And you can access the WordPress dashboard maybe for the first time by hovering your mouse over my WordPress website and clicking on dashboard. And that will take you to this fun, experimental WordPress that just runs in your browser. All of your changes are private. So this allows you to experiment and kind of see how things go. But if you make any changes here, it will be gone after a page refresh. So that's one way that you can experiment for free and decide, hey, is WordPress right for me as I'm learning and playing and discovering all that Learn.WordPress.org has to do. So you also have a couple of other options. Let's say that you want to experiment and keep your changes. There are several local WordPress installations. What local means are they are WordPress databases that just live on your computer. They're not connected to the web. Google can't find it. But it does allow you to set up a website and play with it and save and maintain your changes. There are ways to move your website to a live one from there. But some of the ones that we recommend are local WP by Flywheel. This is also free. They do ask for your name and your email. And there's also another beginning one known as WP Kinsta. And it allows you to just play with your website on your own computer. So again, they ask for a little bit here. They might send you some marketing emails. I don't actually know as much about WP Kinsta. But these are some ways that you can play with WordPress and get familiar with it in a way that doesn't require you to spend money on a host. So the host is just what allows your website to live on the internet. And oh my gosh, if you just Google WordPress hosts, WordPress hosts, if you scroll down to Google's results, you're going to find that, wow, there are a lot of places that you can host WordPress. And some of them are going to be for bigger websites. So think like your favorite news website. Think Facebook. Think like the big websites that have like, I don't know, a store that maybe you shop online. They might be managed with one that requires bigger space and those cost more money. But there are some like Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine, GoDaddy that are lower cost ones. And they're ideal, especially for people who are just starting to blog. So WordPress.org, if you're not sure where to get started, does recommend a few hosts. And you can find those links here. So here, let me have trouble with my chat again. Here we go. Let's try that again. So the two that are recommended here are Bluehost and DreamPost. I think SiteGround used to be on this page as well. But does anyone have a host that they've used in the past that they've liked, that they've really enjoyed with WordPress? Just to give some context, I know that I use SiteGround for my websites right now. I've also used Pressable. But basically, these will allow you to set up a WordPress website that looks just like this one online. So GreenGeeks is solar powered. Oh, my goodness. Oh, how cool is that? There is a great WordPress talk about how to make your WordPress website green. So take up less resources, use less power to make it more eco-friendly, which is a new and emerging science there. So that might be something to search if you're curious about stuff like that, WordPress.tv. Oh, my goodness. Why is it doing that? WordPress.tv. Let's try that again. You can definitely search for things like that here and other learning resources. But yeah, so you'll want to sign up for any one of these hosts that we've recommended. If you're not sure where to start, you can't really go wrong with either Bluehost or Dreamhost. But this is how you first create this dashboard where you can then go live. And just a heads up, some people are messaging me directly. You might want to double-check that it is sending the chat to everyone in the meeting. So hello, world creator. I'm happy that you are with us. But try and send it to everyone, not just me. If you want to be read by everyone. Okay. So those are the first two things that you need to start a real online live blog. Yeah. So one person asked, does my blog have to be about one thing? So the short answer to this is no. But there are some caveats that you should know about that. When I first started my blogging journey back in, I think it was 2016, I created a blog about anything that popped into my head. I talked about a health condition that I have. I gave unasked for advice about relationships. I talked about my birds. And that was very fun for me. But basically nobody knows about that blog. And unless I share it on social media with my friends, my family, people who care about, I don't know, my unasked for relationship advice, it's not going to be listed very highly in search results. Just because people who are interested in things about, say, my birds are not really interested in my relationship advice. So you can start a blog about everything under the sun if you want. But it was recommended that you pick one subject. Now that one subject can be broken up into smaller subjects that relate. But I would not have a relationship blog, like a relationship advice blog with a parrot blog. The audiences for that are completely different. So when you start thinking about your blog, really think about one topic. One example that I like to use is travel blogging. You could have a travel blog with certain sections. So it might be like packing best practices for airplanes or packing in your car versus, I don't know, the best places that you've ever traveled. They're both under that same topic, but people can figure out that they can find a little bit more of what they're looking for. And we'll talk about how to separate those ideas in a little bit when we talk about categories and tags. But in general, try and pick one topic to start. Now you can have multiple blogs in different WordPress installations. Some places such as WordPress.com, Siteground, Bluehost will allow you to create several websites under one host with the same payment plan. So just do keep that in mind. So yeah, that's one happy little answer. And if you have any questions about that, feel free to ask in the chat or aloud. Otherwise, let's talk about the first thing that you're going to want to do. So once you have your host and you picked a domain name, myawesomewebsite.com or sarah.blog or something like that, generally the first thing that people do is they pick a theme. So there are two main types of themes that are created by WordPress. So WordPress offers a wide range of themes that control the design and the layout of your blog. So how it looks. There are free themes and premium themes that cost a little bit of money based on your preferences. And each theme can be customized to some extent to match your branding and make your blogs stand out from all the other ones. So there are two types. One is known as a block theme and block themes are revolutionary. These are relatively new themes that came out in I think late 2021, early 2022. But they give you a lot of control. There is a lot you can do. But I would also say there's a steeper learning curve with these block themes. So you can take a block theme and make it look basically however you would like it to with a few clicks of a button. You don't need code for them. But that also means that it's evolving quickly. WordPress is changing all the time. So WordPress 6.3, the newest version of WordPress is coming out in early August. So some of the learning materials that are linked in that document that I gave you may show a slightly different screen than you're used to. Let's see here. So I'm going to answer your question in just a second. Someone said, hey, I'm writing a blog about merits. I think you mean horses and you can't find a suitable theme. So let's talk about that in a minute. But the other type of theme that you have are classic themes. And these make up the bulk of WordPress themes. They've been designed since WordPress was created over a decade ago. And they give you less control over your theme. But they are generally designed either by the community or by theme developers who use code to make things look very pretty, very professional. But they do often have limited options. But they do oftentimes allow for a faster setup. So yeah. And we'll talk about the differences between free and premium themes. So if you're in your WordPress dashboard, the first place that you'll go, generally, to find the way that your website looks is over here at this appearance and themes. So right now, every WordPress installation will come with a theme right out of the box. Generally speaking, if it's a brand new one, if you are setting up with a host for the first time, you'll be using the 2023 theme, which is a block theme. And you'll notice that there's a button up here that says add new. So if you're on a live host, generally speaking, you'll be able to find themes from the theme directory right here in the screen. Because this is a fun experimental WordPress website, you're going to want to actually go to WordPress.org to find your first theme. So from here, there's a button that says download at an extent. There's a beautiful themes button. And you can either search for something that is interesting to you, or you can say, hey, I want to stay on the cutting edge of WordPress, and you can select this block theme button here. So someone said, hey, I'm writing, or I want to write a blog about horses, about mares, how like I can't find a theme. So I might do something like write, and this is just an example, I might write something that says something about horses, or maybe animals, and see what I can find here. So I'm just searching for animal themes, and you're going to find a lot of different options here. And the thing that's really great about themes is that like, here's one for a vet clinic, veterinary pet care. There's one with chickens, right? You should be able to install a theme and then edit it to your heart's content. So one thing that I'm seeing, there's this one here, domination.blog, I'm going to download this theme. I've never heard of it before, but it looks like something where I might be able to put a picture of a horse here instead of a picture of my dog here. So to install this theme from this directory, let's go back to here. I'm going to click on upload theme, choose file, and here it is in my downloads, Dalmatian blog. Let's see what this looks like right out of the box. So I'm going to click install now, and it says, hey, it's installed successfully. The second thing that you need to do after you install a theme is go ahead and activate it. So you're going to click that button, and now I'm going to see what this looks like. I'm going to click on visit site. So the first thing that I noticed is that it changed the colors here. It's got a nice little sidebar over here on the right. It has my first blog post, so there's always a hello world blog post that comes right out of the box just to kind of show you where things are and where they live. And now we can edit this theme. So to do that, we're going to head to our dashboard. So my WordPress website, dashboard, I'm going to hover over appearance. So the but, there are two words that I'm looking for here. The first is customize. The second one will be editor. And that's how you tell the difference generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking between themes. So this customize button tells me that this is a classic theme. And apparently this classic theme, oh, there it went. Okay. So classic themes allow you to get started really, really quickly. You can, this gives you a lot of things that you can change right here. And you can just go down these options and kind of see what's available for you. So for example, the first thing I'd probably want to change is the title, right? So my blog about mayors. You can also give it a site tagline. So all about horses and the joy that they bring. So your tagline, this also shows on Google. So definitely make sure you take a minute to like really think about that. And you'll be able to do similar things with block themes as well. But you can just go down this list and decide, hey, do I want the site tagline to appear on my website? Or just on Google? Not all classic themes give you this option, but some do. It also allows you to pick different fonts depending on what is installed in your theme. And then you might have some color options. So for example, I have the ability to change, the background color of my website, but not a lot else. So that's one of the limitations that I was talking about with those classic themes. Some have more ability to change colors. Some have less. Whereas with block themes, you will be able to stylize your themes, colors, its fonts, where things are positioned in quite a big way. So I've changed this so it has this background here. And you can just go down this list here. The other thing to know about setting up classic themes is that if you click on a theme, you might be able to find suggestions for, like, you can find support. So if you have a problem with your theme, you're really stuck. Many of them have support forums. Not all of them are active. But like, for example, I don't think this one has any support forums, like threads right now. But you can definitely find support here as well. Sometimes there will also be directions on how to set up a block theme. So when you first install it, it may not look quite like what you see here on the screen. They will oftentimes have step-by-step instructions. So definitely recommend playing, experimenting, seeing what works. And from here, if I head to my dashboard, I can start writing about this. Okay, so that's the first thing to note. And if you're not sure that document, picking a theme, there's two tutorials here that I highly recommend. They're super short. One, it helps you to figure out what kind of theme do I have, classic or block. The other one is about choosing and installing a theme. So both of these are really good for you when you are ready to figure out what type of theme do you actually want. So the other type of theme I'm going to show you, just again, this is a high-level overview, but the other type of theme is a block theme. And so if I had to appearance, the 2023 theme I know is a block theme. And if you definitely want lots of control, make sure that when you're in your themes list, you search for block themes here. And this is going to give you a lot of control over your theme. So I'm going to show you a little bit of the difference before moving on. So I've activated the 2023 theme, and you'll notice that my options over here have changed. So here I've got my site editor rather than the customizer. So I'm going to click that button. And one thing to note, what you're seeing here today is probably going to change if you install something next week, 6.3 WordPress. This is changing quite a bit to try and make the user experience even better. It's one of the benefits of WordPress is that we are always evolving, always trying to keep up with the latest technology. But what I can do here is click into this, and I'm able to do a lot more. So this list view here shows you all of the building blocks that are made up of your theme. That's why they're called block themes. And they allow you to do things like change where something is. So for example, here I have a query loop. This is an advanced block that gives you different options for how to display your theme. But what I can do with it, let's say I want my title to be above my featured image. In the classic theme, I wouldn't be able to change that without code. But in the block theme, I can move that right on up, and there it is. The title is now above that featured image. And there are lots of different ways to do the same thing. So you can drag and drop like I did here in my list view. You can use arrows to play there. And there's a lot that you can do. We talked about the limitation of sometimes changing the colors, right? So you also have something known as global styles that will change every single page. It's colors, it's typographies, it's fonts, all of that with a few clicks of a button. So here, let me think about this. Sometimes you'll see something called a browse style. But what I can do is pick something that is closer to what I want it to look like. And you can see with the click of a button, I can find something that speaks much more to me very quickly. And then using this, I can do things like say, hey, I don't want this bright blue text. Let me change my text from bright blue to red. So I'm going to do that. And we're going to see, oh, yep, most of that text has changed across the website. So you can see that you have a lot more control here, which also means that there's a lot more to learn, but it's really fun to just play and explore and enjoy. So we have a question. Can I use another theme website other than just WordPress.org? The short answer to that is yes. If you wanted to, you could go to your favorite search engine and type in WordPress themes. One thing to note about that is that you are going, like your mileage may vary. And what I mean by that is that some themes such as from Theme Forest may not have support. Also, anyone, including your neighbor kid down the street, can design a theme, which might mean that it doesn't work very well, that you don't get very much support. Like if you get stuck on something or worst case scenario, it may actually break your WordPress website. And just rather than seeing your dashboard in here, it just says error. Your theme is not compatible. This doesn't work. So I highly recommend sticking to the WordPress.org theme repository, just because these themes all have one thing in common, or one thing in common. And that is that they were designed either by designers and developers or by the community. You know that they have passed accessibility checks. You know that they have passed safety checks. And that is a very strong way to get started. So while you can use another theme site, do know that it may break your WordPress website. Great question. I love it. So with that in mind, it is also possible to simply pick a WordPress theme or just use the one right out of the box where was I here. And it's possible to get started blogging. Like let's say that we really liked that Dalmatians theme, right? It was very simple, very streamlined, very much a blog. So I'm going to head back to appearance. I'm going to switch back to my Dalmatian blog over here. Now the bread and butter of blogs is in your post page. So these work kind of like social media, Facebook, Twitter, in that any new post you write, any new post will appear wherever it's designated to. So I can write all kinds of things here. And it's like this is obviously this is content of my blog posts. You have this beautiful tool here that is the block inserter. Whether you're using a classic theme or a block theme, your posts and pages will be using blocks. And you've got all kinds of stuff that you can do here. You can insert a single image. You can insert a gallery. You can put media and text side by side. And there's a lot to experiment here. But you also have the opportunity, and I'm going to use my list here to remove all of this really quick because there's a lot of visual clutter right now. They also come prebuilt with something known as patterns. So you can find lots of different patterns. And I think that this may not be working because of the experimental nature of this. So the other place that you can find this is WordPress.org. If you're just experimenting. There is also a patterns directory here, which are pre designed block layouts. So let's say that I really like this time for adventure one. All I have to do is click this copy button. And we're going to see if it works in this experimental playground, y'all. I'm going to close this and I'm going to press control V. And now you'll notice that, hey, there's some pretty waterfall pictures here. It's got text here that I can then edit. I can remove the sign up button or make a different one. Like you can really just modify to your heart's content here. So John asked, hey, will the classic editor plugin work with the block theme? So yes, there is a plugin. And I think it actually may be, there actually may be a block for it. Let's say that you've used WordPress before. Underneath this block, I'm going to show you what this looks like insert after. There is also a block known as the classic editor. And this classic editor looks a lot like a Microsoft Word or like a Google Docs document. And you are able to write in here rather than using blocks. So on posts and pages, yes, this is still going to work within block themes. What a great question. So if you prefer the more Microsoft Wordy, like Word document type editor, definitely consider using the classic block that can definitely get you started writing a little bit faster. So that, this is where you write the bulk of your posts. But I'm going to open up this settings button here because there are a couple of settings that I think are going to be really interesting to you that you may not know exist yet. So when I click my settings button, there are settings for every single block under the sun and they allow you to do different things depending on what block is selected. The classic theme doesn't have many, let me see if I can, I don't know, let's do a list one. Can I do anything with the list? Okay. So these settings, each block, depending on which one you select, which you can do either by clicking on them or by using the list view, list view makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for. But I can make a list of, I don't know, let's say that this was a recipe one, I could say flour and eggs and sugar. With this list block, I have the ability to do things like just here, change my text color. Now it's red. I can say, hey, I want the size to be enormous or maybe a little smaller. You might have some toggles on the side to experiment with that change things to different things. So there's a lot that you can do. And that's just block by block. But what I want you to be able to find is when you're working on your website and you're writing a blog post for the first time, you're going to click these settings and you're going to scooch over from the block individual block settings to the post settings. And this is where a lot of the blogging magic happens here. There's so much you can do here. So for example, this is my first blog post. I can choose to make this blog post public if I have a host. What that means is that anybody would be able to view this, but I also could make it private. So let's say that I'm making a family blog and I'm posting none of my family like social media, but we want to like share images. I can invite other people to be part of my website. And they'd have to log in, but only they would be allowed to see that website. There's also a password protection option here and you can give it a password like our family rocks. That could be the password for this one. So that way when you go and view it, this content is password protected. So that's one of the options that you have here. So that's something that I didn't know existed and that's so cool. As like a former teacher, I would have loved to have used this in my classroom. Other things that you can do. There are lots of options here, but I think that the most important ones that you should be aware of are you have things known as categories and tags and we'll get into that in just a minute, but these basically allow you to separate your content. So we had talked about a travel blog once upon a time. So traveling, we could do air travel, right? Maybe I'm telling people how to best travel by an airplane. I can add that category or let's say we're traveling by train, train travel. I can add this category and then depending on what this post is about, let's say the beauty of traveling by trains. I can say, hey, I don't want this to be under air travel. I just want this to be under train travel. Any posts that I write with this train travel here will appear in this category and WordPress does something really cool. It allows you to automatically have a category page here. So if I click on air travel, we haven't put anything in there yet. It's just going to be really blank, right? But if I'm looking for posts that are just about train travel, I can view this and you'll see, hey, the beauty of traveling by trains is here. So that's one way that you can separate categories so that people who aren't interested in air travel and just want to learn about trains can click on that link and find what they're looking for. The quick thing to remember is that categories separate. So when you first go to write your first blog post, I highly recommend you look at this, organizing your content with categories and tags. It's a super short tutorial. It helps you to differentiate between the two. Tags also do something really similar in that they create pages, but they allow people to find things that are similar. So let's say that in my travel blog, I travel over rivers and I travel over oceans and I travel over mountains. A lot of block themes and just themes in general will have tags at the bottom and someone could say, hey, I want to learn about like other mountainous regions and they can find things that are connected there. So John just asked a great question. He's like, okay, well, once I've assigned a category, how do I remove that? Great question. Let's see here. Where was I? Over here. So if I am in this post, you can edit it either by editing the post itself and I can remove it there. I can also remove tags in a similar place. The other dashboard that you may not know exists is over here under categories. So I can see every post by clicking on that one over there of what's in here. And from there, there's a button here that says quick edit and it allows me to in one or if I had multiples, I could select multiple posts here and either deselect or unselect it. And I can also delete things entirely. So delete categories and tags. We will talk about getting traffic towards the end of today's session. That's a great question though. And as far as how long a post should be for search engine optimization purposes, it should probably be at least 300 words. It can be anywhere from 300, 500, 1,000, but you definitely need to know your audience. So most people do not have the longest attention span these days. So keeping it concise and what they expect is probably the way to go there. Okay. As far as getting traffic goes, we'll talk about that in a minute. Let's go back. So we've talked about writing content. We talked about publishing now or in the future. That is one thing that I don't think I showed you. So let's say that I write a beautiful post, my new post. And I don't want it to go out now because one rule of thumb about blogging a great way to get traffic and to be listed in search engines is to write consistently. I try to aim for a blog post a week, sometimes two, sometimes fewer, but the more you post consistently, the better. It would be better to use this post setting over here. So rather than publish immediately, you can click that button. And I could say, hey, I want this blog post that I wrote to publish on August 4th or the 11th. And scheduling your posts here, it says, hey, your work will be published in the future. That's a really good way to bring more traffic to your website. So yeah, good question. We talked about private or password protected. The last feature in the post settings that I think is really important are featured images and excerpts. So your themes can display them in different ways. But okay, that's scheduled. Yes. Okay. I would like to edit this scheduled post that is not live yet. It will publish then. If you scroll down, you have this option to set a featured image. Now, I don't have any images on here yet. But if I did, I could select an image and it would appear on my blog. This is also what social media will choose to display for the most part on Facebook, Twitter, or I guess the social media website, formerly known as Twitter. Most social media websites will choose this to display. So if I have a big gallery of images and I want to make sure that the right image shows, I would do that in my post settings with that featured image. And the other thing is an excerpt. Now, your theme will show some excerpts here. Here is a post excerpt. And what I want you to notice, insert after, the post excerpt is going to be different than what I write here. I'm going to change this because I want to show you where this is. So going back to my post settings, it's supposed to publish later. I'm actually going to backdate it. Ho-ho. To July 14th, publish it. That'll change the date. So now if I go look at my website, you'll notice my new post, July 14th. Here is my post excerpt, right? That's not what I wrote in the actual post itself. The post excerpt was different than what I write here. That's the other thing that we'll share on social media and often is what appears in search engines in Google. So it's a good idea to write a brief post excerpt, one to two sentences, describing the post. It's basically your commercial. So that is something to be aware of when you first start blogging. So when you're writing your content, we talked about categories and tags. Categories again are for broad topic sections. They're used to separate, to help people not see things that they're not interested in. Tags are specific keywords that relate to your content. They find these, they use these to find similar content. And we showed you the categories and tags pages, where anytime I tag a post or add a category, they show up on those pages. The other thing that you can do is interact with your readers by managing comments. So readers can leave comments on your blog posts and you can manage those through the dashboard. You can approve, moderate them. You can mark them as spam and there is a lot of spam out there or reply. So if we view, just view our hello world post, you'll notice that there's a sample comment here. I can leave a reply as a logged in user. Let's see if it loads on our experimental one and it should post to that. I'm not sure that it's going to with this. But if you're really interested in comments, please make sure that you check out the managing comments section, how to do that in general. And then with block themes, there are ways to manage those as well. So those are really good learning resources for you. And the last thing that a lot of people like to explore are adding plugins. So these extend what WordPress can do. So for search engine optimization, for social media sharing, contact forms, analytics, buying and selling things, there are beautiful plugins. Let's see if it worked. Oh no, I broke it. All right. So I'm going to refresh this and because it's not saved anywhere, it's going to be a brand new installation. That's okay. We're just using this to experiment today. So WordPress by default can do quite a lot, but anyone can design a plugin to extend its functionality. And what that's going to do is it's going to add more buttons here. Let's say that on my blog, I want to have a page where my Instagram, whatever I post on Instagram or another social media, I want my Instagram pictures to appear here. And anytime I post, it'll automatically do it. I'm not going to have to do anything other than post like I normally would to Instagram. You can find a plugin for that by going to plugins and add new. And normally you can search for a plugin here. So I would search for something like social media or Instagram feed or, I don't know, a Facebook page. There's so much that you can do there. Darinda asked, can you change the WordPress logo to your own logo in the browser tab next to the URL? So I think you're referring to these little buttons up here and Assad is absolutely right. Yes, you can. And if you had to learn WordPress, there are all kinds of tutorials. So this is when I wrote about how to add and remove a logo inside Icon. Rather than show you how to do that here is a link you're welcome to. Oh, I think I just said that to one person. Here we go. You're welcome to watch this when you're ready to do that and it will get you set up step by step. Yeah, you're very welcome. So yeah, there's so much you can do with WordPress. You can also extend it and play with it and see if this is right for you. I love it. Okay. So adding plugins, there's also a, this choosing plugins I've included this last just because plugins from the repository tend to be pretty stable. They have been vetted for accessibility for safety purposes. They're required to be updated if something goes awry, if they discover a security vulnerability. So keep that in mind that from WordPress.org or in that dashboard. These plugins are generally vetted. However, not all plugins are created equally. So for example, on this block enabled plugins page, this one has 2098 people, this events calendar have said, Hey, yeah, this is really good four and a half stars, right? So this might be a really safe one. Whereas this one is in here as well, but it looks really new. Only five people have installed it. They've loved it so far. But knowing that it might be something that you may have to experiment with that may not have as much documentation. And that's not necessarily true for this one just in general. The link here on choosing plugins is going to teach you how to pick plugins that are going to go, that are going to work a lot better for your site. So that's just something to know that's a little bit more of an advanced thing. You don't need plugins to blog, but many people choose to install them for funsies and to experiment and explore. So definitely watch that video. And the last thing I'll say about choosing plugins is it's a good idea to install plugins one at a time, experiment with them one at a time. Not all plugins work well together and they can also break your website if you are not careful. So make sure that you are backing up your WordPress website. If you're not sure how to do that, I highly recommend looking for backing up. And you can find a lot of content here. So there's a lesson plan about teaching that. And there's another backup one on here somewhere. So let me see if I can find it. Managing updates. So there's just a lot to know. It's basically the short answer. But this high-level overview is taking longer than I wanted it to, but that's okay. You're asking such great questions. So let's talk about some blogging tips. That's probably where we're going to have to end today. Just for the sake of time, I should probably do a session on using AI. But the first thing that is recommended is that you identify your niche. So for example, travel blogs. Once upon a time, there weren't very many travel bloggers. Now there are thousands and thousands of people writing about travel. So you want to find something that's going to stand out. So for me, I have a travel blog that I'm starting and it's about traveling in an RV with birds. What it's like to do that, how to do that successfully. That is my niche. That makes me stand out from all the other travel bloggers that exist. So when you're thinking about it, like if you're writing a blog on mares or horses, what new things can you bring to the table there? And see if you can't specialize. Maybe it's a certain breed of mare that is fascinating. Or maybe, I don't know, it's about mare behavior. You want to specialize. The second thing is to create really high quality content. So good content is good search engine optimization. You want to produce valuable, well-researched content, accurate, true, that's engaging and addresses what your readers are interested in. So you really want to take some time to think, hey, someone who's reading this blog, what do they need to know that they can't necessarily find somewhere else. Quality content will keep visitors coming back and encourage them to share your posts on social media. So how to take a mare from getting pregnant to having the baby. Oh, wow, that's fascinating. Oh, I totally read that blog. Oh, I love it. So that could be a blog post or it could be your entire blog. The next one is to be consistent. You want to regularly update your blog with fresh content. So you don't want to say the same thing over and over again. And creating like a publishing schedule, saying, hey, I'm going to schedule blog posts to go out every Monday. I'm going to write a blog once a month. Being consistent is so important. That's how search engines find you. That's how readers know to come back. And it's how they share your posts. You also want to interact with your audience. So you want to engage with your readers. So through those comments, you can also engage readers through social media. You can use a plugin for a newsletter. You want to respond to comments. You want to answer reader questions and encourage discussions to build a community within and around that blog. So someone asked, can I write a weekly blog from start to finish? I think what you mean is like, could I sit down over the span of a day and write a lot of content to be scheduled at different points? Yeah, you could do that. It just kind of depends on how quickly you write. But the main thing is don't publish it all at once. Be consistent. Schedule those posts. Great question. It can take months. Yeah. So building a blog does take months because you are also interacting with your audience. You can't just necessarily set it and forget it. You want to respond to your audience. Write things that they say, hey, I'm curious about this one thing that you said. Could you write about that? So being reactive and responsive is an important way to do that as well. You definitely want to utilize SEO strategies. So this is a whole other topic, but there's a lot on Learn WordPress about this, about how to utilize SEO. So things like using relevant keywords, creating descriptive meta tags, and mostly just building high quality links on other websites that come back to yours. All of these are some strategies that you can use. You definitely want to promote your blog elsewhere. Don't just rely on organic traffic. Share it on social media. Share it on Twitter. If people ask a question somewhere, you can say, hey, I have an answer to that question and you can link to your website. So you definitely want to figure out a promotion strategy to bring more people in. But I think most importantly, you want to be authentic and genuine. Your personality should shine through and your writing should be yours. And it should sound like you and readers really connect more with bloggers who are genuine and relatable and transparent. Some other things that you can do, you can definitely look into an analytics plugin to see, hey, what's working? What's not? Which of your blog posts are most popular? Can you write more about those? Can you not? See what resonates with your audience to improve your blog accordingly. You can also network with other bloggers. So if I have a travel blog, I probably want to reach out to other travel bloggers and be active on their blogs so that they know that, one, I exist. And two, you can build that rapport with people. And then maybe they'll ask you to write on their blog and link back to yours. You never know. And the other thing is just to stay up to date. Prepare to evolve. Know that WordPress changes all the time. And the digital landscape is constantly changing. Who knows? Maybe we will have 3D blogs here in the next couple of years and that'll be a whole different thing. But just plan on staying current. Is there a site under construction page before you're ready to publish? So John says yes, there are patterns and ready-made pages for that. There are also plugins that you can install that are, I think they're called construction page plugins. And they will put a front page that says, hey, this is being built right now, like come back later. So yeah, there are ways to do that. It doesn't happen by default. But you can definitely do that. And then with our last few minutes, somebody asked me privately, how do you become successful in blogging in the presence of billions of websites? So all of these tips will get you so far. Having a good niche, great quality content, saying something fresh, spreading your word, being active, that that's all part of that story. So the last workshop that I did about finding blog ideas, I went into detail about my partner and how he and his then partner had set up a travel blog that was very successful, that they made money with. It's mostly about being visible and being authentic. And all of these tips help you to do that. But I'm gonna be honest, some of it does just take a little bit of luck being in the right place at the right time. My partner had a travel blog and they didn't have very many people viewing it very often. Like they just kind of were writing about what they were doing. They were rebuilding an Airstream RV, which is kind of like a metal tin can on wheels. And they rebuilt it from the ground up. But it was when they decided to sell that, that suddenly people were finding their blogs. Everybody linked to that post and it went viral before going viral was a thing. And suddenly they had thousands and thousands of viewers, which didn't allow them to monetize it. So yeah, that's a there's a little bit of luck, but these best practices can absolutely take you a very long way. Yeah, and you really just want to stand out because there are hundreds of thousands of websites out there and there are thousands and thousands of blogs out there. So really work on how you can stand out and promoting your blog and networking, like there's there's a lot to it. But as you get familiar with it, as you start writing, as you start to figure out what works for you and what doesn't, you will grow your audience over time. So don't expect it to to happen overnight. And definitely write what resonates both with you and with your audience. The last tip I will probably share is that if you're bored writing it, people are probably going to be bored reading it. So definitely write also for you to entertain yourself and other people who are just like you. All right. I feel like there was one other question that I said, I would save till the end, find where it was, I think it was about like how to build a following. In between you have answered this is about deleting the category and tags. Oh, and deleted. I think we went over that a little bit. Yeah. So deleting categories and tags, I think we went over that. All right. So the last thing that I'll say about blogging is one of my co-workers or another, I'm sorry, contributor on the training team own your content and share it everywhere. Here it is. So I think there's some really good value, like value in here from Courtney, who's been a long time WordPress contributor, really knows her stuff. This talks about like why blogging with WordPress specifically allows you to keep your content in a way that most other blogging platforms do not. You write something on their platforms, they own it. If you write something on WordPress, that content is yours. And she talks a lot about how to share that everywhere. So highly recommend that. That's another one. But yeah, there's just a lot to know, but get set up and use those resources that we link to throughout here. And of course, always use learn.wordpress.org to stay current with content. These recent tutorials will teach you a lot as well, but a lot of this is learned by doing and have fun doing it. So if WordPress had a motto, that would be mine for it. All right. Thank you all so much for your time and your attention. And I really look forward to seeing what you blog about in the future. Thank you all so much. Cheers. And thank you Asad for being a wonderful co-host. Ah, okay. All right. Have a good one, y'all.