 I'm going to post some links in a little thing called chat roll, and I have it right here. And I'm going to post some links in there, and that will come up as we're doing this. And that's pretty much it for that. I'm also going to be teaching tomorrow the productivity, increasing productivity with a builder class at 10.45. So if you want to learn more about builders, which I'm going to kind of touch on here, then you'll want to come to that as well, and we'll have slides and chat roll too. Okay, so let's get started with some fancy WordPress stuff. And like I said, my name is Elizabeth. I do a lot of stuff with WordPress. This is my 18th year in the industry, and I have owned my own business as a website designer for 12 years. So it's a very sustainable model if you're looking to do this for yourself and to do websites for others. Like I said, this is 12 years in business for myself. My husband actually worked with me for five years of that, so even two people could earn an income on that. Now he's doing some other fun stuff about building water treatment plans. So, okay, so we're going to start with the dashboard. How many of you have a WordPress site already up? Okay, good. Now if you have your computer, you can log into that and just follow along with me. If you don't, I will have it on the screen here. And then if you do not have something to take notes, if you like to do paper notes while you're looking at your computer, which is sometimes what I like to do, I do have a few notebooks up here. If you want one, you may come get one. But you will need to probably want to take notes with this, but I would log into your site if you can and follow along with me in the dashboard. If you see weird things that I do not have, we'll have to talk about that later because, I mean, you probably put something in that's not a standard piece of WordPress. So, let's talk about this little thing called the dashboard. I do like the way that WordPress does this. I like that it's kind of side by side. I like that it is really easy to see everything all at once. And let me move my little button. Can I move it? No, you won't let me move it. It's easy to see everything all at once. And you can also, it's pretty standard across every part of WordPress. So if you go into one WordPress site, you're going to see this dashboard. If you go into another WordPress site, you're going to see this dashboard. And that's what I like about WordPress is that no matter what site you're going into, you know it. You get it. Now, there may be some weird stuff in there, but you'll figure those pieces out rather than having to try and figure out the whole thing all over again. It allows for what I call extreme customization. If you are that fancy and you want to be extra, you can do as much stuff as you want with WordPress. It is pretty much the sky is the limit. There's a lot of even major, major websites, even like Disney uses WordPress and stuff like that. I mean, they, you have these major sites you would never have thought were on WordPress running on WordPress. And you can actually go to wordpress.org and see some of those sites. They have like a little gallery of sites that have been built on WordPress. So you can see how kind of crazy you might be using a site you didn't even know was running WordPress. I like to keep it as basic as possible. I like to keep things really simple. My whole thing is about simply profitable brands. How many of you in here own a business? And how many of you have a business where you help other people with their websites? So like the other half. Okay. Good. So I'm going to try and touch on both of those things today. And like he said, if you have any questions, I'll try and catch arms up as I look around the room. But you know, keep it up there or just kind of say, hey, and I'll try and get to you as we go through. If you have a question. The other thing about WordPress is it's a really, really well-supported community. As you can see here, like he said, this is an online thing. And we're all actually sitting here physically in the same room, which is pretty cool. Some of us are nerder than others. You're very welcome to meet me. And so it's really fun to meet so many different people from so many different backgrounds. You get free and paid options with a lot of things. There's themes. There's plugins. There's stuff. And there's always free options. And there's always paid options. I'm a fan of paid options in certain cases. And we'll talk about that as we get there. Okay. How many people know that WordPress is for, was originally intended for, blogging? Okay. Awesome. Has anybody blogged on WordPress? Okay. Good. There is a very big question in the community sometimes with new people. People have started out with WordPress. What's the difference between a page and a post? So pages and posts can sometimes almost seem identical and they have a lot of the same properties, but posts are the blog entries themselves. They come with an RSS feed. It's things for like news entries, something you want to keep tabs of on a regular basis, announcements, that kind of stuff. Pages on the other hand is where your content lives. And it's more static. I mean you can change it obviously, but it's not meant to be kind of changing all the time. It's meant to be there so that it has the information that someone can get to all the time like an about page or a contact page. You can also embed content on pages. You can on posts as well, but like I said with posts, they're meant to be rolling. They're meant to be moving and changing out, you know, newest at the top all the time. And if you embed content on a post, it might get buried with your other posts. So embedding content on static pages is better. You can also use pages for landing pages. And I use a platform within WordPress that is really good for landing pages. So you don't want to take note of that when we get to themes. There are a couple of things about posts and pages. I'm going to go in here and show you. There's all these little things right here. Can you see at the top of the word pages, I know it's small, but it says all mine, published, draft, pending, trash. You may not see that in yours. You may not have all of those things in there. So I had to create posts and draft them and create posts and trash them and create posts and append them so that you could see all those options. If you see any of those, those are normal. All means you're looking at all the posts. Mine means you're looking at posts that you have published under your user. Published means you're looking at a post that's already published. It's out there. It's on the website itself. Draft, obviously we know what that is. Pending means that maybe someone else published a post and they don't have access to published posts, and so it goes into our pending. And that means you as the administrator should go in and check on that pending post and maybe make it live or put it back to draft so that they can go in and re-edit it if they need to change something else. So I actually had a client require that I, I'm the administrator. He said I want this, my friend, to run part of the website. This was literally yesterday. And I gave her the site access a couple weeks ago. I gave her editor status. We're going to talk about users in a little bit. I gave her editor status. He's like, yeah, she knows what she's doing. She'll be okay. I trusted him, don't do that. And he gave her, we gave her the access. I went in yesterday to look at the website just to check on it. The entire front page was completely wrong. It was all down. There was page, things missing. There was dark text on light, or on dark backgrounds. It was a mess and it's my site. So I basically reverted it back 59 versions, which she had done. And I put it back to what it was that I did and I said, when she's done with that page, I drafted a page for her and said, when she's done, then we'll put it up. But I'm not doing that right now. And so I actually had to go in and change her access as a user so that she can only do pending pages. She's not allowed to publish anymore. So she would be one of those people that would be in pending. Now when something is in pending, if you let someone do this and you let someone have a publish a post or publish a page and it's pending, they cannot edit it until you've either approved it or until it's drafted again. So it's kind of like in a limbo when it's in pending. I gave that story to kind of illustrate that point that they really can't do anything with it until it's done, out of pending. And then of course, trash is if in case you draft or you delete something you didn't mean to delete, or you delete something and you decide you want it back later, it's always in the trash. Okay. Let's go to the next part. We're going to talk about posts, so we'll stay here. Categories. I love categories that WordPress allows us to use this. There are two things called categories and tags. Yes, question. Yeah, that's probably, cornerstone content is a theme thing probably. So it's probably something either a plugin or a theme is throwing in there. And that would be something you'd want to talk to the people that are happy to spar about, and you can talk to me. I'll be in there later. But yeah, you can kind of talk to somebody about that specifically about that theme. Categories in posts. There's categories and tags. Does anybody know the difference? I just told you the difference, so you can know. But anyway, high level categories. They're like things like I put on here, business tips, tech, inspiration. Like that high level, basic, doesn't really tell you much about what the post is about, but just kind of gives you a category, right? Then tags are more specific, and tags are not necessarily used on the website, so that you can do, like you can see them. A lot of times when you see a post, it'll have a photo, the title, and then it'll have some names under it, you know, inspiration and tech or something like that. But then the tags are more for searching and SEO and things like that. So if you want to do that, then you do something like time management, email marketing, Facebook posts. Those are very specific, and you would use those as like tags. Apple, iOS, Android, apps printers, that's like a tech, you know, that's tech, but it's not, it's really specific. And then inspiration, you have children, family, failure, you know, those kind of specific pieces. Now, I'm telling you this, and I meant to say this at the beginning, and I forgot, you're gonna hear a lot of them. That's not really helpful to the community. So I try to get people to say, take in all the pieces, pick the ones that you think are the best for you, and then follow those people that say those things. It's always good to get other opinions to see if your opinion changes. But at the same time, you don't want to like disrupt everything by saying, well, so and so said this, and you don't know what you're talking about. But because there's so many different ways to do it, there's so many different avenues to the same end. So it's kind of like Ohio roads. You can take 50 different roads to get to one place, because there's so many back roads, which is awesome. So it's kind of like that. But just take this, like I said, with a grain of salt. If you think I'm being silly, don't tell me, because there's still, like I said, a lot of ways to kind of skin a cat here. All right, so do you get the difference between tags and categories? Does that make sense? Okay, categories. I did have something on here about changing the default name or adding a new default level. When we get into settings, which is a little bit further down, we're going to see that we can change this default category. It's called uncategorized. It's in every WordPress installation. And if you do not put a category to a post, it will automatically be shoved here. As you can see, I had one published post, and it shows my count of one. This is really annoying and really ugly looking when you've posted a really great website, and then you have this uncategorized thing sticking out there, listed somewhere. It just looks like you didn't finish it all the way. So what I like to do is you can do quick edit. You can actually change the name of this default category. Sometimes I name it like general or something like that. And then or news or whatever that main thing is I'm using the blog for. Or you can add a second category if you want to leave uncategorized and leave it as the kind of default. You can make a new category named whatever you want. And then we go to settings, you can actually say my default is not uncategorized, it's this new one that I made. So it's up to you how you want to do it. But I just like to go in here, change the name of this one, and everything is fine because this is the default. Anytime you make a post, it's going to automatically default to this. Unless you have lots of other categories you're trying to work with and you've already added. Adding a category is really simple. You just go to categories and right here it says add a new category. You type the name and the slug. This is one of the really interesting things about WordPress is there's slugs all over the place. Anybody know what a slug is? WordPress if you want to. I like to have my images ready before I get them into WordPress, but if for some reason someone sends you an image and it's not ready, you can always do a few things at WordPress. So you can change the scale, you can flip it, you can try it horizontally if you need to. And then this little thing down here, the thumbnail settings. It says apply changes to all image sizes, just the thumbnail or all sizes except the thumbnail. And sometimes you want to center the thumbnail on something really specific. Maybe you just want the globe in the thumbnail or you just want the time to go part in the thumbnail and you can adjust those little things. But I like to keep things again, like I said, simple. I'm just showing you what's all here, but I like to keep it as simple as I can. If you have an image uploaded and then you upload a smaller image or you upload a larger image and it's the same one. There's actually a plug-in that lets you do replacements. WordPress doesn't let you do replacements and what happens when you upload an image to WordPress is it makes it in about 20 different sizes. Because it has it for different size screens and that kind of stuff. It has all these responsive things, fancy things that it does, which are really cool. But it also can weigh your site down if you have images in there multiple times. Then also, when you're looking at the image in the grid, when you go back here, when you're looking at it here, you may not know which one is which. You might have uploaded them right consecutive. And then which one is the right one, which one's the higher resolution or whatever. So there's actually a plug-in which will go to in a few minutes. We get to plug-ins, but it actually will help you actually replace the image, rather than uploading it multiple times the same one over and over with different sizes and resolutions and all that. And the other reason you want to replace is for SEO. Maybe that image has been there a while. And maybe you're doing some optimization or something. And that image has kind of some SEO figures out into the Google search world. You don't want to necessarily mess with that. And you don't want to change the name of the image to number two, or a totally different name. Replacing it will basically keep the same name and everything. And all the links will be the same, but the image will be changed, the actual properties of the image will be changed. Do the smaller image or the higher resolution, whatever it may be. All right, questions about the media library? Anybody have any? It's kind of an easy one. Here we go, SEO. I said, there's many schools of thought. There's not a bad one or a wrong one, not necessarily. I mean, I feel like there's some wrong ones, but that's just me. And like I said, don't go to somebody and be like, oh, they said this. And then the person's like, well, that person's wrong. There's not gonna be a perfect answer. You really do have to find what works for you. It depends on what you're trying to do with SEO. A lot of people will say, well, you have to be good with Google's algorithms and other people will say, well, you need to be on all the search engines and you have to do Google Analytics. And there's like all these, you need to do key words, you need to do, you need to use Yoast, does anybody hear what it goes? We're gonna talk about it in the plug-in later. There's all this stuff out there. And in my opinion, I think you should just do what you can do and try the things that people say if you think that they feel right. There's always stuff that resonates with people and I'm very big on what I call more organic kind of SEO. I do things that are important, but I also don't overdo it. I don't like, SEO is not my business. There are people that do SEO is like for a living, and that's great. But it's not me, and so I try and do a few little things that I can do kind of more like integrated SEO, where you're just doing it as you go, rather than trying to build a site and then go back and do all the SEO after the fact. And so I'll talk about a couple of those like best practice things. But in some cases, I don't like, catch me outside after or something. But in some cases, a lot of SEO stuff is really like kind of coaxing me. It's almost like there's so much out there and people are like, this works, that works, this works, and then what's the right answer? There isn't one. So I try to just do what I can and like I said, talk to people who are in your industry, talk to other experts that you know, that you trust, that you feel like have a good knowledge of a lot of things, not just SEO, and maybe also like look at their work and see where they've had that success. And if they've had success with a chiropractor and you're in direct sales, that's not working with local search and Google Maps and you're an online business, it's not really the same thing. So you got to really look at exactly like, okay, this worked for this chiropractor. I'm also a chiropractor. Let me talk to this guy because he seems to be able to work with, you know, this kind of group and this kind of industry really well. So that's what I say about SEO. The myth versus reality essentially. And so as you're doing things with the library, as you're creating posts, as you're creating pages, you want, like I said, keep it really simple. I also like to, and I just uploaded these images just off, you know, kind of off the cuff, but these image names are like one, four, five, four. Like that's not an image name. If I'm going to upload an image and I want good SEO, I like to rename it with a title, add a caption. The caption will show on the image sometime. So usually I'll use the alt text or the description instead. But I'll put like, you know, woman's hand, sparkler, evening, pretty, you know, whatever kinds of words I would like to, that image to evoke. And then when someone's searching online, they may actually find my photo. It's a stock photo which I paid for. However, they might also find my website through there or something. So you had a question? Never use those on your website. Ever. Google images. Okay. Your results on your website. Oh, just regular. Right. Yep. Okay. Images, right? Okay. So you're looking for like an image of a credit score chart. Right. Right. This is part of that. And like I said, you can't really do that though. You can't really take those images. You can search for public domain, but you have to be specific about that. There are also so many good stock photo companies that are not paid, that are free. Does anybody know of Unsplash? Pexels? I actually, has anybody heard of AppSumo? AppSumo is my favorite. Every year in December, they have a deposit photos deal. And it's 100 images for like 29 bucks. It's crazy. Crazy town. I buy like two or three a year on different email addresses. Yeah. Yeah. The stock photo thing is, yeah, I always just try to make that. If somebody brings it up though, I would just mention anyway. Yes. You have a question. Yeah. Yes. Correct. Now, if you've taken a photo, if it's your photo, if it's a stock photo, you could put a watermark on it if you want. But if you've taken a photo, you always want to watermark those so that if someone does try and take it, you actually have rights and you can sue if somebody takes your photo. The bad thing about these photos getting into the search results is that someone just can take it and they don't know any better or they just do it because they know, but they don't care. So that's one issue. You can also disable right click on your site so that no one can actually take the photo. You can put the watermark on it. I mean, there's all these kinds of things to protect those photos, but you don't necessarily want to just get into image searches. These things will come up in regular searches when someone searches for a blog post and this is on your blog post, but they're searching just in general online. This is going to help that blog post because the image is associated with that blog post. So it's kind of more on the content side rather than the image search side. Other question. Yes. You can actually credit them either in the alt text or the description or the caption and then you can have the caption be really, really light gray with whatever. So that's one way of doing it. Yeah. If you pay for the photos though, if you're purchasing them through deposit or something, you don't have to, there's less of that if you're paying it. They have different rules. All right, so yeah, read the fine print on those things because they can get tricky. Yes, question. Historical, okay? If they're, yes, giving credit is fine. Giving credit is fine. It's when you take it and you don't, you just pull it from someone's site. Maybe it's a picture of some of these kids and you're like, wow, this is really great. I want it for my blog post. You know that kind of thing? Or even if somebody is taking a photo, like a photo like this, maybe I paid for this one on the stock photo website and it's on my blog and you're like, wow, that's cool, I want to use it on my thing and it's, I've already paid for it but you didn't pay for it. So yeah, then there's an issue. Yes, if you're crediting, you're better off I've had people get cease and desist letters even after crediting and then it's just a matter of taking it down. They'll send you a letter first though, if you're in trouble. Yes, just make sure you're crediting. Yeah. Wow, we just got way off on a rabbit tail. I'm sorry, no, my fault, sorry. All right, any other questions about SEO? Things like that. Okay. Is anybody bored yet? No, don't say you're bored, I'm just kidding. Okay, so let's see here, we got comments. We're gonna come back to pages in a minute. I don't think I missed it. Okay, so comments. These are where you have your blog posts you've already written and people can go in and comment on those posts. These are gonna be all the comments for all the posts in the entire site. So you're gonna have all of them listed and you have a couple of things here at the top. So we have pending approved spam and trash. Then you've got also like a little hover menu that pops up here for you as well. If you read the comments and you're not happy with it or something's wrong with it, you can unapprove it or you can delete it or whatever, make it spam. This one's already approved. So if I click unapprove, it gives me the option to approve it. So just the difference between the two. And now I have pending was one and zero is approved. You can reply to it. So let's say you approve it and then you wanna reply to it. They give you a little box to do that. If you are a blogger or you're working for a blogger or you're working for someone who has a blog, you want to be replying. This is where the engagement comes from on your site. It's not just about social media. A lot of people put so much stock in social media and your site is really where your sales happen and I try to get people to remember that. And that's why I think WordPress is so important is because even if you have social media, you need a website, which is why you're here. And this is the engagement you get on your website. So you don't wanna discount this or ignore it. You wanna make sure you're checking those comments. Even if they're spam all the time, you still need to be checking them once a week, once a month, whatever your routine is and replying to them if you get them. All right, and then you can also edit it really quickly. Maybe they misspelled a word. They didn't, so we're cool. They put a link in. Maybe you're like, I don't really want your link in there. I can just take out your link and just say, nah, I don't need that sentence at all. Okay, now I can update the comment. Another link is gone, you know, just depending on if you don't want someone linking in your comments or whatever. Or maybe like sometimes the spam comments is really funny. Sometimes the spam or comments are actually really nice and they're really sweet. And then they have all these links in there and it's all junky. So I just like to leave all their links and be like, oh, look, they're so sweet. But you can reply to them. You can spam them, you can trash them. If you spam someone that is a regular spammer on your site, you're gonna get them. Just, you can install things like Jetpack, which we'll get to in a few minutes, but to help minimize that, we're still gonna get them. If you spam them once, they're kind of on a list in your site, kind of tags that name. And then it will kind of show you like, we think these three are spam, you know, or whatever. So it kind of saves you a little time as you go through and you start doing it more and more. You wanna create a routine with your site. This is one of those things that's gonna be on that routine. And if you have a separate note or a separate page of your notebook, I'm gonna tell you things to add to your routine. This is very important unless you're gonna have someone maintain your site for you. If you don't wanna do all these things by the end of the time and you, that we've listed them and you're like, I don't wanna do this. You need to find someone that's gonna do that entire list for you every month or every week or whatever it is. Because these are really important things. And one of them is to respond, to look at the comments, approve or disapprove the comments and then reply to the ones that are good. So that's something you need to be doing every single month, if not more. That's kind of a minimum is once a month. So that's on your to-do list for maintenance of your site. Oh, let me go back to pages here. So pages is very much like posts. They do not have categories, but they are very much the same as far as what you content you can put on them. They're more static. Like I said, they don't, you can specifically have a menu of them. They're not like blog posts that get pushed down. You know, newest on top. And I like to have one page of pages, one page of pages. It's about 20 items. Usually you can also go up here to screen options. Not a lot of people know this. And you can actually say I want to do 100 pages per section so I can see all of them. If you're gonna have an existing site and you have multiple pages of pages, like one, two, three, whatever, you can actually up this to 50 or whatever it is. And you can see all your pages in one length, all in one scroll. Or you can limit it to 10 or five and you can have fewer that you can look at so it might not be so overwhelming. So it just depends on what you're doing. But those screen options are at the top of every WordPress screen. And if you're ever curious about them, just kind of go into them and see what's available. It allows you to customize the way this looks as well. Like what's listed here. So maybe I don't want the number of comments for these pages to be listed. I can say take off the comments. Now I just have author and date. So this is really the way you kind of customize WordPress for yourself. Like I said, pages and posts are very similar. They do both have comments. I like to turn off the comments for pages just because it's static information. And I don't really want people saying, oh you misspelled this one word. I'd rather them just email me and tell me and then I'll fix it. I don't need it up there for posterity that I misspelled a word once. Or maybe they want to make this really long comment on, oh well I saw you speak at something such and you put on your resume that it was on this year but it was on a different year. They want to be argumentative, whatever. So I just turn off comments for pages in the settings which we'll get to in a few minutes. Just because you want to engage on the posts, that's where the information is constantly changing but the pages is a little bit more static and you don't want to have to go in there and deal with people just kind of trashing your content for no reason. All right, let's see here. Where are we, oh yes, appearance. Any questions about pages? No, okay. Yes, one. Okay. A page of newsletters, PDFs. Okay, it's unlimited but I like to, you could do that. Yep, you can have an archive. I would actually prefer, so let me talk a little bit about newsletters for a second. I'm gonna go into my marketing hat, hold on. Okay. Marketing hat. Going forward newsletters probably shouldn't be archived as PDFs. I like to do them as like something else. I like to do them as blog posts but if you have old ones, I would do them by year. So I would have a page that's 2018 and only put 2018 on it. And then I would have a page that's 2017 and only put 2017 on it. And then I would have a page that says archive and it would have a link of 2018 link, a 2019 link, a 2017 link, a 2013 link. It would have all those links in order. So I would do it a little differently. I would structure it differently but I wouldn't just put all of them on one page. I would only do one year at a time. And then as far as newsletters these days, email marketing is better and newsletters in that sense, you should not put more than one thing. This is my opinion again. You should not put more than one thing on an email. So you can send out 20 emails in a month if you feel like you have to but most of the time people can only read one to two items per email. And usually the subject line only gives you the option to kind of write one to two items per email. You know, per subject line so that people don't get overwhelmed in their email and think, oh, that's a newsletter. I'm gonna take me 20 minutes to read it. I don't have time and then they never read it. But if you say upcoming conference and discount, that's two items, upcoming conference and discount, you tell them about the conference, you show them the discount. They know exactly what's in it. They can say, yes, this is for me, no, it's not. Read it or delete it. And then you send another email the next week and you say, conference was great. You know, pictures of conference. Okay, you know, so you're really simplifying it rather than having a huge newsletter at the end of the month with 50 items in it which gives you those PDFs. I know you have the archive but I'm saying that going forward. Yeah, the archives you would do one year at a time, one page. Yeah, that would be, there's a little button in the page. Well, I can show you that in a minute. Okay, let's talk about a theme because themes are really important and it's pretty much how your whole site's gonna be built on this. If you switch your theme, you can switch your theme. A lot of people don't think you can, but you can and it's a very big pain. If you built with one theme and then you try to switch your theme, it can be a bit of an annoyance because different themes have different ways of doing things and it can mess up your site and make it look funny. So you wanna try and do this in what we call in a staging site or offline. I'm a cowboy so I code live. Everyone can hate me if they want but I try and code live a lot. So that means I just go in there, start changing stuff and I'll care how it looks for a couple hours and then I'm done and it's fine. So, but you really wanna try and do staging. A lot of the hosting companies allow staging sites. So you can call your hosting company or talk to them and chat and say, how do I do a staging site? They'll help you do that. You'll fix your staging site to the way you want it to look and then they'll help you push, they can help you push your staging site live. So that way you're not messing up your current site where customers are coming and visiting and trying to buy stuff and all that. Don't be a cowboy. There's a song about that. Mama, don't let your boys grow up to be cowboys or whatever. All right, so themes. Not all themes are created equal. I like paid themes. The reason I like paid themes is cause typically, typically there's more support and more of a community around these paid themes. Creative market, a lot of people, you know creative market. It's an online theme and plug-in and they have all this creative stuff and people sell themes and fonts and images and image packs and font packs and brushes for Photoshop and it's literally a creative market. They have a lot of themes but a lot of the themes I've seen from them, from clients that have purchased, they're not my fave. They're just not. They don't always take the best practices into consideration. Sometimes people are just whipping them up for themselves and then deciding to sell them and they're not like all coded correctly. So sometimes it can be a little hit or miss there. So just be careful with that. Like I said, again, not all themes are created equal. It's worth saying twice. You wanna make sure you're looking for one that's vetted. Talk to other people about what themes they use and make sure that you're finding one that's best for your industry. Sometimes people have a theme that works really well for online shops. But like I said example before, you're a chiropractor that's not really gonna work or you're a publicist or you're a web designer that's not necessarily gonna be the best for you because you don't need the cart, you don't need all that stuff. So it may be good to talk to people in your industry. And then ask for recommendations. Like I said, talk to people in your industry though. And a lot of people will shy away from, oh, well, I'm not gonna talk to you, they're chiropractors because they're my competition. Well, there's a lot of really good things they might know. They could say, hey, I work with children and babies and you work with adults over 50. We have a great synergy here. We don't do the same thing, but we do the same thing. Also, let me help you with some of the stuff I've learned and you can help them. So always try and talk to people in your industry even if they feel like competition. Yeah, so the credits for themes and theme authors are typically in the code. And if you have Chrome or Firefox or whatever you're using you can right click and click inspect and sometimes you can find it. Or view source and sometimes you can find their names at the top of the code. It's a little harder to do that. There's actually a Chrome plugin called WPReveal or something like that. And it actually shows you what theme that site is running. It's just a plugin on Chrome. So you can just use the plugin. It might be WordPress Theme Finder. I'm not sure, they have a couple of them, but there's one that's in Chrome and you can type in WordPress theme in Chrome plugins and you can download it to your Chrome and it will actually go to a website and it will say this site is not running WordPress. It'll know if it's running WordPress. And if it is running WordPress it'll tell you what theme and what plugins it's using. Not all of them, but some of them. Some themes are custom and if they're customized enough and that person was a good, they knew enough about themes to change the name and stuff like that and customize it it'll just say custom theme by Jim or whatever and you will never know what theme it was built off of originally unless they built it from scratch too. So you can know what themes are and what the plugins are that each site is using if you're using Chrome and you look up that Chrome WP plugin. The reviews of themes are all on those platforms so Creative Market has reviews there. If you find a theme you like you can type in the theme name in Google and then type reviews and you'll find other places that have reviewed it. There's things like Trust Radius and there's another one I can't think of the name at the moment, but those, I think it's App Trust or something and they do reviews as well, but I'll be honest with you, I review for certain companies and I get paid to do those reviews. So I use the products and I'm giving you an honest review, but I don't know that everyone is. I only review the products I've actually used. There are best sellers, like for a while there was a really, really good seller on a Creative Market or theme forest, one of those for a really long time and it ended up being one of the worst themes in history. It was just one of those things that everybody just kind of glommed onto it in the beginning and everybody was using it and so there became this community around it but then it started breaking hardcore and there were so many issues with it and people had to start ditching it and it's still one of the best selling themes just because it had so many sales in the beginning. So I'm gonna talk about which themes where you can go to get a couple themes. Let me go down to my next slide here, actually. It's on my, actually, I think it's down here somewhere. Hold on. I tried to put a couple of these slides here, here we go. These are the two that I recommend. I've vetted them, I vetted both of them actually. If you're looking for just a nice theme that you can customize yourself and it can be really, you like the way it looks on their website, you like the way that it looks, how they've already designed it and you're just gonna go in and change some colors maybe. Blue Sheik is a good one. It's feminine themes, but I've actually used them for guys' websites and like mortgage brokers and things like that, realtors and stuff. They look feminine because of the colors. If you change the colors, you have a guy's site. I mean, it's not hard to change the colors but Blue Sheik is one of them and I'll actually put this link for you in the chat. Oh, let me pull this up. It's bluesheik.com. I put it in the chat for you guys on my website. And then elegant themes is the one that I use exclusively now and this one is actually a builder. And I'm gonna talk about builders tomorrow, but this is specifically a builder and the reason I like builders is because it's like using building blocks and then you create a really cool theme with it and then you can reuse those blocks all over the place even in other websites you're doing. So that's the reason I like builders. If you do something in, let's say Blue Sheik and you really like it, you'd have to essentially copy the entire site and then put it onto another server to kind of say, I wanna use this, like all this cool stuff I did and I wanna use it again. But what I like to do with Divi is that you have these blocks you make that are really cool and so you can use bits and pieces of different sites you've made all over the web rather than having to start with the whole thing that you did and then try and recreate pieces. It's really more modular and gives you a little more flexibility that way. Okay, customizing your theme. That's what we have done here under customize. So I'm just stepping through the dashboard. Is everybody kind of following along too? A little bit. Customizer, this is just the default WordPress 2017 theme. So there's nothing fancy about this one, but it does allow you to, now this customizer allows you to do different color schemes. I can choose the color I want. See how my March 9th is changing color as I move the slider. I like how they have the dark theme and the light theme. They just kind of pick the colors for you with the black and white. And then the header text color, I'll make it red, CWP 101 is changing. So there's that and I can do things like change the header image. I can change the way my menus look. This one doesn't have any menus at the moment. Just kind of the standard site. I have my widgets, which we'll talk about in a minute. And so this customizer really just gives me, information on how I can customize this theme, this particular theme. If you use blue chic, they use the customizer. So all their fonts and all their colors and all that stuff is all listed in this section under customize. And if you use Divi, Divi has its own customizer piece. Doesn't use the customizer necessarily, but it has its own customizer section and you would fill in that as you're building a page rather than having it off to the side as a separate section. So you would actually be on a page working your page and you'd be changing fonts and changing colors and changing sizes of fonts and all that. So that's another kind of advantage of a builder. And if you're interested in more about builders, I'm gonna be demoing like six of them tomorrow in my class. So I don't wanna get into a lot of it now just because I don't wanna take up the time for this, but I am gonna be going into six different ones and showing you demos on all of them. Divi being the last one and the best. You can also add your custom CSS here into the customizer. And I use a lot of custom CSS in my stuff. So this is a really important section for me. Okay, let's look at these. These are available in your sidebars and if you're using a theme like Blue Chic, Blue Chic does still use sidebars to its advantage actually. And if you have just one of the WordPress themes from the repository, a lot of them use sidebars as well. I've personally gotten away from them except in certain circumstances for creating like sidebar menus where you're in one page and you can kind of see the content change almost like a membership site you might be in or whatever kind of like Amazon does with their stuff. They have like a menu on the side and the content in the middle changes but necessarily the header and stuff doesn't. So I use sidebars for that kind of stuff but I don't use them necessarily the way that they were used originally for blogs. Now if you have a blog having your, like this has here the search, recent posts, recent comments, that kind of stuff on the sidebar is important. You can also add the author archive part, let's see here, like a text thing here. So you could add this and put your author information, maybe put a picture of you or whatever. You've seen that on probably a lot of blogs if they're specifically a blogger. That kind of information is good for sidebars but if you're doing a regular website, sidebars aren't really something we're using at the moment as far as what I would consider best practices. Again, my opinion, so don't go crazy. But when you're using a builder, you can actually build sidebars on any page you want to, anywhere you want to. So it gives you a little more flexibility. Okay, menus, let's talk about those. These are really important. All of your pages, posts, let me type a new one here. And categories are gonna be listed here. Now if I had some categories, excuse me, they'd be here. And you can see the one is right here. So if I wanted to link to one of my categories on my menu, I just check the little box, add to menu, and now it's one of my menu items. I can also add my pages. If I have my about, my home, my contact, all of those pages listed here, I check all the boxes. Here's my home page and my sample page, add them to my menu, and now I can decide where I want them to go. I can also add custom links. Maybe I want to link out to another site that's completely somewhere else. Maybe it's my Mary Kay site or my vendor site or whatever. I can put that link in here and type whatever text I want. Has anybody heard of Calendly? It's an online booking free. So if anybody wants to talk with me one-on-one, like after this conference is over kind of thing, and they're like, I really need your help. I need some advice. They can go on my website and there's a button that says, let's chat. And it goes to Calendly.com, forward slash Elizabeth, pamphletone, forward slash 15 minutes. And this link, I'm gonna add this to the menu and we're gonna say display location is the top menu. Now let's see what this looks like. And here's my menu, right? And if I click on let's chat, it takes me to Calendly. And you can see the availability I have. Does that make sense? So this is an external link that I'm using, but it's something that is part of my ecosystem of my marketing and how I run my business. So I recommend that if you don't have a Calendly, sign up for one, it's free. You get one event, it's what this is called an event. You get one event for free and I love it and it's one of those external links you can add to your menu, makes it really cool and professional. Do a little different than a contact page. I still use a contact page, but I also use this as well. You can have multiple menu items created from different areas. So maybe there's a top menu and a footer menu and a secondary menu with a very, very top and little tiny words. Whatever that is, I'll show an example of one that has a couple of different menu locations. This website here has a menu here, the main menu in black and then it has like a secondary menu at the top where you can get the new patient downloads and then you can book an appointment. These are two different menus in the back end of this WordPress site. And then down here at the bottom, we have another menu which has all of her same stuff at the top, but now it's here at the bottom as well and then down here too. So we got menus all over the place on this one. And those are all separate menus in WordPress dashboard. And it says right here, create another menu, do another one here, we'll do secondary. So you can see the difference. And then it will show me, I have two options here. Top menu, primary, secondary. I could do a third one, I could do a footer, I could do whatever it is. And then there's in your theme, it'll tell you where you can place those. So right here it says display location. Your theme will add more to this area and say there's a footer section you can add this menu to. Or there's a secondary section you can add this menu to. I like to name my menus the place they're supposed to go. So I don't forget which one is which. So if it says primary or top, I name it top or primary. If it says footer, I name it footer. If it says secondary, I name it secondary. Then I know exactly where that menu goes and what I need to put on it depends on where it goes. And then manage locations. Again, like I said, you'll have these added if you have a theme that adds them. So there'll be more than just the two here. All right, let's go to the header. And like I said, I'm just stepping through WordPress. So if you see different weird things, that's something a plugin or a theme is done. So it's not necessarily just WordPress. This is a fresh WordPress install as of Friday. So last Friday. So it's just kind of baby WordPress. This is the header. And when I clicked header, it actually took me to the customizer for this theme. So it's just telling me I can, I can add a video with a YouTube URL. I can add a different header image. And that's gonna change this little picture here with the little cactus guy. So that's where the header just takes me back to the customizer for this theme. And then the editor, this is a fun one. Don't touch it. If you're a beginner, don't touch this. See this, see this box? This is your, you know those things you put on your cabinets for your kids or your pets, right? This is one of those. It's the, you can't get in here, but if you really figure it out and you click I understand. All right then, I guess you can get in the trash if you want to. And this is really literally all the code of your site. Right here in WordPress. This is all the code for this theme. I can also drop this down and look at different themes. The other themes that are here, I can edit those. This is only to be touched if you really know what you're doing. Eric, you don't even wanna add anything here if you don't have to. And if you get into this spot and you're like, oh no, I got in there. How did I get in there? You can just go out, just go to a different sidebar piece. But if you mess up something, the only way that it's going to be saved is if you hit this update. So just know that you do have a safety net. If you get in here and your cat's like, oh my gosh, what happened? You can just go back in here. And okay, I'm not gonna touch anything. I'm going back to themes. Leave that page. Okay, I didn't have to save it. It's good, we're good. Crisis averted. So you don't have to touch that if you don't, unless you know what you're doing, but it's just know that it's there. Just like themes, plugins are not created equal either. Paid ones I feel like are better than some of the free ones. There are free ones in the repository are better than any other free ones you're gonna get. So if you go to the WordPress repository, which is wordpress.org and you look up plugins, it's the same thing you're gonna get if you try to add a new plugin in your dashboard. This is the repository as well. So I like to look in here first before I go out and venture into Paid or other free world because it can get a little squirrely with some of the code that's out there. You also need to know that plugins will interfere with your theme. So that's why you need to pick a really good solid theme. And then usually what you can do is type in your name of your theme, for example, Divi. And you can say Divi compatibility Yoast in Google. And it will tell you if Divi is compatible with Yoast. Divi compatibility Smush. And you can put WordPress if Google doesn't understand you, but most of the time they do. And they'll tell you some article that somebody wrote about how Divi is compatible with Smush or if there are issues. So just keep that in mind that if you're gonna have a theme, you wanna pick a good theme first. And then you go with plugins. A lot of times things like WooCommerce and those kind of big plugins like that, they're pretty compatible with like 90% of themes out there, but there are a few that they're not compatible with. You can also look on the plugin website to see if they're compatible with a theme that you're going with. So before you kind of do anything, you can kind of check them out, make sure everything's good. Again, CreativeMarket's not the be all end all with it. Don't just go there, look in the repository first and then start searching elsewhere. Don't put too many plugins in your plugin section. How many plugins, what's the number of plugins, the highest number we got here? Plugins in your plugin area. How many you got? What you got? 25? 23? 27? That's exactly right. 81? No way. Are you serious? For real? Who said 81? Are you for real? But you're what? Okay, good. All right, so that's my point here. Their site is probably kind of slow, maybe, just a little. You might be able to make a cup of coffee while it loads, but I like to stay under 10. How many people think that's impossible? It's not. It's totally doable. And the reason it's totally doable is because, hold on one second, okay, we're good. The reason it's totally doable is because if you pick a really good theme, you don't need 50 million plugins, okay? So that's why I like Builders so much is because they eliminate the need for having so many plugins. They have a lot of plugins already kind of baked into the theme, and yes, a lot of people are like, oh, it slows my site down or whatever. There's other ways you can reduce your site speed, like images and image size, yes. Yes, there are some must-have plugins, and I'm gonna show them to you right now. Thank you for the segue, dear. They would be, I guess I didn't put my slides in as good order as I thought. Here are what I like for site setup. You may not or you may need them all, I don't know. And remember, I am putting these slides up on my website as soon as I'm done with this, so over lunch. So if you don't want to write it all down, don't worry, you'll have it. It'll be on that side I linked and I'll show the link at the end too. So these are the ones I like. Duplicate post, I love this one because sometimes you make a really cool post and you're like, I like this. I don't want to use this again, but you don't want to have to recreate it over and over and over, right, every time you do a post. So this will actually allow you to duplicate it with one click and I do love this plug-in. WordFence is one of my favorites. It's just a good layer of security. There's so many security plugins out there. There's so much you need to know about security with WordPress. So if there's a security, is there a security thing this weekend? Security, I don't know, talk? Anybody know? Okay, if not, talk to somebody in the happiness bar about security. I actually do what's called, like what I like to call a minimal security, which means I do the bare minimum, but I haven't had any site tact either. So I do what a normal person would be able to handle, not what a techie person would be able to like, oh, I know all these cool things. So I try to keep it really simple for average users. But WordFence is one of my favorites. It just kind of, it'll send you emails if it thinks something's going wrong, if it thinks something's funky, if something's happening where somebody's trying to log into your site a lot, like multiple times over and over. It gives you really good notifications. So if you do set up WordFence, make sure you set it up all the way, like go through all the prompts, and make sure you put your email in for the emails. Yes, they get annoying, but yes, your site is being more protected than without it. Smush is another one I love because image sizes are out of this world. They can make your site go so slow. And if you're on good internet, but your client isn't, or they're loading on a phone, this is just way easier just to have Smush and have it optimize your images automatically every time you upload an image. Ninja Forms. I met the guys at Ninja Forms at Birmingham. I spoke there and they are so awesome. They have the best form product. I know a lot of people like Gravity and a lot of people like Contact Form 7 and a lot of people like, again, my opinion, so throw it out if you don't like it. But Ninja Forms is one of the easiest to use. They also have a style extra piece that you could, like a plugin, you can add two Ninja Forms for styles and layouts, and you can really make a lot of customized forms that are really beautiful. They also allow the anything that comes into your website that through a form gets saved into their plugin. And that means if your form stops working or your email is going to spam and you're never getting those contacts, they're all sitting there under submissions in your website. So you're never actually losing anything. Let me tell you a story. A story time people, okay? So get your drink, get comfy. I had a client. Well, she wasn't my client. She was somebody I wanted to be my client. And she was a home-stager. Her business was failing. And she had no idea why. This was about three years ago. And I was like, let me help you with your website. I know that's the problem. I know it can be fixed. Let's just do this. And I gave her a really, really good price, like cheaper than I should have. She said no. And I said, okay, fine. So a couple months go by and she's like, I still am having trouble. My business isn't doing well. And then my husband's telling me I have to quit and get a real job. And I felt really bad for her because my husband's always been really supportive of me doing this. And hers wasn't. And I was just like, oh, breaking my heart. I was like, fine, I will help you for free. Just let me get into your website or let me help you. She said no. Nine months go by. I see her at a meeting. And she said, and I had even told her what to do. On that day, I even asked children I would help her for free. Like, go into your website. Check this, check this, check this. She's like, okay, I'll think about it. I'm just really busy right now. And I'm like, well, your business is failing. How are you busy? She kept just trying to do things to make more business, right? But she wasn't even, she's my website's fine. I built it myself. I know it's working. It's fine. She tells me nine months later at this other meeting we were at, I said, how are you? How are things? Haven't seen you in a while. She said, yeah, I had to get a job. I'm just doing this part time now. She's like, but you were right. And I said, what do you mean? She said, a couple of months ago, like two months ago, after she'd already quit, gotten another job, only doing this part time. She said, I went into my website and I found 60 leads for business over the last year and a half in her contact form that she never got in her email address. 60, over a year. Do you know how many of those she probably could have converted and then those people that I told people and then that's so much business, even just the 60. And it's home staging. So that's past. Those people aren't looking for that anymore. Those homes are sold. Things are moved on, right? She lost all that business because she wasn't checking her contact form. So put this on your to-do list of like maintenance, right? Every single month you need to send yourself a test on your form. Every single month. Put it in your calendar. Do it every month. I have had so many people, even my own clients where we test the forms every month for them and they say I didn't get it. Sometimes it goes to spam and I'm like, check your spam. Make sure you're marking it as not spam. You have those kind of things. Sometimes filters change and all that. Other times, they're like, oh yeah, I changed my email. I forgot to tell you. Well, that would be good. And they change the email. I go in and change it. Forms working fine now. Sometimes the forms just don't work. They just break. So you have to check those every single month or you could be in that position of that woman and I don't want anybody doing that position. It was horrible. So Ninja Forms is one of my favorites. Very easy to use. Huge community behind it. They have a great information packet, I guess, like a website where they have all their, I guess like knowledge base, where it's like all their directions on how to fill everything in and how to set it all up. So if you go to their website and like their documentation, it's really, really good. I like to have a cashier plugin, caching plugin in my site. So Hummingbird is one. W3 Fastest Cache is another one. How many of you are on SiteGround? Is anybody on SiteGround? SiteGround has their own. So you can actually just go in. It's SG Optimizer. Yes. Is that a little too advanced for her? So I would, again, my opinion, nobody going like mug me in the parking lot, okay? Caching and what I kind of simplify it down to is that the websites that we go to are all have tons of images and tons of texts and all that stuff, right? So what your browser does every time you go to a website is they take a picture of it. And it says, okay, I got a good picture of it. I don't need another picture for a while until the website says, hey, browser, yeah, I updated something, so you need another picture. So your website just kind of keeps showing you parts of that picture every time, or your browser shows you parts of that website every time you go to it. So it doesn't have to load everything all over again and all over again and all over again. But when you're working on your site and you've changed something and you go to the browser and you don't see any of those changes, that's because your browser is like, dude, I just got a picture last week, like I'm good. But you're like, no, no browser, listen, I just updated, I need you to get a new picture. So what the cashier does, it kind of clears all the out-out and says to the browsers, yeah, we don't have any pictures here, so you're gonna have to get another one. And so then it gets another one and now you have a new updated picture. Does that make sense? Is that a good explanation? That's my simplified version. So basically that's what it does, but it allows your website to be faster if you don't have any changes going on a lot and it allows your site to get those changes and clear them out every time you kind of make major, major changes. Google XML site maps, that is, I like to use that because it's good for your SEO and you need to just make sure you set it up correctly. They have like step-by-step instructions on there and you can upload that to like Google Analytics and stuff like that as well. Yoast is on here. Does everybody have SSL on their site, the little green lock? Anybody not have SSL on their site? Not sure. So SSL is extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely important. And the reason I say that is because Google does not like you and they will push your site to the bottom of even whatever search it's on. SSL is on page 10, you'll go to page 100 because they don't want you to not have SSL. You have to have SSL if Google is gonna say, gotcha. So it's a mandatory thing they instituted a couple years ago. So what I like to do is I use SiteGround personally because they use what's it called SSL, what's the one called? Let's Encrypt, yes. I couldn't think of, I can see the picture of the little guy, I couldn't think of the words. It's called Let's Encrypt and it's free. So it comes with your hosting. Now if you're on GoDaddy, no problem with that, they're gonna charge you for SSL and it's gonna be expensive as you go forward. So look for a hosting company that uses Let's Encrypt or that includes SSL with your package because you don't wanna be without it and you want your site to show up. What a lot of browsers have started doing is if you go to a site that does not have SSL, you go to your site all the time because you're working on it. You're gonna see your site probably. If I go to your site, I might not even see it because Chrome actually has started putting up that little, if you see that little thing that says, oh, proceed at your own risk, this is a dangerous site. They may be trying to take your money and your social security number and it's just your chiropractor site. They don't have SSL. So that's what that's trying to do is keep you from going to a bad site then the SSL is gonna kind of tell Google, hey, I'm okay, I'm real, I'm legit. Even though it's super simple to install and really easy. So if you're not sure about it, talk to your host and if you're not sure about it, you can see somebody at the Happiness Bar and they'll probably help you be able to figure that out logging into your host. Do you have a question? Okay. Yeah, it's in your hosting. So you'd have to go to your hosting, log into your hosting and look for security or SSL or something like that and then there'll be some information there. If you go to the Happiness Bar or whatever, just tell them, show them what hosting you're using because some people know other hostings better. Like I'm really good with SiteGround because I know it really well. If you're using Bluehost or something else, don't know. Like you can switch if you want, but there's other people that are more familiar with other hosting types but I'm really good with SiteGround because that's what I use. If you're interested in that I can show you my account or whatever. But yeah, you just have to kind of hunt around in there and find it because it's sometimes buried. All right, Advanced Access Manager. Oh, I'm sorry, SSL. When you put your SSL in, sometimes your website doesn't understand that it's there. So I use real simple SSL plugin to make sure that my website knows my SSL is existing and it's there. And then I also, if your site has existed before you put SSL in, like you made your site, you did not have SSL, you add SSL and now you're like, your site's like, I can't show you this page and I can't show you this page and that page blocked. Then there's a thing called secure or SSL insecure content fixer. And that just kind of goes in and fixes all the images and all the little things that are loaded into your site that may not have gotten that SSL memo. And so it kind of just makes sure that that's all kosher there and makes everybody on the same level so that nothing gets blocked and you can see everything you're supposed to see. Advanced Access Manager. Remember I told you about the site that got messed up yesterday? I went in, put in Advanced Access Manager and now she cannot post or publish anything. She is locked out. So this helps you to kind of limit users from doing things you don't want them to do. Maybe you want your editors to be able to delete other people's posts and maybe publish other people's posts but they can't publish their own. So you can like even do that kind of stuff. Like make it really complicated and be like, oh, you can do this but you can't, you know, that kind of stuff. You can even give people individual tasks like someone can only go in and do comments and that's it. They can't see anything else. They can only administer comments like approve, unapproved and like reply or whatever. So you can get real fancy with it. Okay, let's see here. Settings, okay, we're in plugins. Okay, we're going to settings now. Oh wait, I'm gonna come back to the plugins. Those are my main ones. My main like site setup ones. I have some other ones for e-commerce and stuff like that. We're gonna get to that in a few minutes. All right, settings, general. We have general, writing, reading, discussion, media, permalinks and privacy all under settings. We're gonna talk about general first. This is kind of where some SEO stuff happens. So the site title and the tagline can really give you some SEO bump. Not like a huge bump but a little bit. And this is also where your domain will live. So if you change your domain, you wanna make sure this part is changed as well. There's a whole process on how to change your domain, your main domain. And it does have to do with your hosting company. So you'll need to look up how to change your domain via their knowledge base or their documentation. Cause it can be a little tricky on certain different types of hosting. So you wanna just make sure you have like a one, two, three step guide for that before you just start changing stuff cause it can break your site. And then this is another important piece. Time zone. I had a client who was telling us the other day, she's like, my poster's supposed to go out on Tuesday. And I was like, well, they aren't going out on Tuesday, aren't they? And she said, no, they're going out on Wednesday at like three in the morning. And I was like, what? That's not right. So we looked at it and the time zone was off. Time zone was way off. So fix your time zone. And if you scroll up, you'll get all the different countries. And there's like New York, I think, or somewhere in here that's like what would be equivalent to Eastern time zone. Doesn't say Eastern, but you can also use the offsets if you want, if you know the offset. I think ours is minus five. All right. Date formats, if you like a certain kind of date format, I just usually leave mine the same with the word, the number, and then the four letter or the four number year. And then the time you have this type of timeframe rather than 24 hour, but it's up to you how you wanna do that. Week starts on, I like to change it to Sunday because calendar days, I like the week to start on Sunday. So that's just what I'm used to. So I use that, I just switch that over too. And then you hit the save changes and you're good. But this is where you get some SEO stuff with the title and tagline, your domain. And then again, like I said, that time zone thing is important. Okay, let's talk about writing. Any questions about general? Titles, let's just go over that real quick. How many of you think the title of your site should be the title of your site? No, not if you're doing SEO. If you wanna do some SEO fancy stuff. And like I said, I do some of this stuff as I build just because it's easier, because you're already in there. You would wanna do something like, let me give you an example, Thomas McDonald Law, her title, however, family lawyer and probate attorney, Miami, Florida, pipe, the long stick thing on your keyboard. Thomas McDonald Law. That's her whole title. Family lawyer and probate attorney, the city, Miami, Florida, and then the pipe and then Thomas McDonald Law, which is her actual name for company. If she just put Thomas McDonald Law, how many people do you think are searching for Thomas McDonald Law? They're not searching for that. They're searching for family attorney, family lawyer, probate, right? That's the stuff that's gonna come up. She's gonna come up now in searches. More likely, I'll say, more likely to come up in searches now because of that. So that's an SEO thing. Not all my clients will let me do that. It's okay. But it's a thing that if you're going through and you're making a site, it's just easy because you're in there already. Say what you do, not what it is, right? So like put in there what you do, not just what the name of the company is. This is site title. You can also put the tagline like she has offices in Jacksonville, Florida, and Miami, Florida. I could put locations, Miami, Jacksonville, Florida, Southeast, you know, those kind of things. Kind of not, you don't want to keyword stuff but where you're just like family, comma, lawyer, comma, attorney, comma, you know, probate, comma, you know, adoptions, comma. You don't want to do that. But you want to be like a sentence so people can read it and it's appropriate. Okay, writing. Some of these you might not think there's stuff in here but there's actually stuff everywhere in all these little settings things. So here's where you do those category defaults. Remember we talked about that? This is, I only have uncategorized so I don't have another one but it would show me all my categories here and I could set my default category. Most of my clients I do like a general category just called general. That way if they don't have something specific they wanted to put it in, we just put it in general. So mind if I have a news category, an announcement category, a video category. Excuse me. I'll do, let's see what else have I done. Like I said, tech. I could do things like topic, categories, tech, inspiration, family, stuff like that. And you can set the default one here. You can also set the post format default which is typically standard. You can explore some of these. You could actually Google writing settings and then WordPress and then type in one of these and it'll tell you what a quote default looks like, what an image default looks like, things like that. But standard gives you kind of all of those pieces together. And then your mail server is here. I typically don't mess with this because I don't send emails through. I don't do post, that's what's called email post uploads. So that means you can email your own website and it will post for you. It's kind of weird I think. I don't know, does anybody use that? Has anybody ever used it? I've never used it. So you can set that up here if you really want to but it's too complicated. I like simple, right? All right, reading. We have the, oh, that's why I can't see it. Okay, we have the homepage settings. We have some blog settings and some SEO visibility settings. So the homepage settings means with WordPress you get a couple of options. You can have your latest posts as your homepage. A lot of people will do that if they're blogging. It basically just says you don't have a homepage but your post page is your homepage. So it's like an essentially a blog. You see the latest post at the top. You have some links, you can link to a page if you want but you don't have a homepage. If you want to create a homepage it says you can have your homepage display a static page. Then you can say, here's my homepage and you link to it, you drop down and link to it and here's a page where you can put my posts. So you want a blank page where you can actually drop those posts. So I'll show you for example. Since we have a little bit of time I'll do it for you guys. So I'm gonna do a new page. Nope, not post. I'm gonna do a new page and I'm gonna call it home and I'm gonna do a new page and I'm gonna call it posts. This is kind of one of the first things I do when I go into a WordPress site. Then I go into the settings under, is it reading? I'm gonna be reading. And I switch this to static. I go to my homepage and say home. I go to my post page and say posts. Now those were just blank pages I made, right? I didn't do anything to those, just blank. And then I save it. And now my website does not have my posts on it. It just has a blank homepage on it. So I can make it whatever I want. I can put my bio here, I can put some pictures, I can put my tagline, my mission statement, all the fancy stuff you wanna do on a homepage and my menu does not have my post page because it's new. So let me go up here to my menu. Here's my post page I just made and my homepage. This was an old homepage so I don't need it. I'm gonna remove it. Move home up, move posts in. Now I'm gonna show you a little thing with menus while we're in here. You know the category we made we had in there? That's a post category, right? Uncategorize, it's a post category. I'm gonna make it a sub. See how I moved it in? A sub of my menu. So now I have a dropdown essentially. So let me save this and I'll show you what it looks like. So now I have my home, posts, sample, let's chat, right? So if I go to posts and I just click it, I get my post page. Here's all my posts. If I go to my uncategorized, I only see the posts that are in the uncategorized category. So you can use those categories as subs of your posts section if you wanted in your menu so you could have like your tech posts and your inspiration posts and all that could be under subs under your posts or you could call it blog or whatever. Does that make sense? Yep, I just moved it in, just dragged it a little bit. You can also have up to three tiers, I think it's three or four tiers inside, like going down, yeah. Questions? Good? Okay. Now remember, do we design for mobile in this room or do we design for mobile? We design for mobile. Always. 70-ish, I'll just say ish, percent of traffic is on a phone. And if you don't believe me, think about yourself as a consumer. I always tell people that. People don't believe some of the statistics that are out there and I say, think about what you do. Are you on your phone most of the time? Probably, right? So if somebody's gonna look up this company or this website or this blog, they're gonna be on their phone, they might be on Pinterest and they find it through there, whatever, right? And dropdowns in menus on, you know, this can be great on computer. But when you get to mobile, you have a little bit different issue. See how it looks here? If you had 50 dropdowns, 50 different categories under that dropdown, that would take up the whole page. You'd be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling just to get out of the menu. So be careful with those dropdowns. Don't go crazy. I actually try to not do dropdowns ever. It's very rare that I'll do a dropdown. And it's because you want people to have single click, you know, one track mind almost. You want them to go, I'm gonna go to blog. And when I get to the blog, if I see a list of categories at the top of the page, great, but I don't need them in the dropdown necessarily, right? So keep that in mind. Don't go dropdown crazy because you're designing for mobile. Great way to check your mobile view. Make your browser really tiny. And now you have mobile view. And now I can see what it looks like. Look at all that stuff in the footer. Actually, this is the sidebar. You see that sidebar? Look how much sidebar stuff is there. That's a ton. Again, something that's not really needed on mobile. But on the website, it doesn't look so bad, right? So I can't, it's on the side, whatever. But when you go to mobile, it's all at the bottom. So you may not need all that junk there. So keep that in mind, too. When you're looking at it, check your mobile as you go. Okay, let me get this back to where we can see everything. All right, let's go to discussion under settings. Any questions, by the way, I miss any? All right, yes, question. No, it's not the only way. Different browsers have different options. Also, you can get Chrome plugins that help you do that. There's a thing called ScreenFly.com. You can check it there on an iPhone 6, something really small. You can also do some of the themes. Actually, have a button that says, look at it on tablet, look at it on mobile. It'll show you that. Like, Divi does that really well. But to kind of do it like the quick and dirty way, like just real quick, that's what I do, just to see. Sometimes it'll resize, sometimes it won't. So it really depends, but there's the things like ScreenFly, Chrome browser plugins, and then of course the theme often will have that as well. Okay, discussion settings. This is where all your comment information is. Also, if you wanna get email notifications every time someone comments, or every time someone replies to a comment, or all that kind of stuff. And as the administrator, if you have multiple people helping you and they're working on the site with you and they're other users, you wanna make sure you've got all those notifications coming in. Because if they do something and you didn't know they were doing something, you wanna be notified. If it's just you, but you wanna know every time someone comments, you can just check these boxes and kind of give yourself whatever options you want. These are pretty self-explanatory. Let's see, it says here, you know, like attempt to notify any blogs linked to, or from the article, allow link notifications from other blogs. Like if someone links to you, then it'll notify you. Allow anyone to comment on a post. The comment can be held for moderation. That's in here as well, which is what I always like. I don't like my comments just going out there willy-nilly. I need to see them before they go out. Comment author must have been previously approved in a comment before their comment can appear. So you have to approve it before it can go out. That kind of stuff. And then comment moderation. You can give like a little description of, hey, we're gonna hold your comment for two days before it's approved, all that kind of stuff. And then there's a blacklist section. And then the avatars, you can choose what kind of avatar you want for people who just kind of comment that don't have accounts with WordPress. So just some fun things there. Okay, let's go to media. This is a very short section. Now, some of you may see a section that says location, media file location. Does anybody have that by chance? Under media, say media file location or something like that. If you ever find that your images are broken or you're not allowed to upload to the media folder, if you've ever had that happen to you, the simple fix is to go to settings, go to media, and in here you'll see an additional field that has like a path in it, like a website domain path in it. And what that's telling you is this is where we're saving all these media files. And you can't upload, it's telling you error, error, you cannot upload HTTPS error. So what happens is this little line, it's not in here, but like I said, that additional field, it gets corrupted and it's the wrong file name, the wrong file path. And so what you can do is that there's online articles that tell you how to fix it, what to put in the file path, and as soon as you do that, it's like magic, it just works and you can upload all you want. So if you ever run into that where you can't upload images and it gives you error after error after error, I do all the things first, right? Research your computer, research your router. If it's still giving you the errors, it's probably this, go in here and find an article that talks about unable to upload media to WordPress. And it will tell you exactly how to fix it, but that would be listed in here. And then you have the thumbnail sizes, their default, medium size is default and the large size is default. These are pretty much optimized for WordPress. You don't really want anything else. When you upload an image, it creates one of each of these for you. And then you can just say I wanna use the medium size and then it will just give you that size automatically. Depends on what you upload. Who said that? Oh, sorry, I couldn't see. I was like, where did it come from? Yes, yep. All right, permalinks, permalinks. So remember I mentioned about those slugs, right? Slugs making it easy for you to remember, easy something you could actually type in if you're just doing off the top of your head. This is kind of the same thing. I like to use the post name. That's the one I like to use just because it's simple. It doesn't have all those numbers and dates and stuff in it. A lot of times when we blog, how many people in here are like true bloggers? Like that's what you do. Okay, is that one hand? Just, okay, she's gonna start. How many of you are like, I started a blog once. Once? And how many of you are like, I've been meaning to do that. Okay, that's the rest of us, right? Except for this guy, he's awesome. So the thing about that is, it's gonna put dates on all your stuff. Do you want someone to know that you wrote that post in 2013? No, you wanna be able to reuse that sucker today and have nobody know the difference because the content's still great. So I don't like putting dates on my stuff. I like having no dates whatsoever because I reuse that stuff all the time. I'll pull posts from 2015 that I wrote that I probably used from 2012, go in there, tweak a few words and repost it. New fresh content and nobody knows. Uh-huh. No, that's the same thing. So if you're using these permalinks that have the date in them, it's gonna be the same thing when it was posted, typically. Those are gonna match. I don't like that to show because I like to reuse my stuff over and over. So every year I go through my last three years, I delete the ones that aren't relevant anymore and then I kind of refresh the ones that are relevant and then I start scheduling them back out. So I never have dates on them. It does. Yeah. Right, because you have specific things. Now, in some of that though, you're gonna have evergreen content that doesn't have dates but using dates is gonna be better because then you're gonna say, okay, this was a 2018 post versus a 2019 post. Yeah. All right. So, but I like to use the post name one and whether you use the post name one or the one with the date in it, that doesn't matter even if you're using dates because the dates will always show on the actual page itself. You can turn it on or off. There's an option to turn it on or off but you can show the date on the post. So it's up to you but I like to use the simple one. All right. And then privacy. This is where your privacy policy should be. How many people have a privacy policy? Yay. Okay, so this is important. Usually it's something a lawyer will drop for you. You can also purchase them online for different industries and they're usually pretty standard. You wanna create a new page for it. It needs to have its own page. Also terms and conditions, things like that. But this is specifically the privacy policy and where that would be located. Okay, now we're to the maintenance part. So you guys had your list, right? That I was been adding to this whole time. You need to be updating your site every single month, if not more. If you can do more, that'd be great. Once a month is like my minimum requirement for my, when I talk to people and I try to educate them on this stuff. If you update your site, has anybody's site ever gone white when they've updated it? How fun was that? It was so fun. That means that a plugin broke your site or a theme broke your site or a plugin, the theme were like, I'm not doing this today. And they both broke your site. So this can happen any time you update. And it could be a WordPress update. It could be a theme update or a plugin update. Those are the three main pieces you update. Custom work, does anybody have a custom site? It was done by someone else that's super custom and you cannot update it. Those are a problem. If you've got one of those, you're gonna have some work to do, but do not update yet. You wanna make sure it's stable before you start updating stuff because you may actually lose a lot of that customization that was done if they didn't do it correctly. Being cautious of bad updates. How many of you are in a Facebook group about WordPress? Okay, go on Facebook, type in WordPress and look for a group. If you have a theme, did you know your theme has, if it's a good theme, this is a way to check, it's a good theme, it's gonna have groups on Facebook that you can join. And you should join those, two, three or four of those. The reason I say this is because when you update your theme, so let's say Divi for example, when Gutenberg came out, everybody was like, oh no, Gutenberg's gonna break my site. Divi's gonna be useless and there was a WordPress update that had Gutenberg in it and then there was a Divi update that said, disable Gutenberg and everything will be fine. Like it was in the Divi update. It wasn't in a separate plugin even. It was in the Divi update because the way that it runs right now, it doesn't use that piece. So it turns it off so you're not running your site down, you're not doing any, there's no extra code that's like interfering. It just says, you be dormant over here and I will do my thing over here. So the first one I did was a dud, the first Divi update. It actually broke a bunch of people's sites and those people are mostly developers so they went in and did their backups and they were cool. But if you're not a developer, one you should be backing your site up every month also but you can actually look on those forums and they'll say 5.1.2 is not good. It's been breaking a lot of sites. 5.1.3 is great. Everybody's been updating to it, no problems, no issues. We're good. Does that make sense? So you can get into one of these communities where people are gonna just tell you all that stuff. They're gonna tell you all of that and you don't have to worry about it. Okay, and then be on top of the security updates when you're in these forums as well. You're gonna see somebody say, there was a big security break, there was a big security hole, we're gonna get a new patch coming out. It's coming out today. If you're using X plugin, please delete it now. You can go in, fix your site, and you're covered. Or you can go in, update the patch, you're covered. But you'll need to know about those things right away and that's why I like Facebook because you see it on your feed. You get notifications about it, things like that. All right, we're gonna take a five or so minute break and then I'm gonna come back and tell you more plugins that I use and why.