 All right, how's everyone going good? Everyone full belly nice cake Yeah All right, so as he said my name is Mick. I have been many things over my life. I will get straight into who I am Who am I I'm Mick the WordPress mentor now, but I haven't always been that I used to be Mick the camp oven cook He's do all the caravan shows on the Gold Coast and Brisbane teaching camp oven cooking But I won't get too much into all those things and before I did camp oven cooking for the last seven years Well, I did camp oven cooking for seven years and then before that I worked seven years on the floor at Dracula's in costume and makeup running around and You know looking a lot different to what I do now so but yeah and I used to do all the stage shows and stuff a caravan show I'm not new to speaking in front of an audience, but it's just a different topic Paul who gets around he's he does a Gold Coast meetup a couple of months ago He said to me do you want to speak at your local meetup? And I said no what am I gonna talk about and he said well WordPress and I've never done that before but you know I actually have but just not in that topic. So let's go to get my feet and and have a go at doing something a bit different to you know shoveling and coals and cooking damper so So I Dismissed the idea straight away But then you know went home and thought about it and decided that I was enjoying a camp oven cooking because I was helping people So I'm now helping people with websites because I prefer that then doing the dev stuff and building and everything like that I'd rather just come in help and help people on their journey who are starting out So this talk today is more informational than educational And it's just to give you some points that you can go home and look into because everyone's journey is different And you might be already doing some of this and you just choose what you need to research and then look into you know Implementing that in here. So who here today is a beginner who's starting out in their journey? Yep a few of you cool and so while we're talking about this topic or most people who are starting out get told WordPress is easy and You know they go out there and they're still WordPress on their server and Put a bit a couple of pages content on there and then later on they ask questions Like these people who are starting out tend to you know tend to ask questions such as ease after they're building the website How do I speed up my website my image is a slowing down my website. How can I fix this? How do I do SEO? How do I get Google to visit my website? And how do I make my site look more professional now? These are normally things that people seem to do later on in life in their journey instead of knowing that they've got to do it From day dot and it'll be so much easier for them to do instead of costing money because they've got to change this or change that and Move hosting or whatever. So I'm here today to try and give you guys something to you know Go home and work on to make sure that you don't have problems down the track So basics of web design is my number one. These are in no real order other than this one So this is about understanding elements that go into making a website Doesn't matter what platform you're using whether it's WordPress wicks If you don't understand all the bits and pieces that make the website and how to do all that Then you're gonna have a few problems down the track So when I moved over from Joomla to WordPress It was a pretty easy switch because I already had all that foundation and knowledge about how to build a website It was just learning the platform that I'm using same as when I learned Photoshop 20 years ago When I had to learn other programs. They all did the same thing, but just in a different way and we had to adapt to that So number two is web hosting that's one of the biggest things that everyone goes to when they have So websites and they always run out and I used to do it when I first Build my websites run out and buy the cheapest host I could buy and you know when you're looking at why it's slow It is one of the main reasons and people start at that because I haven't got the money But it is best to start you know investing into something that is going to be better than the cheapest option and then moving once you have Moving and scaling to something better later on as grow another one here is SSL certificates So this is another thing that hasn't I you know for a long time I never had an SSL certificate didn't have to worry about it because I never did e-commerce But with the way you know Google and everyone's starting to come in It's best to have one on your website and a lot of the hosts Don't give you a web like some of the cheaper ones don't give it and then they ask you to pay for it Recently I had a lady who was ringing crazy domains going hey My websites hacked and she thought it was hacked because it was redirect bringing up the screen and then but when you clicked on it to Bypass it it took her to someone else's website on that shared hosting because it was bringing up their SSL certificate It was confusing them and then crazy domains are telling her that she's got to spend all this money to get it cleaned When all it was is that we just needed an SSL, but we end up just moving her to another host That was better suitable suitable for her Permalinks is another one that most people Hopefully if you're watching a video or education that they tell you to do this, but sometimes I have watched I've been doing a lot of research on how people build websites so that I can try and better myself in my education and Permalinks sometimes don't get talked about and then later on and I have had that the other day We're not to give them do redirects on everything to Google because everything was index under you know the wrong thing So it can be at something that happens down the track that might cause problems Then another one is back up and restore A lot of people go oh my host does backups, but then yeah, they might do but some hosts You know capitalizes on this and I know I've had this before that they ask you to pay money to get them to Restore their backup so we shouldn't rely on their hosts and some hosts They have a button inside that enables you to restore from back up really quick and then others you don't have that option either But the best way to do is use a third-party plug-in that like updraft and it goes to remote And then if you ever need it, you can just restore back from that There's no reason why you shouldn't be backing up your website Very regularly Like I said, I am more about information and hopefully you can go home and work got some questions afterwards and Security is another one and you know my website's been hacked and stuff like that There's some very easy things to try and put up some Conventions to stop this from happening and a lot of people use word fence and there is a talk later on By the word fence dude about his cleaning spending his life cleaning websites for word fence and You know, it's very easy to do that and that way it stops people You know hacking in and another one is not using admin as a password or or something like that try and use something totally different to What you can think You know a good one is using a password that is my grandma wears red socks instead of hash and say and all the different little caps because When they do the brute force attacks, they put a document full of you know information that just hits the website And if you don't have something like word fence stopping that from happening Then they might happen to get something that you know causes to them to get in and Google Analytics is something very easy It's very often that I see even websites that have been built by other people that have paid charge their money I don't install Google Analytics and then you ask them questions and they're like I don't know and They can't tell you and it's good way to be able to track who's coming to your website and all those sort of things So it's you know something that's good to have in in set up when you build your website Even if you don't really look at it It's good later on if you do get to a point You've always got something to go back to you because you've been collecting that data Over the time even another good one is putting Facebook pixel even if you don't use it straight away It's collecting data of people who is visiting your website and then when you do get into Facebook ads You've already got data built up on your audience that you can target them instead of just paying You know boosted posts and what sort of stuff? Google search console is another important one to set up that It helps, you know the way Google manage you manage your website and how Google sees your website So if you can go in there and submit your site map You can you know get pages removed from Google and see what errors are coming up And it's something that you know when you want to do redirects and stuff It's very handy to have installed so these are flying through and Search engine optimization now. This is a huge topic and we can spend all day talking about it But the best way to do is install things like Yoast and start doing a bit of on page Even if you don't do a lot of all the other stuff that requires having that and you can define all your Yeah, me the piles and permalinks and all that sort of stuff and your keywords and and things like that and Put that all into play It's really handy to build that and not only do you do on your pages in your post So if you've got categories on a blog they all should be set up with the host as well and put all your index But you can spend all day talking about that But this is just something you can go home and go hey, I need a look at doing some SEO on my website What do I do now and you can get out mr. Google or and find a lot of stuff another one that people have is slow down websites is not optimizing their images and The best way that I find is to make sure to optimize them before I even put them onto my website and don't just rely on a plug-in to smush it afterwards and You know using Photoshop or any of those other things out there There are a lot of online ones if you don't have those skills or tools But I've been using Photoshop for a long time and I do a lot of stuff in there You should be using an illustrator or another program because it's easier, but I just like manually like drawing my little man I'd rather do that in Photoshop than Illustration think that that's all my slides. I've grown through those pretty quick Like I said it was informational