 Hi everyone, this is Rob from Projects Handbox, a University of Lethbridge Library initiative. In this video, we're going to learn how to create a blog with WordPress. The first thing you need to know if you go to the UofL is that there's two options for you for how you can create a blog. The first option is the same as everybody else. So you can start a free WordPress blog or an account with WordPress. There are some limitations to what you can do with that. For the free version, you don't have the ability to control a lot of your security settings, but you do have lots of different themes you can choose from to design it. You can add lots of things. It's a pretty robust system, but if you do go to the UofL, the UofL also will provide you with your own WordPress page that does have enhanced security setting. And if you would like to do that, you can go to blogs.ulethbridge.ca, which is the page that we're at right now. And this is the one that I'm actually going to show you how to do stuff with, but this would be transferable to the free version as well. So why don't we go into this blog and check it out a little bit. So we're going to look at my poor excuse for a blog at the moment. I don't think there's any real content in it. It's more filler text and just me trying out a couple things. Anyway, let's log on. So the first thing you want to do is put in your credentials and then your password. And this would be the same credentials for anything that you log on with. And then it'll take you to your blog page. As you can see, I have posted lots of random stuff that isn't really anything, but I'm going to show you how you can post actual material. So the first thing that you'll want to do, if you're not there already anyway, is go to your dashboard. So your dashboard is kind of your base for where you want to do everything with your actual WordPress account. So it'll give you things that you've recently published. It gives you the option to customize stuff. It gives you some quick links to like write blogs and stuff, manage widgets, turn comments on and off, pretty much anything that you want to do really quickly. You can do from here. This is where you also have access to all of your different sections as well as like creating new posts media. This is just where you do everything quite simply. So the first thing that we want to do to this blog is we want to change the way this blog looks because I have just decided that I don't like the way that theme looks anymore. The way you do that is you go into this appearance section and you click on themes and then you can choose from any of these nine themes to change it to whichever one you like the best. So there's two different ways you can look at this. You can click on live preview if you would just like to see what it would look like if you chose it. So this is what mine would look like. Or you can click on that activate button if you're just like, I don't need to look at the preview. I know I like it. And that's what I'm going to do. I just know I like it. So now I've activated it and that's what we're going to use now. We can just go and check it out for a minute to see what people would actually see. Yeah, looks pretty nice. I like the bar on the left hand side. I like the scrolling right here seems pretty good. Now that we have our theme chosen as simply as that was one thing I would like to mention to you is that you do have the ability to customize your theme and with that your customization settings can change from theme to theme. So if you're looking for your site to do something specifically, try changing themes and you actually can potentially change that thing that you want to change. So like this one allows you to change logos, your site icons, stuff like that. We can change colors. So we can change background color. So why don't we make it let's just make it like really I was going to say let's make it really Canadian but I don't I don't know if I want that much red. That's too much red for me. I like black. Black simple. Don't judge me on the way this looks though. The point is that you have the ability to change it however you want to. Okay, so I'm just changing a couple things. This is yeah. So let's say I want that you have the ability to change your header image. Let's add a new image. I'm sure I have an image that's really here. We'll just do this sandbox welcome screen, select and crop. Okay. Oh, sure. Let's use the left hand side. Why not? Oh, cool. That makes that look way better. All right. So that's kind of roughly what you do. You can change your background image. That'll change this here. You can add your menus. This is where you can just muck around with a bunch of different things. One final thing I would like to show you though before I mess around further with stuff is if you're curious how this would look on a tablet or a mobile phone, you can click down here. So this is the desktop view. This would be more of the tablet view. And that would be your mobile phone view just to give you an idea of how this actually is shown on different browsers. And then once you're finished and happy, you can just hit publish. And then this is what your live website actually looks like to people. The thing I want to show you how to do right away is how to start adding blogs or creating new web pages or anything like that. And I'll dive into the adding like media like images and stuff like that a little bit more to the first thing that we're going to look at is how to add a new post. So there's a couple of ways to get into that. One is to go to this top bar and just click post. The other way is from your dashboard. You can click post here and just click add new. And this also gives you a list of all the various posts that you've created. As you can see, I've made lots of draft versions, which are versions that nobody can see it because I haven't published them. Okay, so let's add a new post. So you click add new or like I said, you can go in the new section at the top and you can put in your title or whatever that might be. You can put in your text and this area looks works a lot like Microsoft Word so you can like bold things, italicize things. You can change what this is. So if say this is a heading or like a title of something, you can change that to the heading default. Then it'll go to your paragraph text to actually write the content that you want it to do. And then you just can change it really however you would like it to be. This item right here creates a gives you more options just to give you a heads up. So say I like everything right here. Yeah, it's a beautifully articulated message. Say you're happy with everything. The next thing you want to do is you want to change the privacy settings. So where you can change your privacy settings is just in this top area right here under visibility. So right now my visibility is set to public which means that anybody can watch it. But you also have the ability to make it password protected and put in your password whatever that might be. And you have the ability to make it private which means you would be the only one who can see it. I don't care though so I'm just going to make this one public. Then if you'd like you can preview it before you actually publish it. I like it. It's good enough. My next step would be to publish. If I just wanted to save the draft so I could work on it later, click there. Or if I wanted to scrap it entirely, you could click there. So once that's done, I'm just going to hit publish because I like it. And then it's good. The next thing I'm going to show you how to do is how to make a web page. It's pretty much exactly the same format as doing the blog post. So you click on page up there or you can click on pages in here and then just click add new. Looking at this you can see it's pretty much verbatim the same as the post. But web pages obviously function a little differently than blog posts. Blog posts are a quick little thing that you add. Web pages are more of a static thing that doesn't change that offers information. Like it could be like an about page or a contact page or if you have a page that just like you want to direct people to that has specific elements. You've been to a website I'm sure even by going to this you've been to a website. So I'm sure you know what a web page is but that's how you would think about it a little differently than a blog post. So you can fill out your text once again whatever that might be. You can change the color of your text if you don't like that color. Let's make it I'm obviously making this just awful awful stuff. So yeah that's how you would create everything. Then once again you have the ability to change your visibility settings whether you publish it immediately or on a certain date whatever you want really. The one thing that I should mention too is say you have a menu system and I'll show you what it looks like to make it a little easier. So for page attributes I want this page to be nestled in Aska sound. So to do that I would just click that as the parent and then publish it. So now when we go to that page so this would be an option that I guess isn't available on this theme. Normally what would happen though is when you treat that as a parent there'll be like a drop down arrow so when you scroll over this there'll be that sub menu. Obviously this theme doesn't have this though so you can't do it. This is actually a really good example that you might want it to do something sometimes but it just doesn't allow you to do it. Okay but that's how you would roughly edit your page. The next thing to know is how you could add pictures to whatever page. Say I just know I want to add some things to the library but I don't necessarily know what page I want it to go on at the moment. I just want to add it. If you click on media or you can click up here on media. There we go. You can just drag and drop your files if you click media up here for whatever files you would like to add or in here you would just click add new and do the exact same thing. So I am going to just click and drag this file onto here so as you can see it just uploaded and there is a 20 megabytes file size limit so just be aware of that. So now that you can see this is added to my library. It's not attached to any page whatsoever. If it does get attached it will say right here that so that's one way you can actually add something. Another way is if you go directly into a post or page we're just going to treat them as the same thing for the moment. All you have to do is go to add media. So you can drag and drop your files here just like we did with that other page or if now you know where to add one of these videos or whatever you add to here you can just click on them and click insert into post and then this will actually insert it to whichever post you have selected. Something I should mention too is if you add media from a page you also have the ability to create galleries so say I wanted all of these in a gallery or you can create audio playlists video playlists or do a featured image. A featured image is an image that will like always show up at the top. So let's just create a new gallery and insert gallery. So now we have a little gallery actually created so now when we preview it we can open up each thing and see what it looks like. Go to next damage previous so that's what creating a gallery can look like. As you can see as I've been adding all this stuff though it begins to make less and less sense. One thing that you can do within these pages so you're add a new post or add a new page is going into your text editor so that doesn't actually mean like text in this way. Text editor means like code. So as we can see we got the gallery up here this is where our title is and this is where our body text is. So if we wanted to manipulate say we didn't want the gallery there anymore we wanted it to be under the title but above all that stuff all we would have to do is copy and paste that and then when we go back we can see that it actually moved in that way. Just to give you an idea of how this works this uses HTML code to create whatever it is you want it to. HTML code works by having an open tag and a closing tag. So that's why this h1 starts like this and closes like that and then it has the content in the middle of it. Say we wanted this text to be bolded just to show you what it'll do highlighting that and clicking bold so it adds a strong tag at the beginning and end because strong means bold and that's roughly how anything works with HTML. There's an opening tag and a closing tag and those tags tell what's in the contents of that which would be this middle part what to do. So say I wanted it to be italicized em is the code for italicize so now when we go back to visual you'll see that this is bolded and italicized so that's roughly how this would work. Say we wanted this to be centered this is actually a list once again we can see what it did to that so we can see that this is now a list it's an unordered list and this is now centered. One thing I would like to mention too is if you would like to have a little bit more control than just these couple of HTML elements you can use CSS within HTML code. I realize that you will probably need to start googling stuff to figure out what I'm talking about if you're not familiar with it so if you do go to the UofL feel free to come to the library and you can talk to me a little bit about it just come to the service desk and ask for Rob they will know who you're talking about. Just to give you a brief example of how CSS works within HTML though is to add CSS you want to add this style a little bit within the first tag so say I wanted this list item to have CSS what I would do is write style equals and then two quotation marks and then within those quotation marks is how I would like to put the CSS so say I wanted to change the text to be all white so this should theoretically make my text completely white which it did or say I want to make it blue I should be able to write in the word blue and it'll make my text blue if you would like to know a little bit more about CSS in HTML you can go to a website called w3schools.com you can click on learn HTML or learn CSS and then what it'll do is it will show you some different CSS code and what it'll do so this is an example they've provided if you click on try it yourself you can see what it actually did I'm just going to copy and paste this and put it into my post to show you what the what it'll do so I just copy and paste exactly what they did and you can see my font style changed and everything so that's just roughly how you can start adding CSS or HTML to your stuff it gives you really complete control over what you're doing when you actually use that stuff okay so just to move on a little bit more with what we're doing the next thing that you might want to do in a post is you might want to add a YouTube video or something from SoundCloud or something from Vimeo lots of the time what you would use I'll use our fair dealing video as an example is you would go into share and then you would get your embedded code and then when you copy and paste this code into whatever it is you want to put it into actually you would normally put this into your text editor when you go back to visual you would have the video like this you don't actually need to go to that extents to add a video to WordPress all you actually have to do is let's bring up that page once again is copy and paste the URL and this works for SoundCloud and Vimeo as well and when you post it into your thing it automatically changes to the video so you don't need to go to all that effort of actually copying and pasting that embedded text now that we have the couple pages created and we have a couple posts and stuff like that we can start figuring out like what our home page might be and if we would like any menu systems set up for a page so right now when you go to my page this is what happens when you go to home so it just has a whole bunch of blog posts or you can go to individual pages right here but what I want to do is I want to set up a static home page and I want to change around my menu system a little bit so once again this is what it currently looks like so where you go to change your menu system is into menus under appearance so as you can see I have two pages and a post in my menus what I'm going to do is just delete this menu entirely and then we're going to create a new menu so we'll just call it new menu one you know what I have a theme going so I'm going to call this awesome menu so we're going to click awesome menu and then we have a rough menu created and you can start adding things to it under pages uh see these are this is parented to this one this is what I was talking about earlier this is how you can tell it's parented and so we're actually going to add all those manage with live preview there we go primary menu there we go so now my stuff content's actually showing up so if I did want to add more items I could just go to add items and click on whatever it starts adding to it when I hit publish once again that means it's good and it's all set up so if you want to add a menu this is where you would go into and then you would need to choose that it would be primary menu or say your social links menu if you have like social media tabs and stuff like that so that's how you would set up a menu if you want to change what your home page is that's a little bit different so to get into your home page you would just go into settings and reading then within here you can set it up so it either shows your latest posts or you can set a static page and your static page can be any of the pages that you've created or it can be any of the posts that you've created so I want it set to a post as opposed to my latest posts so now when I save that and now you can see that this is what my home page looks like keep in mind that if your home page is not your list of blog posts you'll need to put a link over here so people can see that link because otherwise it would literally be impossible to get to okay so we know how to add posts we know how to add blogs we know how to do pretty much everything the only thing I haven't mentioned at least without going into settings is how to add widgets and what widgets are really so you may or may not be familiar with widgets but widgets essentially gives more functionality to your blog so my widgets currently are a search function recent posts recent comments an archive of my posts categories and this akismit widget which is a spam blocker but other widgets you would have the ability to add or like say a calendar awesome calendar you could add just an image if you want an image over there custom html if you have any rss feeds that you really like you could add those go a tag cloud let's add a tag cloud awesome tag cloud obviously I don't think anything is really tagged though so nothing will pop up but this is where you would go into if you don't want things you can just delete it so just keep in mind this is where you can add some functionality to your page so when you go to your site this is obviously where your widgets are located so you can see the awesome calendar I just added this will generally lay out whenever you've put posts yeah so really just feel free to play around with that stuff a little bit you can really customize this quite intensely for what you want it to do for you so I've gone over pretty much everything you can do in terms of like the look and what you can add to it some things that I want to tell you how to do though are more of like administration things that you can do with your WordPress so if you go into settings and go into general this is where you can do things like change your site title or your site tagline and your email address associated with things your site language your time zone how dates are displayed anything like that if you want to control like commenting on your posts you would just go to this discussion setting and then you can see if people are allowed to post on comments or new articles that you do and just kind of all of the posts and everything that happens with your website settings that's where you can do all that like administration stuff if say you wanted people attached to your website so you wanted some like other administrators and stuff like that that's where you would use this users tab so under users you can add new users and control what they actually do and since this is your UofL WordPress account I wouldn't really add anybody for the most part and if you did subscriber would probably be their biggest role on your website I wouldn't really add anything else besides that especially anything that could be like administrator where people could just delete your whole website on you because that for sure is something that's possible to do as well remember to just be creative and try stuff out when you're creating your WordPress blog you do have a lot of functionality with the Ulethbridge blog one but if you would rather use your own WordPress you're totally free to do that as well thank you very much for watching this video and if you have any questions please feel free to see me at the library also if you would like to keep up to date with new videos coming out at the library you could subscribe to our page and if you would like to continue your project sandbox journey feel free to click on one of the video links right now once again thank you very much and I hope to see you soon