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Uncategorized Website Building

How to Set Up WP Menus

How to Set Up WP Menus

how to set up wp menusAs we continue our website building series, today we will be looking at how to set up WP menus. Setting up your menus in WordPress is a great way to be able to organize and display your content. Without an easy to navigate website, you will have a very high bounce rate because your users will get frustrated and leave. They need to be able to quickly find what they are looking for on your site. A well configured menu on the header will accomplish this task.

Before we actually create the menu itself, there is one important thing we must do. Before you can organize your website, you must have all of your pages created. This does not mean that we are going to design all of the pages from start to finish. However, we are going to create the pages as placeholders for our menu. Common pages to consider making are a Home page, a Contact Us page, an About Us page, and a Services page. Once you have created all of your page names and created a placeholder for each one, then it is time to begin actually making and organizing the menu.

To begin this process, go to Appearance>menus. Before you can organize the menu, you must create the menu. Do this by entering a name in the input box and hitting “Create Menu”. Now add the pages from the left side to your menu. You can also do this with blog categories or individual posts. Once the menu items are moved to the menu, you can move them and arrange them by simply clicking and dragging them into the proper order.

Setting Up WP Menus is Simple

how to set up wp menusIt is very easy to set up the menus once you have the hang of it. Now let’s talk about different levels of the menus. You can take one of the menu items and drag it slightly to the right and it will become a drop-down menu. This means you can hover over the menu item on your website and a new menu will pop up. This is very useful when organizing your website. With drop-down menus, users will be able to find what they are looking for even faster. Anytime you can make the user experience easier, then you will improve your traffic.

So what would you do if you wanted to create an unclickable menu item with a drop down? For example, you have a Services menu that individually lists all of your services, but you don’t want an actual “Services” page. To do this, you would use the custom links area of the menu page. For the link, you would simply type a hashtag. When we were kids we called them pound signs, but nonetheless, you type a # in the space. This makes that individual item unclickable. This is a useful tip that many novice designers do not know about.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to watch our “How to Set Up WP Menus” tutorial video!

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Website Building

Setting Up Your WordPress Theme

Setting Up Your WordPress Theme

setting up your wordpress themeToday we are continuing our series, Web Wednesdays. In today’s video we are going to be focusing on setting up your WordPress Theme. So this begs the question, what is a WordPress theme?

If this is your first time setting up WordPress, then it is important to understand what a theme is and what it does. The best way to think about it is an anatomical reference. Your blog is the “skin” to your website. It’s what people are going to see the moment they visit your page. Your functionality and content could be incredible, but without the right theme, people will quickly be turned off by your website… and most likely they will leave before they ever get the chance to look under the hood.

While your visitors will see your theme, the theme does also affect the functionality. Each theme comes with settings and/or customization options for things such as your header, sliders, menus, footer, widgets, & more. It is absolutely pivotal that you get to know all of the settings within your header. When I add a new theme to a website I’m working on, the first thing I do is go look at the settings. If the theme does not have settings I like then I will change the theme. There is nothing worse than working with a theme that does not have a lot of customization.

For instance, some themes only allow you to have a text based logo. Just imagine how frustrating it would be to make a beautiful website only to find that it won’t allow you to put your beautifully designed logo at the top of your page. Sure, you could add it within the content… but that is not the best way to brand your business.

Choosing Your WordPress Theme

There are so many different ways to find a WordPress theme. The first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you would like to spend money on a theme. If you are comfortable paying for a theme, then I suggest strolling over to the Envato Market and searching their Themeforest themes. Most of the themes there run anywhere from $29 to $59. They are fairly priced and these are full themes that will also come with support. Personally, I love Themeforest themes.

If you are looking for a free theme, then you will be able to search within the WordPress platform. It’s easy to search within WordPress for a great theme. The issue with the free themes, is that most likely the themes you find are going to be “Lite” versions of premium themes. The goal of the Lite themes is to give you an idea of what the full version or premium version can offer you above and beyond what you get with the Lite theme. It’s basically a way for these themes to advertise their full version… which of course will come with a cost. Some of the free WordPress themes will offer everything you need, but more times than not you will end up frustrated.

setting up your wordpress th

Thanks for reading & don’t forget to check out our tutorial video, “Setting Up Your WordPress Theme.”

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Website Building

Getting Started With WordPress Dashboard

Getting Started With WordPress Dashboard

getting started with wordpress dashboardThis week, we are continuing with our web series about how to build a website from start to finish. We have already purchased a domain name, set up our hosting, installed WordPress, and now we are getting started with WordPress Dashboard. The first thing you must do before investigating the dashboard, is to login to your site. To do this, type /wp-admin after your domain name. It would look like this: http://www.YourDomainName.com/wp-admin. One quirky aspect of the WordPress admin URL is that the “wp-admin” must be typed in lower case letter only. If you were to type “WP-Admin” then you will not be able to get to your admin. To my knowledge, this is literally the only URL address I have ever encountered where the case of the letter matters.

Once you have pulled up your admin login screen, type in your username and password. My email address never seems to work for any sites I have created with WordPress (between 75-100). You will need to use your username here. If you forget your username or password, click Lost Password. You will be prompted to type in the email address associated with your username and WordPress will email you a reset link. Be careful about this though, because my Password Reset link usually gets sent to my spam instead of my main email inbox. Once you have logged into your account, you can now explore the dashboard.

Making Sense of WordPress

If you have never created a website before, WordPress can be quite intimidating at first. However, the platform is very easy to use with a little practice. One of the most frustrating things that WordPress does in my opinion, is allowing spam on their dashboard. Let me explain. If you go through any hosting service to install your WordPress, the hosting company has agreements in place with companies that integrate themes, widgets, & plugins. These agreements allow them to automatically install plugins & widgets onto your WordPress page.

To an experienced designer, this is not a huge problem because a good designer knows that these plugins are unnecessary. To the novice website builder, these extra plugins make the dashboard confusing. Two of the most common companies I’ve seen are JetPack and MojoMarketplace. To me personally, I have never found any use for either of these.

Plugins can create problems for your website. Certain plugins may cause certain parts of your theme to malfunction. Above all, having several plugins on your website will kill the speed of it. My philosophy is the less plugins, the better. Now of course, plugins are not the devil (even though Bobby Boucher’s mom may disagree!). Plugins are a necessary part of website building. They offer functionality that you will find solve a lot of problems. However, you only need to add plugins that you actually need. For this reason, my preference is to deactivate and delete every single plugin that comes preloaded within my WordPress site. When you delete all of those plugins, you will be amazed at just how much that simple action cleans up and simplifies your WordPress Dashboard.

Our tutorial video “Getting Started with WordPress Dashboard” shows you much more about the WordPress Dashboard.

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Website Building

How to Install WordPress – Full Tutorial

How to Install WordPress

how to install wordpressDuring our Web Wednesday series, we have been showing you how to create a website from start to finish. We have walked you through choosing a domain name, choosing a hosting package, & setting your nameservers. Now it is time to move on to the next step and we are going to show you how to install WordPress to your website.

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Website Building

How to Set Up Hosting and Nameservers

How to Set Up Hosting and Nameservers

For our Web Wednesday video series, we are  showing you how to build a website from start to finish. In last week’s video we showed you how to choose your hosting package. We recommend using Hostgator as it has a simple to use cPanel that makes setting up a website there very smooth. Once we have chosen our hosting package, now we must learn how to set up hosting and nameservers for our website. It may be a little intimidating at first for those new to website building, but it is actually quite easy.

how to set up hosting and nameservers

The first thing that users will notice when they sign into their Hostgator account, is the interface of the cPanel. The cPanel is the admin by which you can tweak anything having to do with the backend of your website. This includes the File Manager, Redirects, mx Records, & more. A large portion of available sections on the cPanel are virtually useless. If you do not know yet, every site you visit that sells hosting, domains, or online marketing solutions, unashamedly try to push every product under the sun. So pay attention in our “How to Set Up Hosting and Nameservers” tutorial video above and we will reveal to you which icons you actually need to pay attention to.

Setting Your Nameservers

Since GoDaddy (or whatever domain service you own) controls your URL address, you must make GoDaddy communicate with your new hosting company. When someone visits your website, GoDaddy must be able to send visitors directly to where your website is hosted at. To do this, you must be able to let GoDaddy know where to send the visitors to. You do this through setting what are called nameservers.

how to set up hosting and nameservers

If you navigate to the right side of your cPanel and scroll down the page, there is a section that contains your account information. Within that information, your nameservers are listed. They will generally be something like ns32.hostgator.com & ns33.hostgator.com. Your nameservers will always be sequential in number. This makes setting them through GoDaddy fairly easy.

Once you have located your nameservers on Hostgator, highlight and copy the first one by hitting cmd + C for Mac or ctl + C for PC. Navigate to your GoDaddy account. Once you have entered your account, click on “Manage DNS” next to the domain you are looking to host your website on. One of the options you will have on the Manage DNS screen will be to set your nameservers. Initially, “Default Nameservers” will be the current setting. To change the setting to reflect your Hostgator nameservers, simply click “Change”. In the first box, paste the nameserver address you copied in from your Hostgator account information. Then, paste the same address in the second box and simply change the number to reflect your other nameserver. After you have placed both nameserver addresses in the boxes, click save.

And just like that, you are ready to install WordPress! Thanks for reading & don’t forget to watch our tutorial video!

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Freedom Fridays

How To Make Money Buying Domain Names

Why Make Money Buying Domains

For this week’s Freedom Friday video, we look at how to make money buying domains. Before you head on over to GoDaddy to make a domain purchase, you may be wondering why this is a great way to make money. The answer is quite simple really. You can make an absolute killing reselling domains on the GoDaddy Premium Domain platform. We will show you exactly how to list your domain on the platform next week, but this week we really want to focus on just how much money is out there in this niche.

how to make money buying domains

Usually, here at the Online Business Realm, we try to temper expectations for our audience. We aren’t about teaching you how to become rich over night or how to create a fly-by-night scheme. However, when it comes to buying & selling domains, there is a LOT of potential income. Most premium domains resell for at least 1000% mark-up on them. I have seen some go for as much as $15,000 which would be a 10,000% mark-up. So you are probably wondering, “what’s the catch”?

Making Money Buying Domains Takes Patience

buy domains to make moneyThe catch to making money buying domains is that it requires much more patience than other methods. If you find a great domain you want to purchase then buy it before someone else jumps on it. There may be someone looking at the domain at the same time you are… but most likely that is not the case. What is much more likely is that you may hold on to some of the premium domains for years. Are you prepared to wait that long? Many people are not. That is exactly why this is such a great business to get into. Many people refuse to work within this niche because they simply lack the patience.

There is a method by which you can attempt to speed up the process. Once you find a premium domain and list it, you can try finding businesses that would be interested in the domain. After you find likely interested businesses, call them and try to speak to the person in charge of their advertising. Explain to them that you have a domain they may be interested in. What you may find is that most businesses with a name that closely matches the domain are not the most internet savvy people. This also leads you into an opportunity to not only influence them to buy the domain, but you may even be able to talk them into allowing you to build their website & do their SEO.

How to Find Good Domain Names

The secret to this method is to find actual domain names that people will want to purchase down the road. There are a few great ways to do this, but the most popular one is to search businesses within a city on Google. Scroll through all of the businesses listed on the Google Places portion of the search results. Look for businesses that have contact info, but lack a website. You would be surprised at just how many businesses in 2018 still do not have websites! When you find a business without a website, see if you can find a domain name that closely matches that business and buy it.

make money buying domains

Another method to try is to think about technology trends. For instance, if Apple is releasing a new version of the iPhone, look for domain names that would match it. Apple is a very popular brand and many people rush to get domains as soon as a new announcement is made. Think about how lucrative a domain such as iPhoneXStore.com would be right now? You could easily sell this domain on the GoDaddy Premium Domain platform (this was just an example as that domain is already taken).

Don’t forget to watch our video this week and tutorial next week! Thanks for watching!

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Website Building

How to Pick a Domain Name For Your Website

How to pick a Domain Name Thumb

Picking a Domain Name on GoDaddy

how to pick a domain name on godaddyPicking a domain name is the first step in your journey toward starting a website or blog of any type. The domain is the concrete that holds your entire project together. If your foundation is not good, then the rest of your brand will suffer. It is extremely important to take your time and get the process right. I always purchase all of my domains on GoDaddy.com. In my opinion, GoDaddy is the best domain registrar on the internet.

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