hi and welcome back to the build your custom 
website course my name's Dan i'm a software   engineer and systems analyst with wp update and 
i'll be looking after you today in today's session   we're going to be doing a couple of things firstly 
we'll be preventing search engines from accessing   our beta site that's our pre-launch site we'll 
be configuring the url structure and settings   for wordpress and we'll be installing the base 
website artwork ready for session three today's   requirements are fairly straightforward you just 
need a little bit of time and a little bit of   patience so you may have noticed last session 
we installed wordpress and i wanted to quickly   address why we went with wordpress as opposed 
to one of the managed free online services so   let's do a quick comparison the free services are 
absolutely fantastic but there are a couple of   limitations with them the first of course is that 
you only have limited control over your artwork   whereas with the custom wordpress site you've 
got thousands of different themes and with a bit   of php knowledge you can completely customize 
them or you can hire someone to do it for you   there's only limited or restricted components 
within the free websites as well they give you   a set of tools that you can use and they are 
the only tools that you can use whereas with   wordpress it's almost infinitely extendable you 
can add plugins you can add functionality you   can add add-ons you can extend just about 
any component of wordpress to turn it into   more than it is when you started there can 
be locked or limited e-commerce options   with the free ones where they will give you a type 
of product or an item that you have to use as in   you know it needs to be a single product you can't 
do a variation say colors on t-shirts for example   whereas with custom wordpress there are dozens of 
free e-commerce plugins and and extensions that   allow you to do just about anything we're touching 
that in the master class a little bit later on with the free ones you really can customize 
or extend the functionality within   their their framework as opposed to 
wordpress you can hire a programmer to   customize just about any aspect of your website 
and extend it to do just about anything you like   with the free versions they're quite hard to 
migrate as well so if you're on a prominent   platform that gets advertised a lot on youtube and 
you decide that you no longer want to be with that   platform they have complete control over your site 
you cannot with any deal of ease move from one   host to another whereas wordpress is very very 
easy to migrate it's portable so if you decide   you don't like siteground anymore and move to 
hostgator or godaddy it's a fairly straightforward   process to do that you don't have to be 
locked into a single host if you're not happy   so what we're going to be looking at mainly is the 
permalink the permalink is the structure of your   url or the web address of the individual pages 
on your website they have a surprising impact   on search engine optimization and a really big 
impact on clickability so let's just quickly look   at an example here so a default out of the box 
wordpress page will have a url of question mark   page underscore id and then a number with 
the permalink structure correctly set up   we can change that to forward slash blog forward 
slash top 10 pizzas in italy for example and you   can already see straight away that that's a little 
bit more clickable it's a little bit more friendly   but let's take a look at what it will look like in 
say a google search result so if we have a look at   the first one top 10 pizzas in italy uh from the 
example travel blog here you can see there the   little green text allows you to see what the url 
is and it's not terribly pretty you can tell it's   not been set up well whereas if we tweak that that 
suddenly becomes a lot nicer and google in fact   recognizes the hierarchical structure 
of the url there and then puts little um   little markers in there i suppose you'd 
call them as opposed to just the dashes   which makes it a little bit more professional and 
a lot more clickable one other thing to consider   there as well is the second url you'll notice 
has some really really nice keywords in there   as well so that will cover you for a top 
10 list and that will cover you for pizzas   and italian pizzas as opposed to just a simple 
one two six five so again super simple to set up   but a massive impact on the way your site appears 
and potentially can rank on google so let's get   set up if you get to your website and you see 
this type of error that means that there is a bit   of a problem with the domain registration what 
you'll need to do is contact sitegroundsupport   there is a link in the description 
below on how to do that and what to say if you see this page when you try to visit 
your website or a similar page if you're   using chrome or internet explorer or safari 
it means the security certificate hasn't been   installed correctly it's a fairly easy fix all 
you'll need to do is contact siteground support   and there is a link in the description 
below on how to get there and what to say   all right but in the meantime if 
you do see this error that's okay   just make sure that you are 100 sure that is 
your website address that we registered last time   click on advanced and then click accept the risk 
and continue okay so let's bring up a browser and we're going to navigate to our website so if 
you recall from last time the url you entered or   sorry the domain you registered and what we 
want to do is type in https and that part is   very important colon double slash and then 
your domain so in our case it was error 418 dots coffee put the dot in there and you should see something like this okay so 
let's assume that everything's gone correctly   and you can see the website you will see the 
my wordpress just another wordpress site and   the very very base thing so what we're going to 
do now is go right up to the top to the url bar   and we're going to type in forward 
slash wp hyphen login l-o-g-i-n dot   p-h-p so that's wp hyphen login dot p-h-p move 
that out of the way and then we're going to hit   enter and that will take you to the wordpress 
login page so if you recall from last time we   had a login sent to us from siteground 
so just put in your email address there and then enter the password you would have 
entered when you set up the account and   don't forget down here there's a lost 
your password if you get stuck as well and there we go there's our wordpress starter 
so we're just going to exit the wizard we're   not going to worry about that at the 
moment just click the exit button down   the bottom and now we are in our wordpress 
control panel or the wordpress dashboard   let me go full screen and i'm just going to zoom 
in so you can see things a little bit easier all right so for today's exercise as i mentioned 
before we're looking at setting up permalinks   blocking search engines from seeing 
our beta site or our pre-launch site   and going through the general 
settings for wordpress   so what we're going to start with over here 
is going to settings and then going to general we want to add your site title in here so this 
is the name of your business or the name of your   site and it will appear in search engines 
so in our case we're going to be error 418   and the tag line is a secondary 
catchphrase that you can use for your site   on and that appears in search engine results on 
pages that aren't necessarily super optimized   for search engine optimization 
so for us it's going to be resources the next thing we're going to 
do is go down to the wordpress   address url and we're going to take the 
http there and then stick a little s in   there so you should end up with https colon 
slash and then the domain you registered   and what that's going to do is that's going to 
force new visitors into the site onto the secure   version there's two advantages to that firstly 
it's encrypted end to end so that means that   it protects people who are visiting your site 
from a thing called a man in the middle attack   and also very very handy for google they really 
like a uh a good security certificate set up   rather than insecure standard http websites 
so we'll do that for the wordpress address url   and the site address the next thing is your 
email we just want to make sure that that is okay   and that can stay as your personal 
email for the moment but before we   launch we'll set that up to be the email 
address we registered in the last video now we don't need to worry about 
membership or user roles right now we   just keep short make sure that is unchecked 
the subscriber role doesn't matter at all   set the site language to whatever you prefer 
so we're going to be operating largely in the   uk so we'll go with english uk but you can 
see there there are several other languages   available and you can set it up to whatever you 
prefer or whatever your target market will need don't worry too much about 
the date and time format   and for us the week will start on monday so once 
you're happy with your settings there and again   feel free to pause the video and just have a 
bit of a think if you'd like to put a bit more   time into that but once you're happy scroll 
down to the bottom and hit save changes now because we changed to https we got booted 
back out of the site so we'll need to log in again and once we're in those settings will 
be saved okay so we'll skip the writing   part we'll deal with that a little bit 
later and then go straight to reading now this is for the blog management part of 
the site we won't need to worry about most   of this for the this course what we do want to 
do though is set the search engine visibility   so we want to just check that make sure it's 
set to discourage search engines from indexing   this site and what that does is that asks google 
bing yahoo yandex and and dozens of other sites   not to index this which helps us which well 
gives us time to build the site out without   having to worry about people seeing it a little 
bit early so once that's been checked hit save   okay the next thing we're going to 
do is head over to the discussion tab now this looks after how people interact 
with blog posts and with pages on your site   so we're going to under default posts settings 
here we're just going to uncheck those first three   and what that does is that 
prevents people spamming us   with comments and pingbacks for other sites so 
scroll all the way down and then save changes   all right change is saved the next thing we're 
going to head to is the permalinks setting okay so if you recall back at the start of the 
lesson we were looking at different permalinks and   different structures for urls so i've found the 
most effective one to be the custom structure   what we're going to do is just click on custom 
structure there delete the contents of that   and then add a category and then a 
post name and that gives that canonical   or hierarchical uh url structure and allows us 
to put some really nice keywords in the urls   which google and bing likes a lot we're 
going to scroll down to the save changes and there we go that's the permalink structures 
updated and privacy we're going to worry about   just a little bit later on in the course what 
we're going to do next is from the permalink   settings we're going to mouse over appearance 
and then go to themes you'll see we already   have some pre-installed ones there but i'm 
not a big fan of them they tend to be very   standard and lots and lots of people 
use them so what we're going to do   is install a new theme from the wordpress 
theme library so top left click add new you can see we get a whole heap of themes 
available to us and there are literally tens of   thousands of themes we're going 
to use a very very popular theme   with a very very popular customizable web builder 
to make this site as easy as possible to manage   so in the search themes up the top right 
there i would like you to type zeta z-i-t-a and we will look for the first result there 
which is zeta itself it's uh presently got the   the blue with the fella that looks like 
marshall from how i met your mother   and then click on install that will 
just take a few moments to install and then once that's done 
we're going to click activate all right so that is now our base theme 
installed and because we don't want   any of this stuff here i'd 
like to clean up afterwards so   we click on theme details as we mouse over say 
2019 and then on the right hand side delete   and then okay all right and they will do that for 
all of the themes that we're not using so 2017   delete okay and then again for the 2020 delete 
and okay and if you have anyone in any other   themes in there do the same thing until you get 
presented with just this big fat zeta theme block   all right cool so we'll close that off okay so 
what i really like about zeta is that it has   a whole heap of pre pre-built imports that we can 
use to customize our site straight out of the box   so to install one of those what we want 
to do is go over to the left again to zeta   options which is just under background there and then we've got the import starter site   on the left-hand side and that asks you to install 
the importer plug-in so we'll click on that one   and that will just take a few moments to 
go through all right so once that's done   you'll see the seed library button and the 
the same spot as before click on that one and again if i'm going a bit quick feel free to 
pause go back more than happy to wait for you all right so because we're on a budget   and we want to use a decent theme builder which 
allows us to drag and drop components on around   the website what we're going to do is start 
by filtering the builders down to elementor once that's finished loading we then want to go 
to the free ones you can spend some extra money in   gopro if you like in my opinion for most people 
it's not worth the effort or worse the funds so we can see here we have about 10 or 12 
different options that we can go with for   your site and you can pick absolutely any one of 
these you like and it will work with the rest of   the course it will work with your site and the 
great thing about this kind of stuff is that   if you don't like it later it's 
fairly straightforward to change so have a good look through 
what i'd encourage you to do   is mouse over something you like the 
look of and click the preview button and that will show you what 
it looks like as a site so if you like the theme that's great just 
hit install and install if you're not a fan   close that out and then go and have a look at 
another one and keep going through the themes and   really really take some time with this because it 
is quite important but make sure you're happy with   the components you see on screen with the layout   with the backgrounds because even 
though they're customizable the less   we can play with it the easier it's going to 
be for us and the quicker we'll get this out so i spotted a really nice luscious dark 
looking one down the bottom called the   wine there we go johnny winery now because 
i'm going for rich colors and i'm going for   dark and luxurious feel for the site i'm going to 
use this one because yeah coffee so click on that   i'm very very happy with the layout for this 
one and what it does i think it's it's just   nice i like the transitions i like the the 
backgrounds as well but we will change those   a little bit later too all right so once you 
are happy with the theme you've chosen click   the install plugins button on the top left or the 
one down here doesn't matter does the same thing   all right you can see there it's starting to 
light up the different contact servers or sorry   the different plugins that we need to extend 
wordpress to make it compatible with this theme   so that's elementor was done 
it's now installing woocommerce we won't worry about woocommerce too much at 
this point we do cover it quite extensively   in the master class but right now it's just the 
thing that we need to install okay so once that's   completed you'll know the notice the button change 
to import this site so click on that one next   make sure you have a quick read of 
that and you're happy and then hit ok you'll see there it's starting to import the 
site and import pages and any media it needs   it's worth noting as well this media is not 
licensed so you will need to replace it with   your own photos or with photos that we source 
from a royalty free or stock photo service   which we'll go through in another class so 
that's now just importing the last of it   and that is done so now we 
can click done view site now because we're only using the main 
page at the moment and we don't have   products and we don't necessarily have a map 
organized what we're going to do is quickly   customize this to delete those components   so we'll close that go back to the main service 
there and then go to pages on the left hand side you can see it's installed some pages of 
its own but the main one we're looking at   is wine shop home so you'll see a marker that's 
marked front page and it will also have elementor   it might be marked as home page it might be 
marked as as home or welcome but something   front page-ish and then elemental so once you've 
found that one click the edit with elementor   like uh link i suppose you call it if you get a prompt like this that's okay just hit 
got it we don't need to worry about that right now   and now we're presented with a zoned 
blocked version of the web page that   we were looking at before now each one of 
these little zones each one of these blue   squares that pop up when you mouse over is 
an editable region of the site so what we're   going to do to start with if you have this 
on the front page and you don't necessarily   have to have it but it might be there is find 
the shop block now as mentioned before we don't   have woocommerce at the moment we're not worrying 
about the ecommerce side of things in this course   although we do cover it in the master class so 
what we're going to do is just mouse over and then   on the blue tab top right delete 
section and that's deleted that block   scroll down again and for the map we're going 
to not worry about that for the moment again   so we will just mouse over and 
then delete that section as well okay so that's those two sections deleted   back over to the elementor control 
panel here and then hit update okay so that is done using the little 
hamburger menu on the left hand side click   and then we can view the page and we can see there the shop has been removed 
and the map has been removed   so we don't need to worry about those anymore right now once you're here you can either 
go back and edit the page a bit more by   using the edit with elementor or you can head 
back into the dashboard by mousing over the   name of your site there 
and then clicking dashboard okay big day and that is it for this lesson 
so to summarize today's session we have   looked at any potential problems with your domain 
and ssl certificate and again a quick reminder   that there is information in the description 
below on where to find help to get that resolved   we've set up a permalink structure to give us the 
best possible chance of having a nice clickable   link when we get searched on google and on bing 
and we've also asked google and bing to hold off   indexing our site so that no one can find it while 
it's in beta we've added a base theme to the site   and then cleaned up any unnecessary themes 
to make sure that we don't have unnecessary   clutter and files on the site imported 
a starter theme and did our very first   bit of customization so nice work that's 
pretty cool not bad for a short session   and that's it for this session so thank you very 
much for sticking it out all the way to the end in   the next session we'll be further customizing the 
home page we'll be adding a logo adding some stock   images and telling you how to source stock images 
if you don't have your own as well as tweaking the   text and making the home page a bit more your 
homepage and a bit less templating before you   start the next session please grab a pen and 
paper and jot down your top five things or top   five products that you offer for your your clients 
and we'll use that as the basis to build out some   of the content in the next session thank you very 
much for watching we'll see you in the next lesson

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