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In Part 1 of this series, you saw how to set up hosting using Bluehost (affiliate) and install WordPress.
In this video, you’ll see the fun part – Make a WordPress website! Let’s customize and make your website look pretty. 🙂
How to Make a WordPress Website and Customize it
Pick a Theme
Sign in to your WordPress, and go to your dashboard, and go to Appearance, and click on Themes.
A theme is what determines the overall look or decor of your website. So ones you see on the Themes page are pre-installed themes in your WordPress account. You can click on each one to see how it looks.
Now at the top, find wordpress.org themes, and click on it.
Here you see more themes that you can use for your website. Just click on one you like, see details & preview. Some themes are free, and there are other premium themes as well. Make sure to check the star rating here and get one with good ratings.
For this example, I’ll use this free theme called Vantage. Good rating, and I like the modern look. So I click “install”.
Once it’s installed, click on “Activate”.
Now go back to the home button and click on “Visit Site”, and there you have a new look to your site.
Customize Home Page
Okay, let’s customize this home page, so go back to the dashboard page. Every theme works a little differently from each other, but once you install a theme, look over under “Appearance”. Don’t be afraid to click on a button and see what it’s all about.
For this theme, it gives you a button under “Appearance” called “Home Page”. Click on it.
Here, it basically says this theme works with a plugin to make it easy for you to set up the home page.
A plugin is like an app for your smartphone. There are lots of plugins that you can install onto your WordPress and they try to make your life easier. Let’s look at this plugin for example.
So click on this green button. And click on “Activate Plugin”.
Alright, now let’s go back to Appearance, then Home Page. Click.
Now this page looks different, because now we have a plugin that lets you edit the home page more easily. First, turn this top button on, and save homepage.
It’s really cool, because each box represents an area on the home page. If you open up your site on a new tab, you can see that under the big photo area, there are 3 boxes with circle icons. They are represented in these 3 boxes on this page. And there are 2 more areas underneath.
You can click on the small arrow box that comes with each area and drag it to move the boxes around, save, and refresh the site, and you see the change is reflected right away.
What’s also cool is if you click on this live editor button, you can see the changes you are making right there. So once you like the layout of the boxes, click on the area and you can edit the title and text. Don’t forget to click “Save”.
So here I’ll change the text for the 3 boxes with icons.
There are lots icons to choose from, which is nice. You can take your time and choose what you like. There’s a lot you can customize, but for now, I’ll just add “Learn more” to this “more text” section, and save.
So you can change all the text here the ways you like, and I’ll show you how to connect this button to the correct page you’ll be building in a minute.
Now you must be wondering, how do I change the big picture at the top of the home page?
To change this picture, go to “Appearance”, then “Theme Settings”. Scroll down to the “Home” section, and find this “Home Page Slider”. And again, this theme works with another plugin, so click on “install it”.
Activate plugin, and find this plugin, Meta Slider, on the left bar.
Click on the plus sign, then “Add Slide”. Then you get a pop up window that says “Image”. Here you can drag and drop pictures you want to appear in the picture section. I’m using some photos from Sparkly Belly for this example. Then click “Add to Slider”. Then save.
Now go back to Appearance and Theme Settings, and go to “Home Page Slider” again. Click on the arrow, and you’ll see “Slider: New Slider”. Select it, and scroll down and click “save settings”.
Now go to your site, and ta-da! Your beautiful pictures are up there 🙂 Well, sort of. The photos are a bit cut off. Okay, so here’s how to fix it.
Go back to Meta Slider, and next to your photo, find “crop”. Choose “top center” to show more of the top of the photo. Click on save & preview to see if you like it. Looks better! I do the same for the other photo, save and see how I like it.
Good. Finished.
Create Pages
Let’s make a few pages. In WordPress, a page is a webpage that is very important to the structure of your website, like your About page, Gallery page and Contact page. If you are interested in having a blog, each blog post is created as a post, which I’ll show you in a minute.
Create an About Page
Go to “Pages”.
Click “Add New”.
At the top, type in the title of the page. I’m going to make an About page.
Then type in whatever description you’d like. I’ll just copy and paste the text I prepared.
And hit “Publish”.
One thing to fix now is the permalink. You see right under the title the address for this page. To make your website look professional, we want more descriptive URL than maobellydance.com/?page_id=33. So click on “change permalink”, and it shows how you can automatically format URL.
I recommend you pick “Post Name” for professional looking URLs. Save.
Go back to the edit page, and make sure to click “Update”. And there you have maobellydance.com/about. That’s more like it.
Click “View page”, and you can see your “About” page.
You can follow the same steps if you want to make a page with your lesson schedule or with your service to perform at events.
Create a Contact Page with a Contact Form
Now I’m going to go back to the “Pages” and create another page.
This time I call it “Contact me”.
Type in the text and publish.
Now we want a contact form that your clients can fill out to ask you questions.
To do so, go to Settings, and right click on General and open it in a new tab.
Scroll down to Email Address, and type in the email address you’d like people to send messages to. Click on Save Changes.
Now find a button that says “Forms” on the left, and it’s actually a pre-installed plugin called “Formidable”.
This is a very cool plugin that lets you create forms.
All you need to do is click “add new”, and I’m using their template, so click on “Load Template”. This looks good, I don’t need their website information, so I’ll delete that by clicking the trash can button.
Hit “Create”.
Now go back to the page editor, click on where you want the form to be inserted, and click on this Forms button.
Select the “Contact Us” form we just created. Click on “Insert into post” and “Update”.
Let’s view the page, and there you are, your potential customers can contact you through a professional-looking form.
Create a Gallery Page with photos and videos
As a dancer, your website has to have a gallery page that showcases your work.
So create a new page (by now you should be an expert at this 😉 ), and click on “Add Media” then click on “Upload Files”.
Drag and drop all the photos you want on the gallery page.
Then click on “Create Gallery” at the left.
photo credit: Brendan Lally Photography
Make sure all the photos are selected, and click on “Create a new gallery”.
You can play around with the photo sizes on the right here, I’ll pick medium for now. You can also drag and move around the photos.
Then click on “Insert Gallery” at the bottom right.
Click “Publish”, and view the page.
On your Gallery page, if you click on the individual photo, you can see a larger version.
Now let’s go back to the editing page. Let’s say you have a YouTube video you want to include here.
Then go find your video on YouTube, and under your video, click on “Share”. Then click on “Embed”.
Now you’ll see this code highlighted here. Copy it, go back to the editing page, and click on the “Text” tab here. And paste the code under everything. This “Text” section is where you can type in code to format your content if you know how to. Here’s your first coding.
Hit “Update” and view the page. Now you’ve got your video on your website!
Adding Links on Home Page
Now that we’ve got 3 pages, I want to quickly show you how to add a link to these pages on the home page.
So if you go back to Appearance, then Home Page, you’ll see the page builder again. I’m going back to the second box and click edit.
Here I wrote, “Who is Mao?” and I want people to click on “Learn more” to go to my About page. So I type in the URL for my About page in this More URL box. Click “Done”. And “Save Home Page”.
Now I go to my home page, and click on “Learn More” and it takes me to my About page, just as I wanted. You can do the same for the other boxes on the home page.
Write a Blog Post
If you want to write informative content to attract students or clients, writing blog posts is a good idea. To do so, go to “Posts” and “Add New”.
Now this one is just like creating pages. Be sure to select the “Visual” tab here. Write your text and publish.
And there you have your first blog post!
Now what’s cool about this Vantage Theme is that there is this automatic blog posts slider at the bottom of the home page, and they are automatically linked to your posts.
If you go back to the post editing page, and scroll down to the bottom to see “Featured Image”. Click on “Set featured image” and upload or select your image. Update the post.
Now this picture shows up in the slider on the home page, letting visitors know that you have these cool posts for them to read!
Finally, when you are ready to show this beautiful work to the world, find this banner at the top that says “Your site is currently displaying a “Coming Soon” page. Once you are ready to launch click here.” Great, click.
And now you can go and share your lovely website!
So, this is what you can do to create a beautiful, professional-looking website on your own. As you can see, there are so many things you can change and customize, but there you have the basics of setting up a good-looking website! It’s really not bad if you give it a try. Don’t be afraid to poke around, and if you have questions, there are lots of articles available out there, and you can email me and ask questions. I’ll do my best to answer your questions 🙂
Good luck, and next week, I’ll do a showcase of 3 professional belly dancers and costumer that are using online marketing tools really well. if you want to receive more of the Business of Belly Dance series, sign up for my newsletter below.
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Thanks for reading and keep sparkling!
