How To Make A WordPress Website - 2022 Tutorial for Beginners

Key Takeaways

having a website is an extremely powerful tool and in most industries out there it's pretty much essential so whether you're a business trying to find more customers a fundraiser looking for donors or just making a personal website for fun for a wedding or even for a personal portfolio in this video i'm going to show you step-by-step how to make a beautiful professional website that is not only easy beautiful but also very affordable so we're going to be using wordpress in this video and i'll talk more about that in a second but the first thing i want to say is congratulations on clicking on this tutorial watching this video is the first step to creating your online presence now like i said in this video there's a couple different steps we're going to go through but starting off with the first thing we are using wordpress word wordpress is the same powerful tool that is used by tons of major industries out there from cnn to disney to sony ebay etsy like so many different websites are built on wordpress and the big advantage of this is it doesn't have to be hard to make i'm going to show you guys how to use a drag and drop editor so you don't need to know any code at all you don't need to understand any html you don't have to know what's going on whatsoever all you have to know is that you're able to drag and drop anything you want and you're going to have a beautiful website at the end of this video so there are really four steps in this video the first step is choosing your domain now a domain is going to be what people type in to get to your website so for example facebook.com amazon.com irs.gov wikipedia.org those are all examples of domains and when you type them in and you hit enter it's going to direct you to that website so we'll talk about that in a second but the second step is actually getting hosting so i mentioned that we're building this website on something called wordpress now you could think of wordpress like microsoft word it's a way of making a document or in this case making a website but you still need somewhere to save the website you can't just save it on your own computer because sometimes you turn your computer off so what we do is we get something called a host now your host is going to be a just a big bank of computers that are on 24 hours a day seven days a week and your website is saved on that so when somebody types in your domain they're directed to your website and they're able to see everything you have there now the third step in this video is going to be the majority of this video and this is actually customizing our website i mentioned before that this is a really easy thing to do and we will actually be able to import an entire website so we have all the pages all of the images the text everything we need already laid out it's a big template it's easy to use and then from there on we can actually go in and customize anything we want we can change images add videos add buttons and links you can change the background you can add blank pages like you can really do anything you want and like i said we're gonna spend a large portion of this video talking about how to customize that and then the fourth step is actually just publishing your website so it's out there and people can actually start accessing your website now with that being said guys the first step is actually to go down the first link in the description so the first link below the like button is going to be how we're getting started here so if you guys want to scroll down and copy and paste that into a new tab or just click on it it should open in a new tab and we'll be getting going from there okay so here we are on my desktop and the first thing you want to do like i said is go on down and click the first link below the like button it'll be the top of the description and we should also be able to instead just type it into our browser if that's easier for you and this is just going to make sure that we all start at the same page have the same exact steps for this tutorial and on top of that make sure we all get the same discount i'm going to show you guys you're getting 90 off when you do this so you're getting web hosting and a free domain it's really a good deal which is why one of the reasons of course we recommend hosting here it's as low as one dollar per month and it really performs exceptionally well especially for that price so when we go to start now you'll see that we have a couple tabs on the top now if you end up on online store or something like that just head on back to web hosting that's what we're looking for in this video and you have three options here so the cheapest one is very tempting and for some people this is exactly what you want especially if it's like a personal portfolio or something small a project maybe this is definitely a great option now for a lot of other people if you're looking for some extra storage or some extra monthly visits these are definitely some big advantages when moving up to the middle one the premium one here and of course like i said you come with it comes with a free domain google ads credit unlimited bandwidth like you get a lot of benefits with this one where again i i really recommend this for most people out there but if you're really looking to push it you could also upgrade to uh i mean even more 100 000 monthly visits and you know some other significant benefits down there but like i said for this video i'm going to choose this one really no matter which one you choose it will be exactly the same throughout this tutorial with the exception of getting the free domain which you will not have on the cheapest one so we're going to add this to cart so then it's going to bring you to this page here and you have four different options for how long you want your hosting to be prepaid and so when you're checking out right now you can just pay for one month and it's going to be 10 obviously per month it's going to be very expensive renewing at 11 per month and we can instead go to a longer one obviously the longer you subscribe the more money you're saving and also when it renews it also renews at a lower price so please note that these are introductory prices once you renew it's typically a little bit more expensive which is why a lot of times it makes the most sense to just go as long as possible so you can see that it's ten dollars for one month it's uh seven it's forty three dollars or seventy one dollars sorry it's seventy one dollars for one year and then as we go to two years it's only an extra 25 dollars and then actually four years is even cheaper than two years so there's really no reason to ever get uh two years at a time just save five dollars and get four years and that's what i'm gonna do in this video right now so as we go down we have to create our account so i'm going to sign up with my email and of course you can just sign in with google if that's easier for you guys and in fact maybe i will do that right now so we're just going to click on that say yes we want to sign in with google and it makes things very easy in the future just connected to your gmail account you can connect it to facebook whatever account you like to use the most and so as we scroll down another benefit i forgot to mention before is we actually do have a discount code for you so if we click on yes we have a code you can just type in santrell central and it goes from 90 down to 81 dollars so saving 10 percent right there that's one of the best codes out there as well so you're going down to less than like a dollar it's a dollar 70 per month it's really hard to beat that price for hosting so as we go down we can type in our credit card i'm going to do that right now i'm not going to show you my credit card obviously but we'll hit submit secure payment and i'll see you on the next page all right so then we end up on this page here and we will just click on start now so the next page wants to know what the name of our website is which is going to be the same as the domain so for example amazon is amazon.com facebook is facebook.com and so we have three options here we can buy a new domain although it comes with a free one so i wouldn't do that and we can also use an existing one so if you already have a domain that you bought on godaddy or google domains or whatever else out there you could do that over there so we i selected this one here we're going to claim our free domain and then down here we can choose whatever we want so if we want this to be uh mike or we want this to be central central tutorial website dot com you can choose dot online dot com whatever i'm just gonna type in dot com that's what we want so we'll select that and we will search for this and see what it allows for this one sometimes we might have to choose something else but it looks like that is available right now so santrel tutorialwebsite.com i am going to say continue and it's going to ask us what we want to do so we can migrate a website if you have one we're not interested in that we're going to build a new website and here again a lot of other options but wordpress is by far the best way to do this so we are going to be selecting wordpress here now keep in mind if you're interested in using woocommerce you can do that now or we can actually add that later and it's just as easy to do now here we have to create our wordpress account definitely do not forget this because you'll be using this to sign into your wordpress account anytime you go to the dashboard to add a new blog or edit your website or really do anything out there this is going to be your new password pretty much from now on so i'm going to sure let's use a strong password and we are going to continue and then down here it's going to ask what template we want what theme we want i'm going to skip this we don't need a template right now i'll show you how to do that in a better way later on now here before we finish the setup one quick thing you want to notice is actually the chosen location so if you think your audience is going to be somewhere else in the world this is where you'd want to change that just to make sure that your servers are as close to your audience as possible to give them the best load time available so north america is where i am that's where my audience most likely would be and so i'm going to finish setup with that of course you could click the little pencil and change it if you thought it was going to be another location so then it takes a couple minutes here to initialize setup something really great about hosting here again is that it automatically installs wordpress gets everything set up for you and it's really a seamless process that is exceptionally easy so we're actually that was less than three minutes it looks like we're already done but we're going to say select some details here sure it's a primary one or is it for a company we're going to say it's personal my personal website we will say next and it wants to know a couple details about me so i'm just going to type this in and click finish registration and then of course the website is registered now one of the benefits that you might want to consider of getting your own domain somewhere else is that you have a little bit more control over migrating your domain setting up a gmail like you have a lot of other things you could do including things like more security with that now with that being said getting it through hosting here is not a bad option for a lot of people all right so now we have a choice here we can manage our wordpress website or we can go to the control panel so the first thing i want to do is go over to the control panel we'll click on the right side here opens in a new tab so we can actually do both if we want but starting off in the control panel we have some options down here so we can go and edit our website that is going to bring us to the wordpress dashboard essentially exactly where the other link would have taken us so we'll get there in a second anyway but as we go down here there's a couple things we want to keep an eye on first of all let's get rid of the little notification there we want to make sure that we have the latest version of the php so we can say update that and the latest right now looks like 7.4 and we are going to save that you definitely want to make sure you're doing this because i actually at one point a couple years ago had a website that i just forgot to update this for a while and then one day i went on and i realized that my website had been completely down for two days which meant i lost a lot of affiliate conversions i lost a lot of traffic there was a lot of problems so definitely make sure you keep your php up to date something else we want to do is make sure that lightspeed is active right here this is going to increase the load speed or really improve the load speed of your website which effectively helps you rank higher in google and pretty much everybody wants to rank higher in google other than that there's really not a whole lot of other things we want to talk about here we can talk about having your ssl which will be right here ssl certificate we will go and set that up actually so let's say install ssl that way you can see like for example right here on hostinger they have a little lock icon saying that it is secure if you're on google chrome it's somewhere over here it's secure and you want to make sure that you have that on your website so right now it's automatically being installed and so we're good it looks like it's going to do this and it's ready to go so we're going to say close now other than that we have some options here if you want a daily backup you'd pay one dollar per month daily backup is a nice thing to have in case something goes wrong with your website you can just roll back to a previous version i'm not going to do that in this tutorial feeling risky we're just going to go with what we have now we can actually go to edit our website which is going to take us to the wordpress dashboard although there's one other step we want to do before we click on that and let's head back over to your email and you should have an email saying please verify your email address so go there click on the link to verify your email address and say yes we want to verify the email now okay so now that i confirmed my email address we should be able to go to edit website right here and that should redirect us to wordpress our wordpress dashboard in fact which is behind the scenes everything we'll need to know when we're editing our website now i'm going to get into everything you need to know here what these things do but first things first you can see our actual website by clicking on the top so when we hover over this we can say visit site and that'll bring us to this you see that's exactly what our website looks like obviously very bare right now but it is live it's a website out there that anybody could go to something else to note is it currently says not secure because the ssl has not yet been installed we told it to do that and it's going to automatically do that very shortly so we're going to close out of this tab and sorry i really did not want to close out of that tab we want to go back sorry let's go back to edit the website here we are back in the dashboard um and so in the dashboard we have a lot of things on the left side but let's first go down here and start deleting the the stuff that we don't want so if we go to all posts we can select this one and click on trash and that is going to get rid of that just by default they give you a lot of things that you really don't need if we go down to pages again we have two more pages that are to sample pages select all of them bulk actions move to trash again click apply and i believe the same thing we want to do that with appearance if we have any themes down here looks like we have a couple themes we don't need those but regardless what i want to do right now is go to add new and in add new we want to type in astra astra astra and then here we have astra so we can go and install astra and this is going to be a theme this is a theme that a lot of people use obviously there's tons and tons and tons of different themes after is a really great one because it works very well with a lot of different designs a lot of styles you have a lot of freedom with this and i'm going to show you how you can actually use elementor in this to make it a really nice easy drag and drop editor so now we'll click activate and it's going to create this it's going to make this as our theme you should see a banner right up here that says thank you for installing astra if we click on get started it'll activate that and it'll bring us over to the next page where we will have the option to start adding a predefined template so a page builder first of all something we want to select i know i'm talking kind of fast but you have a couple options for your page builder elementor is the one we use there's obviously these other three are very popular as well beaver is a really big one but elementor out of all of these is definitely the biggest one the most common one from my experience and also probably the easiest to use so if we click on elementor it brings us into this option here where we have we can choose any one of these websites and it'll just be a pre-loaded template everything on there and it's really easy to customize and you can customize anything you want but let's go to the top and instead of searching all let's instead click the drop down and maybe we just want the free ones so let's go to just the free ones here and anything here anyone that you want is going to be completely free and you can look at them and and change anything you want about any one of these but choosing one that's similar to what you're interested in actually like having on your final website is a great way to get started here so the less you have to change obviously the more work you're saving yourself and the better your website looks with almost no effort at all so out of all of these let's go down and say that uh i don't know which one looks interesting to you guys maybe this one's kind of interesting i actually kind of like this one as well personally this one's catching my eye and this one is catching my eye so i think that i really like the little graphics here i'm not sure how i would duplicate those graphics this one i think is a lot easier to duplicate those little icons there and you also have a really nice color scheme i really like the idea of this one so let's go with this one right now and obviously when you click on it it's going to show you each individual page it comes with a home page an about page services everything like that and we're going to import the complete site this will definitely take a minute to do that and we can delete the previously imported site um so we can find that if you want it's going to delete all the data from the previous site so old pages stuff like that if you want to get rid of that you can you don't have to delete the old site if you don't want so you know what for this video i already deleted everything so we don't have anything to lose here i'm just going to say import as it is so import and it definitely takes a second because we are installing elementor so it's a really easy way to get the plugin just by default it's automatically going to be installed and again i'll show you how to use that later on in the video and then it says it's ready to go so we can go and click on visit site and it's obviously going to open a new tab and show us the entire website so in just a matter of minutes we've already made or imported an entire website actually i didn't realize it had that really cool parallax effect i really like that even more now and as you go down you see that obviously we can customize everything about this but it already looks really good we have little shadows showing up behind these when you hover there's tons and tons of stuff that saves you so much work all of these nice little animation there and this website really looks great considering it's free and we haven't paid for anything except our hosting so far so once you get here we can go to edit with elementor you'll see that on the top and so if you click on that it'll bring you into the editor for this page and so once you're in the editor we'll talk more about everything you can do here in a second but essentially you're able to do you customize anything double click on this and you can change uh whatever the text says you can also click on the pencil icon and change all kinds of stuff the formatting of it if it's right aligned left aligned lots and lots of stuff like that and so as we go down you'll see that there are quite a few things we can change i'll talk about how this is structured and how to make a new page in general but i don't want to get quite into the little details of this just yet so let's start off back over on the wordpress dashboard so from here we can click on the three little bars and go down to exit to dashboard it'll bring us back to our wordpress dashboard let's get out of that click on the wordpress logo and from the wordpress dashboard the first thing i want to do is actually talk about what pages we want on our website so right now it came with these pages but let's say maybe we don't want a gallery page if you don't want a gallery page you could click trash or you could maybe repurpose that and make it a different page by renaming it but i'm going to put this one in the trash we don't need that one and maybe instead we want to have another one that is going to be a privacy policy so i can go and add new and adding a new page we can do it you know completely from scratch i'll say edit with elementor and this page is just going to be our privacy policy in my opinion starting with a blank page is a really easy way to experiment with elementor and start to learn how it works so i recommend you do this as well even if you end up deleting the page in the long run but like i said it could save you some time if you don't end up breaking other pages so i want to show you guys how you can do things right here and the first thing is if you wanted a full-blown page you could click on this little icon here so this will be allowing you to import entire templates for the page and in many ways this could be you know really really useful you kind of want to stick with the same theme though so if you remember what theme you used you could go down and find one of those pages it's really no different than duplicating a different page and i can show you that later on in the video but like i said let's start off with a blank one here and start figuring out how this actually works so the way it works is with different sections we have one section right here that has nothing in it yet that's what the dotted line is showing and we can click any one of these elements here and drag it over into there so let's say we start with the heading and we will just drop it right there and this heading if we double click on it and then say control a we can name this heading whatever we want so we are going to call this privacy policy privacy policy and that is our heading now you see it's outlined in blue here when i hover that is the new section so we have the entire section outlined there and another you know blank section down here if we want to add elements there now this is a single column as you can see on the left side this little icon here showing us that it is a single column so there are three tiers here you have the section the column and then the element within that so the section is outlined with this little bar right here the column is outlined with this little gray dotted line and then the element has this little pencil to show you where that is there now you can click on any one of those to edit that one so click on this edit the column click on the pencil to edit the text in the middle or of course just double click on the text and you're editing that as it is now if we want this to be let's say centered we can click on the pencil icon we can go to style and we can actually choose or sorry not style it was within content on the bottom we can go to center we can also choose maybe this is a primary header which it obviously is so h1 makes sense for this we can change the size of it we can make it extra large which it already was we can go to default which is going to be larger for this page and we can change things in style if you want to change the color if you want to change the font i don't recommend changing the font too much here it's easier to do that across your entire website by changing the font for your whole theme now we can go to advanced and you can change all kinds of stuff that i'll show you later on with other things because margin and padding are relatively hard to see with text like this so if we go back to the little grid icon there we can start adding some other stuff let's say below this we want to add a short little maybe a little thing we'll say text editor we can add that to the same section here and when you hover you can put it above or below you cannot put it on the left or the right though and i'll show you how you can actually do that using a slightly different method in a second but adding it directly below is going to allow us to say uh what our privacy policy is so it's going to be maybe a subtitle we could say this section outlines our privacy policy obviously that's redundant but i'm just showing you guys where you can add text so again here we want to make this centered so we can uh maybe change let's close that uh see this is why i thought the title was going to be in the center so for a little text editor you have to go to style to make this one centered and again you can change all the same stuff with this one now if we want to use a different section we can either drag stuff down here or we can click on the little plus icon so if we click on plus you can choose how you want this section to be laid out and this is going to allow you to have more than just one column so if we want to have say two columns or three columns let's say let's say three columns now we have three columns here as you can see outlined in the gray boxes and if we hover between them we get this little icon and we can drag and readjust the size of these now this is a great way to make a narrower website if you want your website to have a buffer on either side and you want it to be narrow like this that's a great way to do that you could also instead make it obviously three different columns and just have things items in each column so let's do that for now and we want to say that click on the little grid icon maybe we want an image on one side we want an image over here and maybe we want another image in the middle let's just put three images across the board here so images click and drag them and the images end up there and we can click and drag these to make sure they're all approximately the same size so it looks like maybe like right around there is going to give us what we want something like that and now we so again we have three columns as you can you guys can really start to see this stuff but if we click on the grid we'll go down and we'll add a little title below them so if we hover below them we can add a title and then below that let's just say we want to add an intersection so or not intersection we want to add a text editor and now you can see i accidentally i put down the wrong spot so if we click on the pencil you can click and drag it to wherever you want and so this is a great way to start building your page just start dragging things around and you'll see that a lot of this stuff is really easy to edit you can click and drag it anywhere you want by clicking on the pencil icon or click and hold and drag it to anywhere on the entire page now something that i accidentally did click on that you guys saw right there was the intersection so if we want to have a subsection so right here if we want two columns below that we can easily drop that right there so now we have uh in this main column we have two sub columns and we can add again in there whatever we want we can add a little video in there it's going to be really tiny but regardless that's how you can do stuff like that and you can also resize this as well so if we want to go and change the section we can change the width right there and do whatever we want now if for one reason or another you really like this section you can click on the top and the three little dots or the six dots rather and if you right click on that you can duplicate the section and so duplicating that obviously here is going to give you exactly the same thing and that's maybe exactly what you're looking for now we can do more than just that though we can change a lot with this section so if we click on the little array you can go and change maybe like the background for example so if we go to style we can say the background right now is not showing anything but we can go and make that a classic one we can make it a video we could make it a video from youtube it could be a slideshow it could be a gradient and so for now let's just make this some kind of image let's see if we can find an image for the background so if we go to classic click on image we will select files to upload it looks like i have some from a previous example of a coffee shop so we're going to use this one right here that's going to be our new background we're going to import the media and it doesn't look good it looks tiled it looks not exact exactly what i did not want to happen so we can change this by going to the position and we can keep it in the center so let's say center center is where we want it we want it to be a it could be scroll or fix we're not going to do that we could have no repeat anywhere and that's going to be in the middle and of course the size we could just have it to go auto and that's not really going to do what we want cover is going to span across the entire thing or we could go to contain if you wanted to be as large as possible without leaving any borders cut off so in this situation i wanted to go to cover it's not looking great but we could do a lot of other things on top of here so we can add a background overlay which means we can add either a color or maybe a gradient on the back to make it not look like a standard image it's going to be easier to read your text then so let's go and add a gradient now the gradient for this one we could have the first color uh let's say the first color is white so we'll go and click on white as you can see here and that's actually more like a pink let's go why is that not white i want white okay whatever that's close enough and we're going to say that's maybe the location of that one sliding down here a little bit and then the next color i think you guys get the idea of how gradient works i'm not going to get into this too much but you'll see that you can change how this gradient is set up by sliding these things and you can change the direction of it if you want it to be a radial one it's obviously going to be circular then or a linear one and the linear one you can change the angle by sliding this so if we want it to be maybe like that there and of course change the opacity to make it as visible as you want it to so you can see the background image and also read your text in the most optimal way possible now of course if that's not enough for you you can also go up here and go to some advanced settings we can add some margins and padding so when we're talking about a section margin is going to add space on the outside above and below it and it's not going to stretch out this section but padding on the other hand will do that so if we click up on padding it's going to make it larger on the top and the bottom and also the right and left side if we click on the link it'll actually unlink these so we can change the right and left we don't necessarily want padding on the left or the right side we still want this to be centered without being smashed in too much but we could make these let's say like 150 above and 150 below that way you just have more image space above and below that to spread things out a little bit so it's not cramped like it was now that's something that maybe it doesn't necessarily work with this right here but with an image background a lot of times that's exactly what you're looking for so then let's say the next section down here we want this to be uh maybe just a big video we just want this to be a whole video or just white space whatever you're doing we're going to make this a single column we can go back to this and we just want to add a spacer so a spacer is a great way to just kind of fill this out and it's not going to do anything but if we make this larger you'll see right now we have kind of a big canvas to work on now if we added an image into this column the image is going to be limited to the width of the column but if we add a spacer we can change the background and make that the image or otherwise make it a video or whatever you're looking for and it's going to span the entire width of the screen so for this background what i want to do is click on the little array of six dots we can go to style and we can go to the background type click on classic click on image and let's say we want this image right here so we're going to insert the media and just like we did before we want it to not repeat and we want it to cover the entire space so that is not oriented exactly where i want it to maybe i can make this slightly smaller and we can reposition this so we can center or top center move it around a little bit maybe bottom center center center yeah that's closer to what i want i think you guys get the idea of how you can do this this is not the best image for that i thought it would be better but maybe if you had the spacer was slightly larger just like that you can have a picture that is just doing nothing on your website other than being a picture and essentially acting like a spacer similarly videos would work well whatever you're doing here works well so let's quickly talk about some of the other elements we have here and i think you guys kind of get the idea of essentially how elementor works we're going to get back to actually editing our website in a second but again this is just kind of a little side note showing you guys how this works so spacers just kind of go between elements so if we wanted a spacer to move the video down spacer click and drag and i'm sorry click and drag and it's going to add space there self-explanatory it really it makes sense now if we go back to the array we have we can add icons google maps those are self-explanatory a divider is just going to be a bar or you can really make it a dotted line whatever you're looking for that is going to obviously be a divider if we get elementor pro there's a lot of other stuff we can get and so elementor pro is something that i mean i recommend considering upgrading to that on a lot of websites i've built i've used elementor pro because it gives you cool things like some forms some things to link to your blog posts navigational menu things animated headlines a lot of stuff that is more you know exciting for your website to use a countdown timer uh facebook button lots of things like that so if you want to ever upgrade to that what you want to do is open a new tab and go to central media.com elementor and that'll bring you to here and you'll just go and pay for that i believe it's a one-time payment maybe it's a yearly payment let's go to pricing is a yearly payment for this one 49 per year for personal and obviously you get lots of widgets lots of templates and a lot of other functionality that as you start growing your website it becomes more and more useful so once you're making a profit on your website it's one of the first things i recommend upgrading and it's something again that i've been using for a while but regardless the free version works well when you're starting out and we have a lot of other things down here so i mean experiment with these if you're interested in like a progress bar we can add a progress bar it's going to show maybe for a resume this would be a great example it's like my skill what you're at for that one and there's a lot of other things like that but really when you get down to the bottom you start getting back to some other kind of different things that are not especially useful but sound cloud short code short code is really going to be if you have any kind of third party thing a third party app that you want to add into here you're going to use short code for that you can have anchors sidebars lots of stuff like that again experiment with this on your own time but you get the idea of how things really work when you're done if you like this page which obviously this page looks like crap but if you did like you you would go down and say publish you could also click on the little up icon save it as a draft and it's going to be saved as a draft that's obviously not published so nobody else can see it except for you so let's close out of this one it'll bring us back to one of our other pages here on the dashboard so from our dashboard if we click on dashboard on the top i want to talk about what we're actually dealing with here and then i'm going to get into how to edit the website we already have using elementor so first things first on on the top you'll have a little updates icon or updates tab and if you go to updates you'll see that we have some things that we can do we can update some other themes these are completely irrelevant because we're not using these themes but regardless you usually want to go through to see your plugins and your themes and just say update themes it's going to update everything a lot of times updates come maybe once a week every other week whatever and it's good to keep things up to date it's going to be improving little security things uh functionality things making sure everything works properly on your website and obviously it doesn't cost you anything other than like a minute or two to do that definitely make sure you keep things up to date post is going to be things that you release as a blog post this is not going to be like your home page it's not your privacy policy uh these are going to be things that if you release an article that is going to be how to make coffee in you know 10 minutes that would be a post that you would make right here and the good thing is creating a post if we say add new is very similar to making any other page if we go to edit with elementor you'll see that it looks almost exactly the same we can use templates for this one as well and it makes things a lot faster but regardless i'm not going to go through this because editing a post is almost exactly the same as editing a page so i'm going to close out of this i should not have closed out of that let's go back to our wordpress dashboard again if you end up wondering how to get to your wordpress dashboard you can always do it from your hosting your dashboard here and you go down to edit website it'll bring you to your wordpress dashboard continuing down media is not something that important or at least not right now this is going to be when you're editing your website all the pictures that you have uploaded and it's being saved on your site these are the ones available so from here it's not really that exciting i'm not going to do anything with this one you could delete them if you want but regardless we're just keeping the template ones pages like i said is going to be uh your about page your contact us page home all the stuff that is going to be on your navigation menu and i'll show you exactly what navigation looks like in a second but mostly these are going to be your main pages comments i usually disable these but people can comment on articles or on your posts up there and your comments will show up here so if you see spam comments you can filter them here you can delete them and you can respond to them do whatever you need to do from here from elementor you have some settings i'm not going to go into the settings for that because there's really not a whole lot you need to change when you're starting templates is something that is really cool again one of the reasons that it's helpful to upgrade to elementor pro is that you can make templates in a template it would essentially be so let me show you an example here so if we go to centralmedia.com [Music] like just regular centralmedia.com and we go to maybe like shopify versus bigcommerce you'll see right here this is part of a template so we have our article all down here this is our normal article but at the top this whole thing we have saved as a template so we can apply this to every single article we make and it saves us a lot of time so we don't go and remake this every single time obviously we customize it for each template but regardless it's going to be something that when you're writing articles if you think there's going to be something similar on the top for every single one you can save it as a template like i said this one we technically customize every time but it's from a base template that we just kind of duplicate very easy to do saves us a ton of time so templates are great for articles or really anything else you want pop-ups stuff like that and pop-ups you can also again do a lot more with that when you go pro with elementor going down wordpress forms that's a plugin you might see some different plugins here if you start adding more and so the side the dashboard is going to look a little different going to appearance this is where you can customize your theme i'm not going to do that right now either because the theme we have i think looks just fine the plugins though this is really where you start to get a lot of functionality on your website we have a lot of things that already it came with a lot of things an anti anti-spam thing uh wordpress migration a lot of other things lightspeed cache lots of stuff here so you can go through and if you decide that you don't want something like you don't need the wordpress migration you can just click on that and go to move it to the trash so we'll go to first you have to deactivate it and then you can delete it now i don't really care about that right now so i'm not going to do that at this moment but we can go and add some other ones so if we go to add new you'll see there are a ton of different different things we can add and you want to be careful that things don't conflict so if we have jetpack and we have something else that does the same exact thing as jetpack it's going to slow down your website it's not going to be worth it to have both of those and you're going to run into problems but regardless if you're ever wondering how to add functionality to your website in most situations it's going to be with a plug-in so if you want to capture emails just go on over here find a way to capture emails and you can just add that plug-in if you want to add a little free quiz again if you just want to say like for example like quiz there's probably going to be some kind of plug-in that can give you a quiz right here quiz and survey master stuff like that so a lot of stuff you can add to your website again i'm not going to dive into those too much in this website or in this tutorial so going down to users this is where you can add other people so if i want to add somebody right now we can add somebody that is sorry let's get rid of this thing i really don't want that on the top so we can add a new user and we can give them a username email and they can be a subscriber they can be a contributor they can be an author they can be an editor or they can be an admin obviously be careful who's going to be an admin for your site because they could do really whatever they want on there now i'm not going to add users at the second but if we go down to settings that's really the next thing i want to talk about in settings we have a lot of options here the first thing is the website title so the website title we actually want this to be something that looks a little better than that so we're going to say central media tutorials and then our tagline can be we teach you how to make a website and our url i'm not going to change that i'm not going to change that you don't want to break your website that's a real fast track to breaking your website but going down the the default everyone's going to be subscriber yes we can change the date format the time format looks fine to me uh weekday starts on monday sure we're going to save changes for this one and then we can go down to writing so writing is really not going to do a whole lot here but it's going to say by default you can add like so we'll talk about categories categories in a second but if you want by default all of your articles to go to a single category you can choose that right here and then your post format again you can choose uh here as well so i'm not changing anything else here going down to reading nothing we want to change here discussion looks fine to me media is again nothing to nothing to worry about here but permalinks is something that we should be changing so permalinks means that every page of our website is going to be set up like this so centralwebsite.com questionp equals i don't want to do that so instead i think what we want to do is go down to something like this the post name so if we make an article that is how to make coffee then this will be santrelltutorialwebsite.com how to make coffee and i think that's a really easy convenient way to have your website set up so people can navigate google can effectively identify websites or pages on your website and overall it's going to make your website just better in general so that's usually what i go with the post name one and we definitely want to save changes on that and other than that there's nothing else in settings we really need to change so what i was showing you guys was actually how to make categories uh and categories are right up here in post so if we hover over post you'll see that this shows up if we go to categories right now there's just an unnamed category or uncategorized category uh which means that everything by default is being thrown into that so if we want to make a new category let's say that we are a clothing company we can make a category that is a bunch of posts that are related to shoes we can make another category about t-shirts or maybe on the other hand if you're making a blog about recipes you're cooking right you can make a category on like desserts one on entrees whatever you want to do i think you get the idea of how you would make different categories again very easy to do you just need a name the slug is essentially going to be what comes after your domain so centralmediatutorials.com or centraltutorialwebsite.com what and that's going to be the slug so website dot centraltutorialwebsite.com slash recipes and that's going to be this category if you have a parent category you can add that here usually you don't need that and then of course the description as well so that google can identify what that is and other people can identify that as well so i think that's pretty much everything i want to show you in the dashboard it's really easy to set that stuff up but now let's actually go back and start editing our website just a little bit more so if we go down to pages go to all pages and it's going to show us this right here now if we want to edit say the home page for example we can go down here and click edit with elementor when you're editing with elementor like i showed you before we have all the tools on the left side here and the first thing you want to do is kind of try to figure out what they did for each section so on the top you can see we have the parallax image and really what i suspect they did before we click on this is they have the entire section they have a background image on the section that you can see because it stretches from the side all the way to the other side down here they have a lower border on that section that's a setting that i actually didn't show you guys but it's a cool thing you can do you can add borders on there and so this one obviously has a radius and it looks like we have probably two columns here on the right we have everything left justified all of our text and then here looks like it's probably just a spacer we can find out for sure now if we actually start clicking on stuff so here it looks like this actually might be it actually might all be one column but just all right justified i would have made this as two columns but you could do it however you want as we go down you can see this one's definitely three columns we have a column here in each one we have a little icon then we have some text icon and some text icon some text so really easy to customize whatever you want with this one so we can go and like double click on that we can edit that it actually looks like so we chose our icon sure and everything through here i mean it's going to be really easy to customize this stuff you just double click on it you say i don't want this image and you change it to whatever you know any other image you want so let's say find this image and that's our new image we can go down here and we'll see that this right here these little animations are just animating whatever text you want so we can have the ending number and whatever text below that to say like you know angry people angry customers and we can have this duration is going to be sure that length and we can have this go up to 12 mill