A lot of the time technology can get in the way and be a cause of procrastination in getting your videos out there.

Of course the quality will be vastly improved if you start getting into using more high end camera gear but the purpose of this post is to make video creation as quick and painless as possible.

These few simple tips will help you stop overthinking it and start publishing more.

Use your phone camera

It’s safe to assume you have a fairly recent smart phone such as an iPhone or Android device. Anything made in the last 2-3 years or more has a camera good enough to publish in an online video.

By following a few simple principals you can get away without the need to use a digital SLR or complex video system.

3 things to remember

• Good lighting
• Use the rule of thirds
• A tripod or a steady hand

Keeping these 3 simple aspects in mind will ensure you can produce quality looking video.

Having natural light or a couple of lamps pointed at you or your subject will make a huge difference in the quality of your videos.

When lining up your shot on your screen, use the rule of thirds. This means you should have your subject in either the left or right third section of the screen, preferably where the third lines intersect.

If you’re using your device hand held, make sure your hand is steady. If you are able to use a tripod, even better. You can find mobile phone holders to fit on top of a standard tripod on eBay for under $5.

Don’t worry about perfection first go

You’re probably going to need a few takes to get the perfect video. You will be able to trim the clip down later so leave the camera recording while you do a few takes.

If you mess something up:

• Stop, leave the camera rolling
• Take a few breaths, leaving enough time in between for editing
• Start again
• Repeat until you get your best take
• Leave some time at the end for editing

Edit to length on the device

Now you’ve recorded your clip you probably have a few takes.

Most recent model smart phones have the ability to do basic edits to trim the length of your video. Find the section you want and trim it to length. Save is as a new clip just incase you want to refer back to the original.

Different social media platforms allow different length videos. For example Instagram currently allows up to 1 minute of video. Keep this in mind when you’re recording your content and editing it down. You can even edit in Instagram but i find it easier to do it before hand.

There is some powerful software available such as the iMovie app on iOS enabling you to edit separate clips together, add separate audio such as music or overdubs, but for now let’s use a single clip with sound recorded with the phone microphone.

Write an accompanying post with hashtags and upload to social media

By now you should have your video edited to the best take at just the right length ready to upload to social media.

It’s always good to write a short post to describe the video for people who may not automatically decide to watch it. Keep it short and descriptive so that it can be read at a glance.

If you’re uploading to somewhere like Instagram or Facebook you can also use hashtags to enable people to be able to search more easily for relevant topics.

Hashtags should be related to the content of your video. For example if you want people to be able to find the video of you playing a song on guitar you could use hashtags such as #guitar #guitarist #song #songwriter #music and more.

It’s pointless to use unrelated hashtags unless you have a specific reason such as getting more followers on Instagram. In which case you could use some hashtags like #tagsforlikes #spamforlikes. Try not to come across too spammy though.

Now you can post your video and wait for the likes to roll in! 🙂

Next steps

The sky’s the limit when it comes to editing video. The purpose of this post was to give you some ideas on how to make it as quick as easy as possible while producing quality looking content.

Now give it a try! Think of something you want to post, grab your phone and start filming. As with everything practice makes perfect so the more you do it the better you’ll get.

Contact us if you would like help with ideas about creating content for your website

The post Quick and easy way to create quality video for social media appeared first on Abepe.

Providing valuable content for your audience is a sure fire way to increase traffic to your website and form a basis for increased engagement and sales.

Coming up with content on a regular basis can be time consuming and often feels like you can never keep up. Here are some simple things you can keep in mind to help boost your productivity when it comes to creating content.

Be consistent

The number one thing to do is be consistent! It doesn’t matter if you’re creating content every day or once a week, keeping a regular routine will help you to get into the habit of creating content. Set a schedule in your calendar and stick to it.

If it means getting up a little earlier each day, set an alarm and do it. Just make sure you turn up and create something.

The interesting thing i noticed when i started writing every day is that it made me realise things I never would have though of if i hadn’t been getting the words out of my head.

It doesn’t matter if you end up using the content, just create something on a regular basis and the good stuff will follow.

Start simple

You don’t need to write a movie script in a week. It can be as simple as writing down your thoughts in a journal regularly. The act of doing this alone will get the juices flowing and get the thoughts out of your head.

If you’re creating video content don’t get bogged down in the technical minutia of camera gear and lighting. Get your mobile phone out and use that to record a simple video.

This simple act of just getting something done will provide a huge boost to your confidence regardless of whether anyone sees that piece of content.

Start with writing

Everything starts with writing. Anything you can think of from books to movies to podcasts to marketing campaigns starts with some form of writing.

Whether it’s a simple outline of some show notes, an entire movie script, or a sales page. Getting words on paper is going to form the basis for every piece of content you create.

But everything has already been said!

With so much content already on the internet it can be tough to not think it’s all been said before. Yes a lot has been said already, but when you say it in your own unique voice it’s coming form a unique perspective.

Write about what you know

Writing about what you know and being honest will make your content stand out from the rest. Apart from being completely obvious when someone writes about something they know little about, it just making your job harder.

Thinking of things to create content about when you start with topics you know about is much easier and will benefit you and everyone who consumes your content.

Set aside time to brainstorm topics

As well as being regular with creating content, its a great idea to lock in a time and day to focus on coming up with topics to create content about.

Sit down for 10-20 minutes on a Monday morning, put a timer on if you have to, and start listing topics you know a thing or two about. Pretty soon you will have a list of things to write about or create content about.

Start an editorial calendar

The best way to remain consistent is to start a simple editorial calendar with a list of topics you want to create content about with a date next to each one. Having this helps to keep you accountable and as you start to create more often, you will not want to miss those days.

It can be a simple spread sheet with a date column on the left then a column for your topics. Seriously, trust me, once you have a list of topics in a list you will want to get it done.

Take the topics you came up with when you brainstormed and add them to your calendar. Start off with four to six topics and add a date next to each one of them for when you plan to expand on the content for each topic.

When it comes to that date:

• Use your topic as the title
• Expand the topic into 3-5 bullet points to break the topic down further
• Expand on each point.

Don’t worry about grammar or editing your writing, just get the words and ideas out of your head and edit later.

Do this consistently for a week or two and I guarantee you will start to think of things you never would have if you had not started doing this.

To re-cap and get your content on track:

• Be consistent
• Start simple
• Start with writing
• Write about what you know
• Set aside time to brainstorm topics
• Start an editorial calendar

Starting with these 6 simple tips to improve your content creation will be a huge step in the right direction to adding value to your audience and customers.

Doing it consistently will put you head and shoulders above most other people and make you stand out from the rapidly increasing noise on the internet.

Get in touch if you would like some guidance on creating content for your website

The post 6 things you can do to make creating content easier appeared first on Abepe.

SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular tweaking and keeping up to date with the latest methods, but there are a few simple steps you can take yourself to get started with SEO on your WordPress site.

Install an SEO plugin

There are a few SEO plugins available for WordPress and you may already be using one. I use Yoast SEO as it’s actively developed, well supported, and it’s free.

Installing the plugin is done exactly the same way as any WordPress plugin.

Go to Plugins > Add New, search for Yoast SEO and click Install Now then Activate

HOT TIP! It’s a great idea to run a backup and update your WordPress site to the latest version along with all other plugins. Check out THIS POST for more information.

Keeping track of your site stats

One of the most important steps in a good SEO strategy is tracking your website statistics. One of the best ways to do this for free is with Google Analytics.

If you don’t have a Google or Gmail account already, head over to google.com and create one.

• Go to Google Analytics and signup while logged in to your Gmail or Google account
• Create new property using your website domain name
• Copy and paste the Google analytics tracking code into the header of your website

HOT TIP! You can use a plugin like this one to easily add your tracking code to your WordPress site 

More webmaster resources

When used in addition to Google Analytics, Google Search Console is a great way to track your site’s performance.

Go to Google Webmasters and log in to Search Console

• Add a property, choose Website and add your domain name
• Download the HTML file and upload it to the public folder of you hosting
• Verify your domain

Yoast SEO Settings

There are a few steps needed to get your site configured for SEO. Again, there are a whole list of more advanced things you could do to help with SEO, but this is a quick start guide to get you started.

• In WordPress admin go to SEO > Social
• Under the accounts tab add all your social media account URLs
• Under the Facebook tab add the URL to your default Facebook image
  This image will be used if Facebook cannot find any other images. Go to Media and copy and paste the URL of of your existing images
• If you use Pinterest you can add a meta tag to verify your domain

You should do the steps below for every page and post on your website but for now we’ll start with your home page.

• Go to Pages > [your home page]
• Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and click the Edit snippet button
• Edit the SEO title to something with relevant keywords
  This will usually be the same as your page title
• Add some relevant text in the meta description
  This is what will show up in searches as the brief description or excerpt
• Add a focus keyword or keywords
  Yoast SEO will show some analysis below with tips on how you can improve
• Save your page

How will my pages and posts look on Facebook when I share them?

Facebook and other social media sites will pick up on the content making up your pages and posts and grab whatever it can find. The steps above help to give you a little more control over what they see.

You can check what Facebook sees, make changes, then have Facebook refresh to the latest changes by following the steps below.

• Go to the Facebook Debug tool
• Enter your domain name and click the debug button
• Check that the content and image is correct or how you want it to appear when shared on social media
• Click the Scrape Again button if you have made changes to update

You can do this for any page or post on your website. It’s a good idea to check blog posts before sharing to make sure they are displayed how you want them.

Things to remember

There are a few basic principals to remember when publishing search engine friendly content on the internet. Keep in mind the following and make sure:

• Your page and post titles contain keywords that relate to the main topic or are descriptive enough to give visitors an idea of what your content is about
• Your content is original and hasn’t been copied and pasted from somewhere else
  There are some exceptions such as re-using a guest post you have written where you should use a Canonical URL to point to the original post.
• Your images have alt and title tags that relate to the topic in your page or post

Next steps

There are some pretty meaty steps for you to carry out in this post so go back to the top and run through them again.

I’ll say it again, SEO is an ongoing process you could spend a truck load of time on. The steps above will provide a basis to ensure your site is on track to be more easily found by search engines.

Need help with SEO? Get in touch for some guidance on the best strategy.

The post Optimise your website to help get more visitors appeared first on Abepe.

It’s also a good idea to use a secure method to store your passwords. Most modern operating systems include a system to do this or you can use 1Password or Lastpass.

This applies not only to WordPress but for E V E R Y W H E R E you use a password.

Update your username and password

By default it’s not possible to update your username but theres a plugin for that simply called Username Changer.

Install the plugin, change your username to something less obvious then deactivate and delete the plugin.

You should then update your WordPress admin password to something impossible to guess. The latest versions of WordPress include a strong password generator for this.

WordPress security plugins

In the past few years a lot of great security plugins have been popping up due to the large increase in WordPress hacking attempts.

Sucuri is great for scanning for bad code and hardening the parts making up a WordPress installation.

Wordfence is great at detecting suspicious login attempts (basically anyone who isn’t you or someone you know) and blocking them so they cannot get into your website. It also checks everything is up to date and monitors traffic

Both plugins are free and have premium options for more advanced functionality.

Once you have installed these plugins you will need to carry out a few quick steps to set them up.

Sucuri basic setup

You will see a notice “Plugin not fully activated yet. Please generate the free API key to enable audit logging, integrity checking, email alerts and other tools.”

• Click Generate API Key, select your email address and click Proceed
  If you keep seeing the API message, you may need to contact support [at] sucuri.net to have them manually add your site
• Go to Sucuri Security in the left menu
• Go to the Malware Scan tab and click Scan Website
• If everything is clean go to the Hardening tab
• Scroll down and click the Harden button in each row with a red warning*
  * Website Firewall Protection is a paid feature. You don’t absolutely need it but it will add an extra layer of protection to your site.
• Go to your site and refresh to check everything is still working

I’m getting loads of emails!

After some time you might notice you receive a lot of emails alerting you of unsuccessful login attempts. To turn off this email notification go to Sucuri Security > Settings > Alerts [tab] and un-tick “Receive email alerts for failed login attempts (you may receive tons of emails)”.

You can also edit other email alerts from this page.

Wordfence basic setup

• Go to Wordfence in the left menu
• Click Start a Wordfence Scan
  Since you previously updated WordPress and all plugins in the previous post, the scan should be clean
• Scroll down to New Issues and check for anything requiring attention
• If everything has been done and the scan is good you will see a message “Congratulations! No security problems were detected by Wordfence.”

This is by no means a complete guide to setting up WordPress security, but with these steps in place you’ll be on track to avoiding a lot of potential headaches in future.

Next Steps

After you’ve backed up your site, update your WordPress site and all plugins to the latest versions and check everything is working. Install the Sucuri and Wordfence plugins, run scans and carry out the basic setup steps above.

In the next post I’ll be running through a few ways you can increase the performance pf your WordPress site quickly and easily.

The post Securing your WordPress website in under 10 minutes appeared first on Abepe.

Another reason to have a good backup plan in place is sometimes when updating the WordPress core and plugins it’s possible there will be conflicts that can completely break a site.

Having a recent backup, especially one taken right before updating everything can save you a lot of valuable time and hassle as you will be able to just restore your site to the latest backup.

Once you have backups in place and you have made your first full backup of your files and database you can go ahead and update WordPress and plugins. If you don’t have regular backups scheduled, check out this post for guidance.

• Go to the Dashboard > Updates and check for updates
• Update WordPress to the latest version and wait for it to do its thing
• You will be redirected to a page if successful outlining the new version you just updated to

Now you can update the plugins

• Plugins > Update Available tab and tick all the boxes.
• The latest version of WordPress will do the updates right there on the page.

Once everything is updated and you are able to navigate around the admin area as normal open up the front page of your website and navigate around to test if things are working ok.

Most of the time things will go smoothly and everything will be up to date and working just fine. In the rare instances where something has broken or you just see a blank white screen there are a few quick things you can do to get back up and running.

What if my site is broken after updating everything?

The quickest way to get back online is to try and restore to the most recent backup but there are some things you can try first.

Go to the file manager in your hosting control panel and navigate to /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ and rename the plugins folder to something like pluginsx (just something different to plugins). This can help to narrow the issue down to be plugin related.

Refresh your browser and check the site. If it works but is missing some things then you may have an issue with a plugin.

The next step is to rename plugins folder back to plugins then go into the folder and rename each plugin folder to something different e.g. plugin-name-x

Now name each folder back to the original name and refresh the website after each time you rename a plugin folder.

Most of the time you will notice one plugin which, when enabled, causes the site to break. You can leave the problematic plugin folder renamed while you dig a little deeper to find what the issue is.

At least for now your site is working just without the functionality of the problematic plugin.

Hopefully the entire site doesn’t hinge off this plugin but usually if an issue is caused by a plugin it will be well known in the WordPress community and it will be fixed with an update soon.

Next Steps

Backup your site and update WordPress and all plugins to the latest versions.

If everything went well, as it usually does, congratulations! You have just backed up and updated your WordPress site. Nice going!

The post Update your WordPress site and plugins yourself appeared first on Abepe.

You’ve done everything yourself and haven’t spent a cent, but you’ve still spent a lot of time getting to this point so no matter which way you look it you need to have a plan in place to take care of your site.

There has been much talk lately about WordPress security and it seems like every day there’s some new malware or virus out to destroy your website. Most of their time they are computer automated attempts by faceless hackers to try and find the weak points of websites to exploit in the hope they will get lucky.

With a little bit of extra effort you can put steps in place to make it more difficult for these cretins so they will give up trying and move on.

There’s a lot to cover so I’ll break it down into a couple of posts. The overall steps will be:

• Backing up your website
• Keeping your site up to date
• Security precautions and monitoring
• Boosting performance

First things first – Backups!

The first step to take is making sure your website is regularly backed up. Most hosting companies include an automated weekly backup which is great, but I recommend doing your own backups and storing them on a separate server.

As with everything WordPress there are a lot of free and paid options out there. I have tried a lot of different plugins for backing up WordPress and the one I’ve found to be the easiest to use and works the best is Updraft Plus. Their free version should be enough to get started and there is paid version inclduing a few more features, but the free version should be more than enough to take care of your backups.

Updraft Plus enables you to backup to a cloud based remote storage service of your choice such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon and more which makes it an easy way to put a solid backup plan in place.

If for some reason your hosting server goes down and their default backups become unavailable, you will still have access to the remote backups you made which can be transferred to another host if needed. In well over ten years I’ve never had to do that so fingers crossed!

Go into the settings and enter your details to connect it your preferred remote storage location and then set up a backup schedule. I recommend at least weekly backups for most sites, but the more backups you have available the better. I would carry out daily backups at a minimum for e-commerce stores.

You can also set it to only keep a certain number of backups. This way you’re only going to take up a limited amount of space on your remote storage. The chances of a site needing to be restored from a backup and you not noticing for two to four weeks are slim, so this is a good amount of buffer.

You should also be manually monitoring your website regularly so you notice anything strange happening and can catch it before too much time has passed.

Third party services

Another service I have used is ManageWP. It’s designed to manage multiple WordPress sites and comes with a monthly cost for daily backups.

It’s a totally separate system running independently of WordPress which adds another layer of safety.

In addition to backups ManageWP can also handle all of your WordPress updates, security scans and monitoring and includes a performance report. For a single site it might be overkill as it will be another thing to manage, but if you are planning on running multiple sites in future it’s a good option to check out.

Next Steps

Jump into your wordpress admin area and install the Updraft Plus backup plugin or head over to ManageWP and signup for an account.

In the next post I will cover updating WordPress and plugins.

The post Where to start when managing your own WordPress site appeared first on Abepe.

A word of warning!

Use plugins sparingly as they can slow down your site and in some cases make it more vulnerable to being hacked or compromised. For the most part, using well known and frequently developed plugins is perfectly fine.

When you start getting into plugins with lower ratings or less widely used plugins you may start to see issues. WordPress.org has a ratings and review system making it easy to tell if a plugin is going to be a good fit.

Plugins can be used to add anything as simple as a contact form or as complex as an entire shopping cart system and a lot of things in between. There are page builders, events calendars, photo image galleries, YouTube video gallery plugins and much, much more.

At the least I like to start with plugins for backups, a contact form, search engine optimisation (SEO), email list capture form, basic security and something to brand the WordPress login page with your own custom logo.

Getting started

Here are some plugins I recommend using. There are lot of alternate options to these so by all means try some different plugins out to get an idea of what works for you.

• Updraft Plus (WordPress Backups)
• Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms
• Yoast SEO
• Chimpress (Adds a Mailchimp signup form)
• Sucuri (Security monitoring)
• Login Logo (Add a custom logo to your login page)

There are also a lot of premium plugins available requiring a paid license to work on the website. This post was written to help you install a WordPress site as cheaply as possible so i won’t be talking about any premium plugins.

While there are a huge amount of free plugins out there, because of the fact they are free they level of features and support available can vary greatly. Make sure you check the ratings, date the plugin was last updated and make your decision based on what other people are saying.

A general rule of thumb is anything more than a year since last update is possibly (not always) not compatible with the latest version of WordPress and may cause issues. There are exceptions to this rule for some of the more basic plugins but for anything with more advanced functionality I would recommend being careful with this.

Find and install a plugins

• Go to Plugins > Add New
• Use the search field on the right hand side
• Check the ratings and date the plugin was last updated
• Once you have found the plugin you’re looking for click the install button, wait for it to download the files and then click the activate button

Some plugins will add a new menu item to the left hand side and some will only add a link to one of the existing WordPress admin menu items such at Settings.

If you want to try a plugin out to test its functionality, by all means install and activate it and see how it goes. If for some reason you don’t want to use it, simply deactivate and delete it.

Backups

Usually the hosting you chose will provide automated weekly backups which is great if something happens and you need to just get your site back up and running if something breaks.

If you update your website more often than once a week you should have daily backups in place. What if you have posted 5 new blog articles and your site gets hacked? If you only have a weekly backup available and restore your site you will lose all your hard work. With daily backups it’s more likely you will save a lot of heartache.

I recommend doing daily offsite backups to somewhere like Dropbox or Amazon. The Updraft Plus plugin is free and comes with the ability to store backups on your Dropbox account. It’s worth taking the time to set this up for peace of mind.

Contact Form

You could simply add your email address to your website as a way for visitors to contact you but this may open you up to being spammed. One way around this is to add a contact form to your website which can easily be done using a plugin.

Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms both come with a standard contact form installed so you will need to do very little work to get one up and running. Go to the plugin admin area, select the form and copy and paste the short code into your contact page and you should be almost good to go.

You may need to add your email address to the settings so that the form send an email to you. You can test this by using the form on your website.

Search Engine Optimisation

There are a lot of well know plugins to help with SEO on the market and Yoast is one of the forerunners. Their support is amazing and their head developer is active in the WordPress community, always answering questions and helping out. The documentation on their site is some of the best there is for any plugin so I choose to use Yoast.

At a minimum after installing I would link your google webmaster tools account, add on your social media accounts under SEO > Social media, add a custom Facebook Open Graph image and any other specific social media information.

Yoast adds a section to every page and post in the admin area where you can edit the way Google and other search engines see your pages and posts. A lot of the time depending on how your site is set up the default setting will be ok but having the power to control this can be the difference between being found and or not being as easily searchable.

I would definitely recommend taking the time to do some of the tutorials at yoast.com and read through their blog to familiarise yourself with some of the basic principals of SEO.

Email lists

Adding a plugin to make it easy to add a Mailchimp email capture form is a must. Building an audience and email list capture is a huge topic covered a lot elsewhere. Email engagement is still at a high level so it’s crucial you give your visitors the opportunity to subscribe to your email list.

I will get into this more in future posts but creating regular content and keeping in touch regularly with your audience is a huge factor in how engaged with them you will be.

Setting up a Mailchimp account is easy. Go to mailchimp.com and signup then go to Lists create a list.

Using the Chimpress plugin you can easily add a subscribe form to your site. Follow the open screen instructions to get up and running.

Security

In this day and age and with WordPress being such a popular platform, it has also become the target of malicious attackers and other pesky intruders. By default WordPress is only protected by the password you set on your admin area. There are a few plugins to harden you WordPress installation by blocking and detecting login attempts it deems to be from a non-trusted source.

Usually this would be someone trying to log in who isn’t you. This could be an actual person but is usually a bot set up to carry out what is know as brute force attacks. This is when a program will repeatedly try and log in to your site using common usernames and password in the hope it will be able to.

Sucuri is the go to plugin I use to help stop this kind of traffic. I also use Wordfence which is also very popular.

Other useful plugins

There are too many plugins available to talk about here but depending on what you need you should be able to find something to do the job.

Adding icons to link to your social media accounts or to enable people to share your content, an events or gigs calendar page, online store to sell music and merch – almost anything you can imagine can be done with plugins.

Next steps

Login to admin area and install some of the plugins I have talked about above. Have a go at searching for plugin you think might be useful to your site. Make sure you check the rating and the date the plugin was last updated and only install plugins you plan on using. Try some different plugins to get an idea of what works best for you.

The post Add features to your website with no technical knowledge appeared first on Abepe.

Choose a theme and set up your website layout and design

I’m going talk briefly about what a theme is then guide you in how to select a modern WordPress theme and get it set up and looking like a million bucks.

If you’ve been following along with the previous posts you will have a WordPress all set up and ready to go with a basic page structure and a menu in place.

What is a theme?

To put it simply a theme is the thing where the front end design of your website is determined and controlled from.

Everything you installed and configured in the last post is what makes up the foundation of your content management system (CMS) and enables you to add and edit content, and add functionality with plugins.

The theme is what displays your content to the world in a nice looking way.

Finding a current and responsive theme

There are a plethora of places on the internet to find WordPress themes and the amount available is staggering. As with everything I recommend not overthinking this. Themes can be updated or changed in future and you won’t be locked into any one design.

Below is a small selection of places I would start.

• https://wordpress.org/themes/ or right inside the WordPress admin area under Appearance > Themes > Add New. WordPress comes with a couple of themes more than suitable for a basic website and they release a new theme with each major version.
• https://themeforest.net offers a large range of premium themes which usually offer more features and functionality than free themes
• http://studiopress.com a bit more on the high end but the Genesis theme has been around for a long time and boasts a good selection of search engine friendly themes.
• http://elegantthemes.com creators of the popular Divi page builder, Elegant Themes offers a membership with access to all of their themes

Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means if you click through from here and buy a theme or membership I get a cut of any sales to help fund this website at no extra cost to you.

There are a few pre-requisites your theme should have to make life easier both in the initial setup phase and down the track as websites progress. Here are a few things to keep in mind when looking for a theme:

Is it current? Make sure it was initially built by it’s creator in the past 1-2 years or is regularly updated.

What do other people think? Often you will be able to see ratings from other users which will give a good indication of the quality and usability of the theme.

Is it responsive? It should be responsive which means it will work on mobile devices (iPhone, Android Phone), tablets (iPad, Surface Touch) and standard laptop and desktop browsers.

Does it have the options I need? Most modern themes will enable you to be able to update things such as the colour scheme, add a logo and favicon and more, depending on the theme.

If being able to update colours without editing any code is important to you then make sure you choose a theme including this functionality. Try to find a theme utilising the WordPress customizer for this.

Some themes also include the option to easily add social media icons to link to your pages and social sharing functionality with will save a lot of time setting up.

There are many other factors contributing to how good a theme is and how easy it will be to use. Feel free to comment below or in the Facebook group if you have any questions.

Page builders

In recent years the popularity of WordPress page builders has been growing rapidly. Usually they are added to the site as separate plugin and the add the ability to drag and drop content rather than the basic WordPress content editor which is more focused on text and html.

Some of them also enable you do edit the front end so you can see exactly what changes you are making on the site before you save the changes. This is good for more visual people who like to see what changes they’re making before committing them to the live website.

There are a ridiculous amount of page builders available today. Some offer a free version with a paid version for more advanced functionality. Here are a few I have used and recommend.

• Elementor – Free and paid versions.
• Beaver Builder – Free and paid versions.
• Visual Composer – Paid version only. Full of features but has been known to slow down a site’s performance
• Divi – Paid version only. Has been known to make it difficult to switch to a different page builder in future.
• Installing and configuring

Once you’ve selected your theme you can go to your website admin area Appearance > Themes > Add New and either upload the files or if you’ve chosen a theme from right in WordPress, go ahead and click install.

Some themes will add a new menu item but most of the time your theme options will be under Appearance > [theme options] or for more current theme Appearance > Customiser

Adding a logo image and favicon

If you have a logo in an image format you can usually upload it through the theme options or customiser. The best file type for a logo depends on the logo and how big you want it but usually about 600-1000 pixels wide and saved as a transparent png is good. A good theme will have the option to adjust the size.

A favicon is the little square icon in the browser next to the website address. It’s also used when the site is saved as a favourite and increasingly on other devices in all different sizes. A square png at 512px x 512px is usually a good start but it can take some tweaking to get this right.

Small design tweaks

Most modern themes have the option to update your colour scheme from within the time options without changing any code. Every theme is different so you will need to have a look at the theme documentation if it has any to find out where they are. A good place to start is in Appearance > Customiser > Colors or something along those lines.

You may have noticed not once have i mentioned going to the front page of your website to have a look at it! This was intentional as I wanted to show you all the set up stuff before you start worrying about how the website looks.

If you want to have a cheeky sneak peak go to your main domain name and refresh your browser.

Adding pages and posts with images

If you have content ready for your pages you can go back to Pages, select the page you want to edit by clicking on the title and add your content in the content editor.

Depending on the way your theme is set up you can add images to your pages in a few ways.

If the theme has support for thumbnail or featured images you can upload a main image in the Featured image section on the right. You can also place your cursor anywhere in the text and click the Add media button then upload or select an image.

If you’re using a page builder there will most likely be an image block you can drag to where you want it then add an image.

You should now have a website really starting to take shape! Head back to your website address and refresh your browser. If not, go and get building!

In the next post I’m going to touch on plugins and adding extra functionality such as contact forms, shopping carts and pretty much anything you can think of in between. If you can think of it, chances are someone else has or at least something similar.

The post Design your website theme quickly appeared first on Abepe.

This is where the fun really starts! When you hear the words ‘installing’ and ‘configuring’ I wouldn’t be surprised if your eyes glazed over, but once you know how to do this stuff you will want to know more. Trust me!

I’m going to show you how to:

• Install WordPress
• Get it set up and ready for your new website
• Plan for your content and design

You’re going to need website hosting including a database to do all of this which was already covered in this post.

I will try and keep everything as simple and easy as possible, but if I get too technical let me know in the comments below or ask in the Facebook group and I’ll do my best to help out.

There are a lot of different ways to do the steps I’m going to talk about below which you may have found if you’ve been doing any research on this topic before now.

I have tested this method hundreds of times over the years and find it to be the cleanest way to install WordPress without spending too much time learning overly technical skills.

Uploading and installing WordPress

Head over to https://wordpress.org/download/ and download the latest WordPress package to your hard drive.

Once the package has finished downloading you will need to upload it to your hosting. There are a few ways you can do this and I would normally use FTP but the easiest way not involving downloading any new software will be to use the hosting control panel file manager.

1. Login to your hosting control panel and go to the File Manager.
2. Upload the WordPress package .zip file and extract it to the public folder.
3. Make sure all the WordPress files and folders are in the public_html folder.
4. If they’re in a folder named ‘wordpress’ move all the files and folders to the public_html folder.

Now you’re ready to install WordPress!

Go to your domain http://example.com and follow the prompts. You will need to enter the database details you saved when you set up your website hosting. In most cases the database server will be localhost. Use something other than ‘admin’ for the WordPress administrator username.

Once you’re all done and assuming it went smoothly you will be looking at a shiny new WordPress admin dashboard! Woo hoo!

General settings

There’s a bit of housekeeping to be done when you log in for the first time. All of these settings can be changed at a later date but it’s a good idea to get it set up before you start working on anything else.

In the menu on the left hand side got to Settings > General

Check your title is correct and update the tagline. This should be something describing your business in one line so keep it fairly simple. It doesn’t display in all themes so you can leave it blank and update it later if you like.

Scroll down to Timezone and update the drop down menu to your timezone. You can adjust the date and time formats but usually they are ok as is.

You can update the site language to whatever you like at the bottom of the page.

Click the Save Changes button.

Now go to Settings > Permalinks, select ‘Post name’ and click the Save Changes button. This can be updated later but for now it’s the best setting.

Planning your website structure and adding pages

If you haven’t thought about this already you will need to come up with a few pages to start with.

Don’t worry if you don’t have any content right now, you can add new pages, add some filler text or just leave them empty for now.

Go to Pages > Add New, add a page title at the top and some content in the text area underneath. Repeat this process until you have all the pages you need. Don’t worry if you think you might have more pages or the page titles aren’t correct, you can always update them later.

It’s a good idea to paste plain text with only basic paragraphs. Sometimes if you copy and paste text with extra formatting it can mess up the design of your site by pulling in unwanted formatting. On Mac use ‘shift option command v’ to paste without extra formatting.

If you plan on having a blog or news section add a new page with the title Blog (or whatever you would prefer to call your blog section) and leave it empty.

Setting up a menu

Every website needs a menu so visitors can find their way around. WordPress has a built in menu system making it super easy to manage.

Go to Appearance > Menus and click ‘create a new menu’ next to the ‘Select a menu to edit’ drop down. Give the menu a name such as Main Menu and click the Create Menu button.

On the left you will see the new pages you created, tick each page you want to appear in the menu and click the Add to Menu button. You can then drag and drop them into the order you want them in.

You may see an option for Display location. This changes depending on which theme you are using. For now just select Main Menu.

Click the Save Menu button when you’re done.

Setting up a separate home page and blog

By default WordPress displays Posts on the home page. To set a separate home page and blog page go to Settings > Reading, next to ‘Front page displays’ select ‘A static page (select below)’, for the front page select your home page and for the posts page select your blog page. Click the Save Changes button.

By now the back end of your WordPress website should be starting to take shape. Your site is now ready to get started on setting up the front end design and layout using a theme.

In the next post I’m going to talk you through finding a theme and getting it set up.

The post Get your new website up and running quickly appeared first on Abepe.

It’s actually pretty straight forward when you know how it’s done, but there are thousands of providers out there offering the same kind of service so it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

Everyone has an opinion on hosting and they all have valid points. The point of this exercise is to get you set up to host a WordPress site as cheaply and reliably as possible, not to source the best, fastest and most scalable hosting platform.

Register your Domain Name

First of all you need to think of domain such as example.com you can use anything you like, as long as it hasn’t already been registered by someone else.

You can start searching here http://domains.abepe.com.au to narrow it down to a few options. If you know exactly what you want and it’s available, well done!

More often than not, depending on how generic the word/s are in your choice of domain they will be taken, especially the .com version.

You will need to try a few different variations of the words, make up some alternate spellings, add words such as wearebandname.com or locationrecordingstudios.com or something along those lines.

The part after the dot (the TLD) can be any number of different types. Some are supposed to be reserved for different things, such as .org being intended for use with an organisation, generally non-commercial, or .com.au for Australian websites. It’s up to you what you choose but I would recommend going with something relevant to your business.

Now you’ve chosen your domain name you can go ahead and register it. Some domain name providers also offer website hosting so it can be a good idea to keep everything in one place and register both the domain name and website hosting with one company.

Website Hosting

If you’ve decided to go with one of the website builder platforms in the last post, you don’t need to worry about hosting. If you want to get your hands a little dirty and take control read on!

Below are some companies offering both domain name registration and website hosting at competitive prices:

*Disclaimer! While I have used all of these companies at one time or another, I do not specifically recommend one over the other. I have listed them because they are at the cheaper end of the market while still offering decent support. I have included some affiliate links to help support this website.

• crazydomains.com.au
• namecheap.com
• hostgator.com
• godaddy.com

Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means if you click through from here and sign up I get a cut to help fund this website at no extra cost to you.

Website hosting can cost anywhere from $0 a month to $5000 a month and beyond so going into more detail about what different hosting offers is outside the scope of this article.

The cheaper hosting plans offered by these providers are perfectly fine for running a small WordPress site with moderate traffic. Although, being at the cheaper end of the market they do have their limitations.

There are hosting companies offering WordPress specific hosting including extra features to help with ongoing management of your WordPress website. They are also a good option I would highly recommend if you have the budget.

Check out WP Engine for WordPress hosting.

As we’re trying to keep costs down, I recommend using a standard generic website hosting package for now. You should choose a hosting account with at least 1gb of storage space (most will offer a lot more) and at least one MySql database.

Email Addresses

Most hosting plans include email addresses as part of their plans which means you can have yourname@example.com

The email bundled with website hosting should be acceptable in most cases although I like to separate website hosting and email hosting. I use and recommend Google G Suite or Zoho for email as it is a lot more robust solution and completely separates your email from your website hosting.

If for some reason your website hosting goes down and your email is hosted on the same server, you will lose access to email too. If you use a separate email provider this will not be an issue and will also make moving hosting companies in future a lot easier if you need to.

Hosting Setup and Configuration

If you registered your domain name and hosting with the same company, you should not have to change any settings to link the two.

You will need one (1) MySql database to install WordPress:

1. Login in to your newly created hosting control panel and find the section for ‘databases’.
2. Create a new database, user and password and save the details somewhere.

There are a lot of ways you can save this kind of information. It’s up to you to use something secure.

If you decided to use a third party provider for email there are a few extra steps needed to link the two. Follow the steps in the email providers support documentation.

Don’t overthink it

There are many domain and hosting providers out there and the options I listed are a small sample of companies I have used and have had a good experience with. Don’t overthink it or spend hours searching through different prices and specifications.

You might see free options for hosting while searching online. My only advice here is nothing is free and everything comes at a price. Avoid ‘free’ hosting at all costs.

Next Steps

Now you’ve set up a new domain and website hosting with a database it’s time to get WordPress installed and set up!

The post Setting up low cost website hosting for your WordPress site appeared first on Abepe.