Learn how to setup a form (contact form or lead capture form). You’ll learn how to install, configure and insert the WordPress form plugin into your website.

content coming soon.

WordPress Plugins

You can read about the plugins in this video here, but its best just to install them directly from the plugin installer as shown in the video:

• Contact Form 7
• Really Simple CAPTCHA

An basic introduction to WordPress plugins, and how to install WordPress plugins on your website.

content coming soon.

WordPress Plugins

A couple good places to get WordPress plugins are

• WordPress Plugin Directory
• SiteBuilder Recommended Plugins

In this lesson you get an overview of the all of the WordPress Settings options. I’ll go over the initial settings configurations you should consider when setting up your WordPress driven website.

In this video I’m gonna walk through the Settings panels of wordpress and what the changes I typically make during the setup process. I’m not gonna spend a ton of time here since some of these will require in depth discussion, depending on your site goals and requirements.

For now, lets just get the basics setup right, then we’ll comeback when we need to.

General Settings

Under the General Settings tabs its important to set the Site Title, which is the name of your business or blog and then add your tagline if you have one. Depending on your theme you may or may not see either of these but its likely that the search engines will so I typically try to use the company name or keywords here.

The urls are already set, make sure to update your email address, since this is where notifications will be sent.

I typically don’t use this membership option, since a membership site will actually require a significant thought and plan.

Set your timezone, date and time formats, click save changes and we’re off to the next setting.

Writing Settings

The Writing Setting is really used for you and what things look like in the backend.

During my initial setup, I don’t usually touch this.

Reading Settings

This is how your blog posts or content gets read.

The front page display is about what shows up on the front page, or what I typically refer to as the homepage. This is often determined by your theme, so don’t mess with this yet, til you start to configure your theme.

Discusson Settings

Ok, next. Discussion.

This really depends on the types of commenting you are expecting on your website and/or blogs. but typically the default settings are fine.

One change you may want to make is change the default avatar to blank or something generated so your comments aren’t littered with the mystery man.

Media Settings

In the Media Settings we can set the image sizes. This is often determined by your theme and its layouts so don’t tweak this yet until you know for sure.

Then one change I typically make it so UNCHECK the “organize my uploads into month and year based folder”, which will cause photos to be stored in the default folder “wp-content/uploads”

This makes it easier for me to find or link my photos.

Privacy Settings

Privacy, this is a big one, which basically says, I want the search engines to visit my website and add my content. Very important if you want people to find you in google, bing and yahoo. But if your website is in development and you’re putting up dummy content, I’d turn this off and “Ask search engines NOT to index my site”. Then when I launch my site and ready to rock, I’ll come in here and “Allow search engines to index my site”. You’d be surprised how many sites show have dummy content related to their search engine results. just search hello world

Permalink Settings

Under Permalink Settings, WordPress 3.3 just introduced a new option which is Post Name, I recommend you choose this option to make your content search engine friendly.

by default our posts end up with something like, sitename/category/post-name. For SEO purposes, You can add a plugin like the no categories plugin to remove this, or the SEO WordPress plugin I recommend does this as well.

Conclusion

For our default Settings that will do it. What you’ll discover is that as you add themes and plugins, this setting options will grow. Sometime themes and plugins will have their own sections but if you can’t find a plugin configuration check here.

You should be good with your basic settings, If you’ve turned off your privacy settings, make sure to remember to come back here and turn it off when you make your website live.

Plugins

These plugins were referenced in the WordPress Settings video in the Permalinks section. Use only one of these plugins. My recommendation is the WordPress SEO plugin. I wil be covering this plugin in detail in another video.

• WP No Categories Base plugin
• WordPress SEO plugin

In this lesson I’ll give you an overview of the WordPress Dashboard, Admin Toolbar and Screen Options.

I want to give you a quick tour of the WordPress Dashboard to help you get acquainted and improve your efficiency working on your WordPress website.

At the top of the page, you’ll notice the Toolbar (or admin toolbar), which was introduced with word WordPress 3.2 and is an awesome feature. It has links to the WordPress site and and documentation, a link to view your site.

We’d be able to see our comments here, we’ll be able to add new content from the toolbar as well as view or edit our profile. As we add plugins to our site, there may be additional option visible on the tool bar as well. I use the toolbar quite a bit to toggle between the dashboard and my live site. Notice the drop-down changes and gives me different options will allow me to navigate specific places within the dashboard Or I’ll navigate to a page I want to edit, then I’ll click the edit link on the page or the edit page or post link on the toolbar, then I go into that specific page or post. Once I’m done editing and can either view the page which will take me to the live site in this window, or I can click view post to open in a new tab. I tend to open things in a new tab so I have a a dashboard view and live site view at the same time. As a reminder I also have the ability to create new content from the toolbar.

Lets go back to the dashboard. In the main column, you’ll see a variety of panels, some are there by default, others might be there because of various plugins that are installed. You can control the layout of your panel by either dragging them, or opening/closing them. Or you can even remove them by expanding the Screen options in the upper right and and deselecting the respective checkbox. You’re not deleting them, just hiding them from the dashboard. A word on the Screen Options, this options will change depending on the screen you are logged into, so it will be different on pages/post/menus etc. Explore this and you’ll be surprised at what you find. I don’t ever use the quickpress, so i’ll remove that, then hide the plugins for now.

Another major part of the dashboard is the sidebar menu. If your challenged for screen real estate, you can minimize it by collapsing the menu here. With the introduction of WordPress 3.3, flyout menus were introduced, which is super cool, because know you can host over each section to see the sub menus. Once you click a submenu, the entire section will expand to show related menu items. So click and around and check.

A couple places to check out are the settings, plugins, and widgets areas.
I’ll cover these in more detail in another video.

I hope that gives you a bit of insight into the WordPress dashboard.

None Available

I’ll show you how to get a professionally designed website for next to nothing by using WordPress Themes. Looking good was never so easy!

I’ve got good news and bads news for you. This may be the hardest part of the web design process and the reason is because there are so many excellent designs that are available as WordPress Themes.

By the way, this checklist could be applied to either free or commercial WordPress themes, but it’s typically worth it to spend the $25-50 bucks on a premium wordpress theme.

1. Have Realistic Expectations – You’re probably not going to find the perfect template that will accommodate your every desire, requirement and customization need, so manage your expectations.

2. Define Project Requirements – During your website project planning stage you probably identified specific requirements for your project. Most of time these are the driving force when choosing the wordpress theme. Here are few examples of project requirements that might dictate your theme selection:

• Navigation menus i.e. topnav, dropdown, or left/right navbars, etc.
• Support for social media, email tools, forms, photo galleries, videos, ecommerce or other specific functionality
• Page layout i.e. full width, multi-column, sidebars, etc
• Font requirements
• Specific colors
• Homepage layout and/or features like sliders, videos, flash and other special functionality
• Designed for the browsers, tablets, devices and smart phones of your target audience

3. Check WordPress Compatibility – Sounds silly I know, but more accurately, I’d say make sure that the theme is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. You don’t want an older theme that doesn’t support the latest and greatest WordPress features.

4. Read Theme Reviews – Look for a theme and/or designer who has good to excellent reviews, either on their own website for from a website that sells themes from multiple designers. High reviews from a large number of users go along way in my book.

5. Check Documentation – Find out if there are step-by-step instructions or videos available, or better yet, and let me underscore this point, it is extremely valuable to have sample data available so you can easy replicate the theme demo.

6. Determine Customization Options – Don’t get crazy on this one, because its really subjective, and I usually suggest that you limit your customizations. But most website projects have the need to be able to control colors, logo inclusion along with some general graphical elements to maintain branding.

7. Check for Theme Updates – You can usually tell if the designer or developer is available because of a visible change log, commenting, updates or threads in the support forum. Nothing worse that finding the perfect theme only to find out that it has been abandoned by the author.

8. Review Support – OK, inevitably this is a BIG DEAL. When it you are ready to launch your website and find out that something is broken, it is always so assuring to have someone who knows the theme and has your back. Check out their support forum before purchase or put together a list of questions prior to your purchase and send them to the developer. Let’s face it, its sucks trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

9. Identify Value – Don’t get stuck searching for free wordpress themes, when you can spend $35 and solve a lot of potential time wasting problems.

WordPress Theme Resources

• Elegant Themes: Great value, dozens of themes for only $39, fantastic support, built in framework & excellent documentation.
• Theme Forest: Many different theme designers to choose from, strict submission requirements, which ensures a high quality of theme and support, rating system to review purchaser feedback, hundreds of diverse and beautifully designed WordPress Themes.
• List of Premium WordPress Themes: I’ve put together a massive list of premium themes to help shortcut your search.

Learn how to size and crop photos for Facebook photo strips. Use these dimensions and psd template to customize your Fan page and get it right every time.

In this video and tutorial, I’m gonna give you a few tips to help you understand the Facebook Photo Strip. If you have a Facebook Page (Fan Page) for your business, you’ve probably asked yourself, how the heck do I manage the photo strip at the top of the page?

 

 

I’m not really sure, what it’s called officially, photo strip, photo album strip, photo banner, regardless, you know what I’m talking about.

Photo Sizing and Cropping

Probably the biggest question about the photo strip is how does the sizing and cropping occur. Maybe you’ve got a photo that gets cropped in a way that doesn’t work for you. Here are a couple sizing tips to help you overcome this hurdle. I don’t know what the exact ratio is, but I’ve got good idea.

Basically how I do it is this. I start in Photoshop and create a file of 720w x 540h pixels, then I’ll create a guide for the viewable cropped area, which is basically what is going to get reduced and show up on the photo strip thumbnail.

You can either center a photo here or even create a box or something that fits almost perfectly here. And you can see the dimensions I’m using here.

Photo Size: 720w x 540h pixels
Viewable Cropped Area: 511w x 357h pixels
Thumbnails: 97w x 68h pixels

Not everyone uses photoshop, but you can use these dimension in whatever tool your use to get some pretty nice results.

Like my page and grab my psd template for the Facebook Photo Strip if you’re interested. Of course, you can alway color outside the lines, but the template is to help identify the cropped area and how you should center or align your photos for that synchronized look.

Download the Facebook PSD Photo Strip template

Ordering Photos

Another topic in question is how to order the photos. Unfortunately, on your Facebook Page the order of photos are random in nature. Apparently, Facebook did this purposely to discourage people from trying to sell that area as ad space. I don’t know this for a fact, but my understanding is that you can order these on your personal profile page.

What Photos Show Up

Since the photos show up randomly, you might not get your message or branding perfectly but you can determine which photos show up here. If there is an unwanted photo, you you can hover over the photo, click the little x to remove them from the strip. Don’t worry, your photos aren’t deleted, they’re just removed from the strip.

Marketing Your Brand

If you’re trying to broadcast a message here, I suggest creating an dedicated photostrip or maketing Album. Name the album something like company name, mission, marketing or whatever makes sense. That way, when someone clicks the thumbnail and it it will launches the lightbox with the bigger image, they’ll be able to read your description or marketing message. Not only that, but when they click the next or previous arrows, they’ll continue to see your integrated marketing message, rather than a random profile pic or you living large at last friday’s business mixer.

Share This Video and Article

Well, I hope this has been helpful to you, if you liked this, do me a favor and show me some love by liking my Page, since its brand new and needs some friendlove. And then of course I’d appreciate it if you share or tweet this video.

Do You Have Something to Add?

Let me know your insights regarding the Facebook photo strip in the comments below.

• Download the Facebook PSD Photo Strip template (Right-click and Save Target File as…)

In the Quickstart video part 4, I’ll show you how to create pages, categories and posts to build a content framework, then you’ll create a navigation menu, and finally you’ll add content to your website.

What I’m looking for specifically are the pages, posts, and categories that I need to build that will serve as the framework for my website. By the way, when I’m starting this process, I typically hide my site from search engines, because if I’m adding dummy content, I don’t want it to get picked up in the search engines.

In later videos, I’ll get into details and will cover things like page naming conventions, permalinks, search engine optimization, and so on.

Let’s start by going to settings > privacy and selecting the radio button that says hide from my site from search engines.

Back to our content. Pages first.

Pages

Here’s a list of pages that I need to create: The homepage is created by default. I need to add the Services page, About us, Contact, Work, and my Free Marketing Guide Page.

So here’s how it works. I’ll navigate to Pages, click add new, and plugin my title. If I’ve got my text I can paste it in, or just insert a line like coming soon.

click publish, then from the top, click add new page and repeat for the next several pages.

Categories

Since this primarily a businesses website, I’m thinking my categories will be blog, for mostly any blog posts that I create, then an updates category for anything related to the company containing things like special offers, press releases, or company news. I may or may not add these types of blog posts to the blog category. It will really depend. I don’t want to clutter up my blog with my companies ads, otherwise no one will want to read my blog if it’s just a list of promotions. And don’t worry, I’ll get into the nuances of categories and tags in the membership videos.

By default we have the uncategorized category. Let’s change that to blog, remove the slug, and click save. You’ll notice it created a slug for us. Now add the updates category.

Alright, let’s quickly add two more blog posts. We’ve already got the Hello World post, which is fine for now since we’re just building our framework.

I’m going to add one called Website Redesign: New Website on the Way. I’m not going to add any content yet. This is easy. If I wanted to, I could write this in like 2-5 minutes.

I’ll add the blog and updates, then I’ll add another article that I either have in mind or have already written. This one is titled 5 Free Online Business Tools that are a No-Brainer. Add the blog category.

Now that I’ve got these pages, categories, and posts created, I’ve essentially built my site’s framework.

Let’s move on to our Navigation Menus.

Navigation

When building a website, there are a number of dependencies. In order to build our menus, we need to do a prerequisite step.

Real quick, go to appearance, menus and we’ll type Main Menu and save.

Notice that now we’ve got an option to associate this or other menus with our theme. Let’s do that.

Now we’ll add our pages to the menu and save it. For our blog, we’ll add this as a category. Remember, sometimes we might have a template with a custom post type that doesn’t show up here, so you can always view screen options if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

By the way, we can drag these menu items around to reorder them, or drag them underneath other pages to create drop down menus. Lets take a look.

You’ll notice I can change the label to ready whatever I wish. Sometimes I need to change these so that everything fits on the navbar.

Because my theme has left and right menus, I’m going to add my call to action to the right menu so it stands alone. I’ll add it the same way I did the first, then add my page.

Once you have created your menu, make sure to save it, then view your template and make changes as necessary.

One other thing I’d like to point out is the how categories look versus pages. It actually loads what is called a specially configured archive page that will list a certain post type. Currently, this just happens to be our blog category, but we can have multiple pages like this for categories tags, and depending on your theme, other groups of posts.

This image here is called a feature image, and I’ll show you how to add that in the next step.

Content Insertion

Moving right along, when its time to add our content, we can easily navigate to our content via the menus, which is much easier that adding everything through the wordpress dashboard.

Let’s add some text, a photo, and a featured image and do a little formatting and you should have enough to get rolling.

For the purpose of this demo, I’m going to use some dummy text. This is Latin and it’s primarily used in design comps to show what a layout might look like. It’s funny how many people get stuck on this and have said things like, our content is in the wrong language or some is using spanish. lol. Anyway, lets add some.

When formatting, keep it simple and rely on your theme’s built-in styles. This is a NOT a circus or a flyer so avoid centered, multi-colored text. If you want something to stand out and create a call to action, it should be your landing pages, and I’ll cover that in great detail for members.

On the toolbar, click the hide/show kitchen sink, and this will give us some formatting options. I like to use headings to break up the content and also to make my site search engine friendly.

If you must add color, select your text, then apply it.

Let’s add a quick link to another page.

And let’s add some photos.

By the way, inside the members area, I’ll also show you where to get some amazing photos for free, and some other super cheap photos for about 1-5 bucks.

I’ll start by uploading my photos, and I’ll do two right now. If possible, you should modify the size for your website in a photo editor like photoshop, but the cool thing is that wordpress has a built in tool for this that I’ll cover later.

For now, lets just upload the photos. I’ll set my featured photo. The size is configured by my theme or possibly WordPress. I’ll set the photo. Now I’ll place my cursor where I want the other photo to show in my post. Click the upload/insert photos button. Select the size and placement. Make sure to always add alt text if you’re worried about getting found by search engines.

Lets save and view.

Now let resize my image a tad.

And that’s a quickie for you on how to insert content. Again, this is the quickstart guide, and there are a number of other techniques, tips, and strategies I’ll cover in detail later.

I hope this was helpful. We built our content framework, added our navigation menus, and did some content insertion.

Thats it for the DIY quickstart series for now. Make sure to become a member and get access to even more in depth video training that will cover a variety of subjects focused on building, marketing, and profiting with your online business.

In the DIY Website Quickstart Part 3, you’ll learn how to simply organize your content and map it to your WordPress theme.

Overview

1. Organize the Content- I’ll show you an example of how I organize content by creating a sitemap or outline of content.
2. Map it to the Theme  - I’ll demonstrate how I map my content to my theme. This is probably the most important aspect of this video
3. Build the Content Framework – I’ll show you how to build your content framework to make your project go smoother
4. Setup the Menus -We’ll setup the navigation
5. Lastly I’ll do the Content Insertion – Then I’ll show you how to add your content.

Content Organization – I typically refer to content as what populates the site, primarily focusing on text, photos, and video, but it would ultimately any type of file we might want to include.

Step 1: Organizing Content

The key to Content organization is to keep it simple, and it doesn’t matter whether you have your content written or produced yet because you can always add it later. In fact, I’d like to point out that your goal is to launch your website asap, so often my strategy is to initially add a minimal amount of content to start, then continue to add or modify the content later. Don’t wait until your content is produced or perfect or else you’ll never launch your website. Trust me on this.

Basically what I do is this: I like to use Google docs or Evernote, which are both free, but you can use any tool that gives you an outline view. I just produce an outline of my content, and if there are sub sections they are represented as indented bullets, which may or may not show up as drop down menus.

In this example, you can see how I’ve listed my pages, then I’ve listed some of the services that I provide which are indented under the services bullet. Initially, these services will be covered on the services page as paragraphs, but later on I’ll give each service its own pages as I write more, and then it will be represented as a dropdown menu. I may even incorporate them into a services menu on the sidebar as well. Just a side note, there are a lot of templates that allow you to specify certain menus on certain pages instead of having the same menu on every single page. This is a very flexible feature I often look for in my templates. If fact, there are a couple plugins that offer this functionality as well.

• Home
• Why Us
• Work
• Services
• Web Design
• Social Media
• SEO
• etc
• About
• Privacy
• Terms of Use
• Blog
• article #1
• article #2
• article #3
• Contact

Step 2: Mapping Content

So now that I’ve organized my content, I’ve spent some time reviewing my theme’s documentation and I figured out how my theme works, what is required, and the different ways I can add content.

Because these is different from theme to theme, I’m not going to bore your with my particular setup details. What I will do is walk you through the process so that you can do it with your content and make it work with your theme. So make sure to spend a considerable amount of time consulting your theme’s setup or configuration instructions.

When using WP, there are two primary ways to add text: pages and posts. I’m not going to get into the all the details here, but pages typically contain static content like about us, services, privacy, contact, etc. Posts are for blog articles, updates, or content based on time and they are organized by categories or tags.

By the way, I mentioned this in the first video and it’s worth repeating: try to find a theme that will meet most of your initial requirements and has most of the features you want. It’s hard to find a theme that that does it all, but you want to avoid making major customizations. Don’t look at a theme and think I can customize this or that or make these changes. You’ll end up spending tons of time on it and getting thoroughly frustrated. The easiest way is to basically replace the demo content with you own.

With that said, let me show you how I’ve done it with my theme.

Here is a screen shot of my demo site. I’ve marked it up to show you how my content will layout. You could make a screenshot and mark it up using Photoshop, but I’m doing this mainly for you, so it just easier to modify the sitemap to reflect the mapping like this.

This is what the sitemap or outline looks like.

• Header
• Logo – (theme config)
• Phone (widget)
• Left Menu / Right Menu (wp menus)
• Footer
• About box (widget)
• Address (widget)
• Social media (widget)
• Home page template
• Main slider/banner – Services overview w/call to action (theme config)
• 4 columns of service overview (theme config)
• Services content – extend your reach… including icons page (theme config)
• Latest blog post – (widget / theme config)
• Interior pages
• Content in main area
• Email subscription box or button (widget)
• Connect with social media (widget)
• Latest or popular blog posts (widget)
• Why Choose Us (page)
• Work – examples of work, possibly even case study pages later (page with gallery / images)
• Services – overview of offerings, later expanded to detailed pages (page)
• About – overview of who we are (page)
• Blog – list of blog articles, updates, etc (category)
• Contact – page with form from theme, or a plugin (page)
• Free Marketing Strategy – very similar to the contact page,  page with form from theme, or a plugin, later, I’ll use a specific plugin I like to give me some custom fields. (page)

Again, you really need to understand your theme to map the content. Like I said, the easiest way is to replace the demo content with you own. I was fortunate enough to get a very customizable theme. I highly recommend this one.

Alright, so now that I’ve shown you a visual example of how I mapped my content to my theme. I want to show you how I expand on my original outline.  Basically what I do is this: I add the template features like header and footer which are typically the same regardless of page layout, then I’ll breakdown the homepage, which usually has a custom layout, then I’ll break down any other layouts. I only plan on having one other layout which is for the interior pages and it will contain a right sidebar with widgets. Then I’ll further markup my outline in RED by trying to specify the what the specific elements are based on my theme. For example, whether it’s a theme configuration, a widget a page, a post, or a category, etc.

So I hope both the visual markup and outline view help drive home the point of mapping content to your WordPress theme. I thought I was going to get through all of the content in this video, but it didn’t happen. In the next video, we’ll continue by creating our content frame, building our navigation, and finally inserting our content.

Used in this Video

• Evernote
• Google Docs

Theme Resources

• Elegant Themes
• Theme Forest
• Check out this massive list of themes

In the DIY Website Quickstart Part 2 you’ll learn the basic setup of WordPress and theme installation.

In this video, I’ll focus in on the setup and we’ll cover

• Web hosting and your domain name
• Installing WordPress
• Installing the WordPress theme from the dashboard as well as manually

A couple good places to get themes are

• Elegant Themes
• Theme Forest
• Check out this massive list of themes

Web Hosting & Domain Name

Most importantly, you’ll need a web host that supports WordPress. Hosting companies typically have a control panel that has what they call a one click WordPress install.

If you’re a SiteBuilder member, then you’re entitled to free web hosting, so make sure to take advantage of that. You can also register a domain name if you need to.

If you’re not using SiteBuilder hosting or another company that has cPanel, then you’ll want get the specifics from your web host WordPress installation.

Also, make sure that you’ve registered your domain name before installing WordPress or there could be some issues later on.

Just note that in the members area, I’ll have a couple different WordPress install videos that cover cPanel, manual installation, and installation in vDeck.

WordPress Install

Installing WordPress is a snap. We’ll login to cpanel, launch fantastico, then enter our setup info. Let me show you how.

First, login to cpanel. You can type http://sitebuilder.ws/cpanel and you’ll be redirected to a secure cpanel login. https://titan.sitebuilder-hosting.com:2083/

If you’re using SiteBuilder hosting, you’ll probably will get a warning or error message, but don’t panic. The reason is that this ssl certificate and encryption is from my server. It’s not a signed cert, but it is encrypted, so everything is safe.

Go ahead and enter your username and password.

Oh, and by the way, if you click the little icon in the address bar, you can verify that it is an encrypted connection.

Once logged in to cPanel

1. Find the fantastico icon and click it
2. Click WordPress on the left under blogs
3. Click New Installation
4. Installation location – for most users, you’ll leave the directory blank because this will be your main website and you’re installing WordPress in the “root”
1. In this video I’m installing into the demo03 subdirectory
5. Enter your admin username and password info
1. Scott
2. Password – I suggest a strong password, uppercase, lower case and at least one number.
6. For Base Configuration, note that You’ll be able to modify this information later if necessary.
1. Nickname is what shows up on blog posts and comments: I’ll use my full name Scott Barnes
2. scott@infiniumgroupllc.com
3. Site name: Infinium
4. Description – this is basically a tagline
7. Click the Install button
8. Click the Finish Installation button
9. Enter your email address and click the Send E-mail button
10. Click the back to wordpress overview
11. Click the visit the site link.

Congrats, this is our base install of WordPress. That was super easy, wasn’t it?
Now that we’ve installed WordPress, the content management system, we have ultimately laid the foundation for our website.

Theme Installation

Now lets install a WordPress theme. This too is very easy. We unzip our theme, upload to the wp dashboard and activate it, or upload to the our hosting control panel, then go into wordpress and activate it.

Like I mentioned before, I suggest you purchase a premium or commercial theme for $25-$50 bucks to get nice design with some support.

For my project, I’m using the Mingle theme I found at ThemeForest. it was $45, but believe me, it was well worth it.

Most themes can be installed via the wordpress control panel, but for some reason, and maybe it was the size of the theme’s zip file, the mingle theme install didn’t work smoothly, which is probably a good thing for some of you, since this is forcing me to show you how install our theme via the dashboard as well as manually.

Download & Unzip Your Theme

Before I start, I’m going to locate the themes I’ve purchased and downloaded to my computer and unzip them. Usually, there are a number of folders and files in the initial zip file, like source files, a help file, and the theme itself, so we need to make sure you unzip the download so you can get the theme itself.

Ok, lets start with the dashboad theme install

1. Login into wordpress by typing in yourdomain/wp-admin directly into your address bar or browsing the site for the login button
2. Go to appearance > themes > install themes tab
3. Click the upload link, then browse to your themes zip file
4. Click the Activate link
5. Oftentimes you’ll see some direction like go to the theme control panel to configure, etc.
6. We view them and our naked wordpress installation here by clicking our site name
7. At some point, I think version 3.2 of wordpress, the admin toolbar was introduced which I love, because I can view my site and easily toggle back to the dashboard
8. Once inside, I can click the theme on on left navbar to update its settings

So that was easy, like I said. Sometimes, our theme doesn’t want to play nice, so we’re forced to do it manually.

Manual Theme Install

1. From the cPanel login
2. Access the File Manager
3. Browse to the folder where WordPress resides and click through to wp-content > themes
4. Once inside the themes folder, click the upload button and browse to your the theme
5. Notice that I just leave the permission set to 644 – it should set the appropriate permission once extracted. Once the upload is compelete, close this window
6. Reload the themes folder, right click on the zip file and click the extract link, which will open a window and show the results. Close this window and reload again
7. You can delete the zip file
8. Navigate to your WordPress admin. Notice how I leverage the browsers tabs to work inside cPanel and the WordPress dashboard at the same time
9. Navigate to appearance > themes and manage themes to see our theme, click activate, then click the sitename to view our theme

So thats it for this video. We successfully installed WordPress and a theme, and now its time to really get cooking. In the next video, I’ll show you a surefire content management strategy where you’ll learn how to:

• Organize your content
• Map to your theme
• Build a content framework
• Setup easy to use navigation
• See how to insert content.

Thanks for your time and I’ll see you in the next video.

Themes

A couple good places to get themes are

• Elegant Themes
• Theme Forest
• Check out this massive list of themes

This is part 1 of the Quickstart videos. This 10 minute video covers the following topics:

1. Goals
2. Brainstorming
3. Objectives
4. Primary Call-to-Action
5. Requirements
6. How to Choose a Web Design

Overview

The website I’ll be building is for me.  It’s for my marketing and web design company that I will actually publish live once it is completed. Don’t worry – the web building concepts will apply regardless of the type of business you have.

Goals

The first part of my process is to identify my goals for this website.  They are as follows:

• Increase my sales
• Establish credibility
• Serve as my corporate presence
• Support my current marketing efforts
• Provide portfolio examples
• Use as an example and case study for this DIY training video
• Stay in touch with current clients

Brainstorming

The second part of my process is to do some brainstorming to find inspiration and ideas about what I want in my website. I do this by checking out the competition or websites that I just like in general. Part of the trick here is to find out what their objectives are and how they are incorporated into the website. I’ll go through some of the sites and talk about what I like.

• (Promote Services) Like Slider with Services / simple mission statement / simple nav: http://www.venicecreatives.com/
• (Credibility) Like 4 reason you’ll love us: http://mindovo.com/
• (CTA) Like quote form: http://item-9.com/hire-me/
• (Visually Appealing) Like colors: http://www.ghostownstudios.com/
• (Visually Appealing) Like woman/quote: http://www.ghostownstudios.com/projects/
• (CTA) Like cta in upper left / contact map/social icons: http://www.epicenterconsulting.com/contact
• (CTA) Like the multiple cta and incentive: http://www.madwirewebdesign.com/
• (CTA) Like the use of icons, I also like their form which incorporates the like button and establishes credibility: http://www.wildfireapp.com/
• (Credibility) Use of logos: http://www.toplingo.com/
• (Credibility) Gravity forms – basically the homepage is a sales page, its all about selling their product.

Objectives

After getting inspired, I’m ready to define my objectives based on my goals. Some of these are actually calls to action on my website while others are things I wish to accomplish or measure on my website.

• Increase visitor to prospects ratio with clear CTA and incentive
• Get true prospects to fill out a contact form containing qualify fields i.e. budget, timeframe, website
• Provide info about services
• Integrate and encourage social media interaction
• Identify most viewed pages
• Track offline marketing efforts
• Incorporate identifiable logos if possible, i.e. social media brands…to give users a connection to known brands
• Incorporate video
• Build my email list for clients and prospects
• Make the site intuitive and easy to navigate – simple menu system

Primary Call to Action

My primary CTA is the #1 action I want visitors to do. I need to guide my visitor down this path, my primary objective or CTA is to obtain contact info from prospective clients. I plan on doing this by offering a free website strategy and consultation when they fill out my form. My form will have some qualifying questions so that I can shortcut the proposal process and see who is truly interested and who’s just kicking the tires.

Specify My Requirements

Like building blocks, goals, objectives, primary call to action. I’m now ready to specify my requirements some technical, preferential, or based on brand requirements.

• Incorporate logo
• No specific color scheme, so I’m flexible
• Must have homepage slider that will support video
• Have a homepage that has a unique layout and is customizable
• Need area above the fold to incorporate clear call to action button
• Must be able to incorporate social media
• Have a customizable form
• Implement email newsletter
• Tool to measure traffic
• Support text, video, and photo content sources
• Mobile friendly

Choosing the Right Web Design

Now that we laid the planning foundation and saw some killer examples, its time to choose a design.  This is a good point to mention that I use WordPress as the CMS, or content management system, for my websites, and this is actually one of the main reasons I like WP: the fact that there are tons of cheap, professionally design themes.

• Find something you like
• Don’t expect to make major customizations
• Make sure it will meet MOST of your requirements
• Consider the fact that your website will need another redesign or facelift in about a year, so it doesn’t need to last forever

I usually choose to buy my WordPress themes in order to get the highest quality and have some level of theme support. I usually get them at either Themeforest or Elegant Themes. This can actually be the hardest part because there are so many good options.  That’s why I really like to determine my requirements first. So after minutes or hours of searching, based on the above requirements, I am going to use the Mingle theme from Themeforest. Once you purchase and download the theme, it is important to unzip the file since it usually contains some source file, help, and the actual theme.

Setup

Ok, now we’re off to the races.  In the next segment, I’m gonna show you how to install WP and your theme. So this assumes that you’ve purchased your domain name and web hosting. If you haven’t gotten this far, make sure to check out those related videos.

Video

• Download Quickstart Video Part 1