How to Create a Food Blog Tutorial for Beginners | Step-by-step WordPress tutorial for beginners Video Tutorial DreamHost

How to Create a Food Blog Tutorial for Beginners | Step-by-step WordPress tutorial for beginners

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All right so in this video I’m going to show  you guys step by step, all the way through,   how to make a great looking professional food  blog. A food blog that you can use to make money  

With if you want; sort of go beyond like a  hobby of cooking and actually turn it into   potentially a business. I spent a lot of time  putting this tutorial together and going through   every single detail and this here is the food  blog that we’re gonna make. I think it’s a great  

Look. A very professional looking food blog,  and actually if you look at other popular food   blogs out there it has a very similar look. Just  check out some of these other food blogs here.

So, as you can see a really good look and very  comparable to a lot of other food blogs out there.   I tried to make this tutorial as comprehensive as  possible. So, that really by using this tutorial  

I’m going to take you all the way from nothing to  having a food blog and starting to write your very   first food blog posts. And along with that I’m  going to give you guys some hints on how to best  

Take advantage of the tools in this food blog  theme. So, I’m going to show you how to set   up advertising areas so you can start making  money with your food blog. I’m going to show   you how to get those recipe cards at the top  of google search. So, if you’ve ever seen it,  

Let’s just look at it real quick, see these cards  up here at the top? We’ve got this like easy pizza   example and we’ve got some featured recipes up  here at the top. We’re going to use a tool on our  

Website that’s going to give us the opportunity  to have those cards show up just like that,   because that doesn’t happen automatically.  There’s specific steps that you need to take   to give yourself the opportunity to have your  recipes show up there at the top of google search.  

And finally I’m going to give you a few hints on  how to write your blog posts. How to lay them out   and what you can do to help people click through  and choose your recipes over some of the other  

Recipes out there. So, if you’re excited about  this and you want to dive in and get started.   Again this is a very detailed tutorial and so  if you don’t have time to do it right now what  

I’m going to ask you to do is first of all  subscribe to my youtube channel so you can   easily come back and find this, and go ahead and  share this tutorial with yourself. You know use   the share button down below email it to yourself  message it to yourself whatever you need to do  

So you can come back to it later. And if you know  somebody else that should be building a food blog   share this tutorial with them. Also I’m really  here to help you build an awesome food blog.  

So if you’re ready to spend about an hour and a  half with this guy right here building a food blog   let’s go ahead and let’s do this together. I’m  Tim from realwebsitehints.com and it’s my mission   and my passion to help you find the best and  easiest ways of building great looking websites.

Okay so how much is this going to cost? How much  is it going to cost to set up a professional food   blog? And i’m talking about the whole package so  we’re going to get a domain name we’re going to  

Get professional email at our own domain, so that  for example in this tutorial i’m going to build   cooking thyme with Tim and i’m going to be able  to have tim at cookingthymewithtim.com as my email   address and you’re going to be able to have the  same thing for your domain name so whatever your  

Domain name is and whatever you want actually for  your email address it could be something like info   it could be your name whatever your want so we’re  going to get domain email we’re going to set up   WordPress and we’re going to get this theme here  that’s going to give us this professional look.  

I’m also going to show you a few different ways  you can style this theme to get different looks   out of it so the whole thing is going to cost a  little less than 130 dollars it’s about 59 right  

Now for the hosting using Dreamhost, which is also  the same hosting company that i use. The reason   why i choose Dreamhost for myself is first of all  when you register your domain you get free domain   privacy and what that means is that instead of  sharing your email address and address and phone  

Number with the world you’re sharing a Dreamhost  email address phone number for your website so   basically what that does is it just prevents you  from getting a lot of spam emails from getting   those annoying telemarketing phone calls and from  getting junk mail at home. That’s why I like using  

That and most other hosting companies and domain  registrars charge you extra for that so i feel   like Dreamhost gives you a good value right there.  I also like the fact that with this hosting plan  

That we’re going to set up here you can actually  build as many websites as you want to. So if   you’ve got a couple of different ideas that you  want to try out you’re free to sort of explore  

Those different ideas using this hosting setup. So  the hosting is 59 and then this WordPress theme is   going to be 69 so that’s a total of a little  less than 130 which i think is a great deal  

For starting a professional blog, and in about two  hours or so you should be able to have your entire   website set up. I’m going to include links down  below to every single step of the process along  

The way so if you’re already familiar with some  of the things you can skip ahead and also at the   bottom of the video you should be able to see  those little bars at the bottom that show you  

Each different section so you can easily skip  from one section to the next. Also I’ll include   links to dreamhosts that we’re going to use and  to the foodica theme that we’re going to use down   below and if you use those links that helps to  support this free tutorial so i definitely thank  

You guys for your support. Now let’s go ahead and  dive in and start building this awesome looking   food blog okay so if you use that link that’s  down below the video that should take you here  

And what we want to do is since we’re building a  wordpress website we want to use this wordpress   tab here and for this video we’re going to use the  wordpress basics that’s going to be sort of the   lowest cost to entry to get into wordpress  that dreamhost offers i’m gonna go ahead and  

Click on that and now if you’re interested in  dream press which is sort of the more advanced   options um and there’s some great features that  it has and i think it’s even good for beginners  

If you have extra money to spend to build your  website i’ve got a separate video on that and i   will link to that in the description down below  and up above this video but right now let’s look  

At these two wordpress plans the first thing i  want to point out is that with dreamhost you get a   97-day money-back guarantee so if you’re not happy  with the hosting or if you just change your mind  

About wanting to do this at all you can always  get your money back within that first 97 days   and i’m gonna suggest uh that you go for well  it’s really up to you i’m gonna suggest that  

You go for one year i think it takes some time  to build and get your website going so i think   a year is a good amount of time to sort of test  that out if you know that you’re committed to  

Making a website some website even if it’s not  this first website that you start i mean going   for three years is definitely a great bargain  because you can get this introductory price   for the whole three years which is really good and  also according to this too it renews at a lower  

Amount after that introductory period and the  great thing about the wordpress unlimited plan   is that you get unlimited websites so you know you  might be just starting with one first website but   you might have some other ideas and you might  want to try those out so you can just go ahead  

And do that because you already have the hosting  paid for in order to do that but for this video   i’m going to go for the one year it doesn’t really  change the price for the unlimited the unlimited’s  

The same price for that introductory period and as  you can see here the introductory price after that   promotional period is 9.95 a month which is still  a really good deal for the hosting that we’re   getting here and the reason the other reason why  i recommend the unlimited plan is because you get  

The email included at your domain and you can  have as many email addresses as you want and   you can even have different email addresses at  different domains if you’re trying out different  

Ideas this is a great way to do that so go ahead  and click on sign up now and if you know which   domain name you want to use or if you were  ready to just go ahead and try a domain name  

You can do that now or you can click choose a  domain later and you can even start building your   website without a domain but it’s a little bit  easier if you already pick your domain right now  

So let’s go ahead and we’re going to do that okay  i’ve got a little bit of advice on what you should   name your website some ideas that will help you  kind of get the most out of what your website  

Is first of all if you can include the main topic  of your website so say you do gluten-free cooking   one idea is that you could put gluten-free  someplace in the name of your domain that might   help the other idea is just make it something  simple and easy to say and easy to understand  

Maybe three or four words so what i’m going to  do for example is i’m going to do cooking time   with tim it’s not really the best because  i’m going to use time like t-h-y-m-e   kind of clever but it’s probably not what i  would actually use for a real website only  

Because people might misunderstand that but you  want to come up with something catchy something   that’s easy to say so when somebody’s talking to a  friend they can easily recommend oh you should go   to cooking time with tim or whatever your website  is so that’s something to think about the other  

Thing you want to do is you definitely want to  have if you have somebody else who can look over   the name look over the name for what it looks like  when all of the letters are run together because  

I’ve had some embarrassing moments where i’ve come  up with some awesome website ideas and then i look   at what the name says when you put all the words  together and sometimes it just doesn’t look right  

And then the last kind of tip is you don’t want to  use a trademark in your name so if you like to do   for example instapot recipes i wouldn’t  recommend putting instapot in the name only   because technically by law to maintain a trademark  companies need to defend that trademark by keeping  

Other people from using it so i wouldn’t use  a trademark in my name that’s kind of my main   advice there go ahead and take your time think  of some good ideas and see if they work see if   nobody else is using them or unfortunately  just sitting on them and doing absolutely  

Nothing with them which a lot of people come up  with all these ideas and write all these domain   names down and then just don’t do anything with  it but go ahead spend some time think of a good  

Donate domain name for yourself and then we can  continue on with this tutorial when you’re ready   so now i’m going to go for for  this test website is cooking time   with tim.com and you want to put the dot com in  there just to make sure that it’s showing you  

The com options okay and we’re gonna go click  search and it was available so i can click add   for zero dollars and now we’ve got our payment  methods but we want to make sure that we’re  

Getting exactly what we want and nothing extra  so over here on the right you’ll see sort of the   summary of what is being set up so we’ve got  a setup fee there’s no setup fee that’s great   domain privacy as i was saying before this sort  of hides your information by putting it behind  

Dream host information so that you don’t  get a bunch of spam email or phone calls or   junk mail in the mail and then we get the domain  name here that we signed up for and we want to   have wordpress pre-installed and that’s just going  to get us going immediately we’re not going to  

Have to do anything to get wordpress set up so  that’s great i don’t like the wp website builder   as i said so just uncheck that we just don’t  need any extra things on your wordpress website   and that’s kind of one of the keys to making  sure that your experience with wordpress goes  

As smoothly as possible is to just not have  any extra plugins any extra themes you want   to have just what you need on your website as next  thing i do recommend this dream shield protection   i kind of wish that they just included this  but it does scan for malware and malicious code  

But i would say right in the beginning it’s  definitely optional so i’m actually going to   uncheck this so but i do think that three dollars  for this protection is is worth it it’s just extra   money and if you don’t have extra money right  now you know don’t do it but just think later  

On down the road you should get some protection  for your website okay so that’s going to bring our   total to 59.40 and this g suite is a free 30-day  trial which of the google’s professional email   for businesses i think if you’re just starting  out just use the email that they provide you  

Once you start making money with your website  then you can go and get g suite or one of the   other more professional email services then  all you need to do is just either choose to use   a credit card or paypal account to check out and  then after you fill out your billing information  

Whether it’s with paypal or with a credit card  scroll down here to the bottom double check that   we have the things that we want here so definitely  pre-install wordpress the dream shield protection   is optional and then click submit order okay and  so then after signing up uh wordpress is gonna  

Get installed on our website our domain is gonna  start to be configured so if you’re looking for a   moment to take a break this might be a good  time to take a short break and then when we   come back we should have wordpress kind of  installing and hopefully it’ll be installed  

And we can start setting up our email and  then we can start configuring our website   okay so now while wordpress is installing and  while our hosting is getting set up we should   actually be able to set up our email so let’s go  ahead and here and click complete setup and it’s  

Going to take us right into starting and creating  an email address at our own domain so we’ve got   our domain name here and now if you have multiple  domain names that you’re using with dreamhost you   could select from your different domains that  you already own but since we just signed up we  

Just have this one domain name so we’ll go ahead  and set this up and you can set it up to whatever   you want i mean it could be info at your domain  or in this case i like to use tim at my domain  

So we’re just going to put in tim here and give  the mailbox sort of the name who it’s coming from   if you’re using info at your domain you might put  your domain name here i’m going to put my name

And then you can choose to pick a password  for you or you can pick your own password   and i definitely recommend using some sort of  password manager for example i use lastpass when   you start getting into the i mean online world  just in general but especially when you’re making  

Websites there’s going to be a lot of accounts  that you need to sign up for so having a good   password manager like lastpass um is definitely  really helpful for this we’re going to keep   this checked just to make sure that we have a  large enough size email address and now this  

Has an option in your for your emails to  sort of automatically clean them up for you   so that’s something that you’re going to want to  think about on your own how you want to do that   but basically when your inbox reaches 250 messages  it’s automatically going to archive them or if the  

Message has been sitting in there for more than 45  days it’s automatically going to archive them so   these are settings that you can change it’s going  to keep those emails as long as you have space on   your mailbox which you should have plenty of space  but it’s going to just automatically archive those  

For you and you can choose to have whether you  want to automatically archive unread messages   and then which folder it’s going  to archive those messages too so   in this case it’s old messages you can  change that if you’d like then go ahead  

And create address now we’ve got this set  up and we’ve got our total mailbox size at   25 gigabytes that’s what this is showing right  here and now let’s go ahead and just create   one more standard email address like this  and we’ll just show you how that works

And just the reason why i wanted to  show you a second email address is   you’ll see down here that you have a choice  of how much disk space you would like this   account to have so i definitely recommend  making it at least two thousand megabytes  

That’s two gigabytes um but you might want  to make it like ten thousand megabytes just   so you have plenty of space for your email  down the road so let’s call this one info and give it a name give it a password and then of  course make sure you set this  

To something higher i think that ten  thousand megabytes is good and we’ve   got the same settings here about removing  email and then we can click create address okay so now i’ve got two sort  of standard email inboxes  

They’re both accessible and we’ve got the email  setup information over here so you can use your   email client to check mail you definitely want  to use the imap settings here because that’s   going to make sure that your mail stays on the  dreamhost server and that’s going to be great for  

When in the future you move to a different mail  service or if you decide to move to a different   mail service you’ll have all the email on your  server and you can transfer all that email to the  

New mail service and you don’t have to worry about  whether it’s downloaded on this device or that   device it’s all going to stay on the server this  is sort of the basics of the email setup and it’s   pretty easy and straightforward as you can  see here to set up professional email using  

Dreamhost you can also access webmail so you  can just go to a web browser and you’re going   to go to as we can see here webmail.whatever  your domain name is so in my example it’s webmail.cookingthymewithtim.com and you’re going  to be able to check your email there and you’re  

Gonna be able to sign in using the credentials  that you created when you created your email   addresses okay and then so the last thing we need  to do here is to get an ssl certificate and what  

That does is it creates this little lock key lock  here what it does is basically it encrypts the   information between our website and the people  who are viewing our website and it’s something   that basically is required to be able to rank on  google or to also just not get that error message  

That says this site may not be secure i don’t  have ever seen that so let’s go ahead and quickly   add that to our domain so in order to do  that we’re gonna go over here to domains   and then we’re gonna click on ssl certificates  certificates that’s a funny way of saying it and  

Then we’re going to add an ssl certificate to that  domain that we just signed up for so click add and you can use a paid one or i always just  use the free one right here from let’s encrypt   so we’re gonna go ahead and  do select this certificate

And then that should take care of it the  next thing we’re gonna do is set up wordpress   there’s a small chance that you’ll have an  issue with the ssl certificate not being fully   activated yet when we start wordpress  if that happens if you see that issue  

All you have to do is just wait 30 to 40 minutes  and then continue with the wordpress installation   okay now just a note something i’ve discovered  in testing this tutorial here is that sometimes   the ssl certificate can take 30 to 40  minutes to fully get activated on your site  

And during that time you might see an error  message when we go into the wordpress segment   of this tutorial where it says something like  this site is could be hazardous or the site isn’t  

Or the site might be dangerous something like that  if you do see that you just want to take a break   for 30 or 40 minutes let that ssl certificate  fully get set up on your website and then come  

Back to it so this might be a good time to take  a break if you’re looking for a spot to take a   break okay so now let’s go back and let’s see  how our website’s doing and if wordpress is  

All set up and so wordpress here is all set  up so let’s go ahead and log into wordpress   and start learning about how to use wordpress  uh the first way you’re going to be able to   log into your wordpress dashboard is by clicking  here and clicking the open the wordpress editor  

And then i’m going to show you the second way  that you can log into your wordpress website   and that’s kind of the more normal way and that is  by is by going to your domain name wp admin but in  

Order to do that we’re going to need to make our  own login for this website instead of using the   default login that was created by dreamhost so  to do that we’re going to go over here to users

And this is where you’ll see all of the  users that have been created for your website   so this initial user here is the user that was  generated automatically by dreamhost which allows   us to log in from our dreamhost dashboard  over here but let’s create kind of a more  

Normal user and we’ll also set it  to the administration role which   allows us to change all of the settings on our  website and so in order to do that we’re going   to click up here on add new and we’re going to  give it a username so this username could be a  

Display name maybe it’s going to be the name of  your website like cooking thyme with tim or maybe   the same name or similar name to what you use on  your social media for your username it doesn’t   really matter here you can churn on whether  the username displays or whether your full name  

Displays on your website so for this i’m going to  use so for this i’m going to use cooking with tim   i’m going to give it an email address i’m going  to use the email address that i created for this  

Domain name because i’m also going to link that to  my jetpack installation when i get that i’m going   to link that to my gravatar so when i’m posting on  my website and when i’m setting up or commenting  

On other people’s websites the websites that use  gravatar will show my avatar on those websites and   it’s sort of gravatar is kind of like a universal  way of having your profile picture show up on lots   of different sources mostly wordpress websites but  some other places too so it’s a good thing to set  

Up and i’m going to show you guys how to set that  up later on when we set up jetpack okay so the   email for this that i’ve created is tim at and  then just type in your first name and last name  

As you want it to display and this you can use  this to display on the byline of your blog post   if you want and since my website is cooking  time with tim i’m going to put that in here cooking thyem with tim and then  we need to create a password here  

Put that password in there and since this is for  me i don’t need to send an email about it but i’ll   show you guys what that email looks like because  that way if you’re having other people help you  

With your site you can see what that email looks  like and in this case since it’s for me i’m going   to set this to an administrator and that’s going  to give me full rights to change anything that i  

Need to change on the website which is what i want  to be able to do and then we’ll click add new user so if we go over to the email that our website  has sent us it will show us our username  

A link to where we can change our password if we  would like and also the link where we will log   into our wordpress website which in my case is  cookingtimewithtim.com wp-login and yours will   be pretty much the same except for the url will  be whatever the url you created slash wp-login  

Okay so now let’s go ahead and log into our  website sort of the normal way or the way that   most people log into their wordpress websites so  we’re gonna log out and then we’re gonna go to www.cookingtimecookingthymewithtim.com and so this  is our homepage that we have right now because we  

Haven’t set anything up and then we’re gonna go  to slash wp dash admin now we get this login thing   here where we can enter in either the username or  email address that we created that new user with   and i’m just going to autofill it using lastpass  and i definitely recommend using lastpass or  

Another password manager when you’re starting  a website because there’s going to be so many   different accounts that you need to create and  you want to use a different unique password for   each account it’s one way to help prevent  your website and your accounts from getting  

Hacked is by using a different password on  each account so i use my email address that   i signed up for that account with and my  password i’m just gonna go ahead and log in   okay so now let’s go ahead and sort of do an  overview of the wordpress dashboard and i’ll show  

You guys how to change some of the basic settings  and just make sure that your website is set up   um in a way that’s going to help you get started  so the first screen we see here when we log into  

The back end of our website is the dashboard and  this has various different tiles that you can show   you various different information and so right  now i’ve got this wp forms plugin installed so   this creates a tile and different themes and  different plugins may have different tiles here  

You can change what you want to display here  by going to the screen options here on the top   right and then you can decide which items show  up here i’m going to add the wordpress welcome  

It’s got some nice quick easy shortcuts for our  website so we can add that in there and we can   turn off anything that we don’t want to  see so like the wordpress news and events   i’m not particularly interested in going to  any of those so i’m just going to turn that off  

That’s sort of an overview of what you can do  here on the main dashboard page you’ll also see   here that we’ve got an updates button and it’s  showing that we have two updates to do on our  

Website and so if you click on updates and this  is something you should regularly be doing on your   website so if you did want to update all of these  things you can do that simply by clicking here  

And then click update plugins and it’s going to  go ahead and automatically update both of those   here or not automatically but manually update them  right here so it’s an important thing to look at   and then let’s look at posts real quick this is  where we’re going to create new posts so if you  

Wanted to create a new post you can click up here  and click add new i’m going to go into more detail   in another section here about exactly how to  create a post you can also do a quick edit of a  

Post and this allows you to edit some of the basic  things about a post really quickly so you can edit   the time and date you can change the author so  if we want to change it to that other name that i  

Created or the other login we can change that here  you can add a password to this post so only people   with a password can log in and then we can change  the category and i’ll show you in a minute how to  

Add categories and we can change the default and  add tags and then if you don’t want to save those   changes you can click cancel and if you do want to  save those changes you can click update over here  

So now let’s go ahead and take a look at how to  add categories because it’s going to come in handy   when we look at some of the other settings on our  website later on here so for categories it’s very  

Simple to add a new category you just give it  a name here and so for this example here i’m   creating a food blog recipe blog website so one  of the categories i should probably have is recipe   there we go and we’re going to change  that so that the default is now going  

To be recipe instead of uncategorized because  uncategorized just doesn’t seem very appealing   you can also nest categories so if you wanted to  have recipes and then underneath that you wanted   to have specific types of recipes like italian  recipes or french recipes you could do that  

And those would show up underneath and give your  category a little description some themes the   description will show up and it will show up right  on that category page and other themes it won’t so   for that for now i’m just going to ignore that  depending on your theme you may want to change  

That and put some information in there go ahead  and add new category there we go and now we’ve got   two categories here we’ve got uncategorized  and recipe and if you already know some of the   categories that you want to add for your website  you can go ahead and just start adding them in  

Here you can also add new categories and create  new categories right when you’re creating your   blog posts and i’ll show you how to do that  later we can add some tags here too tags are   another way of organizing your blog posts so for  example i might do gluten-free as a tag and then  

We’ll do add new tag so these are two different  ways that you can use to organize your blog posts   and help your viewers find the different types of  content that they’re looking for on your website   okay under media here is where all the uploaded  content that we’re gonna find will be so  

When we upload our featured images or the  images for our blog posts or anything like that   all of those things are going to show up here as  we add them to our website pages very similar to  

Blog posts pretty much almost exactly the same  thing and this is how you add a new page to your   website and we’ll talk a little bit about the  privacy policy page later on comments is where   all the new comments for your website will  show up this is kind of the default comment  

Added by wordpress when you first install it and  now we’ll see here that there’s this wp forms   item on our dashboard and some plugins and some  themes will add their settings to as an item here   on your dashboard so that’s something to keep in  mind some themes and some settings will also put  

Their settings here under settings so you can see  the wp super cache plugin that i have added in   has a setting down here so there’s a two different  places that you might find the settings for either  

Your themes or your plugins depending on the theme  or the plugin under appearance this is where we   can add a new theme or change themes and i’ll show  you later on how to add a theme but for right now  

Let’s just get rid of this 2020 default theme  i’m sure it’s a perfectly good theme i just   don’t need any reminders of 2020 on my website  so to do that the first thing we’re going to do   is we’re going to activate another theme so some  of the standard wordpress installed themes on  

Our website just in case you need to do any  troubleshooting of your website so most of   the wordpress themes are 20 something themes like  there’s 2017 here’s 2019. so i’m going to go ahead   and activate the 2019 theme that’s going to change  the look of our website and it’s going to make it  

Look like the 2019 theme here and then we  can go ahead and find that 2020 theme and   to delete a theme we just click on it and then we  click the little delete button here and i would  

Definitely recommend only having basically your  main theme and maybe one or two of these sort of   default wordpress themes installed we want to  keep our website as clean as possible we don’t   have anything extra on there just because later on  it can will lead to frustrations with all of these  

Things needing to be updated and also having items  on our website that aren’t fully updated or that   we’re not paying attention to can potentially be  a security risk later on so definitely i’m going   to go through and delete all of these except  for probably the 2019 theme and the 2017 theme  

And then of course the theme that we’re going  to add later on it’s just good practice on your   wordpress website to keep it as minimalist as  possible and only have the things that you really   need on your website and that goes for both themes  and plugins this customize button here allows you  

To change the look of your website and we’ll look  at that later on widgets allow you to add sort of   these different types of content blocks to various  different parts of your website most themes have  

A sidebar this theme does not and we’re going to  go into more detail on that but this theme has a   place in the footer for the widgets and we can  just take a quick look at what that looks like

So see the front end of our website if we  scroll down here this here is actually the whole   footer area because there’s no content on the  website right now so we’re seeing the search   box recent posts archives and all of those  things are the things here that we’re finding  

In this widget section and so to remove a  widget you can click on it here and click delete   and to add a widget you can either drag it in  like this or you can actually push down on this  

Little arrow here and select which widget  area you would like to add it to in this   case there’s only one widget area available  but some themes have multiple widget areas   where you can just choose from right here  this little this little drop down arrow is  

Really handy once you have a lot of widgets  and depending on the theme that you have or   the plugins that you have you might have more  widgets uh to add to different widget areas

Menus here is where we can create sort of like the  main menu for a website as well as put menus in   other areas depending on your theme that you have  so there’s sort of the primary menu area and the  

Footer menu area and after we add some content  to our website i’m going to show you exactly   how to create a menu and how to organize it and  things like that on your website and we’ll look  

At specifically how to create menus a little bit  later theme editor is if you want to adjust the   code of your website so we’re not going to get  into that at all we’re just going to keep this  

As simple as possible plugins this is here is  where you can add different plugins or remove   plugins and again you know you should keep your  website as minimalist as possible and only have   the plugins that you need i’m going to leave the  wp super cache plugin because that’s something  

That was recommended by dreamhost to keep our  website running fast and i think it’s a good thing   and the wp forms plugin is something that can be  helpful i’m going to leave it there for now but if  

You do want to remove a plugin that is active all  you have to do is first deactivate it just like   this and then click delete and that’s how you get  rid of a plug-in that you know don’t need and the  

Hello dolly plug-in is pretty much useless it  comes with every wordpress install i’m not too   sure why i think maybe just for tutorial videos  so we can show you how to delete things from the   plugins that are completely useless okay so we’ve  already looked at users because we’ve created  

A new user so there’s that tools um this is where  you can import or export data like if you have   blog posts from another website you can import  them there we’re not going to go into that in this  

Tutorial and then settings there’s a few different  settings that we’re going to want to adjust on our   website so here under general the first thing that  we’re going to want to do is to give our website  

A site title so probably the name of your website  so in my example here it’s cooking time with tim so my tagline is just you know quick  explanation about what your website’s about so   there we go so we’re added that here and then  this information here is gonna show up in the  

Title area of our website and this is something  that search engines look forward to kind of get   an understanding of what your website’s about  you don’t want to stuff this with keywords but   you do want to have a short brief description  of what your website’s about because it’s going  

To show up here in this title area so instead  of saying just another wordpress website and   just another wordpress website it’s going to say  cooking time with tim right here and then helping   people easily create a website right there and  the administration email is the email that your  

Website’s going to send email out for so this  is mostly going to be used when your email this   is mostly going to be used when your website is  communicating with you this membership button   here is basically if you’re creating a membership  website i wouldn’t change any of these settings  

Here you definitely don’t want to allow anyone  to register unless you have some robust security   and you’re really looking for and watching what  people are doing on your website even though a   subscriber role as the default role can’t really  do much to your website it can be just a real  

Hassle having a lot of spam people creating spam  accounts on your website so i definitely would not   turn that on i would leave that off here’s where  you can change your site language so the main  

Language used here on the back end of your website  you can change the time zone and the date and time   format and of course for all those changes  to take place we want to click save changes   and then just to show that those changes  have changed we can go here we can hit  

Refresh so i just have another tab open in this  case we have cash on our website so you might   sometimes have to delete the cache and that’s what  this button here is for and now we can see we’ve  

Got the cooking time with tim up here helping  people easily create a website and this delete   cache button here was added by the wp cache plugin  that was added by dreamhost so that’s what this   button does and usually this fresh version happens  automatically after a few minutes sometimes you  

Know if you’re in a hurry and you’re just  looking for the changes that you’ve made   you just want to hit this delete cache button to  sort of force that change to happen immediately   all right so let’s go back to our general settings  here then under writing we can change our default  

Post now to recipes because that’s much more  interesting than uncategorized and basically   i think that your default post is just there  in case you forget to add a category to your   post you should try to remember to do that because  it does help with the organization of your website  

But you know we all have those slip ups but it’s  i think it’s definitely better to have recipe than   it is to have uncategorized default post format is  going to kind of depend on the theme that you have  

And what you want standard is fine for most people  and these settings here are fine for most people   so we’re going to do save changes so that it saves  the default post category change that we made  

And then here under reading since this is going  to be a blog website i already know that i want my   latest posts to show up so that means every time  i create a post it’s going to show up right on my  

Home page but if you’re making a different kind  of website if you’re not making a blog and you   want to have a static page that you’re going to  create you can change this over to a static page  

But obviously you’d need to create some pages  first before you can do that and then you can   select which page is your homepage and basically  which page is your post page or your blog page   here i’d also suggest setting your blog feed to  show a summary that way it’s not showing the full  

Text of your blog on your home page it’s showing  the sort of read more link down below that in a   short description and this discouraged search  engines from indexing the site is something   you definitely want off i assume that you want  your site to be discovered so you do want search  

Engines to index your site so we’ll make sure that  that’s off and then we’ll click save changes again   and then here under discussion i think  that most of these settings here are   fine the one thing i might change is to hold  a comment for moderation if it has more than  

One link in it because chances are if somebody  is writing a spam comment they’re going to have   a link in their spam comment that goes to who  knows who knows where and so we just want to  

Set that to one and that way we get notified  of the comment before it gets posted to our   website we also have this setting here to email  me whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is   held for moderation so anytime you get a comment  to your website you’re automatically going to get  

Emailed about it to that administration email that  we saw earlier on some other settings here you can   do to sort of control which comments show up and  then down here we’ve got avatars and these avatars  

Show up when our users make comments on our blog  we’ve got the uh and it’s gonna pull these avatars   from gravatar which i’ll show you how to set  up later on if you haven’t set that up already  

And i don’t know what all of these other icons  here are all about i wouldn’t use any of these   as the default i would either use mystery person  or blank as the default um i think that just makes  

The most sense and then we can click save changes  here and then under media it’s not much here i   think that leaving these settings as the basic  settings i think is fine and this next setting   is probably the most important setting to make  sure you have right on your website and that  

Is the permalinks and this is what the format is  going to be of your blog pages and blog post links   and we want to use post name here so that  means it’s going to be your url slash slug  

Of your web page or blog post so if you made a  post for example that was called pasta recipe   chances are that the slug and you can edit this  but chances are the slug would automatically be  

Generated as pasta dash recipe and for one thing  that’s easier to tell people so if you’re like oh   if you want to find my pasta recipe you can go  to cookingtimewithtim.com pasta recipe and it’s   also something that helps your search engine  optimization because it sort of makes that  

Very clear wording so that google and other  search engines know a little bit more about   what this page is about so we definitely want  to make sure that post name is clicked here   and that we click save changes there and then the  last thing here is the privacy setting i can’t  

Really go into much detail about this because  really you should be advised by an attorney   but what i can say about it is that wordpress once  you have all of your plugins installed attempts to   get information about how those plugins and how  your website in general are using other people’s  

Information and it attempts to make up sort  of a little write up about each of those items   and places it into a privacy policy page it’s not  something i would worry about you know within the  

First four or five months of creating your website  i don’t think you’re going to have a problem with   that but later on down the road as your website  gets more serious you definitely want to have   somebody help you create a proper privacy policy  for your website so that was a quick introduction  

To wordpress and the wordpress dashboard okay so  the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going   to set up a plugin called jetpack jetpack does  a lot of awesome things for us it’s kind of like   this all-in-one plugin it’s actually made by the  people behind wordpress and we’re going to use the  

Free version of jetpack but i definitely recommend  sort of the professional version of jetpack maybe   later on and the best way to get the professional  version of jetpack is actually to use the dream   press hosting and i’ll include a link up at  the top of the video and down below about dream  

Press it is definitely more expensive it’s  25 a month but it’s professional wordpress   hosting and a great way if you’re ready to  take your website to the next level to do that   and then you get jetpack included in that and  actually if you look at the pricing of jetpack  

Jetpack professional is 25 on its own so you  basically either look at it as you’re paying for   jetpack and getting free hosting or you’re paying  for hosting and getting free jetpack either way i  

Think it’s a really good deal and that’s actually  what i use on my website is i use the dream press   with the professional jetpack so i really like  that the other thing we’re going to do is we’re  

Going to set up something called gravatar and  gravatar is something also set up i believe by   the makers of wordpress and what it is is that  when you’re commenting on someone else’s blog   for example if you type in your email address it’s  automatically going to pull your gravatar or your  

Avatar or your picture and use that in the post  and so we’re going to use that actually on our   website for our little about widget it’s going  to pull that image from gravatar so i’m going to  

Show you exactly how to set up gravatar and that’s  also going to give you more of a professional look   when you’re out there looking at other people’s  blogs and you’re commenting on it it’s going to  

Show you know your picture or if you want to have  your logo whatever you want in there it’s going to   show up it’s kind of a great little hint to make  your website look a little bit more professional  

And make your online presence also look a little  bit more professional let’s go ahead and see how   we set that up so the first thing that we’re  going to need to do here is we’re going to need  

To go to the dashboard of our website we’re  going to go to plugins and installed plugins   gonna make sure that jetpack has the most recent  versions we’re gonna click update now here and   if for some reason you don’t have jetpack already  installed you can always add it just go up here to  

The top click add new and then it probably will  just show up right here but if it doesn’t you   can just type in and search for jetpack right  here and then we’re going to click activate i’m going to click on set up jetpack  and i’m going to set up a username

And i’m going to create a password and i’m  going to go ahead and create our account and i’m using lastpass to manage my  password so i’m going to go ahead and   save this password there definitely  again recommend having a password manager  

And now it is attempting to connect  jetpack and its features with our website and uh we don’t want to do the jetpack complete  plan because holy cow is that expensive   again this is where having dream press can save  you quite a bit of money so let’s click on edit  

Let’s click here to remove this plan  because that’s not the plan we want at all okay so we just closed out of this we go to my  plan you’ll see that we have the free plan here   um and this is going to show us the stats  for our website we’re now on wordpress.com  

And we’re logged into wordpress.com and we can do  actually some management of our website from here   we can also log into the back end of our  website from here by going to wp admin   so now it’s basically created so what  wordpress has done here is it’s created  

A wordpress.com account for us so it’s another  way we can log in by logging into wordpress.com   it’ll show us our wordpress dashboard that we just  saw and it’ll allow us to log into our website now  

If we click here to the main dashboard of our  websites we can see here that we’ve got these   stats from jetpack this is definitely something i  like to have kind of up at the top here we don’t  

Have anything yet but as you start adding content  to your website and start getting traffic you’ll   see some of that traffic show up here and you can  click on view all stats and it’ll take us back to  

Our wordpress.com account and here it will show  you the number of views the number of visitors   to your website so just really easy to use stats  for our website that’s basically how you install   jetpack for free definitely recommend if you  have the money to get dream press which is  

Something like 25 or 26 dollars a month you get a  the professional version of jetpack for free which   includes things like the anti-spam the better  scheduling another way of backing up your website   to a separate place rather than just having  relying on the backups from dreamhost themselves  

Just a lot of great features that are definitely  worthwhile but this is sort of a great way to get   started inexpensively okay and then the last thing  we want to do with jetpack is we want to click  

Activate here to activate that site speed boost  which is going to add our images to this global   content delivery network and it’s also going to  help to compress the images on our website so   that they load faster for our viewers and you  want to make sure that this protect is turned  

On which is going to help keep hackers  from attempting to log into our website   sort of basically just keeps like this brute force  attack from happening on our website so that’s   a really good thing then we’re going to turn on  this image accelerator and that’s what’s going to  

Adjust the image size to sort of optimize the size  of our images so they load faster for our viewers   and there we go now we’ve got  jetpack fully set up and ready to go   so next thing let us go ahead and set up our  gravatar which should actually automatically  

Change this icon here let’s go ahead and try  that so let’s go ahead and go to gravatar.com g-r-a-v-a-t-a-r dot com   and then we can actually sign in with our  wordpress.com account that we just created and we can say approve and then we  can confirm this by going to our  

Email so if you’re using the email that we  set up with our dream host account we can go   to webmail and then your dot your url that you  created so my example is cookingtimewithtim.com   and then we can activate our jetpack account

We’ve got the free plan and we have our  email confirmed so that is all set up now   and then we can go back to gravatar.com if  you’re got logged out you can sign back in   using your wordpress account and then we can  add a new image here we can upload a new image  

Going to go ahead and select  this image here then click next we can kind of reframe it  if we want so i’ll do this   and we can select crop image and we can set our  rating so i think this is a pretty g rating here  

And there we go now if we go over to  wordpress.com and we hit refresh on our page   you should see that our gravatar shows up here  there it is so you can see this has automatically   been added and now whenever we comment on a  wordpress website and in some cases some other  

Websites you will see your headshot or avatar here  automatically show up it’s kind of a great way of   easily making your social media posts  or your posts on different blogs   show up and look professional and here  under my profile you can add your name in  

Also so that way it’ll also show up on posts that  you make and we can click save profile details   you can add a little bit about yourself if  you want to here it’s just another great way  

Of getting sort of the information about you and  what you’re doing with your blog out there so next   up we’re going to install our theme for making  our food blog website so now the next thing we  

Want to do is install our theme which is going to  help us create a great looking food blog website   so the first thing we need to do is to buy and  get that theme and if you’re watching this video  

On youtube and you want to help to support the  channel and this free tutorial you can use the   link that i’ve included to the fudica theme down  below and you can go ahead and click on that

And that will take you to the foodica website  where you can go ahead and buy the foodica theme   i’ve already bought the theme so after you buy  the theme i’ll show you where you will end up  

Okay so once you’ve bought the foodica theme you  should end up someplace around here so what you   want to do is you want to scroll down here  and click under your downloads and click the  

Download button now i bought the full plan uh  for wp zoom because that’s what i do is i test   different themes and so i figured hey i should go  ahead and try the different themes that they have  

To offer i also think it’s kind of a good deal 99  bucks if i change my mind later on on which theme   i want to use you know i can go ahead and do that  so if you just bought the foodica theme you should  

Only have the foodica theme here if you bought all  of them like i did you’ll have all of them here   but what you want to do is you just want to  download the theme they say that both of these  

Themes are actually exactly the same it doesn’t  matter i like to use the foodica pro version   of it just to differentiate it from the free  version of foodica so go ahead and click download   to download that that’s going to download  that theme file and typically that will go  

Into your downloads folder on your computer if  you have a mac it will most likely go to your   downloads folder and i think it should be the same  thing on a windows computer also then go back to  

The dashboard of our website and we can click  over here to appearance and go over to themes and then we want to click add new at the top and then we want to click on this  upload theme button that’s going to  

Allow us to manually upload our own theme  and that’s almost all paid themes and this   is how you activate and upload a theme is doing it  this way so we’re going to click on upload theme   and we’re going to choose  the file from our computer  

I’ve got it in the downloads folder and you should  just say foodica pro mine says foodica pro 3   because i’ve downloaded the same several  times and then you want to leave the file   zipped it’s really important you if your file  got unzipped you need to either re-zip it or  

Re-download it will not work if it is not  a zipped file so make sure that your file   is zipped and then we’re going to click choose  here and now we’re going to click install now  

And that’s going to add the foodica theme to our  website and just give it a few moments to do that   you should wind up with a page like this and since  we want to use this theme on our website we want  

To click activate and now we have it activated  they’ve got a little walk through theme tour   which you can choose to do i’m going to close it  because i’m going to walk you through everything  

Now is also a really good time to go ahead and  put in your license key because it’s right here   we don’t need to go and look for where to add  it in later and what this allows you to do is  

Allows you get the one click theme updates so  basically you can just really quickly get the   theme updates without having to re-upload the file  so to do that we’re going to go back to our wp  

Zoom page here or log back into wp zoom if you’ve  logged out let me go to my account licenses and then you should have this license code  here that you can just copy just like that  

Just highlight it and copy it and we’ll go back  to our website here and we can just enter in that   license key right now and just get that out of the  way click save and we’ll click activate license

There we go and now you might want to deactivate  the license if you have a limited number of   licenses like i have i only have three you may  want to deactivate it if you want to move it  

To a different website for example something  like that okay now let’s sort of go ahead and   take care of some of these things that the  theme is reminding us about up here at the top  

One of the things is they want to track how you’re  using the theme i’m going to say don’t allow next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to  install the plugins that are recommended by this  

Theme and some of them are you know excellent  like this recipe card block which is going to   help us create our recipes on our website in  a way that is more friendly for search engines   so search engines can know that the post that  you’ve created is about a recipe and it also has  

Some of that information about the recipe for  google that it can potentially use to highlight   your recipe on google search it’s not a guarantee  but it’s something that you know could be used by   google to highlight your recipe so hey why not  you know take that chance and be able to do that  

Let’s just go ahead and we’ll click  here but on begin installing plugins and the ones i recommend installing are the  recipe card block the instagram widget if you have   instagram and you want to show some of  your instagram images on your website  

Mail poet i don’t recommend installing um i use  mailchimp so that’s that’s why but this is a way   of creating an email mailing list and being able  to send out an email newsletters to your viewers  

But i prefer to use mailchimp for that so i’m  going to leave that off you don’t need the   rating widget star system okay and then the final  one that i would recommend installing is this   social icons widget by wp zoom so we’re gonna  click here to bulk actions we’re gonna click  

Install and now it’s going to install the ones  that we have selected here i’m gonna click apply i   know that there’s a lot going on here and there’s  a lot of settings that we’ve had to deal with uh  

So far but i promise you that once we get all of  this configured all of this setup that you can do   what you’re good at which is focusing on creating  your content and that’s what i’m here to help you  

Do is help you kind of get through all of this  messy settings things so you can focus on what   you’re good at and what you’re trying to do which  is make some great content all right so i hope  

That you guys are enjoying the tutorial so far  and if you are it would really mean a lot to me   if you would give me a thumbs up give a comment  down below about how it’s going for you so far  

All those kind of things really helped to  encourage me and it makes me feel like making   these tutorials from giving them out for free  is worthwhile so i definitely really appreciate   that and now let’s go ahead and continue making  this website okay so now we’ve got all of those  

Installed we need to activate those next so if  we go over here to plugins installed plugins and then we can either do a bulk action and  select those plugins that we just installed so   the recipe card plugin the social icons plugin and  the instagram widget and we can get a bulk actions  

Activate or you can also click the activate  button underneath each one i’m going to do it   in bulk so i’ll just click apply it’s going to  activate those plugins it’s going to make them  

So they work on our website okay so now we have  done that and since we’re not going to use any   of these other recommended plugins we can go  ahead and just click dismiss this notice that  

It stops reminding us to do that and while we’re  at it so we can make this notification here go   away we can go ahead and configure our instagram  widget so we can click on the settings page here   and you should be able to use it with  this public feed basically you just  

Enter in your username and it should show it i  was not able to get that to work at all so i’m   using the api method which connects us to the  wp zoom website which then helps us to get our  

Api access token so it’s really easy to do  just go ahead and click connect with instagram and you’re giving permission for this widget  from wpzoom to access your instagram account   so if that’s something you’re not comfortable with  definitely don’t do it i’m fine with that but it’s  

Something you need to decide on for yourself i  do will say though it makes it extremely easy   to connect it and just get it up and running  and working so we’re going to click on continue and it’s going to automatically copy in that  access token for us and then at the bottom here  

We just need to click save changes and this is how  often it’s going to look for new instagram posts   so if you post a lot on instagram you  might want to change that to hours   or minutes just know that that’s going to affect  the performance of your website i think that  

Every one day should be fine for most people your  website doesn’t need to have the most up-to-date   instagram post on there if it comes up the next  day that’s going to be totally fine okay and  

We’re going to click save changes here now we can  click back here just to go to the main dashboard   it’s still showing us this message but since we  know we’ve already connected the instagram widget  

We can go ahead and just close this and the next  thing here um that they’re recommending that we do   and what you should do is disable the structured  data markup because we’re going to use the recipe  

Card plug-in instead so go ahead and click on that  and it’s going to take us right to the correct   setting and the setting here just so you know as  i said before some themes and some plugins will  

Install an item on your dashboard in this case  wp zoom has added a item on our dashboard for   modifying the foodica theme so it’s automatically  taking us to the wp zoom theme options general and   then structured data where we can go ahead and  turn off the structured data because we’re going  

To use the recipe card from the recipe card plugin  instead so go ahead and save all changes here okay so we are well on our way to getting this  going just a few more things that i recommend  

That we set up so the next thing is that um if  you look at our home page now and to view the   home page of your website or to view your site  you can just click here on this button here or  

Click on the visit site button and we will now  see that we’ve changed our theme and we’re seeing   what it looks like now now don’t worry um this  isn’t going to show up to your viewers this is  

Just because you’re logged into the back end of  your website but i think the best way to configure   the foodica theme is by actually using their  demo content so you can sort of see what you’re  

Doing without having to have a lot of content  already on your website so let’s go ahead and do   that so we’re going to go back to our dashboard  here we’re going to go to the wp zoom options  

And under theme options here we’re going to click  on import export and then we’re going to click on   this demo content button here and then we’re going  to load the demo content and once we’re done sort  

Of configuring the theme and i’m going to show you  a little bit about how the different ways that i   recommend configuring the theme we’re going to  be able to delete all this content and actually   start adding in our own content just give it a  few moments to install all of that demo content

Okay so and then after a few moments  you’ll wind up with this page here   and then we can just click on the next step  regenerating the thumbnails is going to make   it so that we can change the aspect ratio  of it so we’re going to go ahead and say  

Next step and allow it to do that and it’ll take  a few moments for it to process that information   okay so it takes a little bit of time but it  should be all set up and then we can click next   we can load the default widgets  which will put the widgets  

In the areas that they recommend for us and i  think that’s fine you can see how that looks and then we can decide on which  locations we want the menu in and so   part of the demo content is that they’ve  actually created menus for us so we can see  

What that looks like so we’ll go ahead and just  place the menus in their recommended areas so   that you can see what that looks like so we go at  the top for the top main menu for the main menu  

Main menu for the mobile menu footer menu and  then the recipe index and we can click next step   and you want this to show your latest post because  this is a blog and so on our home page is going  

To show our latest posts let’s go ahead and click  next step and installing a child theme is optional   you’d want to do this if you plan on  making changes to the code of your website   if you don’t plan on making changes to  the code of your website this basically  

Kind of can become a pain in the neck  for you so i’d recommend if you’re just   a beginner and you’re just starting out  that you leave this alone later on you can   add a child theme or create a child theme  if you want to make changes to the code of  

Your website so we’re gonna go ahead and do skip  this step and we’re gonna go ahead and close this there we go now one other thing that i recommend  and something that i always do when i’m making   modifications to the look of my wordpress  website is because you can’t really see  

What you’re doing from the back end of  your website here from the dashboard   i like to open up another tab so you can push  command t that’s going to create a new tab   um in your browser and if you’re on a  windows computer it should be control t  

And then you just want to type in the url for  your website so mine is cooking time with tim and that’s going to load our website with all of  the demo content here and now we can easily go  

Back and forth between the back end of our website  and the front end to see what changes has been   have been made and whenever you make changes  you just want to hit that refresh button up here  

To see what those changes look like and also if  you don’t see a change that you know you’ve made   happen you might want to hit this delete cache  button just to make sure that that change shows  

Up here okay so one of the first things that we  want to turn off which i don’t actually see here   um but is a the shopping cart button we’re going  to make sure the shopping cart button is turned  

Off because we don’t have woocommerce and we  don’t have an online store on this website   and you can have an online store with woocommerce  but if you’re just one or two people and you’re   not a programmer or developer i wouldn’t really  recommend using wordpress and woocommerce for  

Creating an online store you can have much better  luck and much better support using shopify shopify   is what i chose to make the online store that i  made with just because i know that not only for  

Me but for the people who are actually running  the store that when they need help they can   contact shopify and they can also contact all  the suppliers that make the add-ons for shopify   and get really good results at getting help so  that’s why i recommend for keeping your life easy  

If you want to have an online store use shopify  and if you’re interested in that i have a review   of shopify that shows you the pros and cons but  i’m definitely a big fan of shopify for keeping  

Your life simple and being able to make an online  store super easily without much hassle let’s go   back to the back end we’re going to click on the  tab to go back to our dashboard i’m gonna go over  

Here to general and under theme settings we’re  gonna turn off the display woocommerce cart button   in the header and we’re gonna click save changes  there and now let’s take a look at some of the   home page settings so here again under general  we’re going to go here to where it says home page  

And one of the options here is if you’re using  for example the homepage slider which if we go   back to our website is this thing here which i’m  actually not that big of a fan of so i’m probably  

Going to take that off and i’ll show you how to do  that but if this is showing your recent posts you   may want to hide the recent posts from the rest  of your blog feed down here so you don’t have a  

Duplication of the content showing on your website  probably doesn’t matter that much but that is what   this option here is for under recent posts  next we have the homepage slideshow so this   is how you remove this homepage slideshow  from the homepage of your website which  

I recommend doing i don’t particularly think that  slideshows offer that much but it can be kind of   nice to have like one nice big splash image on the  top of your website and it’s pulling this image  

From the featured image on your blog post and  we’re going to look into how to make blog posts   a little bit later on but we’re sort of first  going to design what we want the home page of our  

Website to look like i’m sort of going to show  you the options of what your homepage can look   like so to remove that we’re going to click here  to we’re going to uncheck the display homepage   slideshow and none of these things matter these  are settings for that home page slideshow i’m  

Going to click save all changes and if we go back  to the home page or website and we click refresh   and we click refresh um let’s  go ahead and delete cash   there we go um so i had to delete the cash but now  that’s made that go away now what we have showing  

Here is this widget area where we’re using three  of these image widget cards that were created by   wp zoom i think that this is actually a pretty  nice look here especially if you’re just starting  

Out if you’ve got different pages that you want  your visitors to go to and we’ll look at how you   can change these out in just a little bit here one  of the other home page settings if we go back to  

Wp zoom here and we click on home page click  on general and then home page posts we’ve got   options for how we want our images to display  whether we want them landscape so wide  

Or portrait so tall if we click save all changes  here we go back to our website and we hit refresh or delete cache if the refresh doesn’t work   you’ll see now that the images on our blog  posts are sort of the tall version of the images  

And let’s go ahead and get rid of this hello world  post that was sort of the default added in when   we started our website so to do that we’re going  to go back to our back end i’m going to go click  

On the tab that i have the back end to open with  i’m going to go to posts all posts and i’m just   going to go ahead and click trash on that hello  world post there we go now if we go back here and  

We click refresh and we scroll down now we’ve got  just the demo posts that were created by foodico   or the wp zoom look okay going back here to the  settings for our website we can go here to wp zoom  

And then under general homepage posts where we  were we can also decide how long we want the   excerpt to be so that’s sort of like the short  part of the post here that’s showing here so how  

Many characters we want this to be before it shows  the continue reading button if we want to display   the featured image which we do because that’s sort  of what gives our website that color and that look   and this here is what the featured image  is here so we definitely want to show that

And then we can choose whether we want to  slow display the category and so this here   is showing what the category is and i think that’s  a good idea i think it’s a nice look to it and we  

Can also decide what what of this metadata we  want to show whether we want to show the date   and the comments or not and you can turn that  off here by turning off the date and time  

And turning off the comment count so i definitely  think you should turn off the comment count in   particular but probably the date and time also  until your blog has gotten some more traction   or maybe just leave it off in general and you can  display the authors if you have multiple different  

Authors on your website that might be a good thing  to do i think most of us bloggers are probably the   only ones doing making the website and creating  all the content there’s no real point in   displaying the author and the sticky post option  here is that’s what’s showing up here is this  

Sticky post and what a sticky post is is something  that you flagged to say that you want this to   show up at the top of your blog and you can have  multiple items here i think it does look best with  

Just one item so it’d probably be like one of your  more popular recipes that you want people to see   who you know maybe are coming to your website and  going back and looking at the home page because  

They found a deeper link for a specific recipe and  they’re like oh hey who’s this person about what   what recipes are they all about this would be a  good place to put one of your more popular posts   and so that’s what this uh  sticky post information here  

Options are about and i think the display  read more button on all posts is a good thing   to have so let’s go ahead and save  those changes that we’ve made there okay so next thing we’re going to do  is we’re going to start looking at the  

Widget areas of our website and adding and  styling our home page with those widget areas   so here we’ve got this widget  area here also our sidebar here   these are all of all widgets in a sidebar widget  area let’s go ahead and look at how we edit that  

So back on the dashboard of our website  we’re going to go to appearances widgets and now you’ll see that a bunch more widgets  have been added there’s kind of a lot a lot   of widgets and a whole bunch of widget areas  different places where we can put this content  

And the widget areas that were added by  the theme are highlighted here in blue   so we’ve got the sidebar widget area so this has  got the author buyer about me the social icons etc   we can go ahead and change this about me author  bio here which is again what is showing up right  

Here on the sidebar and it’s going to be the  sidebar on all of the pages our website so   if you look at one of the posts you’ll see that  that sidebar is showing up here so we can change  

What that looks like so you know type in your  name that’s sort of the recommendation thing here and we want to use our email address here and  we need to use the email address that we used  

To create our gravatar with and the reason for  that is that is where the picture is going to get   taken from is going to get pulled from gravatar so  if you’ve been following along with full tutorial   then you should have that gravatar set up so  i created my gravatar email address with tim  

At cookingcookingtimefortim.com you  can decide what image size you want   and you can add a little bit of  information about yourself here   and you can decide what you want um if you want  a button and if you want that to leak link to  

Another page if you create an about page you can  link that here and then we’re going to click save   and of course if you didn’t want this to show up  at all you can just click delete so that’s how  

You adjust that we’ll look at the social social  icons and some of these other items that are in   that are in our sidebar here and we’re going to  do that sidebar in our final setup okay so now  

Let’s go ahead and take a look at a couple of the  different ways that i like to style the homepage   using this theme there are two basic looks that i  like one is kind of what i’m going to consider the  

Full look for this website so it’s what you should  have once you’ve had i don’t know maybe like   seven to ten blog posts put up i would set it  up like this and then the second look that i’ll  

Show you how to do and that’s the look we’re gonna  use to start our blog with um that’s just sort of   like this minimalist look that’s gonna look good  with when you only have like one or two posts  

And you’re just getting started my other advice  too is do not wait until you have 10 or 12 posts   put it up on your website get your posts up as  soon as possible people probably aren’t going  

To be finding your website right away but google  will be finding your website as soon as you start   posting things and the longer that your posts  are up online the better chances you have of   ranking on google so definitely don’t wait to  put posts onto your website so let’s go ahead  

And start out with that kind of full look so  you can know where you can take your website   with after you’ve got some posts set up so let’s  go back to our dashboard here and we’re here  

In the widget area and what i’m going to say is  right below the homepage slideshow you use this   wp zoom carousel slider and then here we can just  select where we want it to go and so as i said  

Before the homepage below the slideshow i think  it’s a good place for it click add widget and now   here we’ve got some different options so i’m going  to say top posts for the title and then showing 10  

Posts is fine we’re going to turn off the auto  scroll because i don’t really think that having   sliders on your home page is that great of an  idea i think showing the navigation dots is a   good idea because it just shows people they  can see more there if they choose to showing  

The category i also think is nice showing the date  let’s turn that off i don’t generally like to show   the date on blogs unless it’s a very topical blog  like a news blog or something like that and then  

What i would suggest for once you have your  website set up and you have a lot of posts is   that you create a tag called best and then you put  your sort of top recipes that you want people to  

See when they’re first discovering you in that  category but since we don’t have any tags yet   for our posts we’re gonna leave that blank but  i would definitely use something like best and   just show off your best recipes here so let’s  go ahead and just use desserts just so we can  

See what this looks like and you can see if it’s  something that you like and then click save and   let’s go back to our tab where we’ve got the home  page of our website and let’s see if refresh works

And it does so this is kind of what i like for a  nice home page look on this we’ve got this we’ve   got this portrait look to our featured images  which i like and i like you know the way that this  

Widget looks with these you know large title cards  and it shows the category that that the post is in   and if viewers want to they can scroll through and  see the different posts so i think it’s got a nice  

Look it says top post so people know that these  are your top posts and then i do like this three   card widget section here if you have something to  put there like maybe the about me thing or maybe  

You want to feature certain categories if you’re  like on the food blog that i’m thinking about   making you know i might put my gluten-free recipes  here and sort of highlight them here but it’s sort   of like this look to just give people different  ideas about where you get where you can go  

But we got the recent post here which i  like another place where you can highlight   your sticky post here and then uh just sort  of the general blog feed continuing out here   now you can see my instagram feed is showing  up and down here at the bottom of the page

We’ve got another instagram  widget here that’s shown up   some other widget areas here which you can use  to feature different categories on your website   so it’s generally a nice look so this  is a the look i think you should have  

Maybe after you’ve got 10 posts or so started  and then if you’re using my recommendation here   of this carousel slider and you’ve got the best  the best recipes tag i would probably choose   some of your recipes that are the most popular  and maybe the ones you’re most proud of and i  

Think maybe every three months set yourself like a  calendar alarm to revisit that and see if you want   to change that up and change up the look of your  homepage or the recipes that you’re featuring here  

So now let’s look at sort of like what i’m  going to call the minimalist look the look   that i think that you should use when you’re just  first starting your blog okay so let’s go back  

To the back end of our website and let’s set up  the sort of what i’m going to call the standard   look or the base look uh for our website for  people who are just starting out brand new  

To blogging and i have this um as their first  blog so it looks right with you know the minimal   amount of content so the first i’m going to say  is actually delete this let’s just start here  

New um so the first thing i’m going to say is  let’s go ahead and delete that carousel slider   sidebar here so if it’s not opened here you can  open it up click delete let’s get rid of the slider columns one two and three posts  we’re gonna go ahead and delete that one

And delete the next one here and then you know  when you’re ready you can add these back in   make it fit you know the content for your  website but this is i think just how you   should get started just real simple basic  look to your website and also let’s see here

Home page featured category so that  was the section down here at the bottom   below the blog feed where we have these different   featured categories sections so since if you’re  just starting out you don’t have a lot of content  

Right now let’s get rid of those here you can  always add them back later when you’re ready and these are here for the  footer columns i think these are   totally fine to put in there the instagram bar  we’re just going to leave that alone that was the  

Instagram feed that we have along the  bottom of our website whoops header   social icons this is where you can control  the social icons that are showing up here in the header part of your website here  so you definitely want to make sure

That you set this to your accounts so you  know in my example it’s real website hints if you’re not sure what it is you know go  ahead and go to your instagram or facebook   page and just double check that you know  you’ve got the right the right uh settings

Don’t have pinterest i’m just going to delete  that and if you have a contact page that you   want people to be able to contact you at you can  put that in here i’m just going to go ahead and  

Delete that and then make sure you push save  super important in wordpress always look down   at the bottom to see where you want to push  what you want to save so i’ll click save here   and let’s go ahead and see what that looks  like now so you can hold down the shift key  

And push refresh and that’s one way of getting  it to kind of reload from the beginning and not   have any cash stored on your computer and if  it doesn’t reload like it didn’t here because   it’s using the cache from the server we can  just click the delete cache button up here

And so now we’ve got sort of the basic look  that i’m sort of recommending so we’ve got our   updated social media icons up here twitter should go to my twitter it does  so that way people can follow you on  

Your various different social medias from up here  we’ve got a recent post so this is a sticky post   and i’ll show you how to create a sticky post  um this might be something you want to remove   or not but i think that it’s a nice  look to have sort of one big wide  

Featured recipe here and then the regular blog  is going to start down here and then we’ve got   our sidebar and when we start building our  site which we’re going to do right after this  

I’ll show you how to set up all these things here  in the sidebar so there we go on this kind of how   you set up the home page with the fudica theme and  a couple different ideas on how i would set it up  

And this right now is how i would set it up if i’m  just starting out with a brand new blog and let’s   look at one more thing and that is what the blog  category pages look like so if we click on dessert  

With their demo content that is one of their  category pages and right now here they’ve got a   full width page so there’s no sidebar but what i’m  going to recommend is that you do add the sidebar   to pretty much all of your pages so your  category pages and your blog post pages  

Because if you’re looking to make this blog to  start making some money you definitely want to   be able to put some ads in that sidebar so let’s  go ahead and see how we do that so we’re going to  

Go back to the back end of our website here  we are going to go to wp zoom theme options   and then here under general layouts we’ve got the  home page layout which has the sidebar and we saw  

That there and we’ve got the category pages and  let’s also make those sidebar pages like this   and then we’ll click save changes if we click  here and we hit refresh if i hit delete cache

There we go now we’ve got the sidebar here on our  category pages now this is optional maybe you just   want to make sure people can get to the recipe  that they’re looking for and that’s fine but i  

Always think it’s nice to be able to you know have  some ads featured on every page if you’re starting   to make money and maybe this is something you want  to implement later on after you’ve gotten a little  

Bit more established and you’ve set up your ads  but i say just go ahead and set up the sidebar   now that way you don’t have to remember later  on to add the sidebar to these category pages  

So speaking of ads i’m going to show you where  you set up the ad space on your theme so let’s   go ahead and check that out because definitely  after a few months of making content you know you  

Should look into getting google adsense and adding  that to your website as an opportunity uh you know   to make some money from your blogging so let’s  go back to the back end of our website and we’re  

Already here on the wp zoom settings and what we  want to do is we want to look for banners here   and we can enable add space in the header and that  looks like this that’s what the ad space here is  

I don’t really like this ad space i wish that the  ad was actually above the title of our website   i think that looks better and it kind of keeps  everything all in one line but that’s what the  

Ad space would look like here on the back end you  can either paste in your google adsense code you   want to make sure it’s the right size or you can  paste in an image depending on what you’re doing  

If you do an image you want to make sure you  add the url of where it’s supposed to go to   and then a banner title for the alt tag and then  you can click save changes and then the other  

Banner area we have here is after the first  post and you can able enable this here which   goes on the home page and that’s this here is  what that looks like on my test site and then  

We’ve got the sidebar ads and so this here can go  before the widget area or after the widget area   so it’s going to put an ad either right at the  top of where your widgets are or right at the  

Bottom for your widgets arm and you can save that  and then there’s also this post ad space and this   ad here goes at the bottom of all of your posts  and one of the other options is later on as you’re  

Sort of building your website up you can also use  a content block to add ads directly in between the   content of your article and that’s what a lot of  food blogs do to make extra money so that’s what  

The ad space looks like so now let’s go ahead and  sort of finish this up and actually set up this   website for making our blog with and so the first  thing we need to do to do that is get rid of all  

Of that demo content so to do that we’re going to  go over here to the wp zoom if you didn’t click on   that already click on that and then we’re going  to go to import and export and then demo content  

And then right here we’re going to do erase  content and then we’ll say yes erase content   it’s going to erase all of that demo  content that was added to our website   okay so now all that demo content is deleted  so let’s do the final touches to setting up  

Our blog and making sure that it’s ready to  go so first thing we’re going to do is we’re   going to go back to the home page of our website  just see what it looks like now without anything  

In there so we’re going to click delete cache  here to refresh it and we should remove all the   content and there we go now we’ve got no posts we  have the about me widget is still set up and i’m  

Going to look again and see why this here isn’t  showing up and we’re going to set up the rest of   these widgets here right now let’s go ahead and  set up those sidebar widgets so let’s go over  

To our other tab here where we have all of our  settings and then let’s go to appearance widgets and let’s see what’s going on with this author  bio did i spell it wrong tim at cooking time   oh cooking time with tim

Calm okay that should fix that so  let’s push save hit refresh there we go   it needs to say cooking time with tim to  show up so make sure you type in the right   email address there if you want it to show up  

Okay so that’s got that set up there now we’ve  got the social media icons and they’ve got kind of   two looks that they’ve set up for you here so if  you decide you like one look over the other better  

I’m gonna go with a more colorful one so that’s  the first one here and so what i’m gonna do with   the second version here is i’m just gonna delete  it so i’m gonna scroll down here click delete okay and then i’m gonna go back to  the first social icon zoom and we’ve  

Got uh some text above what you want that  text to say so you can type that in here whatever you want that to say i’m going  to leave the settings just the way they   are because i pretty much like that look and  then here you want to make sure that you remove  

Any social media accounts that you don’t use and that you change the link here  to go to your social media profiles and i’m not going to go through it all  i think you guys get the idea but you  

Just want to make sure you edit that all in  click save and i’m just going to close this   here and then we’ve got these image cards  that were added in so if you have images or   things that you want to draw people’s  attention to you can use those cards  

Since i don’t really have anything on this website  right now i’m gonna go ahead and delete these two and then i do have my instagram widget that  was automatically configured and set up when we  

Use that api key for instagram so now i think that  we’ve got a pretty good place with our sidebar to   get started so now let’s start adjusting the look  of our website and making sure that everything is  

The way we want it to be so one of the things  that we can do here on our homepage is if you   have a logo that you want to put up here instead  of just the default text that the theme has  

We can add a logo so we can hit the customize  button up here to edit this or from the dashboard   of which i’m going to click back here and  go to the dashboard on my dashboard tab

We can go to appearance customized so this is  the two ways that you can get to this part of   the website okay and then we click under site  identity here and if we have a logo we want  

To add we can add this logo so i’m going to  go ahead and upload a logo that i’ve created and then go just and then just make sure it’s selected um you  can give it some alt text so you know maybe

Tim’s cooking blog logo something like that and  then a title here then we’ll click select oops okay and now it’s changed that to this graphic  logo instead of the text logo logo you can also  

Change your site title which again shows up at the  top of your website and then click publish to save   those changes and then if you you know the little  icons that show up here you’ve got this c icon  

Or you know like wp zoom has this w icon up here  if you have an icon like that that you’ve created   for your website you can add that also under site  identity here where it says site icon and you can  

Upload an icon here i haven’t created one but i’d  probably use something like this frying pan logo   here and you just want to make sure that it’s  this size here so 512 by 512 pixels for that  

And if you don’t like the sort of default fonts  that are on this website you can go here under   typography and you can control the font family the  font size do you think that this is a pretty good  

Font size usually with most teams that i test  you need to bump up the font size a bit but i   think that 16 is actually a decent easy to read  size so you can control sort of all of the looks  

Of the fonts right here under this typography  section and each different type of font on the   website has different controls over what that  font looks like so the settings are right there and then if we wanna on our website  here if you scroll down to the bottom  

It gives a credit to wp zoom and  you know it’s kind of tacky so   let’s remove that and i’ll include a link  down below to where you can find the code   to remove this but this is the page here and what  you want to do is you want to copy all of whoops  

Just the code here hit copy and then back on the  dashboard here we want to go back to customize and you know if these things take a little  while to load that’s one of the things about  

Working live online on your website um is that  sometimes it takes a little bit of time for things   to load that’s normal that’s unfortunately  how building websites goes so under here   under additional css we’re just going to paste  that code right in there and if i take it out  

You can see that it you can see in the live  preview here that it shows back up and then if   i paste that code back in you can see in the live  preview that that disappears so we’re gonna go  

Ahead and click publish to save that setting and  there we go we can close this let’s go ahead and   hit refresh here and we just want to confirm that  the change took place and it did so we’re all good  

And one of the other things that i like about this  theme is that it has a global disclosure section   where i’ll automatically add a disclosure to  every single one of your blog posts so if you use  

Affiliate marketing to make money on your website  and you don’t have to remember to put in that   disclosure you can have it placed in there for  you automatically and so if that’s something   you’re interested in you’ll find the setting  for that underneath the wp zoom general and  

Then single post options and then right here  is where you can add your global disclosure   statement which will show up on all of your  posts automatically and so you know the example   they give is this post may contain affiliate links  we may earn money so you could put something like  

That or whatever it is that you know your  attorney recommends or your lawyer um since   you know you may want to consult with them about  what you should do but the ftc here in the united   states has said that if you’re using affiliate  links you need to someplace prominently display  

That disclosure and it can’t be hidden anyplace  and it needs to be close to where the links are   without there being any additional action taken  by the user so you can’t actually have it on  

Another page so i like the fact that they include  that here and the next thing we’re going to do is   we’re going to start making a blog post and  i’ll show you an alternative method to adding  

In a disclosure where you can make a consistent  block that you can always add to posts that   have affiliate links on them okay so next up we’re  going to be looking at how to write our blog posts  

How to use the recipe card plug-in in our blog  posts to sort of get that little bit of benefit of   having the cards show up in google search and i’m  also going to talk about a couple of hints that  

I have on how to write and format your blog posts  let’s go ahead and take a look at how we actually   start really adding content to our website and  making blog posts and this is a great time if  

You have your own content ready to go maybe  you already have a recipe written up and you   start adding it in this is a great time to pause  pull that information have your images have your  

Text ready to go and you can sort of follow along  and as i’m showing you how to do it you can start   building your first blog post right  now so let’s go ahead and start out by  

Creating a blog post and i’m gonna sort of walk  you through the new features in the blog post   using the new wordpress editor which is  called gutenberg so let’s go over to posts there’s several different ways you can add a new  post you can either go to here posts add new or  

If you’re on your dashboard for example if you  hover over posts you can slide over here and go   to add new then you can also go up here at the top   bar and you can click new post  so those are the different ways  

You can create a new post go back here to the  main posts window and then we’ll click on add new and they’ve got a tour here also which you might  want to check out i’m going to give you just a  

Quick tour of the features of the post so we have  the post layout this is part of the theme here and   you can choose whether you want full width or have  your sidebar so for different posts you may want  

To include or not include the sidebar this is  where we’re going to enter in the content for   our post and this is where the title is going to  go here and then over here on the right hand side  

Is where we have some settings so underneath the  document tab here which is kind of the default of   what your posts open up to these are the settings  for the entire post and so here’s where you’ll  

Find the setting to add the stick to the top of  the blog so every single post that you click stick   to the top of the blog will show up on your home  page there in that sticky section that we said so  

I think it generally looks best with just one  blog post there so i just sort of pick the one   post that you want to feature that month or that  you want to feature in general because it’s your  

Most popular post right there at the top of the  blog and every and all of your other blog posts i   wouldn’t select that you can choose the authors if  you have multiple different users on your website   you can choose which author it has permalinks  we’ve already handled so you don’t need to worry  

About that categories this is where you can select  a category or you can add a new category to your   post tags this is where you can add it could add  a tag so if using my recommendation of using that  

Carousel for the different featured posts at  the top of your site this here is where you   could add a tag like best for example and  use that to feature those on that carousel   featured image where we add and upload the  featured image for our blog so that’s the  

Image that’s going to show up in our main blog  feed and also when we share our image to social   media that’s usually the image that will show  up on that social media post and generally the  

Excerpt will come from the first few lines that  you write of text or in this theme’s example i   think it’s the first 50 characters is what  it’s going to show but if you want to show   something different here you can manually write  a separate excerpt for each one of your posts  

And here under discussion you can turn it on and  off comments for each individual post and this is   if you’re using the homepage slider which i’m  not using but if you did want this featured in  

The homepage slider this is how you would feature  that and if your post is not a recipe that’s where   you would feature that now for scroll back up  here to the top when we start adding in content   that’s where this block functionality will come  in and that gives us the different settings for  

Each of the different types of content blocks we  can add to our page and you can open and close   this window here by using the gear icon and i’ve  had it you know before where you just come in and  

You’re editing a blog post and you don’t see those  settings and that’s how you get to it right here   and you can use the jetpack icon here see  what your posts are going to look like   on social media and then this three little dots  here helps you adjust what shows up in settings  

And what things are visible here so now let’s go  ahead and start writing our blog posts the first   thing we need to do is we need to give our post  a title so i’m going to call this post easy pizza  

And one of the things you might want to do when  you’re creating the title for your blog post is   do some search engine optimization research sort  of viewing what popular terms people are looking   for when they’re looking for say pizza example  and see if you can incorporate that in your title  

If it makes sense with the content that you’re  creating only to a video and some content about   how to kind of do that search engine optimization  research and the next thing we want to do is we’ll  

Start writing our post so the very first part  of your post one of the hints that i have on   sort of what you’re going to write in the first  part of your post is you want to make this  

First couple of sentences something that’s going  to attract people to want to read this article   because this is what’s going to show up on your  excerpt and in the search engine result these   first couple sentences are what’s going to show up  there so you really want to make it enticing sort  

Of draw in your audience into reading this post so  here’s just something off the top of my head here and if i could spell that would help there we  go something like that you know draw your drawer  

Draw your readers in um next thing we might want  to do is let’s go ahead and add a featured image   so one of the things that i like to do when i’m  creating a blog post is i first like to have my  

Images set up and created and i kind of advise um  you don’t need to do if you have jetpack install   if you’ve had the image settings uh set properly  it’s going to automatically compress the images to   make them load quickly but i definitely recommend  at least reducing the size of your images  

You know so they fit within 2500 by 2500 pixels or  2000 by 2000 pixels just so you’re not uploading   a super giant file to your website let’s go  ahead and select an image here and we can  

Choose from our media library which is going to  allow us to upload that image from our computer   so we go to media library upload files select file  and then when i’m making a blog post i like to  

Kind of put everything into one folder so i can  easily find it in this case i’ve got all of my   test images for creating a cooking blog  here but you know i’d recommend having   just a place where you can easily find all  of the images that you’re going to use in  

One post so i’m going to go ahead and use this  pizza with stuff for our featured image here   and you can see here this image was two thousand  by two thousand one megabyte which is definitely   too big jetpack should be doing a good job  of making that image a little bit smaller  

For us i’m hoping and then you definitely  want to give each image you upload to your   website some alternative text so this is sort of  describing what the image is and it’s going to   help search engine optimization you don’t want to  stuff it with just keywords and random things like  

That you do want it to be an actual description of  what the image is that would be you know helpful   to your viewers and also it will help  your search engine optimization so   you know something like this um  you can change the title of it

There we go and then we can set this as the  featured image and we’re not going to see it   here but on our blog post it’s going to show  up at the top of our blog post and then we can  

Go through and just either continue to write by  pushing the enter key or return key and writing   or if you have another image you want to add for  example you can add an image by either pushing  

The plus icon here or the plus icon here to see  all of the different blocks that you can add   we also have the option to do patterns so it’s  different sort of columns that you can add  

Columns with images on top if you want to do that  i think that for a blog where you’re going to   consistently have a sidebar on it i would just  stick with just a simple one column layout so   we’ve got the different text options up here  the different media options uh down here so  

We’ve got images we’ve got video and then as we  scroll down i’ve got some other design options   like buttons and lines so basically just all  different types of content that you can use   if you do want to embed video like from youtube  for example you can use this block here to add  

A link to a youtube video and that will embed it  right on your blog post page and then down here   at the bottom since we have the wp zoom recipe  card installed we’ve got the recipe card block  

That we’ll be using in just a moment here let’s  go ahead and just add an image to this page and we can click upload to upload an image  someplace in here i’ve got another pizza   image so just put that in here there  we go and it’s uploading it right now  

And sometimes it can take a few minutes  but just you know go ahead and be patient   and you know you might want to add all your images  in at the end and sort of write in your text first  

So usually what i do is i actually write my  entire post in another program and then paste   it into wordpress and kind of do all my fiddling  add in my images and things like that uh the  

Other thing you want to be doing when you’re  making your blog post is kind of break it down   into different sections and one way of doing that  is by adding different headlines so we’ve got the   paragraph tab for writing general body text but  we should also be using click browse all here  

Should also be using headlines throughout our  blog post so here we’ll use the heading tab here   and basically there’s an order that search engines  are looking for on the internet for how your   headings go and so typically the title of your  post is going to be an h1 tag and so then you  

Want to think of it as like an outline so then  the next section is going to be an h2 tag so so how to make pizza dough for example  and then if you’re thinking about it   as an outline you might have a couple  of introductory things here about  

The history of pizza dough or i  don’t know something like that put in making great dough is all about i don’t know  what something but then if you have more   that goes underneath that making under that  how to make pizza dough topic and you want  

To add another headline in there you want to  make that an h3 tag because thinking of it   as an outline is going to go h1 which is the  title of your whole blog post there and then  

H2 is sort of the next level and then anything  that goes underneath that heading would be h3   so how to make still properly so it’s going kind  of with the outline feature and i need to write  

Some text in here about it and then now let’s say  we’re going to start talking about the sauce and   some of the things you want to think about when  making sauce we’re going to go back to heading  

And then again thinking about it as an  outline we’re going to go back to the h2   tag because now we’re talking about a new  whole new topic here and we’re going to go pizza sauce and so on and so forth so  that’s kind of how you want to structure  

Your blog posts and that’s going to help you  with your search engine optimization it’s also   going to help your audience easily be able  to scan down your post and find the parts   of it that they’re interested in and i think  that’s one of the really key and important  

Features about making an easy to read blog post  is breaking it down having you know short sentence   sections or short paragraphs and making it just  really easy to scan down your blog post so people  

Can find out the parts that they’re looking for so  now let’s go ahead and look at how we add a recipe   to this blog post so you want to put all of  the main parts of your recipe into this recipe  

Card blog because it’s going to help search  engines find and display your recipe in those   search engine cards so for example if i were to  go to google right now and search for pizza recipe using the card block is going to help your  website have the potential of showing up in  

One of these cards like this where it’s  going to show sort of kind of the ingredients   the title and image and like you know hopefully  make it pop up to the top it’s not a guarantee   but if you don’t use the uh recipe card block  you know this isn’t going to automatically  

Happen you need to use that schema which is  what the recipe card block is going to offer   let’s go back and look at our post here  so now you can either search for it or   go back here and click the plus icon over here  and go down to where that recipe card block  

Is here’s going to default to our featured  image for our blog post and under block here   we can change the style of how this card block  looks there’s a couple different styles here   you can also set a default style if  there’s a simple if there’s a style  

That you particularly like you can replace the  image with a different image if you don’t want   it to use the featured image you can also  choose to hide the image if you want you   can display the print button you can display  a pinterest button which is an excellent idea  

That way if somebody likes this post they can  easily share it by pinning it on pinterest   you can add an author name if you  want to or you can churn that off and by default it’s going to pull  the name of the author of this post  

You can also add a video and so some other things  like the course you need to add over here in the   block settings and you can choose whether you  should display this or not type of cuisine display the difficulty and you can  sort of you can display you know how  

Many it’s serving for or you can turn  any of these any of these features off so that’s how you control kind  of all of these top metadata   settings are over here in the card block settings and the next we have ingredients and you  can also break down the ingredients into  

Different sections if you go add ingredient group   and then you can move them up and down  here just like this so you might say dough flour water salt you can  add another group for sauce

And then as you get down to the bottom of that  list you can click add to add ingredients or   you can use the trash can or you can add  additional images in line here with the   ingredients next up is the directions the  directions work the same way so you can break  

It up into groups for your different recipe if you  want to add a video you can do that over here in   the video settings sides and any additional notes  and you can also add some custom details about  

The post over here if you would like and then  once you’ve finished making your blog post and   you’re satisfied with it you can click the save  draft button if you’re not ready to publish it   and then over here under documents you can you  can change the publishing to publish it at a  

Specific time right over here you can also  click publish here to publish it right away   and you can click the preview button here and  you can preview it on various different formats   so on desktop tablet or mobile and then you can  click preview and it’ll open it up in a new tab

And then you can see what your post  will look like on the home page of your website and also if you want to share it to social media you can click on the jetpack icon here and then  click preview and this will show you what it will  

Look like on facebook on twitter kind of give you  an idea of how your featured image is looking on   these various different sources and this google  search icon is showing you kind of what your   general search results is going to look like so  showing you what the title is going to look like  

In google search and what the description  is going to look like so if we go back to   google pizza recipes we’re talking about down  here what this is going to look like and sort   of what information is going to show up  in the search results for your recipe  

Let’s go ahead and publish this post oh i did  want to say something i forgot about this about   how you make a reoccurring block so let’s say that  we wanted to have a block that we want to be able  

To reuse that talks about our affiliate marketing  so i’m just going to write it up here real quick and just to differentiate it from the standard  text in this post i’m just going to italicize it   and now if we click these  three little dots here we can  

Add to reusable blocks and you can give it a name and then click save and now anytime we want  to use this block we can go over here to our   box and click on reusable and we’ve got that  reusable block here and so any kind of content  

That you’re constantly rewriting or reusing you  can put that in here so that might be like a code   block that if you’re pasting in a code for your  google adwords for example you may just want to  

Make a reusable block that adds that in there for  you so you don’t have to constantly go find the   code paste it in just use that reusable block this  is a great shortcut to adding that content that  

You’re always adding to your different blog posts  and then if you want to move this content block or   any content block you just highlight the block  and then you click the down arrows and that’s  

Going to move it down on your page and same thing  if you want to move something up on your page   same idea and then anytime you make a change  to a blog post you want to click update

And that will update those changes so that’s  how you do a blog post uh in wordpress using   the new gutenberg wordpress editor and then  when we want to go back to the dashboard of   our website we just click on this wordpress logo  up here and that takes us back to the dashboard  

Now if we want to make a page for our website  it works almost exactly the same way as   making a new blog post we go over here to pages we  click add new and of course you can access pages  

In the same way by clicking add new here or at  the top you can create a new page click add new   and then let’s just make an about page   add an image up here super dorky image of me  at my desk and then we can just add some text

There we go and then we can go over here to our  general settings here go to our document settings   and we can click publish that’ll make that page  live and we can copy the link to that page if  

We wanted to use it someplace else like for  example if we wanted to make one of those cards   go to our about page or we can go and we can view  what the page looks like this is not going to look  

Incredible because well it doesn’t have anything  on it it gives you an idea of how you can make an   about page and now since i’ve copied that link and  also up here at the top we can see that the link  

To that page is following that permalink structure  that we set up so it’s my url cooking time with   tim slash about if we wanted to add a link to the  about page either here in this about me card or  

Adding one of those image cards we can do that let  me just show you real quick how to do that go over   here to dashboard which i could have gone over  there to widgets but anyways um appearance widgets and so on the bio link we could  have add a read more button

And i could add that link to the  about page right there that i copied   or in the image card button and we  want to use the image card button by wp zoom let’s see here where is that the wp zoom image box um then we  can add that to the sidebar which  

Is already selected and click add widget and then click about you can add that super  dorky image of me in here again   and then we can add that url in and  click save and now if we go back  

And view our website and hit refresh we’ve got the  read more button that’s going to go to the about   page and we’ve got um this about card that’s going  to go to the about page okay and then one other  

Thing that we should know how to do i don’t think  we need to really do it right now because there’s   not a lot of pages or content on our website but  the last thing that we need to know how to do is  

How to add a menu to our website or add menus  because you can add menus in various different   places on our website so in order to add a menu to  your website you go over here to appearance menus

And then we need to create a new menu name so i  like to have my main menu just called main menu   and then we can decide where on our theme  we want this menu to show up automatically  

So i would say not the top menu because you might  want to reserve that for some other information   but it should be for the main menu and the  mobile menu the footer menu you might want  

It to be in the footer menu that way when people  are all the way at the bottom they can see sort of   your main links and let’s uncheck the recipe  index and then we can create do create menu

And now we need to add items to this menu so as i  said before we don’t have any pages really but we   can add the about page click add that to menu  there we go so now we’ve got one item in our  

Menu and we can also add categories to our menu  and we haven’t created any categories because   we don’t really have any posts yet but once  you start creating posts and adding different   categories you’ll have all of your categories  available to you and so we can add recipes to  

Our menu right now and then when you do have  multiple different items if you wanted to have   one menu item that said categories for example  and then you wanted to have a drop down down below  

That the way you create a drop down on this is you  just drag this to the right a little bit and then   when you see that it’s indented like that and it  shows sub item that means it’s going to show up  

As a drop down on your website’s menu now i was  remember to click save menu here when you’re done   and that’s how you create a menu for your website  all right so now i’ve shown you guys everything  

That you need to get set up and start writing  your blog and i want to hear from you if you   followed this tutorial all the way through i want  you to share the website that you made down below  

And let’s start building a little community here  let’s support each other in making our own food   blogs i think that would be really exciting  if you have any questions about this tutorial   definitely leave them down in the comments below  if you enjoyed it and you found it helpful and  

You know somebody else who is making a food  blog or maybe who should be making a food bug   definitely would appreciate it if you would  share this video with them and for more tips and   hints definitely visit realwebsitehints.com and  be sure to subscribe to this youtube channel  

Thanks for watching i hope you found it  helpful and i’ll see you guys in the next video
Get Food Blog Theme: https://www.realwebsitehints.com/get/foodica-yt/ Get Dreamhost Hosting: https://www.realwebsitehints.com/get/dreamhost-first-food -blog/ Food Blog Theme: https://www.realwebsitehints.com/get/foodica-yt/ These links help support this channel. Thanks for your support!!! Let us do this! In this video I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to learn how to start a food blog. I designed this as a WordPress tutorial for beginners. You don't need any prior knowledge of website building to use this tutorial. All you need is a few hours of time and the desire to create a great recipe blog and share your cooking knowledge! In this video we are using the Foodica WordPress theme, which I previously created a review for: https://youtu.be/srWAMZMPa9Q How to remove footer source for WPZoom: https://www.wpzoom.com/docs/how -to-remove-designed-by-wpzoom-from-footer/ Here are some additional resources worth checking out: Want to learn how much money you could potentially make by starting a food blog? Shelby Church made a great video showing how these blogs make money online. https://youtu.be/ow38URTzv4U Tips for Writing a Great Blog Post That Will Get People Clicking Through! The video may seem a little salesy, but it's actually good advice. https://youtu.be/Q8rN3JKqUc8 How to find keywords and blog post ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YazeBbA0g4 Use the index below to jump to the part you want to view. 0:00:00 – Introduction 0:12:18 – How to set up your email 0:16:27 – Adding an SSL certificate to your website 0:18:24 – Introduction to WordPress 0:18:57 – Creating an Administration User in WordPress 0:22:52 – Starting to view the dashboard 0:23:04 – How to customize the look of the main dashboard 0:23:51 – Managing theme and plugin updates 0:24 :19 – Where do you add? a new blog post? 0:25:04 – How to add categories to your blog 0:26:22 – How to create and edit tags for your pages and blog posts 0:26:45 – WordPress Media Manager 0:27:00 – Where to add ? new pages to your WordPress website? 0:27:11 – Where do you manage comments on your WordPress website 0:27:50 – Managing themes in WordPress 0:29:34 – Managing widgets and widget areas in WordPress 0:30:44 – Managing website -Menus in WordPress 0:31:20 – Manage plugins and remove plugins 0:32:29 – Adjust website settings in WordPress. 0:34:55 – Change default post category 0:36:33 – Blog comment settings 0:37:57 – Permalink settings 0:41:39 – Enable jetpack 0:42:09 – Set up jetpack 0:45:42 – Setting up Gravatar 0:48:06 – Installing our food blog theme 0:58:39 – Setting up the food blog on the homepage 1:03:57 – Remove the shopping cart button 1:04:12 – Homepage settings 1: 12:18 – Different homepage looks 1:13:13 – How to set up the “full look” 1:16:47 – Start setting up the minimalist look 1:21:23 – Adding a sidebar to category pages 1: 22:55 – How to set up advertising spaces in the theme 1:25:00 – Removing the demo content. 1:25:30 – Final touches before website completion. 1:26:09 – Setting up the sidebar widgets 1:28:34 – Customizing the design of our website 1:31:24 – Remove WPZOOM footer 1:32:42 – Add affiliate disclosure to each blog post 1:34 : 58 – How to create a new blog post in WordPress 1:35:31 – Tour of the WordPress blog post editor 1:44:02 – Structure your blog posts using heading tags 1:46:10 – Adding a recipe to our blog post using the Recipe Card plugin 1:51:12 – How to create a recurring block using the Gutenberg editor 1:52:21 – How to move content blocks around the page 1:52:56 – Add new pages to your website 1:54:20 – Adding a link to our About page from the sidebar 1:55:40 – How to create a website menu Read the tutorial at Real Website Hints https://www.realwebsitehints .com/how-to-start-a-Food-Blog-for-Beginners/ Want to create a restaurant website? Check out this video: https://youtu.be/NLWbQnbzyRU
#Create #Food #Blog #Tutorial #Beginners #Stepbystep #WordPress #tutorial #beginners


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