Level 1 Certification Training Lesson 5 "Setting Up Your Website - The Initial Steps"

Hey everyone. Kyle here from Wealthy Affiliate.

Today we’re going to be going through the website set up process and this includes the initial setup of your Wordpress plugins. I’m going to be showing you around the Wordpress administration area and kind of giving you a handle of how you manage your website and your content within there and we’re going to be activating some of the plugins that are pre-installed with your website. Basically I want to familiarize you with the process of logging into your website and getting it ready to go for the next lesson which is coming up pretty quick here after we finish this one. So what I’m going to do here I’m going to take you to the place you find your website details. So if you ever need anything to do with your websites it’s going to always be under the “build my website” tab

Click the “build my websites” and you’re going to find your websites there. You can see that I’ve created a second site within my Starter Account here You can create up to two sites and always find your details. I’m going to delete this site just to show you that you can actually delete sites and free up space for an additional site. I recommend if you don’t want a site anymore that you do delete it because it will free up your space because you do get two websites as a Starter Member.

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So here’s my “How to Lose Belly Fat Fast”, a Siterubix website and to find the details for your website you want to click the details button under “Action” over here. So, click details and this is going to, you probably remember the screen from after you built your website. It’s your general settings and it gives you your website url. So you can click that and it will take you to your website within your browser. It gives you the link to your Administration page for your website. So this is where you go to edit your website and where you’ll be adding content and adding images and that sort of thing.

So this is a spot where you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with because we’re going to be going into the Administration area quite often so you’re going to want to remember how to do this and I will tell you how to do it again in the future but just know that you can always find this under the details area there.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to click this link and then we’re going to add our username and password because it’s going to ask us to log into the website. I’ll show you here, I click this link...I’m actually already logged in so I’m going to log out just to show you you an example here. So...I’ll click the link again, sorry, I click the link here and here’s the login for my website. So below your Administration page you’re going to see Username and Password. These are your login details and your Username by default is always going to be “admin” and this is what you’re going to use to log in. And you can create more Usernames after the fact within the Administration area which we’ll get to in a later lesson but you don’t need to worry about that for now.

So what you want to do is, you want to copy this Password. “Control C” or you can right-click and copy. And then we’re going to be pasting that Password in here (3.36). Remember, Username is always “admin” and Password we’re going to paste that in. So, one thing I want to be clear on is make sure you don’t add or grab extra space when you copy the Password because if there’s extra space when you paste the Password it’s an extra character and it won’t work. So if you click “Log In” and it doesn’t work chances are you’ve accidentally grabbed an extra space from the Password. I just wanted to clarify that because people get stuck there sometimes.

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So I’m going to click “Log In”. And here we are within the Wordpress Dashboard. This is the Administration area where you do just about everything in relationship to your website in terms of creating content, managing comments, updating plugins which are basically add-on features to your website. Changing themes, adding Media, managing your Settings, and tools, and creating backups.

So everything you do is going to be within the Wordpress Administration area here. And for those of you who don’t know, Wordpress is the most widely used website framework in the world. It’s an open-source platform that we leverage with our website builder at Wealthy Affiliate and it’s used by millions by millions of people so you can be sure that it is a very sound platform. You know there are some add-on plugins that you know may cause issues and some themes that aren’t the best. But there are over 1,400 themes and there are tens of thousands of plugins so you can expect the odd thing not to be perfect. But overall it’s the best platform out there for building and maintaining your website and since it’s web-based you can edit your website from anywhere in the world that you have an internet connection. And there are tools you can actually edit it offline as well. So that’s Wordpress.

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The first thing we’re going to be doing is setting up and activating the plugins within Wordpress and I’m going to be showing you that in the next segment here.

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“Activating Your Plug-ins (Website Add-ons)”
So what we’re going to be doing here is we’re going to be activating some plugins that came pre-installed with your website. And to manage plugins which are basically website feature add-ons. They extend the functionality of your website and I’ll be explaining what some of these plugins do as we go into here but to access your plugins you click the Plugins link in your menu here. Basically these plugins perform a different function so depending on what you need your website to do there’s likely a plugin out there for it. There’s tens of thousands of plugins within the Wordpress network and you can definitely use any of these.

We install 4 of the top plugins you’re going to need going forward. And you can add new plugins but I do kind of show a bit of reluctance when adding new plugins. Don’t add anything you don’t need because every plugin you add will slow down your site a little bit so you only want what you need.

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So I’m going to walk you through these plugins here.

You have the “Akismet” plugin which is a funny name but serves a great purpose in terms of preventing your website from getting comment spam, which is pretty prevalent with websites that allow comments. So basically it’s like a spam filter and it blocks comments that are coming into your website through automated bots and scripts out there.

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“All-In-One SEO Pack” gets your site ready for search engines and it’s a great plugin and there’s a lot of other functionality within it that we’re going to be utilizing.

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“Exclude Pages”. This probably won’t make a ton of sense right now but basically what it allows you to do is to exclude pages from your menu because there’s circumstances when you don’t want every page you create to show within your actual menu.

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And this “SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam” this is basically another layer of spam prevention and we will be deactivating this eventually once we activate the Akismet because there’s no sense having two plugins operating that prevent comment spam

These are the four plugins that we install and what we’re going to do now is we’re going to activate two of them that we’re going to be needing in the near future. The SI CAPCHA anti-spam one is already activated so you don’t need to do anything and the Akismet one you can just leave for now because we’ll be activating that at a later date.

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So that’s basically all we’re going to do with these plugins and as I’ve said the All-In-One SEO pack is for getting your website optimized for the search engines and we’re going to be actually setting that up in the next lesson. So that’s the plugins. I’ve kind of given you a bit of an overview. I wouldn’t get too much more involved with these at the moment but definitely activate the All-In-One SEO pack and Exclude Pages From Navigation plugins right now and then I’m going to be showing you how to clear out some of the default content Wordpress installs with every install because we’re going to want to get our website ready for creating content.

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“Deleting The Sub-Title”
So the first thing I want to do is I want to delete the default sub-title that Wordpress actually adds. I’m going to give you an example of what I mean here. So here’s my initial website name, “How To Lose Belly Fat Fast” and underneath of it you’re going to see “Just another Wordpress site”. So that’s a default sub-title and I’m going to want to remove that title. I can replace it with something else that is relevant to my website if I want but for now I’m just going to delete it.

So to access that we want to go to Settings within the menu here and General. And you’re going to see the site title, “How To Lose Belly Fat Fast”. At any time you can change that if you like but it is relevant to my site now. I might want to change it in the future to something but right now it’s just fine. And then there’s a tagline, “Just Another Wordpress Site” and I’m going to want to delete that so I’m just going to delete it there. If you want to have a tagline below that’s relevant to the theme of your site that’s perfectly fine and you can add that if you would like.

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One other thing I want to mention here is, do not touch either of these urls. A lot of people try to add www in here, do not do that. That is going to break your website and you’re never going to be able to access it again. So do not update these url’s here. It should be strictly forbidden to do that so please don’t do that because it’s going to cause you a big headache because you’re going to lose all of the content you create on your site and not be able to log in. So, just wanted to mention that as well.

TRANSCRIPTIONIST’S NOTE: Kyle is referring to these two:
--”Wordpress Address (URL)”
--”Site Address (URL)”

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After you make those changes simply click “Save” here. You can also update your email address here and some other settings. You can go and have a look as you like but for now we’re just going to make those changes and click “Save changes” here and the settings saved and if we go to my website and I do refresh it you’re going to see there the tagline gone and it says just my title now. It says “Nothing Found” just because we don’t have any content on our site yet, which is fine. Don’t worry about that yet , we’ll be adding content in the future.

Right now I’m going to show you how to delete your default content, also known as junk content within your website that comes by default with every website install.

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“Deleting the JUNK Content”
So I like to call it junk content because it’s content that’s pre-created and it’s of no use to us. It’s the default content that Wordpress adds to your website and we’re going to want to delete this. So, a Wordpress install, it depends on the theme that you chose but it will typically come with default posts and pages as well and sometimes comments. What we’re going to do is I click “Posts” and it’s going to show me all my posts and you can see there’s a default post called “Hello World”. And I’m simply going to mouse over it and click “Trash”. You can also do this by clicking the checkbox here and clicking “move to trash” there as well and then “Apply”. So I move that to the trash and you can see I’ve moved to the trash box here. If I ever make a mistake and delete something by accident I can always restore it so don’t be too worried about deleting that.

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Then I’m going to move down to pages here and I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to click the “Trash” and delete my sample page there. And then I’m going to click on the “Comments” tab here on the left and there’s no comments. You might have comments in there and, if you do, simply do the same thing and delete your comments. Basically that’s just cleaning out all the default content which we don’t want on our websites because we’re actually going to be creating content that’s relevant to our niche.

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To visit your website, say you’re in here, and you want to visit your site simply click “Visit Site”. This usually opens in the same screen so, it opens in the same screen. You’re also going to notice that there’s a header along here. You only see this header because you are logged in. If you were to logout of Wordpress “admin” you wouldn’t see this header. A lot of people get confused they’re like, “well, other people can edit my site”, and actually, no, they can’t. They don’t see this. They only see everything below this when they actually visit your page. So don’t worry about other people being able to see this because they can’t and the only reason you see that is because you’re logged into Wordpress

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I’ll just give you a quick example to add some clarity. So if I log out and I go and visit my website you can see that that headers been removed. So, in order to get back to my website or to get the header back I would have to log in which I could do using my details back here in Wealthy Affiliate

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So that’s a quick overview and initial setup. I know I covered a few things here but basically what you want to do is you want to activate those two plugins. You want to get comfortable with logging into your website and logging into the administration area. And then you’re going to clear out the comments and pages and posts if you have them in there. And then we’re going to be moving on in the next lesson to getting your website ready for search engines.

So I hope this helped you out. I hope this gave you a good overview of Wordpress and gave you a good idea of what Wordpress is and how it’s going to benefit you going forward. And if you have any questions or comments just leave them below and I would be more than happy to help you out.