Creating Your Initial Website Framework- Your First Few Pages

Hey everyone, Kyle here from Wealthy Affiliate. Today we are going to be talking about the initial framework creation of your website. And what I mean by this is the actual menu organization of your site.

As you can see now my site is completely raw. I have no content. All I have is essentially a title and an empty framework for me to work within. So what we are going to need to do is we are going to start building out the menu structure with the focus and emphasis on creating a quality user experience.
So being within a niche, I happen to be within the weight loss niche with this example here, so I'm going to be building out my site in a way that will benefit the people that come to my site and that are looking to lose weight. And that's something we don't want to lose sight of. A lot of people tend to get caught up so much in the process of building a website and getting content on there that they lose sight of the fact that its actually people that are coming to their site.

I know that sounds crazy but it does happen and I see it happen far too often, people get so lost in the actual process that they dehumanize their website in a way where it becomes unusable to someone visiting your site. So when we create the framework we are going to be doing so with the user in mind and over time this is going to evolve, so that the first way you set up your website does not have to be your last.
And I also wanted mention that right now you shouldn't be concerned about promoting anything on your website. In order to be able to promote anything you first need content and you need traffic. There is no sense in trying to promote already because we aren't getting any traffic and you're going to start things off on the wrong foot if your site is riddled with promotions and it just seems like one big sales page. That's not what we want.

In order to convert people and to create trust, we got to first be able to help them and they have to like us first. So that's going to be our goal in the next couple of lessons here is to create our framework. And I'm going to be showing you how to get your content rolling in the right direction which is then going to lead to rankings in Google and other search engines where then we can turn our rankings and our traffic into profit by promoting products and services within a website along with some other ways that you can generate revenue.

So in this tutorial here I'm going to be walking you through the process of getting your few pages created on your website. I'm going to be explaining how to do this and the proper ways to do this. And I'm also going to be letting you know about some of the ways that you are going to want to remain flexible within your website creation because this process isn't set in stone and there's no real perfect way of doing this because it's going to vary on the person doing it and your niche. So I'm going to get right into things here.
It's OK to Use Influence, But Not Copy (03:28)

So before we get into the actual framework creation of your website, one thing I want you to be comfortable with is getting influence from other websites online. And this does not mean copying from another website; it simply means going out there, doing some research on what other websites are doing within your niche and coming up with some concepts in respect to categories that you can have on your website to make the experience and organization of your website better for a visitor.

Off the top of my head, I would think that someone looking to lose belly fat or fat in general, lose weight, would be interested in exercises, would be interested in nutrition, they'd be interested in some information about myself, so an about me page, and of course there are some other aspects of your site like a privacy policy and stuff that I'll be getting into. But I just want to quickly show you what I mean by getting influence from other websites.

I'm just going to type in a search term. So you can just type in some of your search terms that you found within the last couple of lessons or whatever within a regular Google search. So how to lose belly fat is what I'm going to type in. It's going to give me a ton of different sites so I'm just going to go a couple of pages deep here. You can look through the first page but I'm just going to see kind of what other categories other sites have.

This one doesn't really apply to me because it's kind of a generalized site. Here's a site that's geared towards it. So Getting Started; here's some sections Calculators, Weight Watchers, Exercise, Weight Loss, Senior Fitness, Super Foods, so this already giving me some category ideas: exercise benefits, exercise tips.

And this is what I mean in terms of framework of your website. see how this website has a lot of different categories and is organized in a way that promotes a good user experience and quality navigation within the website so this is exactly what I mean and I can pull ideas and I can start writing them down within a document or within a piece of paper and get some good ideas. So I just wanted to mention that before we got into the actual website framework.

The initial pages (06:00)
So here I am within the Wordpress admin area and again, if you don't remember how to get there, you simply click the details here within Wealthy Affiliate within the 'Build my Website' tab, click your details and its going to bring up your information on how to log into your administration page.

So here I am logged in and we are going to see over here within the menu posts and pages and first I want to cover what the difference is between those two before I get into the actual creation of the pages which are your initial framework. A post and a page are essentially the exact same thing.

A page typically goes directly to your menu and this how themes and templates work within Wordpress if you create a page it will go within the top menu here usually within your website. If you create a post it will be added to your blog roll and your blog roll by default typically is your homepage. So you're going to see as I start adding posts in the future to this website that the blog roll pages are going to be added as a snippet here and people can click it and get to the actual website.

This will make more sense as we move forward but basically the best way to understand posts and pages is a post goes to your blog roll, a page goes to your menu. So if you're creating your website framework, create a page; if you're adding something to your website and just adding regular content and you want it to show up within your blog roll, which is a typical content addition to your website, you'll want to create a post.

(07:46)
So the first thing we are going to do is head over to the pages section here and we are going to want to create three pages. Initially what we are going to do is create an About Me page, we are going to create a Privacy Policy page, and then we are going to create a page that's relevant to the theme of our website and in this case: how to lose belly fat fast.

So I'm going to take that one and I'm going to create that first. "How to Lose Belly Fat Fast - What You Need to Know." So I'll get into this in more detail later but essentially what I'm going to do is I'm just typing in How to Lose Belly Fat Fast here which is the main theme of my site and this is going to be one of the pages within my site. So after doing this I'm simply going to click save draft and then we are going to come back to this and create the actual content within this page later.

So if I go to all pages here, you're going to see this draft here. So this is in draft mode which means it's not on my website but if I do publish it, it's going to be showing up on my website.

The next step is I want to create another page so you click add new within the menu here and we are going to create an about me or you can call it about Kyle -well you wouldn't want to call it about Kyle if it's you- you do obviously use your name. So I'm just going to create an About Me right now. I can change it in the future. You can change any page name in the future so don't be overly concerned initially. Ideally, you want to have your page name sort of set in stone before you actually publish it but while you're in editing mode its fine to make some changes. And I'll be helping you through that as well.

So I'm going to create that page and save draft. And then I'm going to create one more page called privacy policy. So it's a requirement for all websites online to have a privacy policy. It will lead to better rankings.

You will see sites without it but in respect to things like pay per click marketing or Google Adsense or things like that, if you're ever going to want to have those sort of accounts you're going to want a privacy policy page because those are requirements. And it's also good to have just as a protection for your website.

They're always quite generalized and I'm going to be showing you how to create this in the next lesson. It's very simple but it is something that you're going to likely want to have within your website so I just wanted to make sure that you create this as part of your initial framework. Click save after doing that and we'll go back and just click the pages here to show all of our pages. And you can see the three pages are there right now. So these are ready for me to start adding content and then after adding content I am going to be publishing those so they actually show up on my website.

(11:07)
So that's the first phase is getting the actual architecture of your website started. This is the initial framework. Obviously this is going to evolve as you saw on other websites out there. After doing a bit of research you likely saw that a lot of websites will have you know six or seven different menu headers, so this is just the starting point and as with anything your site is going to evolve over time.

I just wanted to take this lesson and kind of explain the importance of getting your website framework up and running and to make sure that you are focusing on your user, or your reader when you're creating your website because that's the focal point of our business going forward; without readers and without people taking action on your content and trusting you through your content, you're not going to have a business. So this is part of the core of your website and your business foundation going forward.

So I hope this has helped out and we are going to be moving forward with content as we get into the next lesson but this is definitely getting you moving in the right direction here. So if you have any questions about any of the content within this video please do leave them below in the comment area and I'll be happy to help you out.
Thanks.