Welcome to “How To Build A Website From Scratch Series Ep.3”. Today I will be showing you how to customize your WordPress theme and also how to add pages to your website.
There are components when your building a website you must understand using WordPress. WordPress uses a series of Posts, Pages, and Plug-ins for you to customize your website, so in order to fully customize your site to your desire, you must recognize what each component is and understand them.
THE STRUCTURE OF A WORDPRESS SITE
- Pages are the permanent pieces of content on your site like your home, about and contact page.
- Posts are meant to live for a certain period of time. Users will have the ability to search and find older posts. Posts can be categorized, tagged to be searched, your blog feed is going to most likely show a certain amount of blog posts. This is something you will be constantly uploading that’s great for SEO & triggering the algorithms for search engines, notifying them that you’re constantly publishing content & receiving engagement.
- WordPress plugins are coded bits of software that can be uploaded to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site.
When done customizing theme, click publish to save settings.
EDITING PAGES & ADDING BLOG POSTS ON WORDPRESS
- Hover over pages and select “Add New”.
- Pages have two main text sections.
- The Title (or the name of the page).
- The Body Text
- The WordPress text editor is similar to Microsoft Word. You can edit the formatting of the text by using the toolbar above the content area.
- When switching from “Visual” to the “Text” pane, you can edit the HTML of the page. Meaning, you can enter code and scripts to customize the page further.
- On the right hand, you have options to save a draft, preview, and publish your page.
- Some themes will provide extra customization options. Make sure you test each feature out and become familiar with what you can edit.
DESIGNING A WEB PAGE WITH DIVI BUILDER
- Activate the Divi Builder by clicking “Use Divi Builder” you can edit the page using elements modules within the Divi Builder.
- Click on “Use Visual Builder” to enter into the drag and drop version of the page editor. Divi allows you to save time by reusing existing content from your site, using a pre-made template, and/or cloning on existing page.
- Select “Pre-made”
- You can preview any template you like prior to adding it to your page. When ready, select “Use This Layout”.
- Now you can edit any element by clicking on it and changing the text. You can click on on the widget icon to see customization options. You can also edit for each screen size.
Take advantage of the Divi Builder premade layouts, because that’ll save you time. Then you can replicate and use its elements across the board, so you can finish the permanent pages on your site.
NAVIGATING THE POSTS SECTION
- Navigate to the post section and click “Add New”. It will take you to the post editor section which is very similar to the page editor. Here you can add your title and body text.
- Depending on your theme, you may have several options for the most formal. Here you can select if it’s a standard post, video post, audio post, and more….
- A category is used to sort and group content into different sections. This will help you can organize your site’s content and provide a better structure not only for the visitors of your site but for search engines to archive your content.
- Tags are another way of organizing your site’s content, it can help Hyper-Define what your post is about and it can be used as a filler for certain post types in the future.
- The featured image sections are where you select the thumbnails associated with your post.
- You can save a draft, or schedule your post for later.
WordPress organically started as a blogging website, meaning WordPress contains pre-built systems in place to make your blogging much easier.
ACCESSING WORDPRESS PLUGINS
- Navigate to the plugins section and click on “Add New”.
- In the plugins page, you can upload a plugin that you may have purchased or you can browse through featured, popular, recommended, and favorites.
- You can also search by keywords and find relevant plugins for whatever functionality you may need to add to the site. Click “Install Now” to add the plugins to your site.
It’s very important that you keep track of the plugins that you add onto your website. Sometimes, if not managed well, you may have certain plugins in place that may cause the other plugins to not properly work, and cause your website to experience certain errors.
I’m a Digital Marketer and Business Consultant. I write these blogs to help people like you make more money online. Check me out on social media for more tips and resources to help you with your online business.