Creating A Professional Website For Your Business

Are you interested in creating a website for business? In this article, I'm going to show you how I easily made this exact website in less than an hour with zero coding required. This free article is a step-by-step tutorial with not a single step skipped. Web developers would usually charge between 500 to $1,000 for a website of this caliber, but you'll be able to create your own at a fraction of the cost. Seriously, anybody can do this without any experience whatsoever. If there's one article you should read today, it's this one, so stay tuned. (enchanting boom) Hey, what's up, guys? ODR Productions here with how2makewebsite.com, the number one online resource for helping you create your first website, both easily and affordable. 

For those who don't know me, I'm the founder of RecordingNow.com, a website which I built using the exact same platform and techniques I'll be teaching in this article. If you're reading this article, then you're interested in creating a website for your business. Now, whether you already have a business or you're thinking of starting one soon, having a professional website is a necessary investment in today's digital age. The website we're going to create today can be used in a variety of ways. If you've been wanting to start a business for a while now, this website itself can actually become an online business of its own. You can turn this website into an authority website, a profitable blog, or even an eCommerce store if you desire. 

For those who already have a business, you can use this website to promote your products or services, and allow customers to contact you through the website. Now that we have all that out of the way, you're probably thinking, what's the catch? How is all this even possible? Well, I'm glad you asked, my friend. If you're wondering how we're going to be able to make a website with zero coding, the answer is a little platform called WordPress. You've probably heard the name before, but I'll give you some more detail into how it works. WordPress is known as a Content Management System, or CMS. Basically, WordPress is a powerful platform that allows you to create and customize a website with several different themes and plugins so you can create virtually any website you dream of without ever having to touch a line of code. 

It makes making websites easy and even a little fun. So now you're probably wondering, awesome, now, how can we get started with WordPress? Well, before, during the olden times, the process used to be quite lengthy and actually involved quite a bit of technical know-how. To explain it briefly, you used to have to get all these different parts separately and then connect them all together manually. Now, there are three main parts to each website. The first is a domain name such as RecordingNow.com, which you then had to connect to the second part which is a web hosting server. Now, on this web hosting server is where you would install WordPress, which you had to download from wordpress.org, then upload that database via FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. 

Now, if any of that sounds a little confusing, don't worry, life is much easier now, and luckily, we have a simple one-step solution. All you have to do today is just sign up for Web Hosting and the rest will be automatically included. That's right, the domain will already be connected and WordPress can be installed at the click of a button. It doesn't get any easier than this, folks, this really is the best time to be making your first website. Okay, so now we're going to get into the real step-by-step walkthrough from choosing a web host, to purchasing the right web hosting and plan, to setting up WordPress with that one-click install and to finally customizing your business website. If you need help with any step along the way, please feel free to comment any questions you may have and I'll do my best to help you out. 

So the first step, or shall I say, only step, is choosing the right web hosting company. All right, guys, so for choosing the right web host, I actually wanted to let you guys make the decision and provide you guys with all the facts and all the resources in order to research and compare the top web hosts. So, on how2makewebsite.com, if you go to Web Hosting, if you click the link in the description, or you could go to how2makewebsite.com and then go to Web Hosting and Best WordPress Hosting (Rankings), if you go into this page, it's actually going to have a list of all of the top WordPress web hosts. Yes, so, all the official recommended WordPress web hosts and then also all the popular web hosts such as Bluehost, HostGator, DreamHost, are going to be featured on this list and they've been ranked and all of these rankings are up-to-date and they're being updated constantly. 

So, if you guys want to click the link in the description, you can visit this page which is constantly being updated with the top web hosts and everything is getting ranked based on both performance and benefits, features, tech support, et cetera. So if you guys access that page, you guys can read through and then choose a web host which seems right for you based on this comparison. So, I want you guys to click the link in the description and then just do your own research, pick the right web host for you. For the rest of this video, I'm going to be using SiteGround. Now SiteGround is the winner of our 2016 Best Web Hosting for WordPress, as you can see here, they scored first place and this is the current result of our WordPress rankings. SiteGround is an amazing web host that is an official WordPress recommended web host, as you can see here, and actually, if we go into. 

So, here we have wordpress.org/hosting, this is the WordPress' official recommended list of web hosting. So we have Bluehost, DreamHost, Flywheel, and SiteGround, as I mentioned. So all four of these hosts are ranked on our top web hosting for WordPress page, and you can see, SiteGround actually came away with our number one pick because they had the best performance, they were faster than Bluehost, HostGator, they tested faster than 93% of other tested websites based on our independent speed tests using Pingdom. You get free domains, not just for the first year, but for life. Yes, that's $15 a year, no other host does this that I know of, certainly no other hosts on this list offers that, so right there is a great value that's going to save you a chunk of money depending how many years you're going to be running your website. 

With that said, pricing is extremely fair, if not inexpensive, starting at less than $4 per month. Yes, that's one fast food meal or a couple cups of coffee. It comes with WordPress one click install, obviously, because it's a WordPress recommended web host, and last but not least, you get that 30-day money-back guarantee and you really have nothing to lose. So SiteGround is definitely our choice, it's our first place winner of our Best Web Hosting for WordPress 2016. Make sure to visit this page so you can see the updated rankings in the future. So if you're reading this video like a year or two years from now, check this page because it's going to be updated once again with whoever is the top web host at the time. 

Okay, guys, before we begin, the prices that we're going to be looking at will be discounted based on a special SiteGround promotion that how2makewebsite.com has gained access to. If you wanna get access to the same discount, click the link in the description which will take you to a resource page and there will be a button that will take you to SiteGround's website and automatically have the best promotion. Okay, guys, so as you can see here, we have three different shared web hosting plans to choose from. You have the StartUp, the GrowBig, and the GoGeek. Now, I'm going to give you some advice on helping you choose the right plan for you along with recommending my favorite plan for beginners looking to create their first website. 

Now, right off the bat, my first piece of advice is to simply go for the most web hosting that you can afford. Now, I say this because whichever web hosting that you can afford is going to be the best value to start with. Now, the reason I say this is because look at these prices. If you look at the subtext, you see here that this starter plan is 60% off. The GrowBig is 45% off, and the GoGeek is 50% off the regular price. Now, these prices are all introductory, they're all promotional and they are limited pricing, or they're only offered for a limited time. Now what this means is that if you were to, let's say, start off with the StartUp plan and you change your mind and you wanna go up to the GrowBig, then you may not be able to pay the 7.95 per month, or that price may not be offered, it actually might be the 14.95 per month, which is almost double the cost of the GrowBig if you were to start with the GrowBig from the get-go. Now, on top of that, in terms of value, you also get a lot of features and you get increased performance the higher up you go. 

Now if you go from the StartUp to the GrowBig, you get a feature known as SuperCacher for great speed, which is listed below. And what this means is that you get caching which basically is when you visit a website and you download a portion of that website so that when you visit it a second or a third time, it loads up in about half the time as the first visit. Now, caching is very important, especially for a WordPress website with a ton of photos, videos, plugins and a lot of media, caching is what will decrease your load times and make your website perform a lot faster as compared to, let's say, this StartUp plan. Now, if you want even more performance, going up to the GoGeek plan, you get fewer accounts on server. So by definition, shared web hosting. This means that you are sharing a single server with multiple users. Now, if you have less users on each server, this means that you have more resources which are going to be powering your website. 

So the more resources, then the faster load times and the more users you can have concurrently on your website without, you know, experiencing any hesitation or lagging load times, et cetera. So, as I said, if you can go for the GrowBig or the GoGeek, then that would definitely be my recommendation. Another big feature which separates the GrowBig and the GoGeek from the StartUp plan is that you can host multiple websites along with twice or three times the amount of web space, not to mention suitable for 25,000 to 100,000 visits per month. Now, multiple websites, what this means is that you can host unlimited websites and unlimited domains. Now with the StartUp plan, you can only have one website and you're limited to that single website. You know, when I started out, I created my first website, and then, about a couple months later, I realized that I didn't love the idea as much as when I first started and I wanted to create a new website with a new domain. 

Now the problem is if I went with the StartUp plan, then I couldn't pursue any other ideas without either purchasing additional hosting or upgrading to the next plan. And as I said before, if you were to start with a StartUp plan and then change your mind down the line and upgrade, then this price of 7.95 per month may not be offered to you, you may end up paying the full 14.95 per month which is pretty much twice, twice as much as you would be paying if you were to just start off with a GrowBig plan. So, once again, I recommend that you go for the most hosting that you can afford. Now, my favorite web hosting plan for beginners is probably going to be the GrowBig plan. I think this presents the best value at 7.95 per month and the ability to, you know, host multiple websites, multiple domains, and then you have all the premium features in addition to all the essential features which really takes this plan to the next level. 

You're gonna get faster load times, you're gonna get more security through the one year free Wildcard SSL. If you are going to create a business website of any sort, you definitely want to have that SSL which secures your website. As you can see here, you see this lock and https, this is a secured website through SSL and if you were to purchase the GrowBig plan or the GoGeek, you would get that SSL for free for the first year which would totally secure your website and add credibility to your domain. So yeah, I recommend going for the GrowBig if you can. If you really can, I would go for the GoGeek. As you can see, these prices, you know, this really is an investment, it's an investment in yourself, your online presence, your brand, your business. 

So, you know, if we're talking eight bucks a month, 15 bucks a month, you know, that's just a couple fast food meals, a few cups of coffee at Starbucks and you know, that's really not that expensive in terms of business expenses and things that you can invest in, a website is relatively affordable compared to a lot of sort of businesses out there. So, that's why I recommend to go for the best plan because this really is an investment at the end of the day and there's no better investment than investing in yourself. And the next step is to choose a domain. So the domain name, the URL, is like how2makewebsite.com. It's your website's name, and with this, you wanna get kinda creative because there are a lot of domains that will probably be taken up and you want to just experiment and just try different things out. 

Once you find the domain that's available, click Proceed to move on to step three. As you can see here, domain registration is included free upon signup. So this is usually about 15 bucks a year, sometimes it's more expensive such as with WordPress, they charge $18 per year for a custom domain, but one cool thing about SiteGround is that you get your domain completely free with each web host signup. So we're gonna click Proceed and if your domain is available, it's gonna load up and it will take you to step three and it'll tell you, congratulations, your domain is available. So just fill out your information here, fill out your payment information. Okay, so after you fill out the above information, scroll down to the bottom where it says purchase information and here is where we get to finalize the length of the term of our web hosting. 

So one cool thing about SiteGround that other web hosts do not offer is you can actually choose your data center based on which location is closest to you in proximity. So, for me, since I'm in California, the data center in USA automatically loaded, which is in Chicago. Now if you live overseas, if you live in Europe or another country or continent, you can choose whichever data center is closest to you. So I think this is an extremely cool feature that is exclusive to SiteGround. Most of the web hosts, you know, you don't know where you're getting the hosting from or whatever, but with SiteGround, you can actually choose your data center and by choosing the data center that is closest to you, you can ensure that you get reliable service from your servers. 

And so, for me, I'm choosing Chicago, and then you get to select the period. Usually, when you purchase hosting, hosting is always usually bought in annual installments, so you buy one year, two year, three years, and you pay for it all at once instead of monthly. Once cool thing I guess with SiteGround is that you can do a one month trial, it's a bit more expensive, and honestly, I don't recommend it. I recommend, at the very least, to go with 12 months. Go for the one year plan because when you go for the one year plan, you commit yourself to your website for a period of one year which is a ton of time to startup, build, grow, and expand your website. Going for one year is also gonna be the cheapest option here next to the one month trial, so that's why I recommend it. So we've already chosen the GrowBig plan, but here we also have these extra services which are an addition to your plan of choice. 

Now, as you can see here, domain registration is totally free, say 14.95, and one thing that sets SiteGround apart from a lot of other web hosts is that you get your domain free for life. Other web hosts simply do not offer this, some of them offer a free domain for the first year but every year after that, you'd be paying for your domain, every single year, which is an additional cost, whereas with SiteGround, you get your domain free every single year for life, saving you 15 bucks per year, and in the long run, you know, you can save quite a good chunk of money. Now, let's move on to Domain Privacy and this is a feature which for any web host I think is an absolute must-have. Now, what is domain privacy? So domain privacy basically protects your domain from people looking up your who is information. Now, the way that domains work is that when you sign up and when you register a domain, you actually have to give your legal name and your address because this is just in compliance with sort of ICANN and the internet. 

Now with that said, domain privacy basically protects your domain from ever being able to be looked up and you know, people finding out your legal name and your address and everything and your phone number. You want to have this domain privacy because it's the internet, you know. You don't really want people prying into sort of your personal life or whatever, and so, domain privacy basically protects very sensitive personal information from being accessed through your domain. Now, as you could see here, this is included into the GrowBig plan, but if you were on the StartUp plan, an SSL certificate, as you can see here, authenticates and encrypts the data transferred through the website to the server, protecting financial and other sensitive information. Once again, this is another feature which is for security and privacy purposes. 

Now, as I explained earlier, SSL is what gives your website sort of this verified status of having a lock and an https. Now, if you were to create a business website, for example, an SSL certificate is a must-have, in my opinion, because it simply offers credibility to your business, to your website, your domain, and it's something that is definitely worth the price. As you can see with the GrowBig, you save $82 by getting this SSL certificate for the first year completely free. That's another reason why I would go for the GrowBig plan, if not, the GoGeek, because you get this amazing feature for free. And the last feature here is HackAlert Monitoring at $12 per year. So HackAlert is a monitoring service that checks your website daily and immediately notifies you if your website has been hacked or injected with malicious code. 

So, as you guys know, the internet, it's a beautiful place but it can also be a dangerous place. If you were to create a website, you know, you're putting yourself out there. You're putting information out there and you're putting your work out there where anyone can, you know, they can view, and some people can even access or even mess with, and time and time again, you know, I've seen websites that have gotten hacked, they have lost precious information or you know, basically lost work overnight, and so HackAlert Monitoring, this is basically just another extra layer of peace of mind. Now, for me, the must-have options are definitely Domain Privacy. If I were to pick one of these services, the Domain Privacy is the service that I would have in every single website that I register or sign up with because it is just that extra peace of mind that is relatively inexpensive at just $12 per year, and it's just something that I like to have because, you know, I like to have my life private from my online presence and with that said, it's just peace of mind so that people can't be looking up sensitive, personal information. Last thing is to check this, which I think is already checked, it's the terms and agreement, and then just click Pay Now to complete your order. 

All right, so after clicking Pay Now, your order gets processed and you will come to this page which is a confirmation/thank you page. So, your account is now being created, once it's ready, you'll be able to log in to the customer area. So as you can see here, our account has finished being created, so we're gonna proceed to the customer area. So when you first start, you're gonna get this message just saying, Welcome to the SiteGround Account Setup Wizard. Honestly, we can just click Thanks, but I don't need help because I'm gonna help you out and I'm gonna walk you step-by-step on how to install and get started with WordPress. So, click that, hit Proceed, and this should take us to our dashboard. All right, guys, so once you get into your account, once you get into the main dashboard, as you can see here, to install WordPress, all we have to do is go into My Accounts, and then you're gonna go to cPanel here at the top. 

Let's access the cPanel.  All right, so cPanel is sort of a universal dashboard that many of the top web hosts use. So, for SiteGround, it's nice that they use cPanel so that if you're familiar with other web hosts, if you've used other web hosts before, then you should be able to navigate pretty easily through SiteGround. Now with that said, if we want to install WordPress, all we have to do is scroll down. You can see there's an entire category called WordPress Tools, and then you see WordPress Installer. This is a WordPress one-click install, much like other of the top WordPress-friendly hosts. Okay, guys, to install WordPress, all we have to do after we click that WordPress Install, is to click this blue Install on the top-left, and then you're gonna have this information here, you can just scroll past this. Here we have our site settings where you can just specify the name of your blog, and then just a short tagline as you can see here. 

Then you scroll down to this Admin Account. Now this is very important, make sure that you write down your admin username and password because once we download WordPress, we're going to need this to log in for the first time. Okay, so scroll down to the bottom, you can skip everything else, and then just click Install when you're ready to go. As you can see here, you'll be greeted by a progress bar which will tell you your progress of the install, and as you can see, WordPress was installed in just seconds, it was that easy. All we had to do is click a couple buttons, jot down some info, and next thing you know, WordPress is installed on our domain. 

So, what you wanna do is you want to open up this Admin URL which will take you to the WordPress login. You're probably going to be using this URL a lot to log in to the backend of your website, so you might want to bookmark it. Now take your username and password that I told you to write down and to save before the install and then just copy and paste that into this page, as you can see here, and then click log in. (light music) All right, guys, so after clicking that admin URL, we were automatically logged into the WordPress Dashboard, so welcome to WordPress. As you can see here, it can look a little confusing at first but I'm gonna show you guys how to navigate around your website and how to change different things like your theme and how to add posts and also pages including a Contact Us page, so we're gonna do all that right now. 

The first thing that I like to do with any fresh install of WordPress is to change the theme. So you can do that by going into Appearance and then Themes. Now, one of the best parts about WordPress is you have access to literally thousands upon thousands of beautiful custom designs and you can change your theme at the click of a button. So as you can see here, these are the stock WordPress themes which are not bad, they're pretty clean, but also they're a little bland. So what I like to do is click Add New to browse the thousands of available themes. Now as you can see here, right off the bat, there are a ton of different themes that range from business websites to blogs and so forth. Now, what you'll wanna do is you want to check out all these different themes, preview them, and then install a theme that you like. 

So, looking at this preview, you know, some of them, they're not gonna have too much because we don't have any content on our website yet, but with that said, if you look at the actual thumbnail, this is what your website can look like once you do add the content, the pages, the posts, and so forth. So, browse around, pick a theme that you like, and then I'm gonna choose a theme which you can use for your business. Now, it's important to note that a lot of these themes are completely free to try out while some of them have a premium setting that you have to purchase in order to access certain features. So for the most part, you can try all of these for free, some of them do require payment in order to use the full theme, but with that said, I'm going to choose a free theme that you can start using today, free of charge. All right, guys, for this tutorial, the theme that I chose is called Bizlight, that's Bizlight by evisiontheme. 

So, if you want to get the same theme as this tutorial, just search up Bizlight in the Themes section, and then install and then activate that theme. So, this theme is pretty clean, I like it because when you scroll down, it's got some nice responsive design, it's got some cool little graphics and some animation that pops up like I'll show you here. So if we visit our website, you'll see that our theme has changed and we have this slider up top, which is pretty cool, and we're actually looking at the blog page. So, as you can see here, this is the sample blog post that is already included when you install WordPress for the first time. So what we need to do is we need to turn this into an actual homepage and not the blog page for the home. 

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to the dashboard, you're gonna go into Appearance and then you wanna hit Customize. After you go into Customize, in order to activate our homepage, what we need to do is create a static front page, as you can see here, and the default is your latest post. What this means is the default setting is your blog post, as you can see here. So, if you had multiple blog posts, other than just this one, it would show up as a list on this page, including images for your featured image of that blog post. Now, we don't have any of that right now, we actually just want to make a static front page. 

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click a static page and then you're gonna wanna choose the front page which you want to add. So right now we have a sample page which we can include right now just so you guys can see an example. When you do choose a static page, as you can see, our front page has transformed into a homepage like in the preview of the theme, rather than our blog post page. So we're just going to, for now, save and publish that, but let's create an actual homepage. So, let's go back and on the sidebar, you're going to see pages. Now what are pages? Pages are the sections of your website that are most likely going to be static and that do not change, such as a blog post page. So what I mean is an About Us page, a Contact Us page. 

These are parts of your website which are not likely to change, they are likely to remain static and so you wanna have these up in the navigation. So the first page which we're going to add by going into the sidebar and then clicking Add New is the homepage, and all we have to do for this is just title this Home and then click Publish. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to customize this page in the theme itself by going to Appearance, and then Customize. So, what we just did a few moments ago is we changed our static front page into the sample page, but let's change it into home so that, you know, we can keep track of all of our different pages. 

So we're gonna save and publish that and then, as you can see, right now, if we exit back and then we visit our website in the top-left, you'll see that our homepage is no longer our blog post page. Our homepage has now transformed into the default homepage of the theme preview. So, as you can see, if we scroll down, we got some nice little animations, some cool little graphics here, you see these icons, they move if you hover over them, and overall, it looks pretty cool. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna customize this a little bit so we can make it more of our own. So, what you wanna do is we wanna go back to that Appearance, and then Customize once again, and I'll show you guys the general process for how we can customize this slider and then the services here so that you can sort of customize it for your own website. 

Now, what we're looking at at the top here is we have a slider, right? So we have a slider and then we have services, but every single one of these images in the slider and also the services down here is actually just a sample page. So, I'm gonna show you what I mean by that by going into Home/Front Featured Slider, and so, go into Select Slider From Page, Select Page For Slide 1, and then we're gonna choose Sample Page. Now, when I click this, you're gonna see that the first slide in the page or on our homepage becomes that sample page which is already loaded when we installed WordPress. You can tell because it says Sample Page and then it says, this is an example page. It's different from a blog post because it will stay in one place, and so basically, this is the sort of the stock description on that sample page. 

So right now, we're just gonna save and publish that so that I can show you guys how we can customize each of these pages in the slider, which is really just a reflection of one of our pages on our website. So let's go into Pages and let's go into that Sample Page that we were looking at. So, here's our sample page and you can see here in the text, this is an example page, it's different from a blog post, yada-yada, and that's exactly the snippet that showed up on our homepage because it's taken directly from our sample page. So, if you want to, you can just rename this into anything you'd like such as Services, Contact Us, About Us, so let's just do that right here, let's do an About Us, and then what we can do for the snippet is, you know, you can delete this if you want or you can just scroll down, it's only gonna show the first few sentences so we'll say, we are a company that was founded in 2009. We specialize in technology. 

There you go, just a very brief description, we're gonna update that, and ideally, what you wanna do is you wanna add a featured image because this will be the thumbnail that shows up on that homepage. But before we add that, let's just look at our website now and see if things have changed. As you can see, now that first slide, which was our sample page, is now the About Us, 'cause we changed the title, and it has that snippet of we are a company that was founded in 2009. We specialize in technology. Look at that. Very simple, very easy, anybody can do this, all we have to do now is add that background image which is the featured image on the page. So if we go back here, we go into Pages, go to our About Us page. 

You can add an image here, and inside the theme, when you go into Appearance and Customize, they will tell you the dimensions of an image that would fit perfectly within their header. So let's go into that right now so that we can go get an image and then add it to our About Us page. So, when you go into the slider section, and then you look at the Select Slider From Page, it will tell you the recommended featured image size is 1360 by 530. So what that means is what we're looking at up here, these images are 1530 by, or 1360 by 530, I should say, and what that means is when you add an image of that size, it's gonna fit perfectly with the default name. 

Okay, so we'll go with that. What we're gonna do is we're gonna add our image to the About Us page now. All right, guys, so to add your featured image, just go to the bottom-right here, click set featured image, and you can actually just go to Upload Files and you can drag and drop your image right here. So I'm just gonna take our thumbnail, I'm gonna drag it into here, it's going to upload, there we go. So we tried it again and it uploaded successfully, all we have to do now is click set featured image, and as you can see here, our thumbnail is now live, make sure you click Update in order to save those changes. It's gonna say view page, let's actually go to our homepage to see what the thumbnail looks like that we just added. Check it out, guys. 

Okay, so this thumbnail, we just added that, and you can see it pops up in the background now and all of a sudden, our website is starting to look pretty legit. We've got that background, we have the little blurb, and then we also have the title which is About Us. Now, you can make this anything you want, you can change the title to anything you want, you can change the blurb to anything you want, and you can also add whatever image that you can find to the background in order to fit your needs, but this is the basic process. I'm hoping that if I show you guys, you guys can take it from there and then you can customize it as to your desires. 

Now, let's go back. Okay, so we've created the About Us page, we have a homepage, but let's add a Contact Us page. Now this is a little different because with the Contact Us page, we actually have to add the functionality of a Contact Us box, or a Contact Us form, that's going to email you and it's gonna allow you to respond back to that customer by giving you the email of the customer and their information. So, we're gonna do that with the power of something called plugins. Now, plugins is really what sets WordPress apart from those other website builders because plugins are amazing pieces of code, or should I say packages of code, that can add functionality to your website. Now, what I mean by that is if we go into Plugins and we go into Add New, I can show you guys the power of WordPress that is available at your fingertips completely free. 

So if we scroll down, there's going to be a ton of plugins that you can choose from, most of these are free, and if you look at this, you got bbPRess, which is a forum software. So you can add an actual forum to your website at the click of a button. Now, if you look at BuddyPress, BuddyPress adds social networking features to your website which allows people to register profiles to message each other, so on and so forth. So you can actually have sort of a social network on your website at the click of a button. And it gets better from there, I mean, you have those, you got popular plugins, which we can look at right now, and the one which we're gonna add is actually called Contact Form 7, right here, we're gonna install that, but you guys have access to tons upon tons of plugins. 

WooCommerce is one which I'll get into a little later but this is basically if you're gonna create an eCommerce store, all you have to do, download WooCommerce, and then add your products in and all of a sudden, you have a legit eCommerce website, and you didn't have to pay anyone to make it, it's awesome. So, right now, I was talking about the Contact Us page, let's install Contact Form 7 which is going to be our contact plugin. So we're gonna install that, as you can see, it's already installed, we need to activate it. After it's activated, we need to go into the settings so we can add it to a page. So as you can see here, we already have a contact form number one. 

Now this is just a default contact form and this is something that we can add to any page and that we can customize for our needs based on the information that you need to get from your customer. So the default is just your name, your email, subject, and then a message, but you can change this into anything you want. So instead of subject, you can name this into quote, like a pricing quote, and people can input a variable there and then so on and so forth. So basically what we're gonna do, real quick, is we're gonna take the short code, which is basically, it's like a shortcut, it's a snippet of code that you can copy and paste into any page and it's going to summon the plugin. So I'll show you what I mean right now by adding a new page, so we're gonna leave that page, make sure you copied that, and we're gonna create a Contact Us page really quickly. 

All you have to do, at the top, we're going to label this Contact Us and then just paste in that short code. After you paste it in, make sure you click Publish to make sure that this gets added to the website, click Publish, now we can view that page. Check it out, look at that, guys. I literally made a Contact Us page in seconds. So, as you can see here, we have the Contact Us page, it has a nice little header, which was automatic from our theme, and then you have that contact form which I showed you guys, and then, they can just send their message directly on the website, you'll receive it based on the email that you provide within the settings. 

So make sure you customize the settings within the plugin but implementing a Contact Us page is as simple as copy and paste, beautiful. All right, so now that we have that, let's go back, let's go back to the homepage, let's see what else we can do. So we already have our basic website, let's look at this real quick. We have the About Us which is right here, we can actually add that contact page, it's not gonna have a thumbnail, but we can make the Contact Us page the second one here if we go into the Customize, Appearance. So you can do that, you can create another page, whether it's your products, your services, speaking of which, our services, so you see these? These are just pages as well, but these are just the default. 

What you can do is you can make the About Us page one of these, you can make a services page, you can make the contact page one of these through the same exact process which I showed you before with the header. So, as I said before, you go into Appearance, you go into Customize, and then, so let's say you wanna change the services portion right here, right? This is just the default, so in order to change this, all you have to do is go into Home/Front Service section and then click Select Service From Page, and then you can choose which page you want for each service. So let's say we wanna make the first one also about us, click that, check it out. It changed the title to About Us and it has that snippet which we added in, we are a company that was founded in 2009. We specialize in technology, perfect. So, that's exactly how you change this homepage, it's all very, very simple, and you guys can customize it whichever way you want in order to fit your business. 

Now, let's go into, let's go back into Appearance and let's change the navigation, 'cause this is one of the most important parts of any website is this navigation up top. If you want to change this to add certain pages or remove certain pages, it's very simple. We're gonna do the same process, we're gonna into Appearance, but this time, scroll down to Menus. So go down into Menus, and so for menus, we don't have any menu yet, so let's just create one, let's call it Public Menu, and then Create Menu right here. All right, so after you created your menu, you can select the menu to edit, so we're gonna select the Public Menu, then we'll select that. As you can see here, we have our pages on the left-hand side, then you have the menu structure on the right-hand side. So in order to structure your top navigation, it's so simple, guys. 

All you have to do is check the boxes of all the pages that you want to add, click Add to Menu, and they're gonna pop up here. Now, if you wanna change the order, all you do, drag and drop, simple as that. We have the Home page, the About Us, and the Contact Us page. When you're done, all you have to do is click Save Menu and it should apply it to the website. So when you click that, it's already gonna be enforced. One cool thing, which I will show you guys how to do, is if you want subcategories. Now, let's say you want the About Us to pop up under Home and you also want the Contact Us to pop up under that as well, all you have to do is drag it to the right, wait till there's an indent here, and then click Save Menu. If you want to choose a different menu, all you have to do, go into Customize, click Menus, and then choose the menu that you want. 

So we're gonna choose Public Menu and we're gonna make that our primary and our social menu. Now, check it out. So we've already done that, let's save and publish that, then let's visit our website and I'll show you guys the menu which we created just moments ago is now the top navigation. See we have the Home, and then the About Us and the Contact Us pops up underneath. Now, let's split it up because we don't want it to look like that, we do want the Home and the About Us and the Contact Us to all be separate, so let's change that one more time by going into Public Menu, selecting that, then we are simply going to move everything back and make it not a sub item. So take it out, take it out, there we go. 

We have the Home, the About Us, the Contact Us, save that menu. Menu has been saved, let's visit the site once again and our changes should be enforced. All right, so as you can see here, guys, we have the Home, the About Us, and the Contact Us all up at the top and that's pretty much it as far as customization goes. As you can see, our theme is kind of cut off a little bit and the reason why is because we have this Admin bar up top. So what you wanna do is you wanna go into Dashboard, I'm gonna show you a plugin where we can remove that so we can actually preview what our website looks like without seeing that bar up at the top. So you're gonna add new and then you're just gonna search hide admin bar, oh, look at that? It's already there, it's as if it can read our mind. Just pick the first one, there's a few of 'em, but just install that, activate that. Now when you visit your homepage, or your website for that matter, boom, voila. 

Now you can see the full theme, how it looks like, and it looks pretty awesome, guys. We have our navigation, which we set there, we have the About Us page, which we created, and we also have the, if we scroll down, perfect. So, as you can see in the top-left though, it says My Blog and it says my WordPress Blog. So, you obviously want to customize that so what we wanna do is let's go back, go back to our dashboard, and then let's go into Appearance once again, Customize, and then let's change our site identity. As you can see, this is the text that's appearing in the top-left. Let's change it into your businesses name. So we'll just call it Business Name, tagline. Okay, so you can add your business name and a tagline, Technology Since 2009, save and publish that, and then you'll see now we have finally changed that default language, there you go. So you can add your business name in the top-left along with your tagline. 

So as you can see, everything is really, really coming together. If you want to update any of these once again, it's the same process, just go into Customize, Appearance, and then you can change that homepage. So for example, you have this little box at the bottom and the default language is want to know more about our company? Now, you can easily change this. So all we have to do is delete that and look at the text, it disappears. Now, you wanna add something new like Contact Us for a Free Quote Today, all you have to do is add that in. Look at that, beautiful. Save that, save and publish, and we are done. All right, so the last thing I wanna touch upon is blogging. How to add a new blog post and also adding a blog post page to our top navigation. If you want to add a new blog post, simply go over to Posts here in the sidebar and then click Add New. When creating a new post, it's much like creating a new page. 

You choose a title, which we'll title here,  and then you can fill in this text box which will be your body. (light music) You can even add images here. (light music) With that said, you also want to add a category to your blog post. This way, you can easily sort through and allow users to search through your blog posts.  The last thing you want to do with each blog post is to set a featured image. When you set a featured image, you allow a thumbnail to be shown every time this post appears on either another page or on a social network such as Facebook. After you're all done, click the Publish button right here which will publish your post to the web. (light music) You can even view the post after publishing. 

So let's go to the homepage once again and we should see a snippet of our latest blog post at the bottom here under Latest News. Pretty cool. All right, so the last step is to add a blog post page which will display our latest blog posts and then add that page to the top navigation. So to do this, all you have to do is go into the sidebar, go into Pages and then click Add New. We're just gonna title this page Blog, and then click Publish. (light music) After that, next step is to go into your Settings and then Reading. We're gonna set the post page to our blog which we just created. After that saves, go into Appearance and then Menus. Once you're in Menus, make sure that you've selected the Public Menu and then add blog to the menu structure. 

After it's added, you can rearrange the order anyway you like. Click Save Menu to save the progress. Now let's visit our website and see if the menu has updated. All right, as you can see here, we've added our blog posts to the top navigation. Well that wraps this tutorial on how to create a website for your business. I truly believe that a professional website is one of the best investments you can make today. Once again, if you have any questions or need help with building your business website, please leave a comment below and I'll do my best to help you out as soon as possible. I respond to all comments and questions so don't be shy. Lastly, if you enjoy this video and found it useful, please drop a thumbs up and comment letting me know. Also, make sure to subscribe because there will be a lot more tutorials on the way. Thank you for reading and I hope you have a productive day. 

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