Velda: All right, I think we're ready to get started. I'm Velda. I'm going to go ahead and turn off my camera, and you can go ahead and do the same if you'd like. I've got the presentation on thisscreen and my notes over here, so I'm going to just turn off my video. But I'm Velda. I've been involved with WordPress for a minute, so let's get started.
Unknown: Here we go.
Velda: Okay, so thanks to everyone for joining today. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm Velda. It's like Zelda with a V i love WordPress. I first learned about it around 2005 when I was working at ahosting company. I fell in love with the community in 2008 and I have been involved ever since then.
So about this workshop: There are a lot of technical WordPress workshops available. This one is more about technique. If you have technical questions, though, I'm happy to answer what I can in the Q &A, but this is mostly about how to get started, find your content, and then work your site to fit with that. So yeah, let's dive right into the problem I'm hoping to solve.
How many of you have ever spent time trying to find the perfect theme, only to not know what to say when you're replacing the demo content? I don't know if that's ever happened to you. You can say soin the chat. If that's a thing you've seen before, I know I have.
And if it's you, you're not alone. If you try searching the web for this line from the 2024 demo, let's see if it will appear on my I'm not getting my thing to work. There we go. Okay, search foretudes is a pioneering firm that seamlessly merges. This is the line from the 2024 demo. And if you search the web for that, you will find 1000s of websites. So if you haven't gotten around toreplacing your demo content, if you're not sure what to put on your site, if you're just kind of semi launched, you're definitely not alone. And this workshop is for you. I'm hoping that we can justhelp people get past this hurdle.
My speaker notes for this slide are missing for some reason. Sorry about that, but I'll just say content is king. This is a quote by Bill Gates in 1996 and he was talking about how, when it comes tothe web, your design is one thing, but the content is going to matter more than anything else. And I would say that even now, you know, he said that 1996 I was almost 30 years ago, which doesn't feellike 30 years ago to me, but even now today, in the in the days of AI and social media and everything else, content is still the heart of your website, so we're going to focus on that today.
So let's use an analogy. Demo, content is a little bit like the ideal body, right? The ideal fitness so just like the media shows us idealized bodies that don't reflect real people, sometimes democontent shows idealized websites. They're usually styled with perfect stock images. They'll have filler text, polished branding, and when you try to swap in your actual content, it can feel like youdon't really measure up.
And that gap tends to leave people stuck thinking, Well, I guess I'm not ready yet. My site doesn't look good enough. Maybe I don't have what I need for a real site yet. I'll just update this later,when my brand is mature enough. Or maybe I'll just switch things. Sometimes people will get in a trap of switching things over and over and over again. But just like every real healthy body has uniquehealth and beauty or unique strength and beauty. Every real website can and should reflect on your authentic goals and your voice.
So we're going to flip the script. Instead of squeezing your story into somebody else's ideal, you're going to build your content first, get it out there and let your design evolve to support it. Soanother way to look at it, like I said, mentioned, I've been involved with WordPress for a long time, and it used to be more like a one size fits all thing. You change your theme and your content justkind of fits it. The full site editor gives you a much more tailored fit, but you have to do the tailoring. So we're going to talk about developing your content first and then tailoring your site tomake it work.
To make this demo realistic, I didn't want to do my own site, because that's been done and my company site has been done. I needed a realistic company or brand to work with,. So I invented somebody,and as long as we're on the topic of fitness that I mentioned for the analogy, let's meet Sarah.
Sarah is our fictional client for today's demo. She is a fitness coach who helps women 40 and up build strength and confidence as we age. She's actually inspired my by my own new year's resolution, Ihave never been able to do a pull up, and this year I'm trying to do it. I've been working pretty hard at it, and I really wish that I had someone like Sarah nearby.
For the sake of this demo, Sarah already has hosting and a domain name. We're just focusing on content and layout today, not the technical setup. But again, I'm happy to answer questions on that ifyou have them later. So just feel the drop them into the chat, and we will work on those a little bit later if you need them also. We're just going to walk through this process as if we're buildingSarah's site from scratch. These are the steps we're going to use, and again, I'm going with a fitness theme here:
First, motivation. It sounds kind of silly, but to get your website out there, you really need to think about why you want to do it. Instead of just doing a social media site, for example, you'll alsowant to balance your priorities between what you want and what your visitors need. Basically, you want to avoid burnout and be able to build something that's useful and sustainable with the time thatyou can put into it. Then we're going to focus on the core content. So this is the real strength of your site. This is where we get you from zero to launch. Okay?
And then finally, we will flex the power of patterns to design the front page and get your site out into the world. After that, we'll talk about stretch goals. What happens after launch? How do yougrow from there? What kind of results should you expect, and how should you keep momentum going?
Okay, here we go. We're going to work on getting motivated first, let's answer the big question, why even build a website today, when there are a million social media platforms competing for yourattention? It's a fair question.
But building a site doesn't have to be some big pie in the sky dream. Just think of it more like a smart warm up, right? Because this is just you're just getting started right now, right? These arefor the people who don't have a site yet and you're looking to get from zero to launched. So think of it more like a smart warm up, something you can get out there now that makes things better thanwhat you had before.
Here's why a website still matters. (I'm just going to go ahead and put all these up here). Okay, why build a site now, unlike social media, your site is yours. You get to control it. It won't vanishif the platform changes or or if its rules change, or if the platform goes away all together, the site is always yours, and you can always point to it, and people don't need to follow that particularsocial media account to reach you. If you have a website, anybody can reach you. So it's really important to get that going. You can still use your socials to advertise your brand, but the site canlink to your socials, your newsletters, your booking tools, everything that you're using to do what you're doing, can all point back to your site.
Having a website builds trust. It can say I'm serious about what I do, and it gives your visitors confidence. But most importantly, it helps people take action, so whether that's booking a session,getting in touch or learning more about you and your your business, your site can help them get there. I say business, but I mean, this can be a personal site too. So whatever your case is, havingyour site be you and your headquarters is where it looks good. So this doesn't mean you have to stop using social media. It's just your home base, so that you have a stable professional space wherepeople can learn about you and take the next step.
Now let's talk about balancing the priorities. This is where we are looking to figure out what you really need from your site, what your customers need, and help you avoid burnout. (I'm just going togo ahead and put the whole list on here. When I set this up, I thought it would be really cool to have the the animations, but I think it's easier to talk this way.) So let's talk about balance, andagain, I use the fitness thing. We're not just talking about yoga poses, but the juggling act of building a site that actually works for you.
There's a sweet spot between what you want, what your client needs, and what is realistically doable with your time and energy. So let's walk you through a few things to consider:
First, think about your time and resources. How much time do you actually have to work on your site? How comfortable are you with tech? What kind of support do you have or need? If you're addingplugins to the site, consider what you want to put into that. Just think about your time and resources that are available.
Also consider what you need the site to do. Do you need it to book appointments, build credibility, share your story?You're going to want to keep that, goal front and center as you set up your site,keep focused on what you're trying to do with it.
Consider your traffic sources like, how do you want people to find your site? In this day and age with AI, a lot of people will just Google something and follow the AI answers. But sometimes back tosites. Sometimes people will find you through social media. You might have found a business card, or you might just mention it to people. That's usually what I do with my site. You'll just want toconsider where your traffic sources are coming from, and build that into your strategy as you're creating your content.
Also consider what your visitors are looking for. Why would they go to your site? What do they want when they arrive there? So in Sarah's case, perhaps people want to learn about her and answer somequestions and book a session. Right for my site, it's just a personal site. They just want to know more about me. You can decide what your visitors want from you, and then consider what you want fromthem.
Sarah wants people to book sessions, or at least reach out to her. I would like people to follow my site. There are just different things that you can decide you want someone to do. This is basicallyyour call to action. So your "Next Steps" is basically your CTA.
Consider that as you create your content, you also want to think about your communication preferences. I've seen a lot of sites that list all of the social media icons and then they aren't actuallyactive on those social media places you know or I have a friend who had her site set up and she put her phone number on it, but she didn't want phone calls. So you want to consider how you want peopleto communicate with you. You'll want to make it easy for them, but you'll also want to make it doable and reasonable for you. So consider what you want, consider what's easy for your visitors andbuild that into the site. Okay?
And again, the last point here in the priorities is, right now, we're just looking for progress versus perfection, right? We just want to get something out there. It can be iterated on. It's the web;it's not a book. It's really easy to change. So we'll just get started, right?
Now, let's talk about building your core content. For this. I don't know if have you all used the site editor much? You can just say so in the chat, or just consider it in your mind. You may havenoticed with newer themes, when you change themes, the demo content will sometimes get replaced. Rena has seen that. Okay, great. Well, we'll show you what that can look like here in just a moment.
But the idea right now is we want to actually go ahead and define the core content. So I'm just going to click through.
I like to create a helper page, and I'll show you that in just a moment and on it I'm going to write its site title. This can even be a Google Doc, but you can create it as a page on your site that'sjust a draft so nobody sees it. Site title, your tagline, which is kind of what your site is about, any headlines that you're going to use on the site, like the main lines, like these, your bio. Maybehave a short one and a long one. You're going to have a call to action. You probably have at least one main image, maybe some extra images, some kind of contact information, your testimonials and yoursocial links, if you're going to use any of those, okay?
So I'm going to show you this on Sarah's site. In her site, I have gone to pages and see all pages: this is a brand new site. There's nothing on it except for this helper content, because I didn'twant to make you sit here while I generated this. Okay, we're going to edit it. And you can see, I have just defined all of those things that I listed there. I put some images. These are all from chatGPT, by the way, and feel free to use GPT to draft your site. You can put in what your goals are and what you want to do, and everything about your business and who you are, and chat GPT can help youcreate content. I don't recommend using it straight out of the book, because, you know, sometimes it'll sound a little bit cheesy or inaccurate, but you can use it as a first draft, for sure. It's agreat starting point.
So this is Sarah's content. And she's got a site title. She's got her tagline, images. This is a headline that I was talking about. Here's a bio and some about information. She has a few moreheadlines and and these are, like, if you if you see, like, a hero section that could go into something like that. I've just put all of this content here. I've made a little free consultation formthat I can use. You can see it asks for the name, email, phone number and training goals. And then we've got some testimonials that we can plug in, and I've gone ahead and filled in her social links.These are all fake because she's unfortunately not real. But I like putting the social links here because you'll notice when you change themes, sometimes it'll reset your social links. So this willlet you copy them.
Okay, so now with the Core Content Setup, I'm going to go back to the presentation here, using your helper page, or even on a Google Doc, you can just put this information together so you've got it.And then the next step is to flex your design.
We're going to use the full site editor and just build the front page. Okay? So the first step is to pick a theme. You don't have to spend hours theme hunting, any block theme will do. So just pickone that's close to the style that you like. That can give you a head start, or, really, you can just start straight from from a basic block theme, because you can customize everything. Okay? Andyeah, just basically don't get stuck in the theme hunt, because the beauty of WordPress now is that you get to shape the whole site to fit you. It doesn't have to rely on the theme itself.
So the next step is to open the site editor and set up your front page. I'm going to go through these steps with you as well. Okay, this is where your canvas is. Some themes will automatically includesome front page patterns and things some won't. So you can either create a new front page or edit it. And from there, we're going to drop in the patterns that fit. You're going to remove any thatdon't fit. If it has some there already, you can add new patterns and then start replacing the content with the information from your helper page.
You're going to edit it ruthlessly, okay? Remove anything that you don't need, because we don't want to end up launching a site that has even just one little bit of demo content, we just want to getrid of everything that you don't need right now. You can always add it in later, when you know what to say in those spots.
And then you will just adjust your styles and colors to your liking. I'll show you that as well. You can adjust your navigation and social for a front page site, you might get rid of the navigationaltogether, or you might set it up to link to sections of the page.
You can set a feature to image so that when you share on social and that will appear and then go! You're ready to launch. So let's look at Sarah's site. Okay? (I've got to hide this little bar so Ican see it. ) This is what she has right now. She started with a basic 2024, theme.
This is the one that I mentioned earlier. She has her helper content right here. Going to open that in a new tab, and she has her home page.
Now, here we just have an edit Home Page link, but you can also go to the site editor. So I'm going to show you how to access that through the site editor as well.
I am going to Appearance > Editor, and this is the Front Page. You can also jump into templates and look at it this way. It seems in this one, it's the Blog Home template. You can also add a templatefor the Front Page if you prefer. Okay, for now, we're just going to edit Blog Home.
Okay, now we can just literally get rid of everything if we want to, I'm going to open up this group, and just, in fact, I'm just going to delete this entire group right here, because we could gothrough and replace these sections one at a time, trying to fit it with the content that we have, or we can just add patterns. And we're going to focus on adding patterns here. So I'm deletingeverything. It says "Be careful." It's because this has some query loops on it. This is where you would put blog posts on the front page. Sarah doesn't have blog post yet, so we're not going to worryabout it. We're going to press delete.
Now, just above the footer, I'm going to click these three dots. We're going to click Add before and now. We need to add a pattern. We're going to hit this plus sign right here. Browse all and now Ican see patterns. Okay, so let's look at all of these different sections you can choose from. We have Starter Content, 404 templates. If I click through, you can kind of see some different like theseare entire front pages to choose from. But we're not going to worry about that. We're going to click about and just look at some different options here.
I think for Sarah, something like this would be nice. Okay, so we're going to take this on Sarah's site. Because I uploaded those images to this page, these will appear in her media library.
So I'm going to replace this image with her image,
and I'm going to replace this text with some of her text. Okay, just going to copy this actually. We'll put a copy this over. And I did decide to do this live. I actually practiced it beforehand, butI wanted to show you live and in person so you can actually see how it works. Okay, when I paste, I'm going to paste this plain text using shift+V you know, Command, Shift V. We can go like that, ormaybe we want to put her message right there and change this out for this title right here.
That looks nice. Okay, so we've got this information. What else do we have in our content here? We have a little section with a little bit more information, right? So let's copy this and try to find agood section for that. I'm going to hit the plus sign go back to my blocks. Oops, sorry. Gonna go to the list view. I'm going to add it after hit this plus sign and again, browse all and go topatterns. There's smoother ways to do this, but I'm showing these steps. Okay, so I searched for text. There's quite a few options here.
None of these are really great. Let's look in About.
How about this one?
Okay, now one thing is, we do want to change the the call to action to say Free Consolt. Okay, so we're going to switch the swap those out.
We're going to grab another headline from our helper page. Sorry, I'm gonna get rid of that guy right there.
We're gonna grab this headline.
I'm just going to drop this button. So you can see how this is coming together. Basically, we're just grabbing the information that we put together for her and building it into this page. Okay, I'mgoing to add another section after this one, make sure that it's adding it in the right place. I prefer to do add after just to make sure it doesn't get inserted in the wrong spot. Here, we're goingto add a form.
Okay, and in this case, we actually want to replace this feedback form with the one that we created before. So I'm going to remove this. Delete it, hit the plus sign there and grab this form. Now I'mclicking right here in this but you'll see I want to actually select the whole form, so I'm using my list, list view, sorry about that list view, to pull up the form and I will copy it. Okay, and nowwe'll go back to the editor and just paste it right here. I'm going to hit a paragraph block just so we have place, just a place to paste. There we go. We have a form. Maybe we want to add a headingbefore that, so we'll type a heading and then Free Consultation.
Now we have her form. Okay, so this is her page. Let's add one more section. We want some testimonials. And once again, I think it's easier to go to the patterns and testimonials.
Unknown: Okay,
Velda: let's grab one of her testimonials here. We can talk about, actually, let's do this. We have centered testimonial.
Let's remove this one and try to put in another. I don't want to get too into the weeds with this. Sorry, I should have picked a better pattern for you beforehand, but try one more time withtestimonials. I could have sworn we had a better option here.
Well, I'll show you a trick. We can just type columns, and we'll do three columns, and in each one we will put a testimonial.
So put in a paragraph. Gotta go grab a testimonial here.
Put in another paragraph.
And... I think those look squished. So we're going to go right over here and select these columns and change the width. We're just going to go wide so that each of these has a little bit more space.In fact, looks like we need to give the group a wide width as well. Here we go.
All right, let's jump in and talk about colors really quick. I'm getting a guide to do styles because I set up a brand new site. Jump into our color scheme. I'm going to click Edit palette. I'm shewants a nice bright blue in addition to these other colors. So we're going to throw that in as the background for the free consultation. To make it just a little bit lighter.
So now, with this open and with this form selection box check, I'm going to hit the background and make it like so, okay? And I feel like this is pretty good, so far.
We do want to go ahead and change the footer. This is where I say, let's just edit ruthlessly and get rid of things. If you click on the footer, you can actually just pick a much simpler design. Likesee how I clicked on it? And now, over here in this block, I can just choose something else, like something like this, would work. Very easy. You can see she's got her social links there. So we'regoing to jump over here, grab her social icons, copy those,
come back over here and delete these. Plus I'm just hitting paragraph, but once I click on that and click paste, the social icons will appear. Whoops. We'll go back a little bit.
Lacking the social icons. I'm just going to straight here. Those look a little bit funny, so can adjust the style. There we go. That's better, and that's it.
We can go ahead, in her case, and just remove the navigation right here. We could decide to set up to jump links, and there are tutorials on doing that. But I think for now, for Sarah's site, we'rejust going to remove this. We don't have a logo, so we're just leaving it. We're saving her site, and she is ready to launch.
I hope you're still with me. It's kind of hyper focused on that, but let me come back to the chat and back to the presentation and see what questions I have here.
So not too many questions. Doug has a question. It's on the setup say page. It would be good to see the particular block usage: decompose which blocks, how one chooses a block, what happens when onetries to copy from a Word doc and paste it into a WP page, types of items. And yeah, you bet there was a really good question about pasting from a Word doc. I've actually seen different thingsdepending on your version of Word. What I've noticed in most versions is it will paste just as a bunch of new blocks as paragraphs. I have seen some cases where it pastes everything as one singleparagraph block that can be a little bit harder to format. So if that's happening to you, you might paste into a text file first, then copy and paste, and then it will show up as separate blocks. Doesthat help Doug?
And let's also go ahead and look at the deconstruction that he talked about here. Okay, you can see that these patterns are made up of complex things. Like in this header, we've got groups in a row,this little row, this row with navigation, and whatever else we put in it, we have this pattern. If we take it apart, you can see it's got columns with two columns in between.
Let's say we want this button to actually go somewhere, right? We want it to do something. So let's connect it to this part of the page, the free consultation area. I'm going to click on the form, andon advanced I'm going to add an HTML anchor. Okay, and then if I go back up the page and click this, I can add a link, and this is how I'm going to anchor it to the page. There are actually wholetutorials on this, but this will anchor it to the form thing that we just made. Okay? And then let's save now. Let's just go ahead and view her site. We're going to refresh this. Just make sureeverything looks good, right? Let's make sure this goes down where we want it to.
So Reana, am I saying your name? Right? Feel free to unmute for a moment if you can and say your name correctly, so that I get it. But Can you unmute you real quick?
Reana: Did you get that? "Ray-na"?
Velda: Reana, okay. Thank you for sharing your name correctly. You asked in WordPress, where exactly do I get to, where your presentation is. So do you mean here in the Site Editor?
Reana: Yes, okay, site you're in the Site Editor?
Velda: Yes. Let me show you that one more time, just so that you can see.
Reana: Okay
Velda: So if I start at wp-admin, right here.
Reana: Oh, okay.
Velda: So when you log into WordPress, you should have a link to wp-admin. Generally, it will show up. I'm going to just go back to her home page right here. So usually, from your home page, you'llhave this and you can get to the dashboard. You can also just click, say this thing keeps popping down. You can click Edit Site right there.
Reana: Got it! Okay. Thank you so much.
Velda: You bet.
And then from there, in this case, we're going to templates, and we're just editing Blog Home. But you can also add a template for front page. If you prefer that, it'll override every other templatein here and be your front page template if you do that. Okay?
So this is Sarah's little site. We can also use this little tool to preview how it looks on different devices. Make sure that it works out okay. We can go mobile. I noticed we didn't use her littlegallery, but I want to respect your time here so and still have time for Q&A, but you can add things to it. You can have them just test it out in different devices, make sure it looks good.
And I think since the goal today is to get her from zero to having a website, we've we've got it. This is a site, and she can continue to add more as she likes. So let's go ahead and move on to thenext slide and talk about our next steps, and then we can cover any questions.
So here we go.
So okay, so let's say we launched her site. In fact, I'm just, I'm just going to go ahead and click her Launch Site button that is here in her dashboard, just so it's done. This is going to, this ison wordpress.com so it's going to try to take her through, through a thing, but she can actually make her site public from there, right, and it's good enough for today. She can continue to add things.
So let's talk about stretch goals. Okay, what's next after she launches her site?
For people who are looking to get local traffic, like in Sarah's case, she wants people who are in her area. She would want to go get a Google listing for her local business so that she can show upthere. And also, I may have shown you on her site, like I mentioned the location name in some of the content. If you're looking to get location based traffic, you'll want to be sure to mention yourcity or area in the content so that it can help with indexing, okay?
You'll want to go ahead and share your site on your social channels.
You can add a blog. Now, earlier we said we definitely want to be sure that we are balancing what you're getting out of the site versus what you're putting into it, versus making sure your clientneeds are met. So we'll talk about a really easy way to blog, but you don't have to add a blog if you just want to mention your site to people when you meet them or drop it with a business card orwhatever, you can do that too, but we'll talk about blogging in a moment.
Okay, collect testimonials. Doug [asked about adding child themes] I'll get back to you on that. That's a good question. Keep it updated, and that's the trick. Let's talk. (Sorry that jumped to thenext slide!)
I did want to talk about blogging. This is the easiest way to add blog content to your site. I tell this to everybody that I've ever helped. Whenever a client asks you a question, somebody elseprobably has the same question, you can create a new blog post with their question as the title. Just save it as a draft, because you don't have to type up the post right then.
But you can spend time each week answering those questions, and that will help build content for your site. You can set it up to go on a regular schedule so that you're building an audience, or youcan just post when you want to and share on social media. Okay?
And then let's talk about, When will I see results? Because when you first start a web page, I know a lot of people think like the moment it's launched, you're going to just start showing up on Googleand traffic's gonna starts pouring in. Search engines take time. Usually, I've noticed it's around six weeks for a new site before Google starts indexing in most cases. Okay, so you'll want to justhave that in mind and focus on, you know, building traffic in other ways in the meantime.
Know that growth happens gradually again, depending on your goals for the site, if you're trying to get people to follow it, you can encourage that through the way that you you post content. If you'regetting people to follow your site, you're going to definitely want to blog, by the way, but just be aware that this stuff tends to build slowly. The goal today was to get something launched.
You'll want to share it with your. Network. So share it on your socials, tell your friends, you know, pin it on your business board if you're looking for local people. You can add it to your socialprofiles now that you have a link that you can use and point everybody back to.
You might consider using advertisements if that fits your goals, and there are lots of ways that you can advertise your site, so if that makes sense for you, make sure that you target you know yourspecific audience, your specific area, and go ahead with that.
And then, above all, just take pride in the progress that you've made, because chances are you started from zero, and now you've got a site, so celebrate that you've gone this far and keep going. It'slike exercise. You just have to keep moving forward, and you'll keep getting stronger. So just keep showing up.
So I would encourage you to go ahead and work on your site today if you need to. If you haven't launched a site yet, and you're being held back by content. This is your signal to go ahead.
Voltaire said, perfect is the enemy of good. I believe in that. You know, don't wait until you have the perfect theme and the perfect content and everything. Just do what you can to set your coreintentions and your goals and get it out there, and then you can refine as you go.
So if you decide to build something, please do share, drop me a link. I would love to see what you do.
So now we're open for Q&A, this is where you can go. Then my website, you know, I mentioned earlier, it's like, like Zelda with a V. So my website had to be Legend of Velda. It's not that I'm alegend. It's just a silly play on words. But if you do launch your site using this content method, let me know. I'd love to see it.
So let's go ahead and open up for questions. I'm going to go ahead and turn my video back on. Feel free to turn on your videos if you want. We don't have a huge group here, so I'd love to see whatquestions you have and see your lovely faces. So here we go. I'm just going to jump through the questions that we have here.
Gerald only does blocks, block themes. Doug mentioned the setup page, and I think we showed you that, so that's good. We showed where the site editor is.
Doug asks about adding a child theme. Can you go ahead and now this is more advanced topic. I will put that out there. This is definitely more advanced topic, and possibly something that you don'tneed to use when you're using full site editing. So go ahead and tell me more about what you have in mind with that, and I'll see if I can answer that. I'll probably point you to a guide, by the way,rather than going in depth here, but yeah.
Doug: Yeah, that's that would be great. Thanks for doing these WordPress primers. This is really cool. Yeah, I do want child pages. In one guide book I was looking at, said child theme would be a goodthing too. And the child theme may be because I want to have multiple landing pages. Ultimately, I want to have a scalable framework that lets me build multiple landing pages.
Velda: Multiple landing pages?
Doug: Yup, landing pages with a call to action button at the bottom that says, book an appointment. Not complicated at all. So the the idea is to have three tiers of service offerings that have alittle different characteristics to them. And I think that's why the child theme and the child pages are coming up. The whole category would be offerings. And then within that category, three layers.
Velda: Sure, like your services, basically, okay, I could see that being a thing on on Sarah's site, too. When you say you want landing pages, do you want them to all have a totally separate look fromthe front page? Or can they just be pages on the site?
Doug: They could be pages. My idea is having pages on the site.
Velda: Okay, so you actually don't need a child theme for that. I'll give you a tiny bit of background on child themes. It's very technical. Basically, that's if you wanted to change the code in yourtheme, actually edit the PHP code. Instead of editing all of it, you would make a child theme and edit just a part of it and say, "This is the only part that's different. Everything else relies on theparent theme." So it's very code heavy, not necessarily something that you. Need to do to have pages on the site.
So let's talk really quick about adding a page to Sarah's site, because that is a pretty important question. Okay, so let's jump over here. I'm gonna scoot my monitor back, which I'm embarrassed toshow you the side of my face, so I'll turn my video back off, but feel free to leave yours on.
Okay, so we're going over here on Sarah's site. We have stronger with Sarah. We have this page right here. I'm going to just go to her dashboard. You see that? All right? And then I'm going to go intoall pages here. Now she has her front page, she has this draft page, but let's say we wanted to add a page called Group Classes. You know, now you can see it actually just popped up a whole newpattern section by itself. So we could use one of these existing patterns if we wanted to. I think that may be easier, or we can just just close this out and add. We'll say, Group Classes. Now we canjust go through the same setup here and add patterns, browse all, patterns; we're going to put this as About, and I don't have a picture of her group, but "Sarah now offers group classes in the park.These are on Wednesdays, 3pm."
So you could, you could create the page like that, and put whatever you want on it using the same idea with patterns. Let's save a draft and check and see in this theme how that shows up. We gonnajust preview it. See how does that give you the kind of landing page that you would want? You could have a CTA on it as well.
So now the question is, how do we want to connect this page to the front page? Right? We probably want to do that. Okay, so let's go ahead and publish this page. We were just previewing it, so let'sedit it. Let's publish it. We'll just put it right on out there. Even though we didn't swap out the image yet because I don't have a picture of her group, we'll just put something in there so thatlooks more like it. We use this one, even though that's not showing a group. That's fine. (I hope you're not seeing all those techs from my kids there! Whoops, there we go.) Saving that. Okay, so nowwe have a group classes page.
Let's go back to the blog home template. I'm going to just refresh this page by just reloading it. Over here where it says navigation. Let's click on that. I'm going to hit the plus sign because wewant to add a link to the Group Classes. So we can do that. That's one way. We could also add a whole section down here. Let's say something before this. Ah, again, we're going to jump into patterns,just because that's an easy way to do it, if we have one for services. Oh, looks like we've got several. So here's one so we can say Group Classes, Park sessions, and Online Consultations.
And then we'll go through and substitute out each of these images, or we might just delete them. You can choose. For now, I'm just going to leave them so that we have time to answer more questions.But you can hook up this page to the Group Classes by clicking the link to learn more. And I'm going to type Group Classes... there's that page I published. So that's how you can set up landing pagesfor each of those sections. Does that make sense? We'll just go ahead and swap out this image, yeah.
Doug: So you see, so you made a landing page, and then the second piece that you did was a like a hub for the landing pages. Is that that what would you call the page has those three columns. Whatwould you call that?
Velda: I would say ... this little section right here?
Doug: Yeah. Oh, that's a section on your main page?
Velda: This is a section on the main page. Yeah.
Doug: Okay
Velda: I'm gonna go ahead and change views.
Doug: And that could and that could correspond with the three tiers that I had in mind.
Velda: Exactly, exactly. So I'm not gonna swap out the images just to save time right now. But you can see now, if we go back to Stronger with Sarah, she's got these, and that can lead to the landingpage, and you can put whatever you want on that obviously, I wouldn't use a tall image in that space, but you can, you can adjust the templates how you would want to, so that each page is set up theway you like it. Does that answer that question?
Doug: Yeah. So what would you say the customary navigation, the nav, the nav menu at the top, would that, of course, correspond when you start adding a bunch of pages. I'd like to have, like, a submenu based on, you know -- not have a top level menu for every new page.
Velda: Yeah, this doesn't. I didn't set this up to have a top level menu for every page, because if you have a site with a lot of pages that can get out of control pretty quickly, right?
Doug: Right, right.
Velda: So this is a manual menu that I'm doing here. Let's look at this menu with the way I have it set up. This is navigation, and I've literally just added a page link. I think you might be thinkingof a page list.
Doug: Yeah, sub Child, child items. So you're adding a list. That's how you do it!
Velda: Yeah, there's, there's a block that you can just show all of the pages in a list in your navigation. But we're not going to do that. We're just putting, adding each link as we want to to thispart of the menu, okay, so you can add a home link or whatever. You can also edit your navigation over here, if you click on navigation, this can make it a little bit easier, like I can add a customlink to this, and that will be my home page.... a slash, will go home. So and then I can, you know, change the order.
So you can, you can set up this navigation however you want. You can also link.
I think I saw a question about taxonomy on there, so let's jump in there. Okay, so, yeah, I don't think you need to add a child theme for your case. In fact, generally, with this site editor that wedemoed today, you're not going to need to use child themes at all. Even an advanced developer probably doesn't need to use a child theme with the site editor.
Doug: I'm thinking that it gave me a child theme recommendation because I was doing some vibe coding. Haha.
Velda: Gotcha, haha. Yeah. I feel like child themes were definitely the way to go three or four years ago, but now, with the site editor, it's not really necessary. So you asked how to make a custompost type, that's a more advanced topic, and I can you know, are you on the slack for WordPress?
Doug: Probably not. I could use some help. If there's a Slack invite or something, yes,
Velda: Yeah, I'll see if I can find a link for that. If you go to, I think it's just wordpress.slack.com, if you just type that address, I think you can get yourself invited there, (Sharing that inthe chat) and if you're in there, you can feel free to drop a question about where to set up custom post types.
I would argue, you might not need custom post types with most applications now with the Full Site Editor, but again, you can find a guide on that. Let's see what else we have here. Any guidance for aWordPress site owner that wants to render their sub stack blog inside their Wordpress site? That's a good question. I have not seen that, something we could certainly look into. And again, if you wantto jump in the slack and ask questions there, the training channel might be a good place to ask because there are a lot of guides and things available there.
And that's also where I would go to look for questions for making another workshop. So this is actually my first workshop, so thank you all for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being agreat audience, and I hope it's helpful to you. So feel free to drop me a note if you want to, or you can find me on that slack, I'm Velda. I really appreciate you. Any other questions before we go?
Doug: Thank you, belda!
Velda: You're welcome. I hope that helps you.
Reana: Thank you very much. I will say that last December I worked with I was revamping my website. And the person I hired, I felt like I was in, you know, becoming a web designer myself. I mean, Iwas guided very well, so your presentation was helpful, because I'm convinced now I need to manage my website, you know, add pages. So this, this has been very, very helpful.
Velda: I'm glad it helped. I'm really glad it helped. There are some great demos on learn.wordpress.org, too, that can show you individual like, how to do specific things. So you can look at that too.But I hope this is a good help for, like, an overall view of just how to get started and how to get launched.
Reana: Well, it's a good resource. I used to have my husband. He passed away. That was the tech guy. And now I've assumed, you know he I've had my business for 30 years, so it's like, I'm determinedto figure out some of this stuff. I find it fun and interesting.
Velda: I'm sorry for your loss
Unknown: I like this.
Velda: I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm sure you'll get it and yeah, if you have ideas on classes you want to see, I've just started this role where I'm volunteering in the community as a sponsoredvolunteer. So this is my first workshop, and I've got to give at least 10 more. So if you have ideas on something you want to see, just let let me know. And I've also got my colleagues doing them too.
Unknown: Okay, excellent. Appreciate your time
Velda: Absolutely. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of your evening or day, depending on where you are and, thank you. Hopefully I'll see you around in the community. Cheers, okay. Bye.