create blog on wordpress

 Want to learn how to make a blog? In this beginners guide we'll show you how to create a blog step by step in less than 30 minutes with no coding or web design skills required. 

                                                                        

 We'll provide some resources to help you choose the best blog platform for you. Be it WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or Blogger. No one platform is better than the others. It'll just depend on your objectives as to which is the best option for you. In this beginners website tutorial, we'll show you how you can easily create a magazine blog like this, restaurant blog, lifestyle blog, fashion blog or a music or music event blog similar to this. So, if that sounds good, then let's get to it. To help you follow along, we've created a free tutorial guide on the OHKLYN website. In the description below, you'll find a link to this page. Here' you'll be able to follow along with step by step instructions as well as find any links and resources mentioned . We'd recommend opening up this page in another tab for easy access. As part of the OHKLYN community, you'll also be entitled to some discounts on hosting, a free domain, and discounts on website themes and templates by following the link on the OHKLYN site or in the description below. Step 1: Choosing the right platform for you. The first thing you want to decide on is what platform is the best for you your new website or blog. 

. With about 50-60% of the market, WordPress is by far the world's most popular content management system or CMS. And for that reason, it's the platform we'll use for this tutorial. However, WordPress isn't ideal for everyone, and to help with your decision we've created a few short unbiased comparison videos for you to be able to make your decision. On the OHKLYN post here, you'll find the comparison videos for the most popular alternatives: Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Blogger. If you're unsure which platform to choose, we'd recommend pausing this video and taking the time to review your options before getting started. For this video, we'll show you how to make a blog using WordPress. When it comes to WordPress, there are two options; wordpress.com which is the hosted version of WordPress or wordpress.org which is the self-hosted version of WordPress. As this is the industry standard for blogging and professional business websites, we'll show you how to set up a self-hosted version of WordPress for your website. 

                                                                  

Step 2: Planning your blog. Before you jump into building your blog, you should prepare a few essentials and plan out your website as much as possible to make the process a lot smoother. First, make sure you have all the branding elements you need like: A logo, with all the necessary variations like a light and dark version as well as different sizes or dimensions. A favicon: This is the logo your website with display in the browser tab. A brand color palette: This usually consists of a main color as well as a few complimentary colors associated with your brand. You can use tools like palleton.com, Adobe Color or color-hex.com to pick a color palette. A small budget of $100 to $150. This will help fund your hosting, a premium WordPress theme and any stock images you might need. Next, plan out which pages you want on your website as well as how it will fit into your navigation. You can do this using a sitemap similar to this one. As you can see, I've listed the most important pages I want here and organized them under the main navigation menu over here so they can be easily accessed. For a blog, you should always take some time to plan out your categories around the topics you will write about. This will help readers find relevant information on your blog and will help with search engine listings. Lastly, you can make designing your website even easier by first sketching out rough examples for wireframes of what your pages will look like, like this. You can go into as much or as little detail as you want. However, the most important thing to do is to make sure that the flow of information makes sense and that you take the users through a process or tell a story. 

Step 3: Registering for hosting and a free domain and setting up your WordPress website. In the article on the OHKLYN blog you can access a discount for Bluehost by following this button. We recommend using Bluehost because it's one of the most affordable and easiest to use options for beginners. That will take you to the Bluehost page and as you can see, you get a free domain, SSL certificate and a one-click WordPress install. So just click Get Started. Then you need to choose a plan. The basic plan is the most affordable, and the main difference between it and others is that you can have limited storage space and that you can create only one website. Choose whatever plan is right for you. We'll just go along with basic. Then you will need to choose your new free or enter a domain if you already have one. You can also choose the extension for your domain from the available options here. If the domain is available, then Bluehost will let you know over here. The next step is just to provide some very basic personal information. Then, at Package information, just make sure that you choose the right period. And then there are some extras. So, we recommend keeping Domain Privacy + Protection as this will stop your details being published with your domain. But you can uncheck the others. And then lastly you need to provide your payment information to pay for your hosting. And then just accept the terms and conditions and click submit. You'll be taken through to this page welcoming you to Bluehost with a Set Password button. Click it to go set your password. Just enter any password that you want. Try to keep it secure. As you can see, they provide some guidelines for that. Or, you can let Bluehost suggest a secure password for you. Just make sure that you copy this and paste it somewhere. Agree to the terms, and then click next. And you've created your password and can now login to Bluehost. So, if you click the button - this may take some time because they're going to suggest some themes for us. So, yeah. We're already logged into our Bluehost account, and we won't pick one for this tutorial because we'll set this all up later, so we'll just click Skip this Step. So, you can go immediately to your WordPress site by clicking Start Building or first go to your Bluehost account. We'll just open it in a new tab for now. This is your WordPress dashboard hosted on Bluehost, and there will be a welcome message from Bluehost as well as a setup wizard. We won't be using this as we will be setting up our website ourselves. So, we'll just click "I don't need help" which will take us through to our Bluehost dashboard for WordPress. You'll see the left-hand navigation menu, and if you go to Dashboard, this is your actual WordPress dashboard. So, there is a bunch of stuff here mostly related to the extra plugins that Bluehost installs on your behalf, and you will see this orange Coming Soon Active bar at the top toolbar which shows users a coming soon page when they go to your website since it's not setup yet. We can also remove some of this clutter from our dashboard by going to the top right-hand corner of any of these panels and then clicking the X to remove it. We'll keep the "Welcome to WordPress!" panel as it has some handy links that you'll probably use later on. In the left-hand menu, we'll next go to Plugins and then Installed plugins. So, Bluehost installs some plugins on your behalf, and while you can keep them if you feel you'll need them, if you don't, it's best practice to remove them or at least deactivate them as they can only lead to outdated plugins or security vulnerabilities if you just leave them there but don't use them. They will also impact the performance of your site as they add some unneeded complexity. So, we'll just multi-select the WPForms, OptinMonster, and Jetpack plugins as well as the Google Analytics plugin. Then, from the bulk actions dropdown, you can just select deactivate and click apply. Okay, so with the unnecessary deactivated, let's go back to the dashboard. So, let's take a quick run through of the WordPress dashboard. On the left, you have the main admin menu. At the top, you have the toolbar. And in the middle, you have the main dashboard area where you will be doing most of your work. And this changes depending on where you're on at the back end of your website. So, the toolbar is dynamic, and the options will change depending on where you are. You can visit your site by clicking this here and then also come back to the back end. In the main admin area at the top you have the dashboard section where you can access the dashboard, some of your important plugins and also updates. In the middle is the content management section where you manage and create content for your website in the form of posts, pages, media and comments. And then below that you have the site administration section where you change the design and appearance of your website and other options. So, you have the themes, the customizer, widgets, menus. all your plugins. You can manage users and you can also access your website settings. And plugins or themes may add additional options to this menu as you will see throughout the process of building your website. Then, also you will have the screen options here at the top where you can enable or disable extra options for whichever page you're on. And the Help menu is also dynamic and changes the available information based on where you are. This is just a quick run through but take a look at our Introduction to WordPress for Beginners tutorial for a complete overview of the WordPress platform. To make sure your site's secure you then need to activate your free Bluehost SSL certificate, and in the article, we've provided a link to a guide on how to do this and learn why it's so important. '

                                                                        

Step 4: Blocking or unblocking robots.txt and changing your permalink structure. So, there are few WordPress settings we would recommend you use when first building out your website. You can find your WordPress settings under Settings in the left-hand menu. General is where you change settings like your site title and date formats, but we want to go to Reading. And here, under Search Engine Visibility, we recommend that you tick the box "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". This will stop your website from showing up in search engines, so you can hide it from visitors while you're still working on it. Always save your changes. And remember to come untick this once you're ready to launch your website. Then, under permalinks, WordPress sometimes by default uses a permalink structure with the date or the month and the name of the page or post in the URL, but it's much more logical and better for SEO to use a post name structure that your page or blog post title in the URL. So, just make sure that your website is set to Post Name, and then save the changes. And then we'll go back to the dashboard. Check out our introduction to WordPress for beginners tutorial for a full overview of all WordPress settings. Step 5: Installing a WordPress theme. In the accompanying article on the OHKLYN blog, you can follow this button over here to purchase the Themify Ultra WordPress theme at a discounted rate. 

We recommend Themify Ultra 

Themify Ultra because it's popular and best rated .WordPress themes that regularly features in our Top WordPress Theme reviews. You can hover over the Buy Now button to see the options to purchase the Ultra Theme, or you can go to Themes and Pricing to take a look at Themify's pricing plans. You can buy a single theme with 1-year support and updates, or the Master Club theme that comes with the photoshop files and add-ons, or the Lifetime Club option which is what we have. And with this option, for a one-time fee, you get everything Themify has to offer, plus support and updates for life. So, if you choose a plan, then you just have to sign up by filling in your details. And at the bottom, you can add a coupon code that you have received from the Welcome letter if you've signed up to the OHKLYN newsletter. So, if you haven't done that yet, sign up to the OHKLYN newsletter, and then you can get a discount on the Ultra Theme, and then click next to finalize your payment. You should now be able to login to your Themify Member Area.

 From here, you can download any of the assets that are available to you depending on your Themify plan. So, if you scroll down to Theme, you should see the Ultra Theme, and you can download it just by clicking on it. That will download the theme as a zip file, and just keep track of where you download it as you will be using it to upload to your WordPress site in a moment. You can then also download add-ons like the Builder Maps Pro add-on the Themify Builder plug-in just by clicking on them from here. Okay, so to install your WordPress theme, back into the dashboard, you'll go to Appearance in the left-hand menu and then Themes. And as you can see, this is where you'll manage all of your WordPress themes.

                                                                             

 Then, you'll click on Upload. Click Upload Theme. Click Choose File to search for the theme on your computer, and then click Install Now. This will upload and install the entire theme, so it might take some time to finish. Okay, once it's done you can just click Activate, and that will make the theme live on your website. It will take you through to the Themify Settings dashboard. And straightaway, you can choose a look for your website by choosing one of the available skins with demo content. So, you can pick anyone, but for this one, we'll just work with the lifestyle skin. So, just click on it to add it as your active template, and then click Import, and it will show you the plugins and add-ons needed for this theme to work properly. And down here you can check or uncheck the box to import all the demo images so that it looks exactly like the skin if you preview it. So, we'll click Proceed Import. Once again, this might take some time I'm because it's downloading all of the images needed for the theme. Okay. Once it's done if you actually visit your site by clicking on the site name at the top, you will now see the skin loaded with all of its demo content. Okay. And that's how you add the Ultra Theme to your WordPress website.

 Step 6: Creating your website pages. So, alongside your blog and blog posts you'll probably have other pages on your website. So, to manage and create pages for your WordPress website, go to Pages in the left-hand menu. Depending on which skin you chose for the Ultra Theme, it would have created multiple pages on your WordPress website. So, you can create new pages by clicking on Add New in the left-hand menu, hovering over "+ New" in the toolbar and clicking Page, or clicking Add New button on the Pages page. As an example, we will go through creating a blog page. So, we'll call it Blog, and then you can build out the page either using WordPress blocks or the back-end version of Themify Ultra builder. We'll give you a quick introduction to that in the next section. There are also multiple WordPress default settings that determine how your blog posts functions and looks, but we recommend you watch our How to Use WordPress for Beginners tutorial which goes through everything you need to know about creating WordPress pages to learn more about this. After you have worked on your page, you can save it as a draft which will save your changes but won't publish them live on your website. You can also preview your page here or you can click Publish to save your changes and to publish them live on your website. And you can go on and create all your other pages in the same way while referring back to your site map.

 Step 7: Customizing your pages using the Page Builder. So, the Themify Ultra theme has one of the best page builders around, and it's also one of the reasons why we chose it for this tutorial. To show you how it works, we'll use the page we just created. So, here you will see the back-end version of the Themify Ultra builder. We prefer working with the front-end version because that gives you a live preview of what your pages will look like as you're building it and it will work mostly the same. So, after the quick introduction to the front-end builder, you'll know how to use the back-end builder as well. You also have these Themify Custom panel options at the bottom. Here, you can choose a certain sidebar configuration, set the content width of you page or even hide the page title. To open the front-end version of the Themify Ultra builder, you can view your page by clicking this button. And then, once you're viewing your page from the front end, you can click Turn on Builder in the toolbar. So, this is the Themify Ultra page builder, and the most important thing that you should know is that pages are divided according to sections which are big blocks of related content, and these sections consist of column and row structures in which you can place your modules or page elements. So, for example, this purple area is a section. And here, we can give it a certain column or row structure, like a one-column structure, two-column structure, etc. You can also add elements under Modules such as buttons, features, galleries, icons, etc. Under Blocks, you can also add pre-designed sections which are a nice option to quickly build out your pages. In the top toolbar, you can also change the orientation of the page so that you can see what it will look like on different devices. You can undo or redo changes. You can import or export layouts. You can load a layout. So, for instance, as this is a blog page, we can go to Load Layouts, which will show us all the Ultra layouts available. We can search for "Blog" and then we can preview it or we can select it to replace the layout on the page. And then we can customize this according to our own preferences. You can also save your progress by clicking Save which will save the changes but won't publish them live. Then, you can close the builder by clicking "X" over here or you can go back to the WordPress page editor by clicking back in.

 This was just a very quick introduction, but we recommend you go through the Themify Ultra documentation. It's extensive and covers everything you need to know about using the Themify Ultra's powerful page builder to your advantage, and it includes hours and hours of video tutorials which will help you skill up even faster. 

Step 8: Setting the homepage for your WordPress blog. So, hopefully you've also gone through and created all the pages in your sitemap. The next thing you need to do is to tell WordPress which page you'd like to use as your default homepage that users will land on when they follow a link to your website. So, to do that, you'll have to go to Settings and then Reading in the left-hand menu. And under "Your homepage displays" is where you change your homepage. So, sometimes WordPress by default uses the "Your latest post" option. And this will basically display your blog posts, with posts in your blog organized by day. It's a valid option for a blog, but you'll probably want to design your own blog page and use it as your homepage or just design a separate homepage. So, to do that, you'll select "A static page" option. Then, from the homepage dropdown, you will select either your Home or your Blog page. We'll select the Home page. You can then also set your Blog page as your default posts page over here. And then, remember to save your changes. 

Step 9: Creating blog posts and categories. So, to build out your blog, you need to create categories and posts. Categories are like folders to organize your blog posts under, and you can go to Categories by going to Posts in the left-hand menu and then to Categories. To create a category, you just have to enter a name. So, we will go with "Events" as an example and then click Add New Category. And you'll see it created here with your other existing categories that were imported with your skin. So, you can also add subcategories, and in this case, you can just enter another name. And then, you choose the parent category. 

In this case, we'll choose Events and then click Add New Category. The category will be added here, and this little line will indicate that it's one level down on the category hierarchy. You can also edit details of categories here or delete them and you can also multi-select categories and then apply actions from the bulk actions dropdown. The "Uncategorized" category a default WordPress category where all your posts will be stored that you don't assign to a specific category. 

Okay, on to posts. So, if you go to All Posts in the left-hand menu, this is where you manage all your posts, and it works basically the same as the Pages page. You can also add a new post over here in the left-hand menu or by clicking the button. So, you also create and build out posts in the exactly the same way as pages. You can add a title, and then you can build out the page using WordPress Blocks or the Themify Builder or whatever page builder you have. In the right-hand menu, there are also similar options to Pages, and to learn how to use these, refer to our How to Use WordPress for Beginners tutorial which will have a thorough run through of all of these options.

 The most important is how to assign it to a category. So, in the categories box and we will put this under the Concerts category we just created just by ticking it. And then you can also save a draft of your post, preview it, or publish it over here. And that's how you create categories or posts for your WordPress blog. Once, again to learn more about how posts and categories work, check out our How to Use WordPress for Beginners tutorial which will go through all of it in detail.

 Step 10: Creating menus. So, once you have all the content on your site such as pages and posts, you will need to create menus to make it easy for users to access all of it. So, to create menus, you just go to Appearance in the left-hand menu, and Menus. Once again, the Themify Ultra theme should have created some default menus for you, but you can create a new menu by clicking this link here and then entering a name. So, we will call this main menu and then click create menu. 

The first thing you will need to do is choose where this menu will display. So, the main navigation menu will show at the top of the screen and the footer menu will show at the bottom of your pages. So, we will make this our main navigation. Then, to add items to your menu, you just check them on the left. So, as you can see, there are multiple options over here. Under Pages we will add Home, About, Blog and Contact and click Add to Menu. So, once our items are over here, we can rearrange them just by dragging and dropping them into place. 

And to create a dropdown, menu we'll go into Categories and add some more items and then add them to the menu in the same way. To create the dropdown menu, just drag them underneath the Blog menu item, and that will be your drop-down list. So, we will save the menu. And then, if we view it from the front end, we'll see the menu with all of the menu items. And if you hover over Blog, you will see the dropdown items that we added under it.

 If you want to know more about menus, check out our How to Use WordPress for Beginners tutorial which also covers this topic in depth. 

Step 11: Customizing your theme using the theme settings and theme customizer. So, every WordPress theme has a Theme Settings panel where you can change the global theme settings. You can access Themify Ultra's theme settings by going to Themify Ultra in the left-hand menu and clicking Themify Settings.

 Here, you have a lot of options to change the way your theme functions and appears across your website. So, you can change the favicon, you can add custom code, add links to your social media accounts or even change settings for the Themify Builder. You can also update your theme under the Update tab. Almost every theme has something similar, so you should go through your theme's theme documentation to get to grips with all of the settings available here. 

Once again, one of the reasons we chose Themify Ultra is because of how extensive their theme documentation and video tutorials are. So, check it out if you need any help. The last way to customize your website that we'll cover is through the Theme Customizer. You can actually see it either under Themify Ultra and then Customize, or Appearance and Customize. The Theme Customizer is where you change the global styling options for your website.

 So, what this means is if you make, let's say changes to the headers under here, those changes will reflect on all your headers across your website. This is a great way to quickly and consistently update the look of your website. As you can see, there are a lot of options here as well, and while almost every theme has their own specific options, many of them overlap and work in the same way. So, once again, we encourage you to go through Themify Ultra's theme documentation to learn how to use all of these options.

 Step 12: Check out our other popular videos. If you've gone through and followed each of these steps, you've already created a basic block that you can now build out and customize as you wish. To help you along the way, check out our other resources on the OHKLYN website and YouTube. The Introduction to WordPress tutorial will give you an in-depth look at all of the important aspects of WordPress. You should also watch our "How to Add Your Website to Google Search" and "How to Install Google Analytics" videos to get your website to show up in search sites and video traffic statistics. WordPress isn't the best option for everyone, and you can check out our other comparison videos where we compare Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, Blogger and other CMSs to WordPress to see which might be the best option for you. Well, that completes our tutorial on how to make a blog. We hope that you've got a solid understanding of the process and are now well on your way to creating the perfect blog for you. If you like this please comment below.