If you already have hosting great, we can get started! If you need hosting you can check out our article “Web Hosting Setup with BlueHost“.
The process I am going through assumes you already have WordPress installed on your web host. Once you are logged into your hosting account (for example BlueHost) you will need to go to manage your WordPress site. For BlueHost just click the blue “WordPress” button.
You might have a bunch of notifications at the top of of your Dashboard. Some of these are helpful tips and others are recommended plugins to install. Feel free to go ahead and click to dismiss any of them to clean up this screen.
Installing a Theme
The first thing we’re going to do is go to Appearance -> Themes. Once you are on the themes page you will see several themes that you can choose from that come preinstalled. If you want to you can click “Live Preview” on a theme to see a preview of what your site would look like with the theme.
We want to find a new theme and to do this you click “Add New” at the top of the page or “Add New Theme” in the list of Installed themes. On the next screen you will see several themes you can choose from or you can search for a theme. Let’s start by searching “Ashe” as that will be the theme we will use for this tutorial. When you find the theme just click “Install” and then “Activate”.
That’s it, your theme is installed!
Ashe theme is a great theme. We use this theme on some of our sites and really like it. It has great features in the free version and if you want to unlock more features you can upgrade to the “Premium” version for less than a lot of other Premium themes.
GET ASHE PRO THEME
You can help support this site by using this link if you want to purchase the Premium version.
Customize Your Theme
Now it is time to customize your theme. If you chose a theme other than Ashe theme, the following options may be a bit different but the concepts will be the same.
Hover over your Theme and click Customize or in the side menu go to Appearance -> Themes -> Customize.
If you are using the “Ashe” theme then you should see the following (if using another theme you options will be a bit different)
The first thing we want to do is change the site name and/or logo.
To do that click Site Identity from the side menu.
There are many different ways you can lay out you site. For instance if you want your logo in the navigation bar you can click “Main Navigation” in the menu. You should now see the “Mini Logo” option. Let’s try adding our logo here.
You will see your logo appears in the Main Navigation below the “Header Image”. Play around with these settings a bit (you can turn off the header image so your navigation bar is at the top of the screen for instance).
Once you are done lets go ahead and publish or save your changes. To save your changes just click “Publish” or you can click the and choose “Save Draft” if you are not ready to publish the changes. Now lets go back to the dashboard and create our first post. To get back to the dashboard you will need to click the on the top left of the screen.
Create Your First Post
Back at the dashboard screen go to Posts -> Add New.
If this is your first time creating a post you will be greeted with a brief overview of the WordPress Block Editor. The WordPress block editor is very intuitive and makes laying out post pages a breeze. Go ahead and read the info in the pop up or close it out.
This is the block editor. Let’s go ahead and click “Add Title” and change the title.
Now click the icon and select “Image” to change the paragraph block to an image block. Now you can select an image from you media library or upload a new image.
Keep adding blocks until you are happy with your post. Once you are done go ahead and click “Publish”.
Now if you try to go to your site you may be greeted with a “Coming Soon” page or you may see “Coming Soon Active” at the top of your dashboard. In order for other people to see your site you will need to turn this off. You can do that by either clicking “Coming Soon Active” and then clicking “Launch your site”. Alternatively you can go to Setting -> General from the dashboard menu. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you should see an option to turn off the coming soon page.
Congratulations! You now have a website!
I hope you found this article useful in someway and if you have any questions please leave a comment and we will try our best to help you out. If you need hosting you can click get started below and get setup on a good host for a low price, plus free domain name!
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