Start Blogging! (Step 10)
A lot of people in the beginning stages of building their website spend WAY too much time worrying about how their website looks. This is a lot like when you first start your Beachbody business and you focus your time on all the small mundane tasks (like designing your business cards, setting up a Facebook page, etc.) instead of concentrating on the fundamentals of how to build a successful business. What you need to be concentrating on right now is getting as much content published as you possibly can. Read more
Choose and Activate Your WordPress Theme (Step 9)
Now that those important steps are done you’ll want to choose what theme/design you want to use. There are literally hundreds of themes to choose from. You will find that some themes are free and others cost a lot of money. The free themes often are more difficult to customize (unless you know a lot about HMTL, CSS, etc.) and do not come with any type of support. On the other hand, the “premium” themes that cost money often come with more features, are easier to customize, and include some type of support system, usually a forum. Read more
Install and Activate WordPress Plugins (Step 8)
First of all, what’s a WordPress plugin? A plugin is just a small little program that you can add to WordPress to provide some extensibility to the software. Plugins are sort of like clothing accessories. There was a time when you needed to have a gajillion plug-ins installed on your WordPress website according to the SEO and internet marketing gurus. However, a lot has changed during the past year or so and now there’s only a handful that I use on my websites. Read more
Change Your WordPress Settings (Step 7)
There’s a couple really important steps you’ll want to do even before you worry about what your blog looks like. A couple of these steps are really important for SEO and will help build a good foundation for your website. Read more
How to Install WordPress (Step 6)w
Next you will need to log into your Cpanel dashboard so you can install WordPress. Go to yourwebsite.com/cpanel and log in with your Hostgator username and password. Read more
How to Create and Forward Your New Email Address (Step 5)
This step is sort of optional but I wanted to include it just in case. To help people remember you and your website something you might want to do is create an email address that is connected to your domain name. Don’t worry, you won’t have to log into yet another email account, you can simply have this email address forwarded to whatever email account you use most often. For example, I have almost all my email addresses forwarded to my Gmail account. Read more
How to Change Your DNS Information (Step 4)
After you sign-up for web hosting, Hostgator will send you a welcome email that contains your nameserver (DNS) information. These are two series of numbers that start with ‘NS’. Write those down and log into your Namecheap account.
Go to MANAGE DOMAINS and click on your domain name. In the sidebar under GENERAL click on TRANSFER DNS TO WEBHOST. Make sure SPECIFY CUSTOM DNS SERVERS is selected and enter in the two numbers that Hostgator gave you. You can leave the other spaces blank. SAVE CHANGES and you’re done!
Next step: Create and Forward Your Email Address
How to Sign-Up for Web Hosting (Step 3)
After you register your domain name the next thing you’ll need to do is sign-up for web hosting. There are lots of hosting companies out there and you can research them if you want, but I’ve been using Hostgator for several years and I have never had any issues or problems. There’s been a couple times when I’ve done something stupid and caused my websites to crash and their response has been excellent. I also had someone (or something) hack into one of my websites last year and they got everything fixed and back to normal in less than a hour. I was really impressed, and even more relieved! One of my favorite things that they offer is LIVE CHAT, where you can contact support 24-7 if you have a problem or question. I’ve used this MANY times when I can’t find the answer to something after searching Google or their support files. Read more
What the Heck is a Widget?
The majority of WordPress themes (designs) today are widget-ready. This means the theme comes with built-in code that lets you take advantage of sidebar widgets for your blog. But what IS a widget? I think of widgets as tiny blocks of code that allow you to display certain types of content in the sidebar of your website. This content can include a list of your most recent posts, categories, links, etc. With widgets, you can arrange a lot of information in your sidebar without knowing how to program PHP which is a beautiful thing!
Depending on what theme you use, there may be additional widgets for you to add to your sidebar. To see what widgets are available to you, click WIDGETS in your WordPress admin panel which is located in the APPEARANCE menu. To add a widget to the sidebar, simply drag and drop it to where you want it to appear.
One of my favorite widgets is the TEXT widget because of its versatility. You can use it to type a short paragraph of text or to insert any type of HTML code to your sidebar including images, videos, banners, etc.
For more information on widgets check out the WordPress Codex:
Default Widgets that Come with Your Default WordPress Installation
http://codex.wordpress.org/Widgets_SubPanel
Additional Widgets
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Widgets
How to Add a Facebook Friend Badge to the Sidebar
If you have a personal website it only makes sense to add a Facebook badge to the sidebar. This will easily direct website visitors to your profile on Facebook where they can request to add you as a friend. NOTE: the FRIEND badge is different than a LIKE badge. If you have a Facebook PAGE setup for your business that is different than your personal profile, you may want to use that instead (an example of a badge that is used to LIKE a page is used in the sidebar of this website).
Also, there is something else you should know about using the badges for your personal account. If you change your profile picture on Facebook you will have to change the code for your badge because the code is calculated based on the size of your current profile picture. If the size of that picture changes your badge will look distorted if you don’t update it.
To add a badge for your personal profile or business page:
1. Get the code you need from Facebook.
2. Go to your WordPress panel and drag a text widget to your sidebar. Depending on what WordPress theme you are using you may have more than one sidebar. Drag the widget to where you want it to appear in relation to your other sidebar widgets.
3. Paste the code from Facebook into your text wiget. Save and close.
CLICK HERE to view a video that demonstrates how to add a personal badge. I had to drag the widget a second time because it didn’t “catch” the first time I tried to do it! 
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