How to Make a Blog - Step by Step - for Free!

Welcome back to Your Website Tutor. Due to popular requests, in this tutorial, we will be showing you how to make a blog step by step for free. This video is perfect for beginners, and we will show you what to do every step of the way to make your blog a success. Many other tutorials teach you how to make a blog with WordPress. However, that platform costs money, and we know most bloggers don't have that to start with. Therefore, we will be showing you how to do it for free on a platform called Wix. Wix has an easy-to-use website builder that let's you drag and drop things, so that you can create your blog in any way that you like. This is perfect for beginners, so just follow along with our tutorial. Now, here's the blog that we'll be showing you how to make right here. So this is a travel-oriented blog, and again, this can be for any industry. You just have to kind of use your imagination, but basically, we're going to be showing you how to make this beautiful header with a full navigation, your social media up at the top, a video strip back here with overlaying text. We have different categorized images, and of course, we have the entire blog with all of our posts rolling down the home page here. And as you get to the bottom, we have a Google map with a contact form, our social media again, sliding galleries, and a beautiful footer. So all these different things with our About Us page, videos. It’s just a perfect-looking, professional blog site, so if you’re looking to get into how to make this, just follow along, and we’re going to get into it right now. Before I begin, one of the first things you might wondering is, why are we using Wix? And why might you want to use Wix and follow us along on this tutorial? Well, one of the first reasons is because Wix is completely free to start. You don’t need to purchase hosting. Everything that you want to build or look at in terms of designs can be done up front with zero charge at all. So that’s a huge benefit of using Wix right off the bat is you can just get right to it and have your website up in a matter of minutes. Additionally, Wix offers countless templates, plugins, applications, add-ons. So many different things that can help get your website off the ground in a matter of minutes, literally, in some cases, depending on what you’re doing. And you have just every industry template that you could possibly want. So whatever you’re working in or whatever you need your website to cover, Wix can handle it, whether it’s an online business where you’re selling something, or it’s simply informational. It covers all grounds. And lastly, Wix is also so much more intuitive than a lot of other builders out there right now. So for instance, if you have ever heard of WordPress or Shopify, even Weebly, any of those out there. A lot of them are just not at the calibre of what Wix is when it comes to drag and drop design. It’s super easy, and if you have no website knowledge whatsoever, that’s okay. If you’re building a Wix website, you don’t need any code at all. You don’t have to touch or know a single piece of it. You can quite literally build a website from dragging and dropping different pieces where you need be. Now, there are coding options available, which makes it great for advanced users, too. So if you’re an advanced user, that’s totally great and fine. But for most of you out there, the ease-of-use is what is going to sell Wix ahead of any others. So without further ado, let’s get into the first step of building our Wix site, and that is creating your free Wix account. The very first thing we’re going to need to do is set up a free Wix account. Once we have that, we can can jump into the Website Builder, Content Editors, Dashboards. Everything that Wix has to offer will become free to us, but we just have to have that account first. So to do this, it’s a very simple, straight-forward process. All we need to do is copy that link that’s in the description below this video and past it into a browser of your choice. That link is going to take you to where we need to go to sign up for our Wix account. And alternatively, you can also go to YourWebsiteTutor.com\wix, and that will also redirect you to the proper Sign Up page. So I have that link copied right now. I’m just going to past that into Google Chrome here, and I’m going to load the page. And I’ll give everybody just a second to grab that link and get to this page as well. Now, when you get here, it should look a bit something like this with the hikers. It should say “Create Your Own Beautiful Website.” And below that, it’s got the purple Start Now button. So if everybody’s here, we can just hit that Start Now. And it’s going to take us to this page that says “Log In” or if you’re new to Wix, “Sign Up.” We’re assuming that you’re new to Wix. This is your first time building a Wix site or even having a Wix account, so let’s just hit this Sign Up button right here. Now, when you do that, it take to a new page that shows Email and Password queues, so all we really need to create this Wix account is an email and a password, and that’s literally it. That’s all Wix requires. In fact there’s actually no email verification required either, so once you input this information, it takes you right into your account, and you’re ready to start going. So without further ado, let’s get our information in there. Type in a password. Okay. So we’ve got our email and our password in the different sections here, and when you’re ready to go, you will just click Sign Up, and there you go. You have your free Wix account ready to go. So if you created your free Wix account and you hit Sign Up, you should be redirected to a page that looks exactly like this, saying “What kind of a website do you want to create?” So since we’re looking at how to create a blog with Wix in this tutorial, we can quite easily just go down to the Blog section. So you can hit this, and it’s going to take you to this page first that says “Create Wix Website with Wix ADI” or create it with the Wix editor. The difference between the two is that Wix ADI is relatively new, and it’s an automated system that sort of designs your website for you. So it’s really nice if you’re trying to get a website off the ground super fast, like within minutes, but you’re kind of limited when it comes to tailoring every aspect of the design. So if you’re in the Wix Website Editor on the other hand, you can change literally anything and everything that’s on your website that you can visually see. So for our case, we’re going to go into the Wix Editor. Click that. And now, you’re in Wix’s Template section. So this can almost be overwhelming at first because everything that you’re seeing here is an example of what your website could look like. So for instance, these are all templates. If we’re going to do a blog, any of these different looks here are different blog styles that your website could model after. So in our case, we’re going to go with the travel blog here today, and if we wanted to see what this would look like, all we have to do is click this View button, and when you do that, it’s going to bring up the website template as if it were live on Google right now. So you’re going to be able to scroll through this as if it’s a normal website, and one of the things that’s worth noting is that you’re going to have to kind of use your imagination because obviously, the information and pictures that are on this are not your own, but with a little bit of imagination, like I said, you can picture this being your blog. So you can scroll right on through. You can interact with the website as if it were live on google right now. So if you’re happy with the way the design looks and you want to go with this template after you’ve looked at a few—in our case we are going to go with this travel template—all you would have to do is click this Edit This Site button, and when you do that, it’s going to take us into the Content Editor of Wix, which we’ll go over in a little bit here. And once you’re in the Content Editor, you’re going to notice we have a lot more options and everything, but we’ll discuss that later. All you would need to do at this point is just hit this Save button up here. When you hit Save, you’re going to name your site whatever you want. So in our case, we have it named My Site, but you can put your business name, your own name, whatever it’s going to be in this line here, and hit Save and Continue. Now, we already have our template saved, but all you would have to do is hit Save and Continue, and you have your website template chosen. One other thing worth noting is that you can also view this site on a phone, so as if you were looking at this website from your mobile device. You can hit the Mobile Editor button up here, and it’s going to show you what it looks like on your phone or any device, rather, as well. So that gives you a really, really good look at what you’re working with. And like I said, if you’re happy hit that Save button, and we’re ready to move on. Okay. So we’ve picked and saved the template that we want to work with. Now, let’s start actually looking at Wix in a whole sense and give you a broad overview of how we’re going to start working with this. So since we’ve saved this, we can actually close out of this tab, and you should have a second tab open with your Wix home page, but if you don’t, you can just re-sign back in at Wix.com. So let’s leave this page, and if you’re in this other tab that was open, this is what we call the Wix Dashboard, and this is what you’re going to see the first time you sign in or log into your account after it’s been created, and this is basically where you manage a lot of the sort of back-end and front-end operations of your website. So Wix has a whole bunch of different things that you can do right from this page here. So I’m just going to kind of go through each one individually. So we have Wix Video, which is rather new. Wix Video is basically a way to add your own videos to the site. Originally, they used to be able to just pull YouTube or Vimeo links. Now, you can upload your own videos right directly to your site, which is really nice to have, especially for a blogger website. Next to it, we have the Blog section, and this is something we’ll go into later, but this is how you’re going to manage a lot of your blog posts. Next to that, we have an SEO wizard, and this is basically just a free tool Wix offers to give you insight into how you can do better on Google and other search engines. Next to that, we have Email Marketing, and exactly as it says—it says “Send a ShoutOut.” That’s what Wix calls an email blast, basically. This is great. So if you’ve published a new blog post, you can let all of your followers know right from this button here. If we go down a little bit, we have Domains & Mailboxes, and in Domains & Mailboxes, this is where you would go if you want to set up your own domain name - so MyWebsite.com for example - and any emails you might have outside of Wix. Now, just worth mentioning, we can also go up here to Connect Your Domain as well. You’ll see there’s a Connect Your Domain button. So those two will do the exact same thing for you. Next to that, we have an Invoice tab. Not sure how much you’ll need that for a blogging website, but if you’re doing invoicing, you can actually send your own invoiced directly through Wix right here. Next to that, we have our Contacts, so anybody who subscribes to your email lists or contacts you in any way, shape, or form, they get added to this list that gets compiled right here. Next to that, we have Automated Emails, so these sort of auto-responder emails, so if you were selling something on your website or somebody subscribes, you can send them a Thank You email without you having to lift a finger. You can set those all up in here. Below that, we have one of the most important sections, which is Rules and Permissions, and this is a really, really great thing to use if you have a webmaster or you have a team of maybe writers for your blog. You can add them as contributors to your Wix site, so they don’t have to contantly get your password to sign into your account. They kind just kind of get in their own way right through here. So really good, especially for a blogging website. This would be something you definitely want to consider using. Next to that, you have Analytics, and this is also fairly new. Wix now gives you some sort of insights into your website, and it’s also now where you can add a Google Analytics traking code, if you familiar with that. So the Wix dashboard has a lot of different apps right off the bat. You can connect your domain, then lastly, one of the things they have as well on their dashboard is the Upgrade to Premium section, which they have over on the left and right-hand side, and that’s something we’ll go into much later when we have the website sort of built, but this is something you want to use and keep in mind for when you’re ready to put your site live. So that’s a look at the Wix Dashboard. We’re going to jump into the Wix Content Editor next. All right. So to get to the Content Editor, all we really need to do is go over to this button that says “Manage Site” here. When you do that, you’re going to be brought to this whole section that has more functionality for our dashboard. So these are all back-end things that we can do. We have the Preview Site option, another section to connect your domain. All these do the same thing, just so you know. Rename Site, so if you wanted to change—you know, we have this written as Travel Blog, but if you want to change to something else, you can do that. You can duplicate your site. You can transfer it, delete it, and also see different versions of it. So if you accidentally saved your website but you liked how it looked before, you can go into here and restore how your website used to look. So very useful, and it does that automatically for you as well. It has automatic back-ups. So this is the sort of front of the Content Editor. Now, if we want to get into it, as we have to do it hit Edit Site, and this is where you’re going to be going quite often because the Content Editor is where you make all the changes on your Wix website. So you’re going to see this animation here. This happens every time. It’s kind of cool. And when this is done doing its thing, it’s going to load our website back up. And now, we’ve been here before, but now, it’s just time to sort of introduce you to what’s going on. So this is the Content Editor in all its glory, and what we have here is everything that we are able to change and adjust at our discretion. So let’s start with the left-hand side because that’s the most important area of this entire thing. So if we go up to the top here, we have these five buttons here. And if we start from the top, we have a Background button, and this allows you to change the entire sort of wall paper or background of your website. So for instance, right now it looks like we have posibly a white background. You can change this to a different color or an image or even a video, actually, if you wanted to do so with this button here. Beneath that, we have this little plus sign that says “Add,” and this is where you’re going to go to virtually add anything you want to your website. So this a very important button. You’re going to be going to it quite often. If you click it, it’s goint to expand into a whole bunch of different categories. You see Text, Image, Slideshow, Videos, Social Media, you know, Stores. Everything that you could possibly need for your website is going to found pretty much in this Add button. So we’ll go into that more when we start building the site. Below that, we have the Wix App Market, and this is where you can find very specific funtionaly plugins, essentially, that work with your website. So if you needed something very specific for your site. So for instance, if you wanted a search bar on your site if you hade a whole bunch of blog posts or items, you could do that by going to the Wix App Market. Anything you can think of, just search it up here, and you more than likely will find it. Beneath that, we have a My Uploads section, so this is basically just folders for all of your different media. So if you have different fonts, photos, videos, music. Whatever you need, you can upload it to these folder here. Beneath that, we have the Blog Manager, and for this tutorial, this is going to be very important because the Blog Manager is where we’re going to make a whole bunch of different changes and updates to our blog, if need be. Now, if we go to the top-left here, we see this tab here that says “Pages: Home,” and if you click that, this is every page that exists on your website right now, and you can concur that with the navigation here. So if you look at the navigation, it says “Home,” “About,” “Travel,” “Eat,” “Relax,” and “Videos.” And you’ll see that that matches exactly what we’re seeing here, so if you want to delete or add new pages, this is where you would go to do so. To the right of that, we have this Site button that has our basic functions right here. So saving, previewing, publishing. Different options that we have right there. And beneath that, we have the Site Manger, which is one of the only ones worth mentioning here because you probaly won’t use most of these. Maybe Site History. But again, you can get that from your dashboard. The Site Manager is a very important area that is used for extremely specific functions. So if you’re a little more technical or more of an advanced user, if you need to add header scripts, you can do that in this section. Or if you needed to add any code into your site, this is where you would do that. So for the majority of users, you might not need this section, but for any advanced ones out there, Site Manager is going to be a good friend. Next to that, we have Tools. So these are all just cosmetic things that help us to design the website. So for instance, you’ll see there’s little text boxes. A really good example is this Rulers. If we were to check this on, you’ll see that this ruler comes across the top bar, so we can very easily line up all of our different elements on our site. So you have Gridlines, which are these dashed lines. You have a toolbar, which is this guy over here that helps us see different things while we’re designing, and you have Snap to Objects, which helps center everything for you appropriately. So these are very useful. You’re going to want a lot of these on, if not all of them on, while you’re designing. Next to that, we have a Help button like on any website. So if you needed technical advice from Wix or wanted to see how you could do something and you’re just not sure how to do it, you can go into the Help section here. And then we have our Upgrade button, which we saw in the Dashboard as well that we will be going into a little bit later on. On the top-right, we have a zoom in and zoom out. We have an Undo button, a Redo button. We looked at this, switching between the mobile and desktop views. And then of course, we have our Save button, which you want to hit over and over. Don’t accidentally close out of your browser without saving. You’re going to lose a lot of work. I’ve done that before, and it’s not a good feeling [laughter]. Next to that, we have the Preview button, which I was showing you. If you click this, you can easily see your site without all the tools and gridlines on. And then of course, last we have is the Publish button, and you’re not going to want to hit this until you’re 100% ready to put your site live. So that’ll be one of the last things you’ll need to touch. So let’s look at the Content Editor. So now, we can actually start jumping into building this website. We’ve got an understanding of the Content Editor and Dashboard that Wix offers, and I think it’s time we move forward and start building the website. So one of the things that we’re going to start with first is the structure to Wix, and sort of making the skeleton of your website, so making sure that everything’s in place where you want it to be and how to do that. So one of the first things worth noting is that Wix works with something called “strips,” and that’s what gives you this whole full-width kind of feel. So if you notice from end to end on my computer screen here, we’re seeing this picture go all the way across, and Wix is automatically a responsive builder. So basically, no matter what computer screen you’re on, it’s going to fit this image accordingly. So if you have a wide monitor or a small one, it doesn’t matter. This picture will never cut off. It will be sized appropriately. So and like I said, that’s done with something called “strips,” so if you were to click on this, you’ll see this is it’s own object. This is one whole strip here, and that kind of goes for every section of your website. Now, taking it from the top, every website, for the most part, including our Wix site here, have three basic layout functions. So we have a header, which is this whole top bar here, and you can tell when you hover it. You actually see it says “Header” up here, and if you click-- it’s a little bit tough to see with the image, but there’s an orange line that goes across this dash line, indicating that everything above this line is the header. And the header, basically, is going to show on every single page, unless you tell it specifically not to do so. So this navigation, these social media icons, this gray bar is always going to at least at the top of every page, no matter what you do. So below that line is what we call the body, and that’s where our strips can be found. So all these different colors—so for instance, this gray line is a strip with different pictures and icons on it. Everything is basically built on top of strips in the Wix website body section, and as you scroll down—this is a blog, so it’s a pretty large home page. And our strips eventually end when we hit the footer, and the footer can be signaled the exact opposite of the header. So we see – click off that – this dashed line, and it has the orange line above it again. It’s a little tough to see, but if you can make it out, it’s there. So anything below this line is considered the footer, and this also shows on every single page. So any content you have down here will be shown on every single page, unless you explicitely tell it not to do so. So let’s work our way back up to the top, and we’re going to start with the header design and work our way down with this website, in terms of structure. So with the header, if we want to make it larger or smaller, it’s quite simple, and this goes for shaping most sized. We have this little icon that comes up when you just left click it. It’s the Drag Stretch Handle, and when you click and hold this, you’re going to see that it pushes everything below it down. So everything you see below this line is moving according to our Stretch Handle here. So if you wanted to have the header, say, be this big—you wouldn’t want it to be, in most cases. This is a little extreme, but for example sake, this is how you would resize your header. So if you wanted to, you know, maybe make it a little bit bigger – for instance, maybe about that size – you could do so, and now you have a larger header. And if you wanted to move anything in the header or really anything on the website at all, you’ll see if you hover over certain things, there’s an outlining box that goes around it. So if I hover over the social media, you’ll see this orange box that goes around it, and that’s means it’s an object that you’re able to move. So if you click and hold, you can actually just drag and move this object wherever you want on your Wix site. And you’ll see, we have these pink lines that come up, and those are our Snap to lines. So the moment you see that line go through the center, like it’s doing right now, and you see it on the left side, up against this line right here, that means that we have our object placed perfectly, and we can let go of our click. And now, you see that looks perfectly centered on the far left side of our header here. So that’s really cool. You can do the same thing with the social media, so we’ll bring that down just a little bit and center it with that object. Whoops, did not mean to click that. I’ll click off that. There we go. And now, you have a slighly larger header with your objects re-centered. So again, do it to whatever size you want, but for our sake, we’re going to leave it about right here. Now, another thing with the structure of the header is that you can choose if you want to freeze it or have it just show up at the top, and what I mean by that is if we preview this site—I can’t remember if it’s frozen or not. As we scroll—oh, this is a frozen header. So as we scroll, you’ll see that this header—these objects, our navigation and social media, in the header - in the grey bar, really, itself - follows the entire site as we scroll down. So no matter where we scroll on our website, is follows us, and that’s called a frozen header. And some people like that, and some people don’t. The way to change that, if you didn’t want it to do that, would be to right click on the header, and you’ll see this Freeze Position down here, and all you’d have to do is uncheck this box, and when you do that, you’ll see, if we hit this Preview button again, as we scroll, it no longer follows us. So that’s a personal preference of whatever you want to do, whatever you like with your website. In our case, I really like a frozen header, so I’m going to right click and freeze it again, but atleast now you know how to change that if that’s annoying you and you don’t really want that on your website. Okay. So going below that, let’s start talking about strips. So as I was mentioning before, this whole image here – and actually this below it – is a strip, and you can tell where the stip is by the blue lines that indicate the top and bottom of your strips. So strips are always full-width rectangles, and you can drag them, similarly of how we did to the header. So if we wanted to make this image a little bit larger, which I’m going to do here, we can simply grab, click, hold, and sort of drag it down. And as you’ll see, the image automatically gets resized as well, and when you let go, you now have a bigger image. So this is all within a strip, and I’m just going to grab these two objects here, these texts, and I’m going to re-center these as well. And one thing worth noting, too, with moving objects, if you want to move more than one at once—so let’s say that – let’s get this centered – if these two lines of text are perfectly centered with each other, and we like how they look, but it’s just not centered on our image—which, right now, you can see we’re just a little bit off-center, not terribly. If you want to grab two things at once, it’s fairly simple. You just hit the first object you want, and then while holding Control on your keyboard if you’re a Windows user or Command on a Mac, hit that. And you’re going to see that it brings up this dash line around both objects, so it covers both objects, meaning that we can now move both objects, and they’ll stay perfectly in line. You can also hit this Group Elements, and if you do that, it actually completely solidifies them as one object, so you don’t have to keep doing that Command or Control click and moving them. They’re just one solid object this way. So we can move this down, and it’s going to center both of them appropriately, just like that. Okay. So going below that, what if we wanted to add another strip? So this is great that we have our image here and another strip below it with some contect. And we’ll go into adding and changing content next, but what if we just focus on the [construction?]. We want to add another strip here. If you want to add your own custom bit of, you know, picture or text or whatever, all we’d have to do it go up to our Add button here. When you hit the add button, you’ll see there is a section that says “Strip,” and that is quite literally where you’re going to go to grab and create your own one of these little guys over here. So we have classic colors, we have video strips, image strips, and then you have preset design strips, similar to like when we were looking at website templates. You’re going to notice Wix has a lot of templates for things that make your life a lot easier if you want to go for their look. But in our case, just for the sake of our tutorial, let’s just pretend we want to add a strip right below this image. All you’d have to do is click, hold, and you drag it where you want it on your website. So if you wanted it below these images, you could just keep going down and holding it. If we wanted it above these images, then we could do it here. So the moment you let go of your strip, it’s going to lay it out, and it’s flush up against our image strip up here and our white strip up here. And so now, we have a whole new strip that we can start adding whatever content we want onto the site. So very important that you understand strips because this is, again, how you would add any of your own content or pictures, text, whatever it may be, over top a bit because the strips are the base structure of your website. Now, if we didn’t like this strip, and we messed up, and—you know what? Maybe we didn’t want this here. All would have to do is hit Delete on your keyboard, and it gets rid of it. And now, we just simply go down to—because it moved all of our content below it, we would find the next nearest thing to the last object that was placed, click, drag, and pull it, and now everything’s back up to the way it was. So very easy to fix yourself. Additionally, you can hit the Undo button up here or Control + Z if you’re Windows or Command + Z if you’re Mac, and that will undo anything that maybe you didn’t want to place on your website. So that’s what you would do for the body of your site, so it’s all working with strips, and laying content over those strips, which we’ll get into next. But the last thing to cover is the footer, and the footer, unlike the header, it does not scroll with your page. It only sits at the bottom of every page. And it also works with strips, so you could add your own strips if you wanted to and any content that you’d like, so. But something to keep in mind, whatever you placed down here is going to show on every single page, so once you place another strip or anything of the sort down there, it’s going to attach, and we’ll show you how to do that right now. So for instance, let’s just pretend we want to add another strip by going to the strip box. We can grab this black strip, and to place it on a footer, it’s a little bit different because when you go to let it go, you’ll see it’s not really getting us any options down here to sort of lay it on there. So when you let it go, it’ll put it near the footer, but not in the footer. So when you click this and you start dragging this box over our strip here, you’re going to see that it gives us an option to move it to the footer. So if you click and hold this strip, you’ll see this button come up that says “Move to Footer,” and we can hit that, and now you’ll see, this overlayed it in our footer. So here’s our footer or orange line. So this strip is now in our footer, but it’s kind of overlapping our content, so we’d have to kind of pull it down like so. But basically, it’s a little tricky to add stuff to the footer some times because you have to give almost clearance to have your objects down here, but once they are, it works exactly like with the body where you can realign everything as such. So you could use your Drag Handle and do that, ect. So I’m just going to undo all this with Command + Z or Control + Z because we don’t want this strip in our footer. But now you have an idea of how you can go about doing that. So that’s a look at the structure of your Wix website and how you might go about formatting and moving things on it. Let’s get into changing all this content. We now have an idea of how to structure our Wix website, but let’s actually get into how we would change all of these images and text to make it our own. So starting from the top down, we’re going to work with the header first. If we wanted to change this color of our header up here, it’s very easy to do that, and this goes for anything on our website when it comes to changing color. All the strips, boxes, whatever you have on your site—color’s going to be changed in pretty much the same fashion. So with the header, we can simply click on it and go to Change Header Design here, so click on that. And you’re going to see, like I mentioned before, Wix has tons of different presets that we can work with, and you’re going to see this with anything that we can edit on the site. Wix will give you all those different presets, so it’s worth noting. We have this button that says “Customize Design” down here. Now, more than likely, you’re going to want to use this because if you have your own logo up here or whatever it may be, you might want to work with your own color scheme. So when you hit Customize Design, it gives us a whole bunch of options. We have Fill Color & Opacity, Border, Corners, and Shadows. So if we want to change the color of the background – so we have like a light gray right now – all we’d have to do is click on a box, and it brings up our color palet here. If you don’t like any of these colors, if you don’t see anything that you want, you can go to this plus button, and now you can literally drag on any color that you want. That’s basically any color under the sun right here. And then of course, if you know what hexidecimal is, you can add your own little color code right here and get the exact color you’re looking for. So in our case, I’m maybe going to do this sort of light blue like so. And you click Add when you’re done. And you can just ex out of everything, and it would save it. Another thing I’m going to do and that I recommend doing if you’re using a frozen header is turning on the shadow. So all you have to do is enable shadow by clicking this button. And then a really good recommendation is to set the Blur to 10, and this Distance, you can leave that at 1, and the size maybe at 5. That creates this really nice shadow behind here. I might just put it down just a little bit size-wise. There we go. I made it two. It creates this little soft shadow underneath it, so if we preview, you’ll see as we scroll over everything, especially on whites—so when we get down here, you’ll see the shadow. So it really kind of descerns the header from the body, and you can see that really disctinct difference between the two, which is really easy and nice. So again, with colors, that can be done with everything up here, so even with our navigation. If we click on it, you’re going to always see this paint brush for most everything on your Wix website, and that’s always going to be for changing colors or, you know, different fonts or whatever it may be. It’s going to be for the look of it. So when you hit that paint brush, in our navigation, we have, again, presets, but I’m just going to customize our design again because I want to make these white. So we can do that by going to Fill Color & Opacity and Text. And we’re going to hit this. I’m going to change this to a bright white for us. And I’m going to increase the font size down here by grabbing this tool here for the font size. I’m going to make these a little bit bigger, so maybe set this to 18. I’m okay with the Open Sans font, and I’m okay with the dark blue selected tab, too. So that’s okay, but if you want to change it, you go to Hover or Clicked. And that would be—so for instance, this color right for Clicked, since we’re on the home page, this is the page that’s clicked, and that’s why it’s showing that darker color. So that’s how that sort of works with your navigation. We’ll get into the social media in a minute, so I’ll leave those alone. Now, if we wanted to add a logo up in the top corner, that’s something that’s very frequently done on a lot of sites. All we would need to do is go to the Add button. We would go to Image. And basically, when you’re in Images here, you can go to My Image Uploads because this is going to be, I’m assuming, your logo or some image of your kind. We don’t have one uploaded, so in our case, we’re just going to go to this Free from Wix. And something worth noting is that Wix offeres a whole bunch of royalty-free images, so you have an entire massive library of high-quality HD photos at your disposal for your website. So this is super, super nice for when you’re building a website and maybe don’t have great photos of, say, your product or if you’re a blogger, maybe you need some stock photos of a place you traveled to. Wix, 9 times out of 10, will have anything that you search for. So in our case, I’m just going to search “Logo.” I don’t know what’s going to come up for this, but something that we can just generically use. So even if it’s something small like this—let’s just pretent this is our logo. So obviously, this wouldn’t be what we want to use. We would select it. So you see the check mark. And this would be the same way if you had your own logo, so you’d be in My Images, and you would upload an image, pick your image, hit Open, and then, like I was just showing you in our section, you would checkbox it and hit Add to Page. And this isn’t just for a logo. This is for any image on your Wix site. You can just select it and put it on any image, just like that. Now, if you want to resize this—so this is way to big to fit in our header. If we wanted to resize this, all we’d have to do is click the object we’re working with, and you’ll see these dots show up around it, and when those show up, those indicate that you can stretch your image in whatever way you want. So if we wanted to pull it width-wise bigger or hight-wise, you can do that. And then we also have, of course, the corner buttons that do both at the same time, which is, preferably, what we want to do. So we’re going to size this down really, really small. And when we want to put this onto the header, we’d click, hold, drag, just like I was showing you with strips and any other object. And the moment you get onto the header, it’ll sort of highlight everything a burt orange, and it’ll actually say “Attach to Header,” so when you let go of it, it says “Look Great Everywhere.” That means that we are added to the header, and you can just close out of those. So now, this image is going to show up every single time on every single page. So if we preview it, you’ll see it’s going to stay there in our header. So using your imagination and using your logo, that’s what maybe what you’d want to do is put it off to the left side of your navigation. That’s what you typically tend to see. All right. So let’s move it down. Let’s go to our strip here. So this isn’t our picture. What if we wanted to add our own picture to the strip, but not have to remove the whole strip to do it? Because you don’t have to. The easiest way to change a strip background is to simply click on it and actually hit Change Strip Background. When you do that, it’s going to bring up this little box, and you’ll notice anytime you click on a Wix object or element, a certain box comes up for it. So with our stip background, we can change it to a certain color. We can also change it to a different image or a video, even. So in our case, let’s change it to—you know what? Let’s see what videos Wix has to offer. So again, you can upload your own video. In our case, we’re just going to look for a video. So let’s just hit “Travel.” Let’s see what comes up. And we can preview our videos by hovering over them, and kind of going through this all here. So let’s just try this guy out, see what it looks like. When you’re ready, you just select it, hit Change Background, and now, you have your own background going. And it’s really that easy to change the strip background, and that goes for any strip that’s on your website. So one thing that’s worth noting, though, is that our text is getting slightly lost with the brightness of this image, so how can we make this text pop off of this image? Well, there’s a couple ways of doing it, but my preferred way is to actually select the strip itself or whatever the text if overlaying, and going back up to this Change Strip Background. When you do that, you can go to the Setting button here, and when you click that, you’re going to see we have a whole bunch of different things that we can work with. We have overlays, so when you click one of these, it kind of darkens the image with like a grid or lines, anything of the sort, and that kind of helps the text pop. You could also check this right here, Overlay Color, and this is what I would recommend doing. You would basically select your color, and in most cases, you’re going to want to use black. And then you can adjust the opacity of that color, so if you want it to be darker, you can do so by turning it up even more until you get to a solid black, which you obviously wouldn’t want if you’re trying to show your picture. But basically, you have the ability to darken that image, so you’re white text could pop off that a lot more. So I’ll probably set this to 35, let’s say. And then beneath that, we have Scroll Effects, which are really cool. You have parallax design, so as you’re scrolling down your website, this video’s also going to move. You have Zoom in, Reveal, Fade in. Just check these for yourself, select one, and close out, and you’ll see how neat they are to work with. So for instance, if I have Parallax selected and I hit Preview, you’ll see that as I scroll, my image is sort of moving with my website. Pretty cool. So now, let’s go into editing text on our website. So if we wanted to change this to say something else, it’s very easy to do that, and this works with every bit of text that’s on your site. So for instance—let’s ungroup these first because otherwise, we won’t be able to edit them. So when you select it, remember we had these grouped. You can just hit Ungroup Elements. And when we select the text here, we can double click it, and you’re able to adjust the text just as if you were working in Microsoft Word or anything of the like. So you can simply highlight and backspace and start typing whatever you want. It’s really that easy. So in our case, I’m just going to basically sort of undo that, and I’m going to have it say “Going Places” because I really like that theme right there. I think that looked really nice. And another thing that we could do is that if we wanted to have this text pop like we were doing with the darkened background, it’s pretty easy to do that. We’ve a whole bunch of different options to change the look of our text, and we can do anything that you would find in PhotoShop or Microsoft Word. So we can bold the text, we can italisize it, we can underline it, simply by turning things on and off. We can align the text, so left, center, or right. And as I was saying about popping it off the image, we have different effects down here. So we have little shades that we can put underneath it. We can highlight it. You know, make it pop in a lot of different ways. So in our case, I’m going to have it look like this. I think that’s kind of nice. So that’s looking pretty good. We have our text, our strip edited. We went to our header. And now, we have down here different sections again, different text. Again, all you have to do is double click, and you can edit this however you like. Let’s say, though, we wanted to add, you know, more shaped or images or anything of the sort. So like this, for instance, is one static image. If we move it, you’ll see it’s kind of on its own. If we wanted to do that, all we’d have to do is go to Add, and we can add either a box or an image, and when you do that, you can just drag and drop your image into place wherever you want and resize it like we were doing before. One other thing worth noting is that sometimes when you drop an image on your website—so let’s say we put this image here and we wanted this text to come over like it’s doing. Sometimes, when you drop your image, your text will get hidden behind it. So if that is that case, all you have to do is change the layout of what’s overlapping it. So if we right click on this white box here, you’ll see there’s this Arrange button, and we can actually hit Send to Back, and when we do that, you’ll see it’s now behind the image. So if we wanted to bring it back on top of the image, we can go to Arrange and hit Move Forward or Bring To Front. And now, it lays it on top of the image. That’s just something really important to remember and point out because you’re going to notice that as you start putting a lot of content on your website and overlapping things, that happens very frequently, so that’s a very important thing to remember. Now, this is our blog right here. Since we selected a blog template, we don’t actually have to add a blog because our blog comes included on our website, which is really nice and convenient for us. And if we go down to the bottom here, we have our footer. This is a Slider gallery that we’ll go into a little bit later. And basically, just keep going to this plus Add button, and just put whatever you want. If you want more images, more text. So if you wanted to add more text yourself, you can click, drag, and hold. And now, you have your own paragraph over here. You can add literally whatever you want, anytime you want, wherever you want. It’s really as easy as going to that Add button, and whatever you need at the time, just select it, click, drag, and hold, and drop, and you have your content ready to go on your website. All right, so now that we’ve edited a lot of the content – and hopefully you’ve paused the video and taylored it to your needs – let’s jump into one of the most important things of this actual tutorial, and that is our Blog section because that’s the whole point of this website is that it’s a blog website. So how do we go about getting these posts on the home page, writing them, getting them in order, categorizing them, all those good features that come with having a blog on your website. Well, it’s actually really easy to do. All we have to do is go over to this My Blog section, and when we click on that, we’re going to need to go into blog manager, which is the top option here. Below that, these are just used to add more blogs to different pages of your websites and different elements for the blogs, but basically, what we need is just this Blog Manger. And then you’re going to hit Manage Your Blog. So when you do that, we’re going to come up to this page that looks a little but like this. Basically, this is that actual main blog page. So we have our nine different posts here – I have this one I can get rid of – that we’re seeing that Wix automatically kind of popualates. And then we have our categories down here that we can create and organize. We have different tags that we can create and organize. We also have Insights, so when your blog is up and rolling, you can actually see how well it’s doing. And then a Settings button for where you can update your subscribers. So let’s start back up with All Posts. So if we’re in this page, all we have to do to create a new blog post is actually hit this New Post button up at the top-right corner. When you select New Post, it’s going to bring up a page in a minute where we can actually start writing the creative for our blog posts. It’s really as easy as that. So you have a title here. You can put in, you know, My Title. You can put in an author if you want. And then below that, you can also start typing your actual blog post, so this is where you would actually begin writing the content of your post. So you also have the ability to add an image, a gallery, video, gif, divider, and even code, simply by hitting any of these buttons at any time while you’re writing. So that’s how you would go about adding those and making unique content. Now, say you needed to come back to this blog post. You want to schedule it or, you know, you’re not sure if you’re done with it yet or you just want to sit on it for a while, you can go to this Save as Draft, and it’ll keep your blog post private, just for you, so you don’t lose your work, but your website visitors won’t actually see it. Below that, you have the Preview option, so you can see what the post would look like live on your website, similar to what we were doing with the template comparison. And beneath that, we also have a Featured Post option. So if you wanted to put this blog post ahead of others and at the top, even though it might be an older date, you can do that by selecting this option here. Underneath that, we can set our own tags, so if you have a tag that you want and you’ve created it, it’ll automatically pop up here and you can select it. If you need to make a new tag, just simply type in whatever your new tag is. So if we had the new tag called New Tag, we can just write it right there, and when we get that check mark, we’re good to go. Next to it, we have categories, so under the categories, there’s already a few created, and this is a section that is really nice because a lot of times when you write a blog post, you’ll want to categorize it. So if your blog post is about traveling, you’ll want to put it under your Travel category, so people can find it very easily. So very, very nice and convenient to have. It’s similar to WordPress, if you’ve ever seen WordPress blogs. And if we wanted to create a new category, all we have to do is just hit New Category down here, and when you do that, just type in your category that you want. And when you get the check mark, you’re good to go again. So last thing to talk about with your blog post is creating a custom URL for it. So if we go into Advance SEO here, we’ll see at the very top we have our URL link. So right now, it’s showing the date and the title of your article. And the reason why you want to change your URL is because that can get kind of messy and long, especially depending on what your title it. So for instance, if your title was Top 10 Travel Destinations of 2017, you’re URL is going to be the date, and then that entire title, so that’s going to be really long. And to change it, all you really have to do is just type in whatever you want, and you’re good to go with your blog page. Super easy. Very simple. And just hit the Done down there. And that’s about it when it comes to putting up a blog post. It’s really that easy. So once you write it and you hit Publish Post, it’s automatically going to go onto any page where your blog is located, and it will be put in date order by default, unless of course, you hit that Feature Post. So very easy to start writing your blog and getting right to it. All right. So now that we have our blog all in place, and we figured how to do that, we’re going to go into just a couple – or actually a few – bonus features that you might want to add to your website. So what we’re going to look for specifically is an image gallery, and contact form, and a Google map. These are three things that are really, really great to have on your website, and you’ll see them on a lot of major websites because they’re just helpful and convenient for your users, in terms of organization and also contacting. So the way we want to do this is first, let’s just go to our About Us page. I’ve created some space on our page to add an image gallery. Let’s start with that. So if we are in our editor here, if we want to add a gallery to showcase some photos, you know, if we’ve been working on a project and there’s a lot of photos for it or you’re a photographer—if you’re a blogger, a lot of times, there’s a lot of photos that are associated with your blog posts. If you want to organize them into, you know, really nice galleries, this is how we’d go about doing it. So we can go up to the Add button here, and instead of Image this time, we’re going to go right to Gallery. And you have a whole bunch of different choices to select from, but one of my personal favorites is the Thumbnail Classic slider gallery. So you can click, drag, and drop right onto your Wix site, pull it down, and I’m just going to size this just a little bit nicer here for us, just to get it a little bit wider and larger. I might even bring this down just a little bit more. Something like that. There we go, just size this down a bit. And so now that we have our gallery set up on our page, we can actually go about adding our own images by hitting Change Images. And when you do that, you’re going to see the stock Wix photos that are already in there. We can just remove those simply by hitting the trash can icon in the bottom-right corner of these photos. Now, to add our own images to this gallery, we go up to the top right corner and hit Add Images. When we do that, we can add our own by just checking however many you like and hitting Add to Gallery or we can go to the Free from Wix like I’m going to do and search our topic. And I’m going to select a few different ones that look good for us. So let’s try this guy, maybe this one, maybe those photos. That looks about right. We add to gallery. Now, this is the order that they’re going to appear in your gallery, so if you want another photo to be first – say we wanted this one to be first – you would click, hold, drag, and drop wherever you want it to be. So if we want this to be the first photo, it’s now showing as #1, and we’re good to go. So we can hit Done, and there we go. We’ve got out gallery all set up and inserted on our page here. Now, if we want it to be more like a slideshow, we can do that very easily by hitting the Settings button, and then you can go to Navigation Arrows. So you can turn those on, so people can easily toggle between your photos. And then you can also check out this Autoplays on Loading, which will automatically kind of transition between each image for however long you tell it to do it, and with whatever effect you want. So whether it’s fading or sliding to the right or left or up or down, you choose it down here. So if we preview that, you’ll see that looks pretty good. So that’s how we’d get our image gallery onto our page. Now, the other two features I was meantioning are the contact form and map, which I think we’re going to want to add onto the bottom of our home page. And I believe I may have done that already, but if I did, we can just start form scratch. So let’s just scroll down here. Yep, I have them here, but I’ll just delete them and show you how we would go about adding these guys here. So create some space for yourself. Move the footer down again with your Drag Handle. And then we’re going to go up into our Add button again, and this time, we’re going to go all the way down to Contact, and in Contact, you’ll see we have all these different contact forms, and if you keep scrolling, you have all these different Google maps to choose from. Now, my personal favorite to go with because it’s classic and recognizable is Google’s Highways maps, which is this one right here. So I’m going to click and drag that onto our home page, get it centered. Something like that. And that’s a very common map you’ll see, so unless you want a specific color scheme to match your site, this usually tends to be the go-to for the Google map. Now, you’re noticing it’s saying that we’re in San Francisco with the Wix office, and that’s definitely not where we’re located. So let’s change the address by hitting Change Address. When you do that, we have an area to put our own location, so if we wanted New York, we could do that, and hit Find. And then we can change the name of the drop pin to whatever we want. So we can call it, you know, maybe Our Business, and then hit Set. So easy as that when it comes to putting a Google map on your site, and it’s definitely worth having if you have a store front or you’re located somewhere or you’re traveling somewhere. Just it’s a nice feature to have for people to get a visual idea of where you’re coming from. And then if we we want to add our contact form to our page, again back in the Contact section, scroll back up. Because you have all these different contact forms to choose from, but this is my favorite one out of all of them, this little horizontal box one. And it’s going to look pretty nice because if we fit it underneath our map here and we stretch it out, it lays out pretty neatly, just like so. So again, you can change everything on this in terms of design, so if you don’t like the color of that button or the font of the text, you can do all that in our handy paint brush design button. It works exactly like everything else we’ve gone over. But one other thing we will have to do is set our email because when people write this message and hit Send, we want to make sure that’s going to the right email address and the right inbox. So hit Set Email, and make sure you have on the top line whatever email you want it to go to, and you can also add a second email as a backup if the first one fails or if you just want to get it to two different email addresses. Additionally, you can add more information boxes, so if you wanted a phone number as well, you could check this box. Whoops. There we go. And add the phone number. You can also add an address. You can also re-name all these boxes, so if you didn’t want this to say “Message,” you want it to say “Call Now” or whatever it might be, you can do that right by typing in that box. So very intuitive. You can customize it a lot, and it’s just a really nice way to have people contact you on your site without them having to know any of your information, really. They can just fill it out and hit Send. So that’s an image gallery, map, and a contact form on your website. I highly recommend having those things, no matter what style of website you’re making because they’re just going to come in handy for user experience. One of the final things we haven’t talked about with our website design here is the navigation and social media that we have up in our header. So that’s a really important part that we really need to get down because imagine having new pages or adding other pages. You got to know how to link those and how to create them, so it’s really not difficult to do so, and same thing goes for linking your social media pages. Very, very easy to do. What we want to go to is, instead of our toolbar over here on the side, we want to go up to the top-left that we went to in the beginning for our pages. So under our Pages here, we can simply add and remove pages with a couple of clicks. So one way we can start is by clicking Add Page down here, and when we do that, it brings up three different options for us to work with. We have Page, which is quite simply a blank page. We have Link, which will create a tab up, as you see, but when you click it, it will go off to another website or wherever you direct it to go. And then you also just have a Menu Header, which is basically just a fancy term for a drop-down menu. So let’s go ahead and create a blank page, just to show you what it looks like. So the process of doing that would be clicking Page, and you’ll see it will take us to our new page, which is completely blank. It’s all white, except for our header and footer. We can rename that page to whatever we want by simply clicking on it and just typing in, you know, whatever you desire. Now, let’s say we created this page and it was on our site for a while, and maybe it wasn’t working or we don’t need it anymore, and we just want to get rid of it. Well, to delete a page, it’s just as easy. We can go up to these three dots and select them, and you’ll see all the way at the bottom there’s a Delete button, and when you click that, it’s going to give you a confirmation for the deletion. By hitting this button, it’s going to wipe it completely, and that’s why they kind of bring up this window here, to make sure you’re not doing something on accident. So delete that page, and now it’s gone. Now, let’s go ahead and create a drop-down because we have these three categories: Eat, Travel, and Relax. Those are all blog pages, but they’re just different categories for our blog. So let’s go ahead and create a drop-down for these categories under a generic blog page. So let’s hit Add Page, Menu Header, and then let’s name this Blog. And underneath that, if we wanted to add, you know, drop-downs underneath our blog tab, all we’d have to do is click, hold, and drag on anyone of these pages, and as you see, we can align it wherever we want. And wherever you drop this page – just as a side note – it’ll be ordered automatically in the navigation. So if I dropped it in the bottom here, you’ll see that that page gets set all the way at the bottom, just like that. But we want to put this under our blog page as a drop-down menu, so all we do is drag it until we’re underneath the page we want for the drop-down, and then we slide it over to the right, just like so. And you do that will all the pages you want to become a dropdown. And you’ll see it makes those kind of connecting lines, showing that they’re connected to this blog tab. And now, you see they disappear from our navigation, and if we hit Preview and go over to blog, you’ll see that we now have a perfect drop-down working over there. So that’s how we link page. It’s very, very easy, and the same thing goes for our social media. So if we wanted to add social media links, we can go to our Add icon here, hit Social, and you can just drag anyone of these bars, doesn’t matter which because you can change it and drop it where you want it. So we have these social icons right here. And when you click on them, hit Set Social Icons, and you can link exactly what pages these need to go to. It works like your images in our image gallery. You can hit the Facebook one, and then over here, click Add a Link. So you could type in Facebook.com\mypage. And when you do that and hit Done, your Facebook account has been linked to this icon. And if you wanted to add more icons, simply hit Add Icons, and Wix is going to give you basically every social media that exists. You can see it’s categorized here. If we wanted to add Pinterest, you can add a variety of different Pinterest-looking icons to your social media bar. So that’s how we go about setting links for our social media, for our navigation. Very important and something that you’ll be using quite often if you’re adding new pages and removing them as well. All right. We’re back in our Wix dashboard here, and one of the next things that we need to do, now that we have our content on our site, we’ve structured it, and it’s starting to look good, we need to actually go ahead an upgrade our site to Premium so that we can connect our domain in the next step. So to do that, we’re back in our Dashboard, and if we go over to this Upgrade Now button, we can hit that, and it’s going to take use to a page that shows up Wix’s five Premium plans. And again, the reason we’re going to want to upgrade is if you’re putting your site live without one of these plans, you essentially don’t own your website. So what I mean by that is you can have your website live through Wix, completely free, but you can’t connect your domain, and there’s going to be Wix advertizing on your website, so it really is pretty unprofessional and not ideal for a lot of bloggers, businesses, you know, anything in different industries. So looking at these five plans, we have the first one, which is the most basic, which is Connect Your Domain for $5 a month. So as it says, you can connect your own domain, so, you know, youwebsite.com as an example, and then you are allowed 1 GB of bandwidth, 500 MB of storage. And if you’re not sure of the difference between these two, bandwidth is basically how much video, media, and visitors your site can handle, in terms of being played and being online. And then storage is how many photos, videos, whatever you have, you can have on the back-end of your site. So this is something to keep in mind. Especially if you’re a blogger, you probably have a lot of photos and media that you’re working with, so not ideal for this situation. There’s also Wix ads that still show on this plan, so we definitely don’t want that. Stepping it up, we move up to Combo, which Wix recommends for personal use, and I agree with that. For $10 a month, you get 2 GB of bandwidth, 3 GB of storage, you can connect your domain, and the biggiest difference is that the Wix ads are gone. So that’s not bad, but what we probably want and what I recommend to everybody who has a Wix site is to go to the Unlimited, which is the post popular plan that Wix offers, and this is going to give you unlimited bandwidth, so you don’t have to worry about all that video or photography that’s on your site or how many visitors are coming to it, so Wix will be able to handle it. You also get 10 GB of storage, which is plenty enough for working with different videos and photos. And you can connect your domain. The Wix ads are gone, as in this plan, and you have free online advertizing vouters, which are really nice to help get your website fort of kickstarted in different search engines. So this middle-ground plan is definitely very reasonable. The pricing is not to bad, compared to a lot of other hosting companies out there, and really, it’s ideal for any situation. So I highly recommend going with the Unlimited plan over any of these plans. But just so we can look, if you were to step a grade up, you have the eCommerce plan, which is best for small businesses because basically, this is the only plan, other than VIP, that allows you to have an online store. So if you were selling anything on your website or you’re a blogger and you wanted to sell something, you would have to have this plan or VIP. Unfortunately, anything below that, you can’t sell online with Wix. And then above that is the VIP, which basically includes everything you’ve seen in these plans, but you’re getting dedicated support time from Wix. So if you ever had a problem or an issure, they’ll be the first to come to you to help resolve that. So that’s a look at the five different plans. Maybe pause this video. Think about it for a minute which one’s right for you, but I highly recommend this middle-ground Unlimited plan. And when you’re ready, we’ll move on and connect our domain. Hopefully you’ve taken a minute to figure out what plan is right for you and what you’re doing with your website. But like I said, let’s just assume we’re going to go with the Unlimited plan. And now, it’s time to connect our domain, so I’m going to walk you through how to do that. The first thing that we need to do is to upgrade our website. So first, you need to get your plan. You can either pay monthly, yearly, two years, or three years for your plan. So whatever fits your budges and whatever you want to do, it’ll work out one way or the other. So I’m going to go with the yearly subscription. You hit Select, and it’s going to jump you into this page, which is basically just their check-out page, so you can upgrade your website. So just fill out this information with your preferred credit card, and hit Submit Purchase, and you’ll be good to go. You can back out of this screen, and we can jump back into our Wix dashboard here. I didn’t obviously buy the plan, but when you hit Purchase, you’re going to now see a purple ribbon right over in the top corner of this little icon for your website, showing that you are a Premium plan. So what we can do is go right below that now and hit Connect Your Domain. When you hit that, it’s going to take you over to this page, which says “Buy a new domain” or “Connect a domain you already own.” So we’re going to assume that you already have a domain purchased somewhere else. However, if you needed to get a domain, Wix actually allows you to purchase a domain directly through them, so you would just go right through this option here, buying a domain, and it would connect automatically since you’re buying it through Wix. However, is a domain through GoDaddy, Google Domains, One-to-One, any of those providers out there, you can hit this box here, and when we do that, you’ll notice we’re not able to do that because haven’t upgraded our plan, so we can’t connect a domain. But I’ll still walk you through really quickly how to go about doing that because it takes only a couple widows. So instead of this window coming up, where you’re going to go to is a page asking your where you purchased your domain. So for instance, if you bought your domain from GoDaddy, you would select GoDaddy, and then you would hit Continue, and when you go to hit Continue, it’s going to take you to a 12-step plan that’ll guide you exactly how you need to configure your settings in GoDaddy to link your domain to Wix. So it’s fairly easy. Basically, you have to disconfigure you DNS settings in GoDaddy so that the name servers are Wix’s name servers. And that sounds really confusing, and I’m sure many of you don’t know what I’m talking about there. But if you follow those 12 steps that Wix provides, it’s super easy. It’s literally a matter of copying and pasting two lines of text into GoDaddy. So just follow those 12 steps, hit Finish, and then you’ll be on your way. Your domain’s connected. Just make sure you give it about 24 to 48 hours. If you’re not seeing your website connected, that’s totally normal, so just give it that little window of time, and after that, you should definitely see that your website is connected to your domain. All right. If you’re able to successfully connect your domain, then we just need to move on to one final step before we publish our site live, and that is working with out mobile website because you want to have a really good mobile design for your website, not just a perfect design because Google, especially, is really starting to crack down on mobile website. So it’s worth looking at it and making sure that your site is at least looking halfway decent when people go to view it on a phone. So we’re going to jump into our Content Editor here again. Got to let this load. There we go. And so instead of editing any of this conect on here, what we’re going to want to go to is our little phone icon that we talked about in the very beginning of this tutorial, and we’re just going to go to Edit Mobile View. And when you hit that, we can see that everything from our desktop that we’ve edited has been layed out according to how Wix think it should look on a phone, and this is really helpful and really good because most of the time it gets it right. However, sometimes you run into little snaps where maybe some of your text is too large or some of your images are outside of the edges of the mobile view here. So I’m just going to show you how you can fix that if that’s the case for you. So let’s pretend that this text was way too large for us, so it’s showing up a little bit too big. All we need to do is click on this, and you can hit Scale Down or Scale Up. In our case, we’d want to scale down if it was too big, so you just hit that, and as you see, the text gets smaller. And as you hit Scale Up, it gets bigger. So very important to not that. You cannot really change the text, but you can adjust the font size and the color to some extent. So just not that any content that’s on the mobile view is here to stay. You can’t adjust it. If you want to change these pictures and what the text reads, you’d have to go back into the Desktop View, unfortunately. Now, another thing to note is that there are things called Hidden Elements. So for instance, if we didn’t want this picture right here to show on a mobile device, we can just hit this little Hide Element icon, this little eyeball. And when you hit that, it’s going to format everything up and get rid of that picture, so that way, it kind of cleans things up. So you might have a video or a picture that’s too large or that just doesn’t look right on a mobile phone, and you’re just like “Maybe we don’t need that on the mobile device.” Well, that’s how you get rid of it because there’s really no such thing as just completely, completely deleting it. So you can hide the objects that way, and if you needed to bring it back, you can go over to the Hidden Elements icon over here, and simply hit the eyeball again. It’s going to place it right back and format everything exactly to how it was. Above that, we have a mobile menu sort of here or mobile kind of options, rather. Excuse me. And we have this Mobile View, which we want to leave turned on because that’s what creates this vertical view. If we check that off, it’s going to just try and squeeze our desktop site onto a phone, which isn’t usually ideal. Below that, we have a Back to Top button that we can turn on, and when you do that, you’ll see that this animation here shows—there’s a button that shows up at the bottom, and when you click it, it’ll take you all the back up to the top of your page. Very nice and handy. And below that, if you were a business that needed to display a phone number, email, address, or your social media constantly to your visitors, you could turn on this Mobile Action bar, which basically has a little footer – extra footer, I should say – that goes at the bottom of the mobile screen and follows the page, no matter how much you scroll up or down, and it’s going to always display a little phone icon, email address, and social network, whatever you tell it to turn on, and people can click that and just instantly find out any of that critical information. So if you’re more of a business-oriented website, that’s very nice to have on a mobile site. And then above that, we can also change the background as well. So if things aren’t looking right on the phone with your color or your picture that you have set for your sort of wallpaper background, you can change that right here. So very nice that they have that as well. Now, one last imporant thing to mention with mobile design – and this is probably the most imporant to work with – is your mobile menu. So that’s these three lines up here. So if you notice, our navigation that was in our header is no longer there. Or I should say it doesn’t really look like it’s there, but it actually is. In these three lines, this is where we’re going to find all of our navigation in, and it’s up to us to make sure this looks right for our visitors. So if we go into Design here, we hit our paint brush, you’ll see we can change these three lines to whatever we want it to look like, but I’m okay with those. And then you hit Customize Design, and it’s going to show you—there’s and Open and a Closed section. So when hit Closed, that’s these three lines. So you’re editing the color. Whatever you’re changing, it’s for these three lines. When you go to Open, this is what happens when visitors hit those three lines. They’re going to see this right now. And so you can change the background color, the text, the icon colors, everything for the Open menu when you’re selecting in Open. So very important to know the different between those two. Now, if you don’t like the way this looks—so this is the full menu navigation. You can change it to any of these five preset designs up here. So we have this one. You’re going to see that’s how it looks for visitors. Our full open one again, we have it from the left, from the top, and from the right. So I personally like the full menu one. I think that’s really nice. And when you want to just test it, just hit that Preview button, and you’ll see what I mean about this mobile navigation. When you hit these three lines—there we go. It opens up our menu, and you can see all of our navigation here, just like that. So very nice. And when you’re ready to go here and you’re satisfies with your mobile design, let’s go ahead and save that. And when we’re all saved and you feel comfortable, you’re ready to hit that Publish Now button right down here, and when you do that, it’ll just take a second, and there you go. Within seconds, congratulations, your site is published and is live online, so give yourself a pat on the back. You just built your first Wix blog website, and you’re ready to go. And so any time you need to update anything at all, you can just go back in, make the changes, hit Save, and re-publish it again. So very good. We have everything rocking and rolling, and next, we’re going to move onto just one bonus tip. Okay. So our site is live, which is great, but we have one more bonus tip for you that you really might want to listen to. So if you’re building a blog website, a lot of times, you’ll want to take advantage of monotization options. So if you’re not aware, blogs have the potential to make quite a bit of money online or at least a little bit through steady visitors and high readership. So if you are blogging constantly and you have quality content, and, you know, maybe your blog site is going for a few months, maybe a year now, you should definitely consider monotization options if you haven’t done so already because the more visitors you have and the more display advertising you can run, you’ll be able to collect more and more money. So there’s a few ways of going about making money with your blogs, and one of the most common ways is, like I said, display advertising. So if you’re not familiar with display advertising, it’s basically those Google ads that you see when you go to a website, and they’re on the top of the website, on the sides, and at the bottom. So they’re usually those like long panels that have images of something that you’ve maybe looked at on the internet. You were shopping maybe last week or something, and it’s showing it to you over and over on every website you go to. That is Google AdSense display advertising. So how do you get that on your site, and how can you go about making money with that? Well, Google AdSense is very straightforward, actually. You can go ahead and go to Google AdSense right now, if you want to pause this video, and create a Google AdSense account. It’s completely free, and that’s the first thing you’re going to definitely need to do before we can even show you how to add that to your Wix website. So go ahead and create a Google AdSense account, and come back to this video. So if you have that Google AdSense account created now, we can jump into our website here, and we’ll need to go to the Add button. So if we go to the Add button and we scroll down to the - I’m sorry, not the Add button - the Wix App Market, and we go up to the search bar here, we can search “Google AdSense,” just like that. And the first thing to come up, you’ll see Google’s logo, the Google AdSense logo. You can just hit Add to Site, and when you do that, you’re going to see this box kind of come up on your site. And it’ll load here in just a minute. So there we go. We’ll put that off to the side here. So it’s ultimately up to your where you want to put this add, but this box is where you’re going to fill in an advertisement. So if we go to Settings here, you’ll see that we can connect our Google AdSense account by hitting Get Started here. And when we do that, that’s going to actually go ahead and take you through the steps of getting your AdSense account going. So if we hit Text & Image or Image & Text, you’ll see different types of ads being diplayed. You can layout if you want it to be square, tall, or wide, and you can also change its style, so it matches your site a little bit better and doesn’t just stick out like a sore thumb. So this is display advertising, and every time somebody sees this, you get impressions, and when you really get paid is when you get click throughs. So when people click on these ads to get to that other website that they’re promoting, you will make money. Again, so the more readers you have, the steadier the traffic you have, the more money you’ll make with Google AdSense, so that’s a really good option, and it’s free, and it’s well worth having on your website. But you need that premium plan with Wix, and of course, you need the Google AdSense account. So that’s the first way, a second way would be to use site called flippa.com, F-L-I-P-P-A.com. And if you’ve never heard of it, this is basically a resale site for websites where it almost works like in eBay where you can sell your domain or your whole website if you wanted to. So a lot of time, what you’ll see it popular blogs with a lot of content, after they’ve built up authority, some creadability, and maybe you’re getting a lot of steady traffic, you can use that to your advantage and sell off your blog, as if it were a business, basically. And people will bid on it, and you can sometimes get some very high rates for your website. So definitely consider that, and make sure you consider that, especially as you start to build your blog. It’s definitely an option worth considering down the road. So and then one last option is to have paid advertisers for blog space, so having people come in and write blogs on your behalf, or having other, you know, bloggers sponser you, essentially. So that’s a third alternative that you can have and that’s pretty common in the blog world, especially. And again, the easiest one to get started with is Google AdSense, so don’t be afraid to go ahead and try that. You have flippa.com and sponsored advertising. So all those different avenues give you potential revenue on your blog, and it’s definitely well worth your time. Okay, everyone. Well, we hope you enjoyed this tutorial. We’ve gone from the ground up and built your Wix website for a professional blog look, and we’ve kind of guided you through everything that you’ll need to know to really go ahead and keep editing the site and making it yours going forward into the future. So Wix is one of those platforms that’s just so intuitive, it’s so easy to use, and if it doesn’t seem easy now, trust me. It will get easier over time. It’s one of those website builders where it’s “practice makes perfect,” and you’ll get a better eye for design the more you use it. It’s just going to become easier and easier for you. So keep that in mind. Don’t get discouraged if your Wix site isn’t looking perfect right off the bat. But we hope this tutorial at least helped you get into the realm of what you were looking for with your professional blog website. And make sure—remember, don’t forget to go to the Upgrade to Premium section and upgrade now because if you missed that part in the tutorial, that’s critically important to getting your website that professional look. You absolutely want to upgrade to a plane, and the one we recommend, again, is the Unlimited, so you can connect your own domain, remove those ads, put Google AdSense on there to monotize it, and you’ll get that unlimited bandwidth. So super important to remember you do that before you launch your site. And other than that, if you have any questions or comments, leave them in our comment section below the video. Make sure to leave a like, and subscribe for more Wix tutorials. This is YourWebsiteTutor.com, and thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in the next tutorial.

Channel: Your Website Tutor

Views: 16,284

Keywords: how to make a blog, make a blog, create a blog, blog, wordpress, wix, yourwebsitetutor

Id: FfzvSdHLUPs

Length: 94min 3sec (5643 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2017