How To Make A News Website With WordPress

what's up interweb donut here from donut online today I'm going to show you how you can design this beautiful and professional-looking news or magazine site from start to finish because today we're working with WordPress next on through the donut hole [Music] so let's get started the first thing that we need to do is secure hosts for your new website you can't just design a site without a host because the host or rather on the host servers is where all your site files and content lives so you need to be able to choose a host which one is going to support WordPress and for the purposes of this tutorial has access to cPanel and quick install I prefer Hostgator this is not an advertisement I am not sponsored by Hostgator I prefer them personally Hostgator if you see this we really need to talk about your affiliate and partner program but that's another story it's like I said I prefer Hostgator they have access to cPanel and they're just a great overall company they have great support and I've never had an issue with them so if you go to hostgator.com and click web hosting you'll see that they offer the hatchling plan and the baby plan these are both optimal for WordPress one of the big differences between the two is single versus unlimited domains if you're only ever gonna have one domain name like my domain comm then hatchling will work for you I prefer the baby plan so I can have room to grow if I want my website com my website dotnet and my website org so you can have as many of those domains as you want on the baby plan and still get 1-click installs and unmetered bandwidth so I prefer that one now again you don't have to go with Hostgator but make sure whoever you do go with has cPanel access and 1-click installs otherwise you're gonna have a hard time following along with this tutorial once you sign up for your Hostgator or your other web hosting package whoever you went with you're gonna get an email confirmation saying that you signed up and some of the things that they're gonna send you our credentials one of the credentials you need our cPanel login credentials and a link to your cPanel login get that information and then we'll meet back here and we'll start at the cPanel see you guys in a second so before we really get into the control panel there's one other thing that we need to talk about and that is content you can't start a website without some kind of content and you don't want to start a website with demo imported content or no content at all in fact for the type of site we're creating today a newspaper or a magazine site it's not gonna work we're not gonna be able to get to layout how I showed you previously with no content at all or just minimal content we need to have a few articles up there to be able to make it look how I've showed you in the example and so if you take a look here I've got a folder that is full of well I've got one sample article that I'm gonna choose over and over again because for the purposes of this tutorial that's all I need it's an article that I wrote on a DDoS attack some time ago so it's okay for me to use it others and then it's got a full folder full of images for tech and travel stock are images that are royalty-free I'm going to use for this demo and that'll be enough to get me started and it's gonna be enough to get you guys started basically and with this I'm gonna achieve exactly what I showed you at the start of this video we're gonna build that exact website so you can see I've just got about twelve stock art images one article that I'm gonna use over and over again that's going to show you how to get the layout right and it'll show you guys how to create posts and everything so let's go ahead and get started then in cPanel so if you navigate over to your cPanel you'll see at the top you have any find option or a search bar go ahead and type in quick for quick install and you'll see pop up down there under the software menu is the quick install option go ahead and click that [Music] and then on the quick install page you'll see one of the options is WordPress go to click that and this is the install page for WordPress you'll see it'll ask you to select a domain so whatever domain you just created you know hosting for or have had hosting for go ahead and select that out of drop-down menu and then if you want it on your main domain so like if I wanted to create a wordpress site on donut online.com i would just select donut online.com from the drop-down and click Next but if I wanted to do it on a directory or in a new directory like donut online.com slash mag site then we can do that you just type in mag site or whatever you want into the blank directory box so I'm gonna call mine Mac site just for easiness here and click Next it's gonna ask you to enter a title so whatever the title you want your newspaper to have or your magazine to have there's what you will place here and then so it's gonna ask you for an admin user and first and last name in an email address and then automatically create a new database for this installation make sure that is checked and then also make sure that you check the Terms of Service Agreement box and then click the install button it only takes about I'm actually less than 60 seconds to install WordPress with the quick install you'll see the progress bar up there it'll tell you how far it's gone and then in the end it's gonna give you installation details he'll tell you where it was installed to so donut online.com slash Matic site and then it'll give you the user name that you created and a temporary password make sure you change that password and whenever you get a chance or as possible really so I'm gonna copy this information for now and just a temporary notepad file just so I have it ease of access [Music] so you can see if I go there there's nothing there it just says website coming soon that's because Hostgator puts in a temporary page for you and most hosting companies do to get to the admin login you can actually click the login button from the installation details or you can go to whatever your URL was forward slash WP dash admin and that will always take you to your admin login for your WordPress install and then let's go ahead and log into WordPress so the username we created was donuts and then I'm using the temporary password that I had here and we'll click login and then you'll see once you're first logged into WordPress nothing's been done yet you'll see there's a notification of your site currently displays a coming soon sign returning soon page once you are ready to launch it you click this little link and at a launcher site for you right now only you can see it or other administrators of your wordpress install can see the site when they're logged in right now the public can't see it so let's not click that just yet then because we're not ready to launch our site next thing you'll see is please configure Google Google Analytics we're not gonna do that in this video I'll show you that another time in another tutorial for now let's just get your site up and we'll worry about that stuff later so you can actually dismiss pretty much most of these notifications the WP forms plugin we're not even going to use it just welcome to WordPress dismiss that you can dismiss pretty much anything extra at this point because we haven't installed anything we haven't done anything yet but the first thing that we're gonna want to do is install the theme that we want to use which was the color mag theme so go over to appearance and then go to themes and then you're gonna scroll down a little bit and you'll see an option for adding a theme going to click that and then you've got it there should be a search bar over there on the right hand side for search themes and you want to just type in color mag it's gonna be one of the first results right now it's the first result over there on the left just go ahead and hit that blue install button on the bottom right of the thumbnail it's gonna take about 25 seconds to install or less once it's installed then that install button is going to change to an activate button go ahead and click the blue activate all right so we've installed the color mag theme and we've activated it you can still see that we're still displaying the coming soon Sun the coming soon page don't click that launch link yet we're gonna hold off for a little while longer we got some more notifications we can clear out but one notification is of this theme recommends the following plug-in they want us to get the theme grill demo in order and we do want this we're gonna need it because I'm gonna actually show you how to set this website up with the demo content imported so it does all the layout work for us so go ahead and click the begin installing this plug-in link and then over here on the left you'll see an install option underneath the theme grill demo imported go and click install [Music] you'll see it successfully installed to plug in and then you can hit the return to required plugins installer and then you want to click the activate link under the theme grill demo importer all right so that plug-in all install required plugins have been installed and activated [Music] so at this point we can actually install the demo content this is what color mag looks like you can see here in the thumbnail stock with just the demo content that we're about to import so to do that go over to the left hand side under appearance and click demo importer this is the plug-in we just installed and then over on the right you'll see an option for themed demos go ahead and click that and then right there in the top left again you're gonna see the main color mag demo go ahead and click download [Music] and then we can go ahead and basically you want to now upload that demo package that you just downloaded back into the demo importer sounds a little redundant but that's what we need to do so then up in the top of the demo importer click the upload demo button click Choose file in the center color mag free file that you just downloaded and click install now [Music] what's the demo installed successfully we return to the demo importer now the demo installed successfully but we haven't activated it and it's not ready to go yet because it also requires another plugin it's a contact form plug-in so under here where it says required plugins go and make sure that Everest forms is selected and then click install plugins are you sure you want to install the selected plugins yes we are click OK alright one plug-in successfully installed now we need to activate the plugins [Music] all right plugins have been installed plugins been activated now we're ready to try and actually import the content this could fail the first time you might get lucky go ahead and click import the blue button on the bottom left it's gonna tell you that this is going to replace all live content so this is important if you're doing this on an existing WordPress install where you already have a theme and everything set up stop right now consider what you're doing it could affect how your theme looks if you try to switch back but if this is a new install or you already know what you're doing or you don't care continue on and click OK it's gonna take a little bit to import but you'll see the importing status down there [Music] it imports a lot of articles okay you'll see it says update failed this pretty much happens to me the first time every time just hit the update failed button click ok again and let it do its thing one more time [Music] this is a good time to tell you guys I need these videos for free I make nothing on them I currently do not qualify for advertising or monetary status on YouTube nothing like that so do me a favor hit the subscribe button give this video a like if it helped you at all leave a comment share it with a friend save it for later if you're really awesome join my patreon team buy me a cup of coffee whatever much appreciated so we'll see exactly like I said very consistent it always works a second time the color Mac theme demo has now been imported and you can actually click live preview and it'll show you what your site looks like now so this is what our site looks like now it is the standard color mag demo but you can see what's important here is the entire layout for our site is completely organized already for us so basically all we have to do is go through and change what we want these categories fashion sports health these are all wordpress categories that we can create control we can modify existing ones keep ones delete ones whatever we want to do we'll create the categories we want and populate all of this page with the information and the articles that we want so let's go ahead and get started on that okay so what we're gonna want to do is if you hover over the color mag title up there in the top left you'll be able to select dashboard this will take you back to the wordpress dashboard and i'm gonna show you how to from here get to the customization page that way we can go through a little bit of the customization before we start redoing our categories so if you hover over appearance and hit customize this basically takes you to where all the settings for this particular theme are set to customize but they make it really easy you'll see when you're in the customization area you see all these little pencils pencil icons basically each pencil icon controls a widget on the page so like this scrolling feed right here is a widget if you hit the pencil icon you can modify it so you'll see over here on the left hand side you'll see the number of posts to display in this widget which is just a little slider it's two so right now it's sliding between two different posts we can select which post category we want to show the show up there right now it's set for the latest so latest is basically like kind of a standardized category that is usually used throughout a lot of different news and magazine sites you can give your articles more than one category so if you have things categorized as tech but you also have them categorized as latest they're gonna go under to the tech category but they're also show up under latest so that way they show in like the latest feed or the latest articles feed up top here and then same thing with over here if you look over to the right from the slider and hit that pencil icon it brings you up another widget edit and you'll see this is list set to lists for posts and you see it does have four different thumbnails for their posts and you can see that category that it's showing is called featured so anything that we give the category featured is going to show up here and it's gonna it's gonna start from basically the latest posts from that particular category and then it's the same throughout the page if you look down here where it starts to Health section same thing you can change that if you want to change this from health and call it you know travel or lifestyle you can do that and then even change the category to you know life style a Travel category that will create I'm actually gonna close out of that because I don't want to save the changes so that's basically how we're gonna edit where everything is gonna go on this we'll get into the menu up here a little bit later and the advertising a little bit later and we'll go into the the logo change here a little bit later but for right now since we mentioned the categories that's how they're all laid out or how the category is laid out on the website so let's go ahead and go close this out click the little X in the top left there click ok so we don't actually want to make these changes yet I just wanted you to see how everything functions so now we need to go into posts and then categories and we're gonna kind of clean up the categories we'll choose the ones we want to keep and then once we want to add so for like a good magazine or news site like I said you're gonna have your your general categories which are like featured and general and latest and then you know also uncatted arises is always one that you're gonna have but it's not widely used what was one featured so let's go ahead pretty much I'm just going to do this template site or this tutorial based on tech and travel [Music] so we can go ahead and we'll delete this business category complete drinks will delete entertainment fashion will keep featured because that's an essential part of how to layout set if you know it will take food gadgets general health usually guest could probably stay no we'll just we'll take out gadgets and just leave technology basically you're gonna keep whichever ones you want and add whatever ones you want I'm gonna keep latest I'm gonna keep news I'm gonna keep general like I said all the the standard like kind of generic categories keep technology keep featured and then put in I'll show you how to put in another category and I'll use travel as a feature for that will keep top stories top videos and videos because those are all connecting to different widgets go to bulk askins after you've selected the ones you want to remove and select delete and click apply now we've deleted the ones we don't want to use let's add a new one that we do want to use so over here in the left hand side you'll see add new category go ahead and give it a name we'll call it travel the slug is just a URL friendly version of that name we could just do travel lowercase hammock category there is none and then finally the description travel and click add new category and so we'll see we've got the Travel category added you can see the count over here is zero that's because we have no travel articles currently but let's go ahead and change that go ahead over to just click on posts on the left and it's gonna bring up your all posts page and so we can kind of weed out what we don't want at this point which is everything because we don't want to launch a website with demo content so I'm actually gonna select everything here okk actions move to trash and hit apply again select everything bulk actions move to trash and apply we're gonna create our own articles in our own posts all right so we're starting fresh we don't have any posts or anything if you take a look at the site now you can do that by hovering over the color mag visit site and then just opening in a new tab you'll see Oh for it everything go it's all gone but the important thing is our layout is still for the most part intact health is still categorized here fashion is here Sports is here and these are all set up to display however many we want to show for that category but we're not using health fashion and sports we're going to be using tech and travel so we'll change that here in a minute so let's do a new art a new new post and we'll give it a name [Music] and I'm gonna go over to my sample content [Music] and then your actual article itself is going to go down here in this body section and then you want to make sure that you categorize it appropriately so do you want this to show up in that featured section do you want it to show up under latest news of course we do because it's news and it's the latest and then we want to give it technology as well so as of right now we've put it on latest we've put it on technology that's going to show it in a couple different places right now technology set up down here so it's going to show it here and it's going to show it in that latest slider that we saw up here so let's go ahead and test that oh one more thing before we do that tags these are what's gonna help your SEO on your articles basically tag it with that whatever relevant tags that you think so for instance it's about article about DDoS so we'll do a tag for DDoS they can be a comma-separated DDoS prevention and whatever other tags you'd probably think of a bunch more if you're writing something specific select the layout we'll leave it a default because we're gonna change this universally if we decide to and finally to set a featured image this is the sub male image this is also the featured image at the top of the article when they open it individually so go ahead and click set featured image now this is where all those stock images come into play so I'm gonna choose the tech one see what represents a DDoS attack really well well none of these but this looks cool so let's go with this all right so we've got our stock art thumbnail loaded there almost [Music] I promise it's going there goes okay then hit set featured image in the bottom right corner that's a big guy it's gonna resize itself thank God so now that we've got the featured image go back up to the top and hit publish [Music] and then you can actually hit view post or right-click view posts and go to open a new tab and you'll see how these posts are set up to layout individually so you see DDoS attacks on the rise and then when there's our article now let's check out our main page and see where it went there it is so it came up here since we tagged it with latest it's up here in the latest category and then we tagged it with technology so it's down here under technology as well we could have put it in featured in it would have showed up in one of those four blocks thumbnails here but I don't want to have things in latest and featured seems like it might clutter up that space with the same information too much so we'll stick with that for right now and we'll also probably end up moving technology up in fact let's do that now so I actually want to replace this health portion I want this to be my technology or actually I want this to be my technology section and then we'll decide what we want to do with these other sections afterwards so to change that for right now we can hit this customize option [Music] and then we're gonna select where it says health the little pencil icon next to health and then we're gonna rename the title technology we can still have it show five that's fine and it's gonna show posts from category in that category is going to be technology so it'll show one thumbnail here and then four more here and then we can go ahead and click done all right so we've now moved our technology option up here it's still down here so we can actually change this to something else if you want a different category later or just delete it completely up to you so we've already saved that change let's go ahead and back out or actually hit publish first I'm sorry in the top right and then go ahead and back out okay so we've got our first article on there we need some more to bring us all together so let's go ahead and bust out some articles here real quick if you go back over a cuddler mag and hit dashboard again go back to your WordPress dashboard and go to posts and add new this time let's do a travel posts [Music] and I'm gonna use the same article content again just for sake of being quick this time I'm going to tag it with our travel category and then also our latest give it some tags default layout set a featured image all right we'll inset our featured image and then we want to publish now you'll see again we made this one of the categories as latest so it's going to show up in that slider and then it's gonna show up under the Travel category which we haven't created yet so let's go ahead and go back to our main site and so we can see now the latest it's showing up as the latest but this is going to transfer to our other one because we have two latest to show in this slider we can do three four whatever you want to do but right now it's just cycling between our two latest articles now we need to add a section for travel down here on the main page which we can actually we're gonna go ahead and replace fashion so let's go ahead and hit customize again up in the top and if you scroll down a little bit and hit the little pencil next to fashion go ahead and rename the title travel it's set to display four different posts so it's gonna display four different travel posts and then we'll go ahead and select our category which is Travel Show post from that category and that's it go and hit publish up top alright and so we've added our Travel section to our main page let's go and close this all right so you can see we've got our featured it's scrolling our latest - or our sorry our latest which is scrolling our latest two articles our technology and to travel we'll come up with something else here or you can put whatever you want there later on but yeah so we've got a good start going on here we're replacing the dental import content maintaining the layout and doing this as easy as possible so the next thing we need to do is pump out the rest of the articles that we need to completely fill this site so let's go ahead and do that and I'm gonna do some Hollywood magic you guys go ahead and do your own articles categorize them however you'd like and then we'll be right back okay and we're back so I've gone ahead and created all of my posts for the base content or initial content for the site or for this magazine or newspaper site I hope you did the same well I went and did the Hollywood magic so let's go ahead and check out what we've got now so if you go over to your dashboard into your all posts where you should be you'll see I have a whole bunch of more travel and Technology articles that I've added to my posts so you'll see also I've only categorized them as technology and as travel instead of latest and travel and medicine technology it's because we only have two spots for the latest portion right now set up so that's all I'm gonna leave for latest just for the purposes of this example if you want to have more latest news come up you can always head back to your main site and adjust that at any time by hitting customize and of course hitting the little pencil icon next to that where the latest news slider is and you can change that to three post five posts however many posts you want to run through that slider but right now I'm going to keep it at two so I'm gonna keep these two posts in there because I want those to display for the purposes of this tutorial now we do need to categorize these other ones and if you'll remember this right here this section that's blank still had basically featured articles or articles classified with the featured categorization so let's go ahead and put some of our articles for feature featured articles are ones that you want to stand out people you want them to stick in that main spot in the site you you don't want people to read those so let's go ahead and we'll select for random articles to make featured and we'll do bulk actions and edit and click apply and so you'll see it's gonna bulk at it and we've got the four articles that we just selected and we're over here we're gonna change in the categories featured we'll just add that we have to click at once and it's bulk editing and then hit update now if we go back to our main page you'll see boom our featured articles are now appearing our site is coming together guys you are on your way to spreading news and information and whatever else you want into the world hopefully not satire and then you'll see under there we've got our technology sections filled out nicely we've got five different technology articles currently showing up in there and then we've got our Travel section and then we have an empty section that you can use for whatever category you want Sports would be one whatever and then redundant again technology so that's what we're gonna change now we're gonna use this as another blank space blank slate space we'll call it so we'll go ahead and hit customize and if we scroll down to that second technology section and hit the little pencil icon next to it we can go ahead and change it to whatever you want to call your new category hot news who knows and we'll do a number of posters display lets you can play with this actually let's let's do this for a minute so we can see how the display looks so right now if we do four it's gonna display like this one on the left three on the right we do one just gonna be one big thumbnail we did two and then they would just be please side by side there do six and it will organize them accordingly so however many you want to do is up to you let's go ahead and do four and we'll do a new category basically we do need to make sure we select that category here so set the category first so we'll edit an article and make it our new category do top stories we'll use that categorization since it's already in there and then save that article go back to our customization which we may now have to refresh yeah want to refresh that it customized again and then scroll down hit our pencil icon see our hot news options stay there but let's change it to top stories category and you'll see our van-like article show up there and then whatever other articles you classify with that are gonna show up beside it how we did in the example our site is coming together guys there's a few more things I want to show you I think I've gotten across the point of how setting up each category on your layout on your home screen here ties in the posts so whatever you categorize your posts as those tie into whatever you categorized that part or that section of the layout as I hope I've gotten that point across because I want to move on to the next thing and the next thing is [Music] the next thing I want to talk about is the logo [Music] so let's get a good look at her site and what we have so far we've got our layout which came included with the demo import and we kind of populated that with our own articles in our own content and we move things around how we want it to we we changed it a little bit so that's good we've got a good start you've got a good site going you know let's finish it up go ahead hit customize again [Music] and this time over on the left-hand side we're gonna hit site identity and then you'll see an option for logo we'll go ahead and remove this and then go ahead and hit select logo now hopefully you already have your logos created you've gotten this done yourself or had a graphic designer do it for you I'm gonna use the logo from my site so we select our logo hit that select button in the bottom right and it's gonna ask you to crop it hopefully you've got it sized right hit crop image alright and then it's gonna add your logo in up there preferably you would want to use a transparent logo this one is not just for the purposes of this tutorial I'm not to go too in depth with it so next thing we need to do is the site title and a tagline the best and then over here we've got the site icon if you hit select image it's like icons can be really small you actually want them to be really small and we've got our side icon there and hit publish so we've now changed our logo site title and tagline and our site icon so things are starting to come together let's take a look at everything you do nice okay so we've got our new site almost all the way together I'm going to show you a couple more things here and then I'll let you guys loose on it on their own so we've got our logo here you might want to change the color scheme to match your logo if you know you already have your a little bit azad you already have your brand design did you already have your color scheme done and you may want to change these colors you can do that again by hitting customize and selecting colors from the left side menu and then background color is the first thing you can see right now it's set to a very that's this gray color around here we can change that if you want I'm gonna keep mine on the default for that because I like it the color but if you're interested in changing that that background area that's where you'll do that the next thing is design options and then primary color option and that's gonna change this primary color that you see your hovering and everything like that so go ahead and hit select color and you can change that to match your logo whatever you want to put it as so we'll just do this ideally you would use the hex code to do it perfectly but it's just a tutorial right okay so we'll publish that close this and take a look Wow our site is looking great we've got our latest news here we've got our featured articles here we changed our color scheme we added a logo what more can I show you guys it's all self explanatory from here I think you want to edit these social icons hit customize hover over the little pencil icon and it's gonna offer you up at at that element so you plug in your own social media URLs you can uncheck if you don't want that Facebook icon there and put in your Twitter address get that all edited [Music] so if you remove the option and then uncheck it I've checked to open a new tab so I keep that open remove the hashtag and that'll remove the icon for your social up top publish that if you'd like same thing with the bottom any of these widgets you can change all this up that's about us put your logo there whatever you want to put down here you can add whatever links you want if you want to do a different type of menu or just hit that you can just get it this is a text box right now so you can basically customize that however you want if you want to delete those all together this is something else now and do that so like I said all self-explanatory just play around with it your advertisements same thing there if you use Google Adwords there's gonna be code that you're gonna want to replace the stuff here with well guys that really is everything that I can show you I think you guys are ready to go out and create a website of your own and start publishing articles and spreading information or disinformation or whatever it is that you do into the world last couple things I'm going to show you here is the menu and also how to launch your site let's do this menu real quick get this out of the way if you head over to your dashboard and then under appearance and then there's a menus option [Music] and you can see there's a couple different menus that you can edit but the primary menu the one that's currently set is labeled primary menu select that from the drop-down and hit select here we could totally customize our main menu so we could do that by deleting everything that's in here already and then adding our own stuffs let's go ahead and do that now no matter what that Home icon is always going to be there we have that set up as a default but everything else we want to put so let's go ahead and put in what we would think people would want to see in our menu which I'm gonna say we do our categories so put our technology our traveled our top stories or latest and we'll put all of that in there all of our different categories and then we'll also add some pages there's a Contact Us page and any other pages that you might have needed to create you can do that as well or if you want to do custom links to other parts of the site or other sites you can do that as well but this is where you're gonna do all that is in this menu section now we want to reorganize how we want them to be ordered left to right you can do that by just clicking on one and dragging it and changing its priority in the menu structure here so let's say let's do featured articles first and then technology and then travel and then latest top stories contact us whatever you want to do and if you want to modify the label of those all you have to do is expand it and change the navigation label [Music] and just make sure you hit save menu now if we go back to our site you'll see that our menu has changed and our site has almost come completely together there's just one last thing that we need to do here for today's tutorial and that is we are going to launch our site so let's go ahead and do that go ahead back up to your dashboard again and let's go ahead and click that little click here launch site link that I told you not to click in the beginning and that's it congratulations your site is live click here to view it click that little link and it's gonna take you to your site I think we've done a good job guys we've put something together here you've got a good start change your advertisements out change their widgets out modify the categories to your liking start importing your content and you are good to go you are now officially the owner of a news or magazine website congratulations and that really is all that I've got for you guys today thanks again for watching please subscribe if this video helped you at all hit the thumbs up or the like button leave a comment below and of course stay tuned for more wordpress tutorials and other technology videos have a great day guys

Channel: Christopher Spradlin

Views: 116,170

Keywords: Wordpress, Build A Website, Make a Website, Design a Website, WebsiteDesign, News Website, Wordpress Tutorials, HowTo, Magazine Website, WordpressTheme, WordpressHelp, Wordpress2018, Start a website

Id: wK_3epD17Lo

Length: 47min 24sec (2844 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018