How to Make a WordPress Website - The Ultimate Course!

In this lecture, I'll show you how to get your desired domain name for your business and how to register with great and affordable hosting services for WordPress.

To get the best price and maximum discount use this link siteborn.com/hostgator and use my coupon code 'siteborn'.

In this lecture, I'll show you how to create an email address with your registered domain name. You can create as many email account as you wish.

You can access your domain name from this address mail.yourdomain.com/webmail

We also going to do some tests and make sure we can send and receive messages.

This lecture will show you how to make sure that an SSL certificate is installed on your domain name. SSL (the green padlock) and HTTPS are very important for 3 main reasons:

1. We will be able to charge customers.

2. Google will rank us higher than our competitors.

3. It will not display a scary warning message that will send customers and visitors away.

If you used my link when registered to Hostgator (siteborn.com/hostgator) your SSL certificate is completely free and already active on your domain.

WordPress is the best and most popular CMS (Content Management System) platform in the world that generates more than 37% of the world's websites.

In this lecture, we are going to install WordPress on our domain name.

I would like to welcome you into the WordPress dashboard where all the magic happens!

In this lecture, we will briefly walk through the dashboard admin bar and the sidebar.

Also, in order to start fresh, we will delete all the plugins that came pre-installed with our WordPress installation.

In this video, we will visit our website for the first time and see what it looks like.

I'm also going to show you how to force our website to load the secured version of the domain name (HTTPS) and not the regular HTTP.

If you wish, you can also change the language of the WordPress dashboard and change the time format to fit your needs or your country better.

In this lecture, I will explain to you what are WordPress themes and why we need them.

Themes are used to simplify the process of creating a website. It is a collection of templates and style sheets that define the appearance and display of the website.

We will install the Hello Elementor theme because it's the most flexible and lightest WordPress theme in the world and we can make any designs that we wish.

WordPress themes using many PHP and CSS files to generate a website. Because themes' updates happen all the time, those files are overwritten by each update.

Therefore, all of our changes will disappear whenever we updating the theme.

A child theme, on the other hand, contains only a few files and sits on top of the parent theme. When we are using a child theme, we can create our design changes on the child theme and then safely update the parent theme without losing any of the changes we created on the child theme.

Get your Hello Elementor child theme for free from inside the booklet or using this link:

https://pluginsforwp.com/downloads/hello-elementor-child-theme/

WordPress plugins and themes get updated frequently. In this lecture, I'll show you how to update the WordPress plugins and themes.

The header is one of the most important components of any WordPress website. It's the first visible section at the top of the page.

In this lecture, I will explain to you guys what is the header and we will see a few header examples from other websites.

In this lecture, I'll show you how to create a nice logo for your website.

In the course booklet (siteborn.com/resources) you can find many links to various logo maker websites.

Creating a business logo is fairly fun and easy. If you lack time or creativity, you can buy a professional logo for an affordable price using this link: siteborn.com/logo

Our header menu contains links to different pages.

In order to create the menu, we will need to create the pages that will be displayed in the menu.

This lecture will show you how to create pages, how to define which page will be the home page and the blog page, and how to change the permalinks settings of WordPress.

Then, we will create a menu that will link to all the pages we created.

Plugins are necessary to expand WordPress functionality.

Just like with your smartphone or computer, we can do almost everything with it if we install the right apps.

WordPress is the same. Out of the box, WordPress can do many things. Because not all WordPress users want to sell products or create a forum, those (and many other) options are not integrated by default.

However, you can download the right plugins that will allow you to do that.

In this lecture, we are going to talk about plugins and how to install them.

We will install the Elementor page builder and also the Elementor Pro version to enjoy all the widgets and the Theme Builder option. To get Elementor Pro at the best price use this link: siteborn.com/elementor

In this lecture, we will create the header template with the Elementor plugin.

The header template will let us create the header only once and then add a condition to display it on multiple pages across our website.

In this lecture, I'll show you how to change the header background color.

Also, I will show you how to create sub-header menu links and how to style them as well.

When using Elementor, all of our sections and template are automatically responsive and will look great on every screen size like desktop, tablet, and mobile.

In responsive design, the columns are stack on top of each other in order to give each of the elements more space.

In this lecture, I will explain to you what is a responsive design and how to make changes or adjust our design in tablet and mobile views.

In this video, you will learn what are the three Hello Elementor theme page templates and what are the differences between them.

In this video, we will create our first home page section.

The first section on the home page also known as the Hero section and it's probably the most important section of your website.

Use a descriptive title and make sure to have a call to action button to direct your visitors to what is their next step.

In this section, we will learn how to set a background image, beautiful gradient overlay effects, and creating a button.

Because it's your first section, you may feel like it's overwhelming or confusing to use Elementor. I would like to encourage you to try and create the section. You'll see for yourself that it's very easy and fun!

In this lecture, we will make our beautiful hero section looking good on mobile devices as well.

We will learn how to duplicate elements and how to hide and display elements based on the mobile view.

This is a very important section. This section making this course stand out over the other courses.

As a web developer, I have access to knowledge that web designers don't know and I would like to share it with you.

Unlike us, Google bots crawl our website in a different way than we see it. Google put a lot of weight on how fast our website is optimized and compare us to other websites from the same niche.

The knowledge you'll learn in this lecture will rank you higher than your competitors because you'll learn how to optimize your websites' images.

Optimizing the websites' images will make your website load faster and as a result, you'll rank higher.

We will use a plugin (download from siteborn.com/shortpixel) that will compress the images by combining the pixels with the same color and will decrease the image size without affecting the image quality.

When checking our website in the Google speed test tool, we will see a drastic score increase after using the plugin.

The second section will be very fun to make. Again we will use the Elementor page builder to make it and we will learn many new things.

In this lecture, we will make the bullet points section and we will learn:

1. How to paste the content in Elementor (visual vs the text box).

2. How to set default colors.

3. The differences between margin and padding.

4. Few new widgets like the columns, icon boxes, spacers, and dividers.

Knowing about the Elementor history and revision feature will save you a lot of valuable time.

When creating changes to a section or element, it sometimes impossible to track back and reverse all the changes we made.

In this video, I'll introduce you to the Elementor history feature that will give you the option to go back and restore an older version from any point in time that you created before.

In this video, we will talk about the image gallery widget.

Many websites are using the gallery widget to display the brand name logos to increase their brand authority.

Other websites can use the widget gallery to display images about the business or the facility like gyms, coffee shops, or offices.

We will walk through many options of the image gallery widget and by the end of this video you'll know exactly what you can use it for and how to set it up the best way.

In this lecture, we will talk about the slider widget and we will convert it to be a testimonial slider.

We really going to learn a lot in this lecture. We not only going to talk about the slider but also how to create shape divider effects between different sections.

Sliders become more and more popular on websites in the last few years because they are stunning and draw attention. The slider we will build will be that way as well.

The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is one of the most important sections of your website.

When selling a service or a product, your website visitors will have many questions to ask you before purchasing.

If your FAQ section will be able to answer and satisfied their questions, your visitor can become customers. If you won't have an FAQ section, their questions will stay unanswered and they will look at your competitors' websites.

Make sure to think about all kinds of questions that your customers may have and answer them fully.

It will also save you valuable time. Instead of answering each of your customers individually one by one to their email, they will be able to find the answer there are looking for on your website.

The contact us section is one of the most important sections and every website must give its visitors the option to contact the website owner.

We will learn many cool things building the contact us section such as the Google map widget, the contact form widget, multi-step forms, and anchor links.

In this lecture, we will build the foundation of the contact us section and also going to work with the Google map widget to display our business physical location.

In this lecture, we will continue with our contact us section and create the contact form.

We will go in-depth about all the contact form features, and how to hook it up to our inbox.

Then, we will test the form as visitors and make sure the contact form working properly and we can receive the message to our business email address.

In this lecture, I will show you what is a multi-step contact form, when you need it and how to make it.

It's a good idea to have a multi-steps form when the form is too long to fill and may look intimidating to your customers.

Too long of a form will prevent your visitors to fill it and breaking it down into small pieces will solve this issue.

In this final contact us lecture, we will finalize the section and style it a bit more, create a wider gap between the columns, increase the map height to fit the other column hight, and give our section an ID to hook it up to the menu link and the hero button (anchor link).

With anchor links, you can link a text or a button to a specific section on the same page or a specific section on a different page.

In this lecture, we will create our website footer.

The footer is the latest section that appears at the bottom of every page.

Because we already know how to use Elementor, I think it's a great time to show you how to use the pre-designed Elementor templates that came with our pro version of Elementor.

After loading any Elementor templates, we are not limited to the template itself. We still have the option to edit any widget of the template or style it as we wish. We can also add more widgets to the templates if we wish.

In this lecture, we will start creating our About Us page.

We will build this page with Elementor as well but it will be a good time to introduce you to the default WordPress Gutenberg blocks.

The default Gutenberg blocks are similar to Elementor. Every block is like a widget with its own set of styles and settings.

We will talk more about the WordPress blocks later on in the blog section but I just want you to have a basic understanding of what they are.

In this lecture, we will build the first section of the about us page.

An about us page is a very important page to every website and one of the MOST VISITED pages on every website.

In this lecture, we will create a section with two columns and use an image widget on the left to show the gym coach and text on the right to describe who he is.

In this lecture, we will talk about the differences between the image widget vs background image.

This is a very important lecture because you'll most likely run into a scenario where you'll need to reverse the order of the columns on mobile at one point or another.

Because on mobile the columns are one on top of each other, the layout that we're trying to create of image/text/image/text will break in the second section.

We can fix it by reversing the order of the columns of the second section on mobile devices.

I'll also show you how to add animations to the elements or the columns.

In this lecture, before entering our posts sections, we will talk about the differences between pages and blog posts.

WordPress posts have an official publication date and are displayed by date on your site’s blog page. Posts are mostly used for articles.

Pages do not have a publish date and are meant for static, timeless content. Two common examples of content that should be on a page are your site’s “Contact” or “About” pages.

In this lecture, we will delete the default 'Hello World!' post that came with WordPress and we will create relevant posts for our niche or business.

We will talk more about the Gutenberg blocks and other options of the blog posts such as posts categories, tags, and featured images.

I recommend you to use the Gutenberg blocks when creating your blog posts. Elementor is a great design tool and will allow us to create beautiful sections but we don't really need it just for text.

In the next lecture, we will create a post template with Elementor.

I can't tell you enough how important blog posts are for your business. Good blog posts will rank your website higher than your competitors and will help you to acquire more visitors and customers to your business. If you didn't plan to run a blog on your website, you should reconsider it.

Blog posts templates are a great way to design our posts and make sure we have the relevant elements that every post must have.

We will create a beautiful post template that will contain the post title, post metadata, share buttons, categories and tags, and the option to leave comments.

After we will create the template, we will be able to add a condition and display the template for each and every blog post.

Archive pages are pages that display our latest blog posts in chronological order when the newest one is at the top and the oldest at the bottom.

At the beginning of the course, we created the 'Blog' page and we informed WordPress that we would like to make it an archive page.

You might be surprised but it is not the only archive page on our website.

In fact, for every category and tag that you'll create for your blog posts, WordPress will automatically create an archive page.

For example, if you created a Fitness category, WordPress will create a Fitness archive page that will display all the posts under that category.

In this lecture, we will create a beautiful archive page template to display and showcase our blog posts.

The nice thing about creating a template that we can create it once and it will appear for every archive page. The most popular Blog page will show all the blog posts and also other archive pages such as categories and tags pages.

Blog posts featured images can draw the attention you need and encourage visitors to enter your blog posts and read your content.

In this lecture, we will learn how to easily create beautiful and professional WordPress blogs featured images for FREE without any graphic or Photoshop skills.

Website optimizations are the small things that will make your website much better.

Just building a basic beautiful website is not enough in today's world and you'll need to optimize your website to be ranked higher in search engines.

In this section, we will learn how to optimize our WordPress website for search engines. We will also learn how to connect our WordPress website to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and also Install the right plugins that will help us with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and speed up the website.

We will also learn how to get any premium WordPress plugins or themes for 97% off the original price with Pluginsforwp.com.

Data is one of the most important aspects of every business. If you know your data, it will be easier to make profitable decisions and know which pages should be improved.

Google Analytics is the best and most accurate data tool for online websites.

In this lecture, we will learn how to connect our website to Google Analytics so by the time you'll decide to learn GA and get better with it, you'll have enough concrete data to work with.

SEO (or Seach Engine Optimization) is one of the most important optimization options for a website.

You probably heard about SEO before because everyone's talking about it and for a good reason.

Good SEO will rank your website higher in the search engines and will attract more visitors and customers.

In this lecture, we will install the Yoast SEO plugin on our website and go through the configuration wizard to make sure it is configurated best for our website and needs.

After we configurated the Yoast plugin, we will have the option to improve the SEO of each and every page and post on our website.

In this lecture, I will show you how to improve our on-page SEO and how to understand what the Yoast plugin is asking us to do in order to have a better chance and get ranked higher for our keyword.

The Google Search Console tool will help you measure your site's search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.

In this lecture, I will show you how to connect your WordPress website to Google Search Console and submit our sitemap.

A sitemap contains links to all of our pages and posts. When creating a page or a post, the sitemap will get updated automatically and will contain the new link.

After submitting the sitemap to Google Search Console, Google will get informed whenever the sitemap has changed and it will come back and re-crawl our website.

WordPress plugins and themes can get expensive. All WordPress plugins and themes are released under the GPL (General Public License).

It means that after purchasing the plugin or theme, you're free to do anything you want with it including redistributing it for an affordable price.

In this lecture, I will show you how to get any WordPress plugin or theme for about 97% off the original price.

Pluginsforwp.com have an active license to all the original developer and authors and they always carry the latest versions.

When using PluginsForWP you'll save a lot of money and always get the latest version.

Website page speed is the time that it takes to your website to load the content of the page.

The longer it takes to load, the lower you'll rank in search engines like Google and Bing.

In fact, Google already indicated that website speed is one of the most important factors in their rank algorithm.

In this lecture, I will show you a few ways how to test your speed time and how to analyze the speed test results.

Make sure to check the booklet to get all the speed test links.

WP-Rocket is the best WordPress plugin to improve the speed site.

In this lecture, I will show you how to get WPRocket for a great price and how to set it up.

We also going to talk about Cache, what it is, and how to enable it and also what is minifying files and how to do that as well.

Then, after setting the plugin up, we will run another speed test to see our new score!

We all love and enjoy Elementor and for a good reason, they have many widgets and are very easy to edit and style.

Unfortunately, there are some awesome sections that we would like to create but we can't because Elementor doesn't have the right widgets for us.

Have no fear my friends, in this lecture, I will show you how to expand and add to the Elementor widget library, blocks, and template, and by doing so, you'll be able to use the full potential of Elementor.

In this lecture, we will go through the Ultimate Addons for Elementor (UAE) but there are many many more plugins like them.

Make sure to check the booklet for the full list.

What are email marketing and lead capture? why everyone is talking about it and is it really that important?

The answer is YES! email marketing is the difference between a successful business to failing business.

70% of your site visitors will leave and never come back! Email capture is our way to keep communicating with our visitors and customers and bring them back to our website.

By getting their email address, you'll be able to send them emails to your content or promotions and special offers.

If you want to stay in the online business for a long time, START EMAIL MARKETING!

Lists are the way to segment our email subscribers by interest.

For example, if a visitor signed up for our tips and tricks list, we can send him/her weekly tips about fitness.

On the other hand, if the visitor contacted us with a question regarding training, we can enter him into our promotional list and etc...

In this lecture, I will show you how to create a new Getresponse list and how to edit the confirm subscription welcome message.

Autoresponders are emails and messages that will be sent out automatically in chronological order.

For example, if someone just subscribed to our tips and tricks list, he/she will immediately get the first autoresponder that we created.

After a week, he/she will get the second one, and so on.

The idea is to keep adding autoresponder messages to your list so emails will always be sent out to keep the communication.

Our footer contains a signup form that we created with Elementor.

In this lecture, we will connect the Elementor signup form with Getresponse so subscribers will be able to sign up for our newsletters and autoresponders.

That's a great way for us to collect our WordPress visitors' emails and staying in touch with them constantly all the time.

Newsletters, unlike autoresponders, are one-time promotional messages that can be sent out immediately or on a specific date.

For example, if you would like to run a 4th of July promotion, you can create a nice newsletter email and send it on the 4th of July.

Because the 4th of July comes only once a year, you do not need to add this newsletter message to your autoresponders chain because you don't want to send the email on any other date than July 4th.

Newsletter messages are great to run promotions, discount codes, and sales.

Popups are the boxes that appear in the middle of the screen and asks for your email address.

Popups are great to grab visitors' attention because they are impossible to ignore.

In this lecture, I will show you how to create beautiful popups and how to trigger them in a few different ways.

The first way will be on page load and the second way will be when a visitor is trying to leave your website (Exit Intent).

We will create the popups with Elementor so it will be fun and easy as always!

I would like to congratulate you and thank you for taking my course and let me be your coach.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate and contact me here or through my Facebook page or through siteborn.com.

Thank you again and good luck in the future!