This is the blog post that accompanies the following video:
Transcription:
The most important part of any website is the content. In this video, we’re going to create 5 pages that almost every blog will want to have: a home page, a page that displays previous blog posts, an FAQ page, as well as about us and contact us pages. At this point, you should have a domain with WordPress installed and user accounts created for the people who need them. If you don’t, check out the earlier videos in our tutorial series.
To get started, log in to your website with your editor account. Let’s start by creating our homepage with a bit of basic content. Most themes will have a separate homepage template, so we won’t worry too much about this page for right now. Go to the “Pages” section of the WordPress admin, and click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page. We’ll call our page “Home” for now by clicking the title bar and typing in “Home”, but you could title this page your business’ name as well. Next, write a couple of quick sentences describing your business, and hit the “Publish” button. Congratulations, you’ve just added the first page to your site!
Next, let’s make the page that we just created the homepage for our site. To do that, go to “Settings” -> “Reading” in the WordPress admin menu. Click on the “A static page” radio button, and select “Home” from the “Front Page” dropdown menu of the pages on your site. Scroll down, and click the “Save Changes” button. Next, open up a new tab, and navigate to your website. You should now see the page you just created when you enter your site’s URL.
Great. Next, we’re going to create the blog posts archive page. This page will let visitors to your site browse through previous blog posts, and help them quickly find the content that they’re looking for. Go to the “Pages” section again, and click on “Add New”. This time we’ll title our new page “Blog Archive”. We’re going to be using a special page template in our theme to create our archive page, which we’re covering in the next video in this series, so for now we’ll just put a sentence explaining the page and end it with “Archive coming soon!” for the content of the page itself.
That’s it for pages that are really specific to a blog. We’re also going to add three pages that most sites need: an about us page, which talks about the history of your business and what makes you unique, an FAQ page, so that common questions can be answered quickly for visitors, and a contact us page, so that visitors can get information on how to contact you by phone along with listing your address.
Let’s create our “About Us” page. We do it in exactly the same way as the other pages, just this time we’ll add a couple of paragraphs of content, and a bullet point list explaining our values. Things you usually want to mention in an “About Us” page include things like when you started blogging, what the unique history of your blog is, such as how you became interested in travel or what makes you an authority on your particular subject, and any special insight you might bring to the subject matter. We’ll also add in a bullet point list, talking about our blog’s features. To do that, click on the “Bulleted List” button. We’ll list our features as “Knowledgeable”, “Timely” and “Unique Perspective on Travel”. Hit “Publish”, and then press the “Add New” button.
For the FAQ page, we’ll just put in our title “Frequently Asked Questions” and then add a sentence saying “FAQs coming soon” before hitting publish. We’ll be adding in FAQs using a plugin in a later video.
Finally, we’ll add a “Contact Us” page. The format of this page depends a bit on the type of blog you run. If you’re running a blog related to a brick-and-mortar institution, like a university department, this page might have the institution’s address and an embedded map showing that location. Most blogs will want a contact form, so that readers are able to get in touch with you easily to make suggestions and have their questions answered. We’ll go over adding a contact form in our plugins video as well, but for now, it’s probably a good idea to add your phone number and address on this page if you’ve got a physical presence. If you want to add an embedded map showing the location of your institution, we’ve linked to our video of it in the description.
That’s it for the basic content of your shop site! In the next video, we’ll choose a theme, customize it with your color scheme and pictures, and build a proper homepage for your website.
