Another could be that you’ve been thinking about creating your own website for the past 5 minutes or so.

It could be that just the other day a friend of yours said something like, “You know, you should really make a website on the Internet about that. You know so much about it. I bet you could help a lot of people.”

Whatever the scenario was, you’ve now come to the point at which you’ve decided to make a website for yourself.

And you haven’t a clue as to how to do it. Gasp!

Read on. That’s what this article is here for.

How To Create Your Own Website

Making a website for yourself is not rocket science, but it is computer science (sorta) which is a daunting subject for many people.

Let me undaunt it for you.

If you can use a computer to visit various websites to look for information and entertainment, if you can type on a computer keyboard, if you can click a mouse or tap your finger(s) on a trackpad, then you can make a website. (Think about it. You likely just did most of these things in the past few minutes.)

To make your own website, you just have to know which other websites to visit, what to type in certain boxes, and which buttons to click at the right time.

It’s showing which of those things to do where and when that this (and at least one more) article is going to explain to you one small step at a time.

That doesn’t sound so hard, does it? I hope you agree that it doesn’t and will continue to follow along as I guide you through creating your website bit by bit all the way to the end.

Preliminary Steps to Website Creation

One problem that people sometimes have when trying to follow through a series of steps online is that what the teacher shows them in an article (or video) doesn’t look exactly like what they see when they try to do what they’ve been told by themselves.

There are two probable reasons for this.

One might be that someone changed the look of the website or the tool in question between the time the teacher last used it and the time the student attempted to use it. If you come across something like this at any point in what will follow here, I hope you will let me know by using the Contact Form to explain what differences you have found so I can update the information here at the WordPress Inn.

The other likely source of the problem is that the teacher and student aren’t both using the same web browser. As basic as that may sound, it can really make a big difference at times.

The 4 most common browsers (as of this writing) are Internet Explorer (on PCs), Safari (on Macs), Firefox, and Chrome. Firefox and Chrome are available for both PC and Mac users.

There are benefits to using both Firefox and Chrome besides being “platform independent”; that is, being able to use them on PCs or Macs. I am going to guide you through setting up a website using Firefox and strongly suggest that you use it as well. If you choose not to, you do so at your own peril.

If you’re not sure which one you’re using right now, check along the top of your screen for one of those browser names – Explorer, Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. If you don’t see Firefox up there, it’s time to make a change.

If you need help acquiring and setting up Firefox on your computer, send me a note via the Contact Form. (If enough people make this request, I’ll eventually include how to do this within this article.)

So from this point on, I am going to assume that you are using the Firefox browser just like me.

What Should I Call My Website?

Your website is going to need a name so people can identify it as yours and can know where to return after they’ve discovered it the first time.

You may already have some idea of what you want to call your website. The problem may be that someone had that same idea before you and has already bought the rights to that name. (Grr.)For example, you can’t call your site wordpressinn.com because I already own that name. (Sorry, not sorry.) I paid a few dollars for the right to use it for a year.

That brings us to the first cost (of two) involved in making your website – paying for a domain name. The “domain name” (get used to that phrase) of the site you’re on is wordpressinn.com. Most domain names like this cost about $10 per year of ownership.

You can purchase a domain name for more than one year at a time. In some cases, those who sell domain names will give you a little discount if you pay for more than one year up front. If you’re sure you want to stick with your website for more than a year, you might be able to take advantage of such a discount. If not, that’s okay. After all, roughly $10 per year isn’t that much of an expenditure in the grand scheme of things.

If you think you have a domain name that no one else has bought, you can (and should) check for sure by going to NameCheap.com and typing the name (like wordpressinn.com) in the large search box you’ll find there.

Here is what that box currently looks like.

The folks at NameCheap may change the surrounding design from time to time, but that central search box is likely to stay the same.

Click in the box where it says “Go big with your next domain” and type in the domain name you want to check. Then either press Enter on your keyboard or click the magnifying glass to the right of the box you typed in. (Ignore the “Bulk Search” text.)

If someone else already owns the domain name you want, NameCheap will tell you so (on the next page) by showing that it has been “taken” (in a small oval). You may also see a suggestion that you can make an offer to buy it from the current owner. You don’t want to do that, because it would probably cost lots of money.

You will also see other suggestions for variations on the ending of your domain name. That ending after the dot is called the Top Level Domain, often abbreviated TLD. I don’t recommend using any of those variations because it’s just too confusing for visitors.

For example, suppose you wanted to have a site called WordPress Inn but found that the dot com version was already taken. (It’s the site you’re currently visiting.) So you decided to buy wordpressinn.co instead.

Now there’s a wordpressinn.com and a wordpressinn.co on the Internet. Which is which? Did I, as a visitor, go to dot com or dot co last time? Both sites are about WordPress (probably). I’m so confused!

To avoid this problem, just move on to a different name. There are plenty available. (See below for ideas.)

If your domain name is available for purchase, you will see a button that lets you add it to your NameCheap shopping cart.

Since NameCheap is the domain name provider that I recommend in this step of setting up your website, when you find a domain name that is available, go ahead and click that “add to cart” button.

After clicking the cart button, you may be offered additional features for a fee. You don’t need any of them. I don’t recommend adding anything more to your cart. Note that you will get a free email address with your purchase. (More on that later.)

There is one small (less than $.20) iCANN fee that is unavoidable. In fact, NameCheap already added it to your cart for you. It’s a regulatory fee that all domain name owners have to pay.

You can now click the “View Cart” button over on the right. On the next page, you will see that a feature called “WhoisGuard” has already been enabled for you. Since this is free, I suggest you keep it turned on. It prevents anyone else from seeing that you are the owner of this domain name. This is nice because otherwise you might be bombarded by unsolicited offers from people who can see the email address that will be associated with your domain name.

From time to time, NameCheap offers their domain names at a reduced price. When they aren’t currently running such a sale, you may still be able to make your purchase for a little less by entering a “Promo Code” in the box below the “Confirm Order” button.

To check for the current promo code, look at this coupon page.

Find the appropriate coupon (promo) code and enter it in the box. Then click the Confirm Order button.

The rest of the process should be self-explanatory, but if you have any questions about it, just ask me by using the Contact Form.

But I Don’t Know What to Call My Website!

No worries. Let’s talk about this. What goes into the name of your website depends to some degree on what you intend to put on your site and which and how many people you hope will visit it in the future.

Most of the time, website owners want the name of their sites to reflect the main topic that the site is about. Usually, a site is about one main topic, but that might not be the case. You might have eclectic tastes and intend to write about a wide variety of subjects.

For the most part though, you will probably want to include your main topic somewhere in the domain name of your site.

It’s usually a good idea to keep the name of your site short, make it easy to pronounce and spell, and have it be unambiguous. Sometimes you have to go a little longer than you want because all the short names have already been taken. It’s not usually to hard to make the spelling and pronunciation simple. Ambiguity can be a problem though.

Consider the following examples.

• goarmy.com
• godsexchange.com
• twofortheroad.com

The first example, goarmy.com, sounds fine when you say it: Go Army dot com. But the first time I saw it in print (I hadn’t heard it yet.) I thought it was Goar My dot com. Sure, it didn’t make any sense, but that’s how my mind parsed the letters.

The second example has the unfortunate possibility of taking “god” in its singular form, not in its possessive or even plural form. When you do that, you get a rather strange, though grammatically possible, domain name. I leave it to your brain to parse it incorrectly.

The final example looks okay in print as Two For The Road dot com. The problem comes when you only hear it spoken to you, as you might on the radio. Then, is it “Two”, “To”, or “Too”? Is it “For”, “Four”, or “Fore”? Is it “Road”, “Rode”, or “Rowed”? Depending on the subject of the website, you might be able to think of situations when all of the above are possible.

You don’t have to rely solely on your own brain for coming up with a good domain name. Ask a friend or two for ideas. Come up with several possibilities and ask a friend to critique them so you can whittle the list down to the best one.

You very likely will include an adjective in your domain name. If the domain with that adjective is already taken, use a thesaurus to come up with a similar adjective (or to change the noun that follows it) and check on the availability of the new name.

I have found a site called Lean Domain Search very useful when trying to come up with a decent domain name. In fact, I used it to find the WordPress Inn name.

Lena Domain Search gives you another search box to fill in.

If you enter a topic like wordpress and hit your Enter key or click the magnifying glass, you will see thousands of possibilities for a domain name on the resulting page.

Some of these will sound ridiculous. (But maybe that’s what you want.) Others will seem like just about what you were looking for – perhaps exactly what you were looking for. Maybe a slight tweak to one of the suggestions is still available. You can check at Lean Domain Search or NameCheap.

You’ll notice that Lean Domain Search simply adds a word to the beginning or the end of the term you searched for. Using the options on the right side of the screen, you can display the results in a variety of ways.

Go ahead and click some of those options just to see what happens. It’s kinda fun to play with.

You could spend hours looking through these results. If you have the time, feel free to do so. Don’t stress too much over looking for a domain name. In the end, it will be much more important that you put information on your site that others want to see and read than what the site itself is called.

I Bought My Domain Name – Now What?

There is one more necessary expenditure related to your website. It’s called hosting.

That will be the subject of How You Can Have Your Very Own Website, Part 2.

The post How You Can Have Your Very Own Website, Part 1 appeared first on WordPress Inn.

To those of you who know who you are, you’ve already seen the following explanation in video form, but you might also appreciate it in mostly-text form with a few images thrown in for good  measure.

As an aside, I suppose you could argue that this doesn’t really fit under the heading or category of analytics, but it’s close enough for my purposes here. And besides, I didn’t want to create a whole new category for it, so here it stays.

Making a Copy of DKME

I (and others) often refer to DKME as just DKM. I think this is because 4 letters just feels too long, especially when virtually all the other related acronyms are 3 letters long or less.

The full name of this tool, as shown below, is Diamond Keyword Miner Elite.

If, when you visit the page that hosts the original version of DKM, you don’t see something very similar to the above – in particular, the main menu that includes “File” – then you probably accidentally clicked the arrow at the far right that hides some of this information.

To reveal it again, click that arrow (which would now be pointing down) again. You’ll see your own avatar at the upper right (where mine is now) and probably several other colorful circles representing other users. They may not be the same animals shown in the screenshot above.

This original version is, as indicated in the blue button, a “view only” copy. You can’t play with it as you need to until you make a copy for yourself.

To make a copy, click the File menu and select “Make a copy”.

Since this is a Google spreadsheet, Google will place the copy into your Google Drive. (I’m assuming you have a Google account by this time and won’t go into details of creating one here.)

At this point, you have the option of renaming this spreadsheet to anything you want. You can also accept the default (as shown) and change the name later.

After you click the blue OK button, the DKM sheet will open in another tab within your browser. You can leave it open or close it and find it again later in your Drive.

Importing a CSV into DKM

When you’re ready with your special CSV file “in hand”, you will go to Drive and open the DKM sheet you made a copy of earlier. (Or if you still have it open, just go to that browser tab.)

The CSV you got from what is affectionately called TE, is very likely in the Downloads folder on your computer. This is true whether you have a Windows PC or an Apple Mac.

Note: Sometimes a computer system will automatically open a related program when it acquires a new file it can read. For example, when you download a CSV file from TE, your computer may attempt to load it into Excel (on a Windows PC) or Numbers (on an Apple Mac).

If your computer does this, just close the program without saving the file. You want an unadulterated CSV for the steps below.

You’re going to import this CSV into your DKM sheet.

The import function is also under the File menu of your DKM sheet.

After you click Import, click the Upload “tab” on the Import file window that pops up.

At this point, I always click the blue “Select a file from your computer” button, but you can drag a file here too, like it says. The file you want is the CSV you downloaded earlier from TE.

Notice that you didn’t do (or shouldn’t have done) anything to the DKM sheet – other than possibly changing the name – before importing the CSV. In particular, you don’t want to move the spreadsheet’s cursor away from cell A1. Leave that blue outline around the word “Position” just as you got it. This will be important for an upcoming step.

After you select (or drag) your CSV file, you will see this next popup.

The one change to make here (above) is to click “Replace data at selected cell”, as I have already done above. The selected cell must still be A1 as noted earlier.

Then click the blue (Notice how Google is consistent with the blue buttons?) Import data button.

Your CSV should populate your DKM after a few seconds. You may notice a small, gray progress bar in the upper right of the sheet. When it’s done, you’re done!

Enjoy your latest DKM creation.

The post How To Use DKME appeared first on WordPress Inn.

But you don’t have to!

Here’s what I did at the Inn, just to show you some of the possibilities.

Single Post Template #2

When I decided to make a second template that I would apply to some of my posts, I didn’t want it to look too much different from my original post template, so when it came time to choose the template for my template, I chose my original template!

In the list above, it was the one called Default Post Template. I named the new one Test Post Template (which also now shows in the list).

The only changes I made were at the top of a post where the Featured Image usually resides.

I added a section called an Inner Section, mainly just to see what it would do, because you can’t really tell from its name what its purpose is. (I also then deleted the original Featured Image section.)

As the icon for an Inner Section suggests, you get a 2-column area to work with. I changed it from the default 50/50 split horizontally to a 33/66 “structure” with the larger portion on the right.

Into that larger area I then inserted the Featured Image section. I put a Meta Data section on the left and played around with it a bit.

I put the custom text “Gary wrote this for you” instead of standard author line. I changed the date format and added the word “on” before it on the date line.

I deleted the lines that contained the time the post was written and the number of comments the post had received.

Then I got a little fancy and made the area “Fade In Up” which means the name and date lines initially are not in place but instead “fade in” lower than usual and slide up into their final position.

Deciding When to Use a Template

The last step in this process is setting up the conditions that will determine when posts will use this template.

Just before you save the final version of your template, you get to choose conditions that affect which posts (or other items) will use the template.

For this new Test Post Template, I chose to have it show up only when the Category is Analytics. I chose “Category” from a dropdown list. I then started typing in “Analytics” in the next conditions box and Elementor found that I had a category called archives that I could then select to fill that last box.

This selection then conflicted with my original Default Posts Template which I had said should be used for All my Posts.

So I had to edit that template and give it multiple conditions. I had it apply to each of my other Categories. (It doesn’t work, as you might at first think, just to Exclude this template from everything but Analytics. It’s a logic thing.)

The Final Result

So now if you click the Analytics menu item and click any post the shows up (only one, as of this writing), you will see those differences I mentioned above.

You won’t see any differences – assuming you’ve visited here before, which you probably haven’t – in any of my other WordPress Inn posts.

Again, this isn’t likely to be something you want to implement on your site. But it’s nice to know you can, should the need arise.

The post Picking and Choosing Your Templates appeared first on WordPress Inn.

I thought you might be interested in which other plugins I use here too.

Affiliate Marketing Plugins

Even though this isn’t currently I site I use for affiliate marketing, I do have several plugins installed that you probably would only use for that purpose. The reason I have them installed here is that this site is, in part, a test ground for helping affiliate marketers in a course run by Andrew Hansen and Sara Young.

The plugins that I would say belong in this group are the following.

• All in One Schema Rich Snippets
• Header, Footer and Post Injections
• Table of Contents Plus
• Ultimate Nofollow
• Yoast SEO

Now, you might use some of these yourself, even if you’re not into affiliate marketing. (If you don’t know what that is, you’re definitely not into it.) But for the most part, the only reason I have them here or would consider using them is to get certain pages of my site onto the first page of Google’s search results for specific search terms (aka keywords).

I haven’t even started to use All in One Schema Rich Snippets here yet because the course mentioned above hasn’t presented it in detail yet.

Header, Footer and Post Injections, while it can have many uses, is one I just use to connect my site to Google Tag Manager.

Table of Contents Plus is kinda nifty, but it certainly isn’t needed for many sites. With it, you can automatically insert a table of contents into your articles, based on the subheadings that you use. This plugin doesn’t seem to be supported by its creator anymore. If that bothers you and you’re looking for such a plugin, I would suggest Easy Table of Contents instead.

UPDATE: I decided to replace TOC+ with Easy Table of Contents. It works exactly the same way but looks more compact.

If you’ve never heard of “nofollow”, then you don’t need Ultimate Nofollow. It has something to do with what affiliate marketers call “link juice”. Yeah, it’s weird.

Yoast SEO is about Search Engine Optimization. So this is really specific to affiliate marketing and getting your pages to rank high in Google’s search results.

Security Plugins

Many websites use a plugin called Akismet Anti-Spam to handle unwanted comments that spammers make on articles you publish. Technically, you’re supposed to pay something for using it, if you’re making money from your site. The amount you pay is up to you. I’m sure many site owner choose the $0.00 option.

There is another plugin called Anti-spam (by webvitaly) that is almost as popular and seems to do just as good of a job at keeping the spammers at bay. Whether you make money with your site or not, it wouldn’t hurt to install this one to save yourself the trouble of deciding whether or not a comment is really spam or not.

These days – unfortunately – adding a layer of security to your (WordPress) site is a must. The definitive plugin for doing so is Wordfence Security. It has a multitude of options for keeping the bad guys out. (It has even more if you upgrade to; that is, pay for the Premium version.) It includes a Firewall, in addition to the more standard blocking features.

Utility Plugins

Having a terms of service and a privacy policy are also features that are necessary on your site these days. A good plugin for adding these pages is WP AutoTerms. With this plugin, you can easily create a Terms and Conditions page and a Privacy Policy page for your site. These pages are pre-made for you, but you can edit them as needed according to the specific needs of your site.

If you want a contact form on your site, you could get Contact Form 7, but I prefer WPForms Lite. Either is fine, but the last I heard, Contact Form 7 added a line of unneeded code to every page on your site. That’s not really a huge deal and they may have changed this by now, but I still like the other plugin better.

Do you have other plugins you consider essential for everyone to use?

The post Plugins Used at the WordPress Inn appeared first on WordPress Inn.

That left no easy way to get from one Post to another once there were more than 5 Posts in the Inn. (There are already several more than 5 in existence.)

The solution? Adding “previous” and “next” links to the bottom of my Single Post Template.

Updating a Template

To update any of the templates you have created with Elementor (Pro), you go to Elementor in the left menu of your WordPress dashboard and click My Templates at the top of the fly-out sub-menu that appears.

When you see the template you want to change in the list, click Edit with Elementor to get into the same design mode you were in when you first made the template.

Working with the Quirks of the Astra Theme

If you scroll to the bottom of a template based on the Astra Theme, you might at first be stymied by the fact that you can’t add a new element to the main section.

This is because the creators of Astra have overlapped the main section with the others. Technically, it has do to with the z-order, which determines what’s really on top where you can access it.

Fortunately, you can scroll to the top of a template like this and add new elements there. Then you can click and drag them down to where you need them. This is what I did with a Post Navigation element.

Styling a Post Navigation Element

As with most Elementor elements, you can change just about everything associated with a Post Navigation element.

I decided to change the border to match the rest of the page. I also changed the look of the arrows you can click to get to the next (or previous) post.

The rest of the items I left as the defaults.

On a related note, I also changed the border of the Author Info box that (now) falls between the end of the article and the Post Navigation area.

On one more related note, it occurs to me that having 4 posts in the main area of my home page and 5 posts in the sidebar is rather redundant. I’ll probably add a few more to the sidebar list.

Unless you have a better idea…?

The post Previous and Next Links for Getting from Post to Post appeared first on WordPress Inn.