I Dare You to Fail - Make $100 over and over again
Commission Loop System – make a fortune online
Join our FREE Facebook and make money

hello hello everybody uh today we're we're going to be focused on building out the home page of our websites for a lot of blog sites the home page is nothing more than just a simple blog role but we often reach a point where it makes sense to do something a little bit more so today I'm going to be building out the home page for terraintreaders.com this is our project charity website um it needs to be done for one but also I wanted you to get to see the process I'm also going to take questions um the whole time so feel free to type in questions but uh obviously I'll be kind of going back and forth between questions and working on the home page I'm also going to explain why I'm doing what I'm doing the whole time too so thank you everybody and thanks again for for your patience as always so to start out I'm going to share my screen here this is traintraders.com our project charity site and I'm using the Cadence WordPress theme it's one a lot of people have requested it's one that a lot of people recommend I recommend it too frankly I've been using it for quite a while now on this site um and a couple of others a couple other kind of personal projects I've done for organizations that I've just helped out I really like it there are other great themes Astra um Elementor the theme or just the play The Page Builder both um just fantastic for for customizing a website um and you know one of the things I was getting to was that a lot of these highly customizable WordPress themes have a lot of templates built in so all the content you're seeing here on train treaders on the home page right now literally I didn't do any of this it's just there and in fact like to make it look like this right to have this sort of background this layout and then have um these images sort of overlap it and stuff it would take a bit to make that happen if I were just kind of building it out from scratch and so there's really no point in doing that so I want to show you what that looks like when I first installed the theme on the website it was there and then I just went in and I basically chose a starter template now for your theme if you're a relatively new to WordPress there's a couple places where you're going to see all the settings for your theme either they're going to have their own kind of spot here in the side in the menu this is Cadence blocks it's a plug-in that comes with cadence but not the Cadence theme but some sometimes they'll have their own like Divi has its own spot and that's where it's going to have all of its settings or it'll be here under appearance here with cadence it's under appearance and then under Cadence one of the options is starter templates and I click on that and this is super cool okay these are templates that I can use for a single page on a website or literally for an entire website just to start out and I just go through these templates and I find something that I like I built out another website recently for an orchestra my wife's in an orchestra and they needed a new website and I I liked this one I clicked on it I really like the layout it fit perfectly they wanted they also wanted it to have like a cool calendar feature and here it's got that like an events kind of calendar this is just built in through an additional plug-in that and it was completely set up once I once I loaded this on the site and I can view it in a month view or a list view but also I just really liked the layout so all I did was I changed the global colors to match the logo and style for the orchestra and then I literally use these layouts and then I just sort of remove what I don't need sometimes add additional things so that's what I did for train treaders but now we're at the point where I've just installed a starter template it's been there for a few months um and now it's time to actually do something with it all right now before I jump in I'm going to go ahead and take a couple questions here but then we're going to jump right into building this out okay so a couple questions here I've got Marcus Erickson asking where do you put your H1 in your home page when you use a hero section at the top with a different headline so um first of all for me the H1 on the home page the H1 is oftentimes just the name of the website like terrain treaders it could sometimes be train treaders home I don't have any issue with just terrain treaders being the H1 and so that's what this is it's just it's the H1 headline um and you'll see when I go in to build that you'll see that that is literally the name of the page I'm pretty sure it's um it's pulling in the name of the page and it's doing it as the H1 header and so that's usually what I do if I wanted a different headline than or a different you know like a different H1 than what I want to sort of appear as the headline then the H1 I mean if you if you're really concerned about that you could create an an H1 and just sort of hide it um and have you know it's it's there the computer can read it you know the text is there but maybe if I have a solid color background I just match the background so nobody would ever see it unless they moused over it um a lot of times in a theme you can take an H1 header but you can also then take it and change how it physically appears on the website um you could do that and just make it a lot smaller and sort of hide it at the very top and then have a second you know an H2 header maybe that you again sort of reformat to make look bigger I don't see a whole lot of reason why I would want to do that but you might have a use case where you really want to um home Cooks world is Cadence better than generate press I wouldn't necessarily say better uh generate press is one that a lot of people like um and it's and I'm I'm confident really good because people who know people who are developers people who um other bloggers they use it a lot and speak very highly of it it's just not one I have as much experience personally using there are so many themes out there I can't have in-depth knowledge like literally building out whole sites with all of them so I don't think it's better I think generate press is another one that like Cadence is um that has the capability of running very fast websites uh and um if it's just highly capable from if I remember right generate Presto is one that's maybe a little bit less friendly toward total beginners um Steve says can I assume no speed issues with this theme or does it need help from plugins I don't have any speed issues one of the things I love and you're going to see this in just a minute is that while it's highly customizable here like Elementor or Divi it's it's all blocks based so it's all built off of and builds on top of the Gutenberg blocks and so there's just a lot less other stuff going on I used to love Divi from a customization standpoint it's gotten to where I can hardly work on a website with Divi because the back end just is so slow there's so much code and stuff loading even if the front end is fine not super fast but fine the back end working on the website becomes miserable that's where I'm at with Divi right now um okay cool and Marcus is answering that too Cadence one of the fastest themes without bloatware um oh and he mentions caching and yes absolutely caching today I feel like ends up being almost like a just you just do it right it just happens almost um you know we use cloudways for our hosting cloudways has a cache built-in I use cloudflare for my domain registration and they do their own caching they have their whole CDN um if you're on a zoic or um I think the other AD networks too they'll kind of they'll do their caching too to try to speed up the ads the next thing you know you actually end up with too many caches and you end up having to turn some of them off and decide which ones to use so um but yes caching is one that basically takes care of most of the issues the only other speed issue you're going to run into or the biggest speed issue you're going to run into is loading large files large images and so you just want to be careful that images that you put up on the website aren't any bigger than they need to be if there's an image I'm going to load that's never going to appear bigger than this little like best sellers spot here there's no reason it needs to be even like 1200 pixels I can literally upload it at 300 or 400 pixels wide and it's fine plus you've got plugins and stuff that are just kind of automatically resizing for you so that they create smaller versions to render on the screen when you're you're making you're showing the smaller version and they're compressing images and stuff to make them take up less space um all right cool there's a couple other questions um coming in and some of these I think they're going to get answered as we go so let's go ahead and start building here so I'm going to go I'm on the home page I'm going to click edit page again I like this with uh Cadence there's not like a separate editor like with Elementor with Divi it's like enter the Divi editor and then I can't while I'm in the Divi editor I can't mess with any of the post settings um you know but then while I'm in like the normal editor I can't even see the content on the page I kind of like this how it is all right so this here this is actually apparently an H2 so I'm not sure oh the H1 is just up here and it's just literally the theme I just told it don't show the page title so I might not even have an H1 on this page in which case I actually probably want to change that to an H1 all right so but let's just talk home page right now for just a minute like what stuff do we want on the home page um the home page on most of our websites quickly becomes the most viewed page I think a large part of that is because people come to all the different blog posts from Google Search right or from whatever source they land on the website on some other blog post and the most likely page they're going to click through to is the home page because that's where they're going to learn more about you know does this website have more of the information I want now if I do a great job of interlinking I show related posts at the bottom and stuff then maybe maybe um they'll click through to other stuff more often but given just all the different sources that can come in even if only like two percent of all the visitors to the website click through the home page since they're doing it from all the different pages it ends up being a highly viewed page on the website and there's nothing wrong with like let me show you uh here's cookforfolks.com just one of our sites this is built as this is a on akabato it's our WordPress theme it's intended to be very first of all fast loading but very simple to set up and it's it's got some feature content stuff a big hero image but mostly the blog roll is what's featured there's nothing wrong with that especially when you're just starting a new blog but as we talk more and more about the need for differentiating yourself and for Branding um and you know just kind of all of that being more unique and less of a commodity I think it becomes more and more important that eventually we build something that's just a little bit more branded and a little bit more custom so many sites we've built can stay on akabato and look like this forever but um anyway back to this we're today we're talking though about customization so one of the first things I want to do usually is there's you know the title of the website terrain treaders and then I usually want some sort of text that sort of gives people the feel of what we're going for with this website so for example with terrain treaders the feel we're going for here with kind of the off-roading stuff it's less of like the thrill seeking and more of adventure and getting to places that people don't normally go where there's just a lot of nature a lot of beauty and having fun on the journey being safe on the journey and all that but it's less about like him going off-roading and I'm gonna like go jump my Jeep or whatever you know it's less of an X Games kind of feel and a lot more of a getting out there in a nature sort of a feel and so you know I might create something here that's got a little bit of a tagline um you know getting to places people don't go and enjoying the journey all along the way I don't know maybe it's something like that um and I might build that out a little bit more it's kind of seems a little bit short for here the other thing I might do it feels kind of small so what I can do here over on the right um you know Cadence has there's the normal like text blocks for Gutenberg but then they have advanced text that gives me just a lot more customization capabilities so here I can make this font size like 18 20 um and then I guess I think probably just to add a line break there nope that's too sure all right I'm gonna put a line break right there all right then you'll notice there's a button here this is again just part of the template I could get rid of it for now um I like at the top of websites usually very early on having some call to action if there's a piece of content a specific piece of content I could send people to to get started later in the future if I have some sort of a membership even if it's like a patreon or you know anything like that or subscription or even just like a newsletter um you know the button could say um you know subscribe for updates and then this text might have a little bit more information something along the lines of um we like to keep people up to date on the latest happenings in the off-roading World um you know uh are you know our subscribing is completely free and we'll we'll never spam you or something like that and then there's a call to action button for now um I think I will probably so I can click into the button and again I've just got all the information right here I can create put the link there I can click style um I could change the the colors and stuff but I don't need to because I've already set the global colors for the site and if I ever want to change them because like you know we don't have the logo finalized yet for this website so we don't necessarily have like exact colors chosen and so I'm going to leave it alone because if I decide to change the global colors I want this button to update so I'm not going to put a custom color but I will go ahead and I'm going to write start here um that's another piece of content that I like to create or another page or something like that oftentimes on um on sites where I have fully intend for it to be kind of a bigger site right um it's essentially content for people who are just kind of getting into whatever the topic is right if it were on incomeschool.com it would be people who are just kind of getting into content creation or blogging um you know I might have some some text that just explains that a little bit and then start here and then what I would do is I would direct this using the URL to either a specific piece of content that is just sort of like the you know here's the the ABCs of off-roading sort of the things you need to know before you go pick a vehicle even a vehicle type um for being safe and all those sorts of things it's just kind of like here's the high level primer and then it's usually going to link out to a lot of other pieces of content that dive in deeper on the specific aspects of it I haven't created that yet now another thing that this could lead to is literally just a page with a whole bunch of like specific featured blog posts on it that go into all those different aspects even if I haven't created like a a primer full of content about it I hope that made sense so it could go to a specific page on the site that's full of information that links out to other more specific blog posts or it could be just a page with all those blog posts sort of listed okay so I'm going to leave that for now I I think that's a good start if I have this start here button for now I'm just leaving the link blank I don't like leaving it for too long um so before too long now I probably need to go in and create that content in the future though I'll probably update that once we have something else to to call to action um to call them to right all right um okay exploding games your question about the newsletter we're gonna we'll get to that here in just a minute all right um well I'll go ahead and cover that now the best place for it on the home page um it it depends a little bit but I I will give you a straight answer but it really depends on sort of the order of value of the different things okay so I'll tell you like on income school on the home page at the top we're featuring project 24.

That's the thing that's the most valuable to me uh for people that go to the income School website is for them to be able to see that that exists that we have this for them and that they can click through and get more information then I show them like these are other tools that we have that can help you um some free some not right we tell them about we have the income school YouTube channel and we have Channel makers we have akabato our WordPress theme these are things that we have for you um then off then oftentimes I'll have like some featured content from the website basically I want to show and I want to point people to my content and then I might have um some testimonials if that support maybe those products that I sell those might even be before the featured content depends again how if I get more value from directing people to the content and letting that work on them for a bit before trying to pitch them more on the product oftentimes on the home page a sign up for a newsletter ends up kind of at the bottom and that I see that a lot on other people's sites on big company websites um and you know I don't know that that's necessarily the best place for it I think though that oftentimes it just unless you have a really good newsletter and that's like something people would really want to sign up for like they come here because they've heard about it and they just want to get on it then it's probably not something you're going to convince them of really easily and so oftentimes my strongest calls to action for that are in the content of the website in blog posts where I have just a strong reason to say hey by the way for this topic this is something we talk about extensively in our newsletter make sure you sign up for it it's totally free and you'll get an email from us every two weeks or whatever so for today I'm I'm going to show that and I'm going to put it actually probably at the bottom of the page all right the next thing so working our way down the next thing I want to include this is built into this template but I really like this I like to feature a like just a few specific things from the website um it might be that there's a blog post that's really good it might be um like here I might say um like our favorite gear and so and that would just be like a link to like a recommended products page where basically we have um almost like a listing of a lot of the the favorite gear that we've tried out that we've tested um and so this is just a place where people can go and just see like oh these are all the cool things that you guys have recommended based on your testing and so I I would put that there probably here I might feature a specific maybe it's a specific blog post um I could also potentially feature like the start here but I would do it in a different way so um like uh off-road um off-road Essentials or something like that or off-road essential yeah I'll go with off-road Essentials and you'll notice that um it's like it's too it's too narrow right at this point and so it's sort of cutting off we can fix that another cool thing you get with these kinds of themes is I can view like here's what it looks like on desktop although the reality is is it this isn't full width when we see it full width so if I click preview here you see what it'll look like on a typical desktop it's still only two lines and so I'm not that worried about it but I can also click here and I can see what it's going to look like on a mobile device and again it it doesn't run over I can see what it's going to look like on a tablet okay that I'm not liking so I might have to play around with this and choose to have this yeah I'm gonna have to play around with that in the tablet mode tablet's going to get the least amount of traffic but I don't want it to look like this ever and so what I can do is I can make some adjustments while in sort of the tablet View and those adjustments won't carry over to the desktop view and the mobile view which is pretty cool so I can go one by one all right I'm gonna go back to desktop for now and then here I might say um there might be like a category maybe that is just like um off-road safety and maybe because it's all the whole sites about off-roading maybe I just remove off-road and it's just Essentials safety and um and just you know gear favorites or something like that okay and then the images you'll notice like these images like it's kind of cool that the template that I picked was already kind of in the right Style with the right kind of images but um here kind of in this section this row is how it is in Cadence this image you look at and you're like where's the image like the content it's because it's here and it's the background it's not the content of that section it's just it's the background so that's where it is and I can click edit image and I can select a different one now um it's right now I don't have tons of images like uploaded to the website but as I've been out and about hiking and off-roading I've been taking lots of photos I've been taking video clips and stuff and so it won't take very long for me um I was actually trying to pull some yesterday and I realized they're like all on my phone um I don't want to take forever doing this here but if I scroll back actually I just took a picture of driving through a redwood tree last week because that's where I was I went with my family to the Redwoods that'd be kind of cool um in in the Suburban so that's you know a big kind of off-road vehicle um but you know I was recently out too doing some hikes and stuff with my brother got lots of photos of the Forerunner now that kind of stuff so I I can um can do that too and then I'll so basically what I'm saying is I like to do that kind of when I'm doing the thing that my Niche is about my topic when I'm doing those things I take lots of pictures I get lots of little video clips and then I upload them I should have already uploaded them to my computer and categorize them grouped them by Maybe by topic and then then they'd be there the other thing that I like to do with all those images is before I upload them to the site even though yes like we can use short pixel to compress the images and even resize them I do like to put them into Photoshop crop them exactly how I want them and size them down real quick so that's something that I should just do like batch that when I come in with photos I should just do that and then I could just upload them directly to the site with good titles so they're easy to find in the media library so for right now I'm going to leave these exactly as they are because I might actually change what these topics are but I think for right now this is good all right we're going to move on to the next section I'll go ahead and take a couple questions here um let's see bullet Singh says which keyword research tool do you currently do you use currently um full transparency I have subscriptions to ahrefs and semrush in large part because I like to one constantly test what they actually can do sometimes I'll pull the numbers and just see again yep they're still way off but they also do have some really helpful things that like just for coming up with different topics there's like some of the keyword research that it it will do it'll just like give me huge lists of potential um you know potential keywords or queries I don't even like to look at the keywords I like to look at it in the form of queries because that's how people search people don't search based on just keywords and really that's not how Google works anymore either and it's only getting further that way to where like for years now ever since like especially the Bert update semantic SEO basically where Google would take whatever somebody typed in and try to understand its meaning and then provide results based on the meaning of the Search keywords became less of a thing it's more about the query and the topic and then now as we move toward this more AI based SEO it's uh it's even more so that way where basically using the AI capabilities like we see with chat GPT but also with um Bard on Google basically it can understand normal human text so much better that keywords become meaningless and it's all about queries so I look at the queries sometimes mostly for ideas but I completely ignore the numbers um honestly you can use chat GPT my favorite keyword research tool when I really am just doing my search analysis I'm trying to figure out what things I want to write about or need to write about I'm using Google I'm seeing what Google what comes up and the people also ask to just sort of see what what related queries and topics Google Sees like for this entire sort of cluster of information and that gives me the absolute best view of the topics that Google Sees as interrelated if I'm going to ignore the numbers on ahrefs and semrush anyway then there's the only value I get from them is just a huge list of ideas and I ignore the numbers honestly because sometimes ones that they say get real traffic they they get very little and some of and so many of them that say zero just get plenty of traffic sometimes even thousands of page views a month on pages on posts we've written that were catering to those queries that get apparently zero monthly search volume or zero to five or whatever so um you usually end up with a huge list on those keyword tools by the way that just say oh yep these all get zero traffic and so many of them just don't so I usually try to focus on um what Google Sees as interrelated topics and then in terms of estimating search volume in Project 24 we teach some different methods more of kind of just thought exercises to figure out the types of questions that are likely to be asked by more people and it's actually pretty simple anyway so there's that Marcus I showed that in uh you asked about seeing it in Mobile I I did it for you there you go um I hadn't seen your question yet but I thought that was important to see especially with things like this when you have elements with columns and stuff um by the way on another website I had um well I'll show you I'm just going to show you I've alluded to this already uh canyoncountysimphy.org I built this website out for my wife's Orchestra and on this about page I'll show you this is just a good example of this I have you know the the director here on the left and then his about info on the right and then from a design standpoint I thought it'd be great to have their flute Orchestra director sort of inverse right but by default when you go to mobile it's going to go left column right column left column right column so what it looked like was picture a bunch of text a bunch more text than the other picture and with so many people using mobile devices that doesn't work in Cadence I was able to go in and say reverse the order of the columns for this section it's just a second row in Cadence and so now on mobile it just goes picture then content and then picture and then content so you can do all that you can customize all that for like in this case for mobile all right back here I haven't even gotten past the first row okay this next thing here is you see this a lot on just a lot of people's websites where basically it's logos of different places where this brand or this content is featured I I like it I think it's a cool thing I think it speaks to The credibility of the website obviously these are just filler fake logos and I don't have anything to show yet this is not featured anywhere yet because it's a brand new website with literally still one published blog post so what I can do here and by the way in Cadence this is um an advanced Gallery is what this is a gallery of images if I want to select this whole section um I can click that and it will give me the whole section right then the next thing that I can do is I can say well I like this and I want to have it but I don't have any content for it yet right so I think it might be under Advanced yep visibility settings I can just hide it for now okay so notice it's still here on the back end when I update this page and then I go to preview it once it refreshes here it's just gone and so there are elements of this page that I may want to keep but I just don't have anything to put there yet and so that's what we're going to do is we're just going to hide them for now okay all right cool the next sections here are all based on this being a store it's not a store okay so some things that we can do here some of these are just going to go away right they're just going to be gone um uh let's see I have a couple notes of things I was wanting to do I hit the logos um let's see right down here where it says explore our categories I like to I like this layout here I think I can use it in the future um this could be in fact I think I I might even keep it now and so what I could do here is I'm going to change I would change all this text right um maybe I'll even say something like explore the outdoors and then um I'll probably get rid of this new collection text although I kind of like the different color uh like supplemental text before and so I might come up with something to put there and then um here this text I'd replaced with something that explains sort of what these are going to be and then for these again I'm going to update the images but I think what I would want to do is replace these with some of the categories from the website right so uh things like um vehicle selection something like um Adventure planning and then here like off-road safety and then maybe I just don't need any sub content here and then literally like I'll have this link to just the blog archive page for that category or if I don't have a category on WordPress for vehicle selection what I might do is I just might tag all of the Articles so we've often said like I don't worry about tags for blog posts like from a meta tagging standpoint for like SEO doesn't matter right but um if I want to if I want to be able to categorize articles multiple different ways tags can be a great way to do it because I can create then um or really WordPress kind of automatically creates but I can link to a Blog archive page so um just like here you know there's there's a Blog Page right and it's just blog well we can do the same thing for different categories so let me show you here here's the one blog post published uh let me go to edit it and then tags so right now under categories it's it's categorized under ATVs buying an ATV so this is vehicle selection right so tags let me tag it as vehicle selection right so there's the tag so then let's see if I can remember the actual like can't remember if it's tag or tags there it is so the URL structure here for me is traintraders.com tag vehicle selection so any article that is tagged as a vehicle selection related article will show up on this archive page and so then under vehicle selection here go to category I'm just gonna I'll probably change the text to something like um see all content or I don't know I don't love that I'll have to come up with better wording and then here I'm just gonna grab this URL I'm going to put it there okay so I mean I've still got some work to do I'll definitely want to update images like this image should definitely be an off-road vehicle not boots right um and you know as we add the content we've got a bunch written that we just are finishing editing that will get published soon but uh as we add this content we'll decide which categories are kind of going to be most valuable to feature on the home page okay then what am I going to do with the rest of this well I just most of this just does not make sense um maybe at some point it would make sense to feature uh some specific gear that we're Affiliates for that it's just like every off-roader needs or that sort of thing but I just um I don't know I just I just don't see it maybe honestly maybe I could that could be what I feature here maybe it could even be categories of gear um so anyway I'm going to take this I actually let me show you what I what I have in mind here I'm going to completely delete this section I'm going to remove that entire row this one I'm going to remove that section and that section oops I just want to remove the section okay cool and then in here this row here I want one column and I'm going to take this this entire section here and I'm going to move it into there because here where I've got the cool Mountain background there's something else I want to do so we're going to build this one out from scratch and I will take a couple more questions here in just a second um because yeah we've got some really good questions here so give me just a second so I'm going to start with some Advanced text the advanced text is everything from headings to paragraph so I'll make this in H2 and I'm just going to say featured content okay then I'll hit enter it's going to give me a new block actually now I actually want a new section okay and this section actually no I don't want a section sorry that's the one thing you do have to get used to with every theme is kind of sort of how the sections and rows and stuff different things call them different things okay um so actually I don't want to include it in this kind of featured content section so let me go to there and then click add um I think I want a row layout because I want a three column layout and that's why I have to kind of make it into a new section okay then here I'm going to put some text I'll make it an H3 and it's going to be um latest posts then over here I'll do the same thing but I'm going to call this uh featured videos we are going to be making video content for this website um and I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that here in just a second and then over here I'll do a third one that's just like um I'll do featured posts this is maybe where I'll put some of our most popular posts or something like that okay so then under this in this column I'm going to add oops you can um do like a query Loop I'm going to do let's see let me click browse all because I'm not remembering exactly I could do a post grid I feel like there was another option I thought there was like oh yeah just posts um and like I'm just going to do it so we can see what they look like right so I want I only want to see three I want let's go to the layout settings I only want one column right but like this layout I'm not loving right so let's go to style oh that's weird why did it okay columns one that stay that way okay now I'm gonna go to style um the I want so if I click here I want the font size to be smaller maybe I'll shorten the excerpt maybe I'll put the image on top um I can choose which of these things I want do I want to even show the date here maybe I don't need to um do I want to show categories or not um just kind of all those things content settings now the other option would have been so let me remove that because I think that I want the other one so I'll do the post grid because I think I have more customization for sort of the layout Okay so here yeah select the initial Style where'd it go and I want yeah we could go with oh we could go something like this maybe and again I say I want to show just like three and I want to have yeah I've got a lot more options here layout settings and I want one column um yeah let's we'll go with that for now um and then for Featured videos I would do the same thing but this is a cool where here I can say select posts by um query and a query basically says I'm going to choose some taxonomy I'm going to choose like a category or a tag right or an author even so I want posts select posts by query newest to oldest and then I can use pagination if I want so that people can click through to other ones from that category then here filter by category or filter by tag or I can select a different taxonomy and I can right now those are the only options it's giving me but maybe because I only have one author I don't know but I think you can even select you know author I thought so we'll see anyway we'll do it for now it's just this is the latest content so I'm not actually selecting any taxonomy right I'm just including everything and it'll just show my latest three posts and then below that for latest posts I'll probably put like a button that says um see more oops that's the link the link will go to uh terrain treaders .com blog so this is just going to take into the blog and I'm just going to say uh view more recent posts or just view more or recent posts um either one probably just uh view more right and so then people who come to the site are going to be able to view they can click there and it's going to take them to the blog with all of the latest posts featured videos I'm going to do the same thing except what am I going to do the videos that we publish on YouTube will also put on the website as individual posts and and each one of those the maybe the text for the Post will just be the same as the description from the video but I'll add some links and stuff and I will tag each one of those posts as a video that'll just be a tag that I put in there and so then I'll have featured videos that show up here um and people can see the video content and then the view more could take them to over to the YouTube channel I could I could just say um watch on YouTube or something uh then featured posts here I would again do the same thing except the difference is in fact here this is kind of cool too maybe I've got this layout just how I want it and so I'm just going to duplicate it instead of kind of recreating it over here and I'll drag it over by the way recreate are duplicating is such a Time Saver all right you just got to get it right where you want it right under featured posts right there Then here I'm just gonna select post type posts query and then by tag and I don't have a tag for video right now but that's what I would do or no this isn't videos I'm sorry I was going to show you the other way here instead of query I'm going to select them individually so then here I can literally pick specific blog posts that I want to feature so for now I'll feature the one blog post that's published but in the future I can update this and this one just wouldn't have a view more okay um all right cool so I'll come back and update this one again once I have some video content to show all right I'm going to come to these questions now um Marcus asks what are your thoughts on having a news section with latest articles on the homepage I think that's fantastic if you're in an industry by the way where there's any value in like posting news which honestly is something that more of us could do okay it's just hard because if you don't have a lot of time to keep up to date with the latest all the time news can be overwhelming it can be a lot to try to keep up with um and then you put out content and it's mostly only really relevant for a little while and then it fades right there's a news cycle and so it just doesn't seem like the best use of time for a lot of us but if you get to a point with the blog where it's something you can keep up with or you get a writer or two you know even just Freelancers who are just in your industry and want to publish maybe it's a way that they can establish their credibility online within the industry um not necessarily to build their own blog but a lot of people will have a reason for wanting to establish credibility or make a little money on the side um and you can get them to cover Events maybe you can get them to write about upcoming events in the industry or just news and happenings I might have a whole section like this that is just news with multiple articles depending upon really how much recent news or upcoming stuff there is right if there's just a little bit of news then featuring one strip of like three articles might be plenty really I don't want to on the home page be displaying news that's like four months old so if there's just not a lot to keep up with then building out a whole home page full of news articles that are old I don't think adds a lot of value okay but I love it I think it's a great thing we could potentially add um okay and then Armando says I'm receiving some guest post request for my website can having someone writing a blog post for you actually help your domain Authority um it really depends who they are um we've turned down a ton of guest posts uh requests because most of the time it's someone with little or no domain Authority and they're they're just trying to get a backlink the content they'll tell me I'll write a relevant article for your audience but really it's not that relevant it's only like tangentially related they want a backlink because like incomeschool.com has domain Authority it's a known brand and so like they're somewhere in the fight like in the making money space but it's pretty unrelated and they want to write an article for the audience and it just doesn't fit um so I usually turn them down but a lot of that is because you just need to be willing to vet sort of the the author of the website that they're going to link to that sort of thing if they're offering to write a free guest post chances are it's because they want to they're planning to link out and so um anyway is this something you're going to want to look at it can help right if it's more like a situation where um you know someone's like hey it's like they're actually it's relevant and you know they're I don't know their website's a little bit more like up here I don't have a problem helping out smaller websites my biggest problem is that most of the people offering to write guest posts I can tell they're they're not doing this the way that I would recommend they're usually just like Mass producing content the article I'm going to get might be written by completely by an AI might not have anybody even looking over it it's just it's it's hard to keep up with if you're getting a lot of those requests so it's up to you it certainly could help especially if you know that person has built up credibility they've built in up that eat for their site and for themselves even a bit right it can I think it really can help your domain Authority it can help build your eat and just show that like hey if this person who maybe isn't more authoritative than you but they've they've built some decent Authority and it's good content but they also wrote on your site they're sort of it's they're kind of voting in favor of you as well they're saying yeah I wrote on that site because it's a good legitimate site so there's some good reasons for that um there's a lot of good comments here which theme Builders this this is Cadence thanks Marcus for keeping up with that um cool not not tons of questions I know mostly because I'm just showing stuff Matthew do says it's hard to test out new things without creating and running two separate sites got any tips for that it is tough there's one option is you can have your one site and then you can create a staging site and we're doing that right now I'm literally rebuilding our main brand sites so income School Channel makers um and we're building out a separate site for akabato our WordPress theme we're literally completely rebuilding them I've worked with some developers to add some additional functionality because um I want kind of single sign-on across all of them because they're all tied to the main business but I wanted to separate out content there's just some reasons to want to do that and so instead of trying to make changes on the live site which we often do here in WordPress we're doing this more like how real developers do when I used to work for HP and I worked on the website we would build stuff um or we would conceptualize stuff and then designers would design it in a separate tool and then the developers would build it on a staging site and then we would push the staging site to the live site and um when we did we would have to immediately go in and just test everything because sometimes even the process of moving it from staging to live things would break but that's a good way to do it so a lot of hosts have that option big scoots will let you create staging sites wpx might I can't remember we're on cloudways for all of our sites right now cloudways it's super easy I click on a site in the back end like on cloudways and I just it's like one of the options for the site is staging I say create staging and it creates a duplicate of the website on and you can choose like do I want it on the same server or even on a separate server right um create staging it creates a duplicate of the site on a temporary URL so it might just be like incomeschool.staging.com that's not what our staging site is right now but um it just creates it on a temporary URL okay and then you can um play around with it all you want to you can test out different themes and that's a great thing to do by the way if you're going to change themes because a lot of times when you change themes there's a lot of the design and stuff that breaks and sometimes even important site functionality that breaks so if you're going to make a big change using a staging site is a great way to go okay which starter template Holly asks so this one I'm going to click update here let me go to the starter templates I'll get out of the pumpkin patch one this one literally like the the images on the site still are from the starter template um and I did the whole site but I didn't show you guys really that um let's find the one I used I think it was a little yeah this one camping Adventure awaits uh The Outdoor Shop it says Outdoor Shop but it's like yeah it's kind of built the homepage is built to be a shop um and it does have like I removed this free shipping thing from the top um I removed the shop and all of the woocommerce related stuff that automatically pulled in when I pulled this template in for the whole site but it built out the about page the you know all of these other pages to look really good from the beginning so but I can import a single page or the full site if you want to see what the other pages on the site look like I can click the about page and oh look cool it shows me the pre formatted template for the about page that's cool um contact page what they do here okay cool they just made it simple simple contact page they also threw in a map here and then send a message that's cool FAQs well warranty is not going to make a lot of sense a lot of these aren't going to make sense for me um but maybe the layouts are something that I'd like for um some other pages on the site Etc and then the blog I can see oh here's the layout they use for the blog that looks nice cool so I went ahead and I uploaded the whole template including I liked the footer the way that they laid out the footer so I'm pretty sure I just copied that right right in as the full site template if you only copy in a single page like oh I like the blog page I'm just going to copy in that page you won't get the header and footer with it which is another reason to do the full site at the very beginning right if that's something that you like so anyway that's the one I chose is this um Outdoor Shop is where I started now because these images are from the template I will want to replace them and I will I absolutely will um this is there's an auto save that's newer I'm just gonna keep the one I have um all right cool so I will want to replace those images even this cool little mountain background but guess what I live in a place with lots of mountains I'll take a cool picture and we'll put it in here when I click this style here the background notice it's just a normal photo they've just set the um opacity so and I think it's a little bit of a gradient and then I can actually move the focus point there we go now it's doing it um anyway so it's either opacity or they've done like a white overlay I can't remember now set those back to 50 50.

So if I do background overlay settings there it is the overlay opacity is 100 and the overlay yeah they've done a gradient that goes I think from like white to it's white to white but right here the opacity it's white but they've just said I guess that's fully opaque and maybe this one is partially transparent or something yeah that's what it was so uh so it's fully opaque at the bottom this kind of gray and it moves up to um somewhat transparent but the same color so that's what they've done so I can just literally replace the image and the overlay will stay the same which is pretty cool all right um let's see let me show you let me finish out the page here we're almost done this little our best seller I'm going to get rid of that I just don't have a need for anything else here um I don't know maybe some text here maybe again if I had a course or a membership or something even if it was like a free newsletter um here I might put in like testimonials you know what our subscribers say and then then below it I'm gonna get rid of this one too it's more shopping stuff um below it in this section here like it's all set up for me to basically create instead of putting here like this uh you know subscribe for our to be a member and see like our deals and stuff I'm just gonna probably replace this with a simple opt-in form for an email newsletter now for um excuse me uh for that what I'd probably do if I'm just going to have a simple opt-in on the page and not really pitch it very hard I might say um you know members uh you know members get I'll come up like we got to come up with something that would make people really want to sign up for your email newsletter this goes Way Beyond just the design of the home page but um you know on income school and on channel makers our YouTube channel about building YouTube channels um we've come up with this program we call insiders where basically instead of it being like hey sign up for our email newsletter it's like hey become an Insider and then insiders are the people we reach out to when we want to do case studies and we're looking for example sites or YouTube channels um they're the people who like we do we try to do it monthly but we do some like an audit right um like I've audited I've looked at somebody's website basically done an hour consult on someone's website I picked somebody from insiders did a consult and then I published it and I pushed it out to the Insiders only it's a freebie it's something they get it's a piece of content that's only for them that's free but they're also the people that when we have some sort of a sale or something they're the ones that we make aware of that sale um that's also the people that were sort of promoting the sale to right but they're the ones that are going to get the first information they're the ones who are going to know if there's some sort of a discount or whatever um and so it's it's a great way to do an email list that doesn't feel like it's just an email list there's some real value there we've always said that like add real value but it has to not feel just like oh we have a newsletter but I promise it's really good it's you're going to be a lot more effective if it's more like hey I have something exclusive for you it's basically like joining my patreon but it's free you just have to recognize that I am going to tell you about my product every now and then um so I might do something like here like that here right um members I don't love I would rather come up with a different name insiders is a great one that we've really liked for income school and channel makers but I might come up with something like that but members get you know exclusive this is kind of generic I'll come up with something better later but exclusive um content every month and again I'll probably just do a line break there if I hold shift when I hit enter Then it just drops it to the next line instead of making it a new block um and then something like sign up is 100 free and then I could click I could have um the Subscribe now button I might replace it with just an email opt-in button and to the right literally just ask for maybe first name email address but I will probably also create a link here um maybe it is a second button like this where I say learn more and that would take them to a page where I go into depth about what people who sign up like what they're actually getting how often they'll hear from us all of that information but I want to give them an opportunity to just subscribe right now if they want to or to um to learn more but uh anyway so that's kind of the home page then um with that sort of along those lines you get also I've I actually have done another video where I talked about the footer and building out a footer like this and why so that's I think it's really valuable to have this information I'm still a little bit floored that with only one article on this entire website um this article is featured in the new Google search uh when is the best time to buy an ATV it's all it's ranking on the first page um at least the last time I checked there it is right so it's the third organic one I guess technically four because there's a snippet above but then um right here in the uh AI um generated snapshot it's right there there's my article being featured uh and it's again a single article on a website that's a few months old but one article I was a little surprised and honestly I think that um things like this just add a lot more legitimacy they just tick a lot of boxes that make Google a little bit less wary of your new website all right I'm going to go back here I'll take a few more questions um so if anybody has any questions feel free to I've gone a little bit over the time I planned but we had a little bit of slow start here due to some technical glitches on my end so um if you have any questions either related to the home page or just anything else right now I'll spend just a few more minutes here answering those questions so I'll give you guys a minute if you have anything I guess FPL Roy says hey everyone how's your day going or how's everyone's day going um so far so good this is the first thing I've done today um other than like waking up getting ready and leaving my home um oh there was a couple questions here sorry Matthew do says uh what fonts do you use and how do you ensure mobile responsiveness um so um really one of the ways that that I handle this is I like to try to use system fonts especially for like the main text the um well let me go into here so for train treaders I can go to customize and we can just see exactly colors and fonts typography and you'll see the base font here is PT Sans um let's see the H1 font well all this I just says inherit from Global um I thought this is where I set the global I think though that for the most part we're we're trying to use I don't usually use like Google fonts and stuff um for the most part I try to use the system fonts and so basically like for the text it might look a little bit different on Safari than it does on Chrome but it's going to be a very similar Sans serif font I use Sans serif Sans serif is appropriate for web publishing a serifed font makes sense in like printed but online it's it's actually too much for the most part people prefer and it looks better to use a Sans serif font so without those little serif marks the exception would be if you had a Blog that was like meant to sort of look like a newspaper then maybe you would use a serif font right but for the most part I just keep it pretty simple The Heading font oh there it is the heading font family I picked here is Rubik that's why it's all inherent they're all Rubik I could go specific on the H1 the H2 Rubik I don't remember um where that comes from if that's the system font or not so here I went kind of for design I went for a look but I think it is I think it's anyway I don't remember for sure um on my all of my like akabato websites I choose to use system fonts and I just pick sort of which ones I want and again I just say pick kind of this Sans serif something that looks uh looks good and it's like helvetica and Ariel and stuff um and I don't worry too much about it it's headings are the are the place where I kind of like to pick something that has sort of the feel that I want for the website so I hope that wasn't too um vague but hey that's that uh let's see if I missed any other questions up here um all right there's more down here uh why did you choose let's see okay I'll start with midnight music is it better to make one long post or short with interlinking well it does depend on the topic but in general um it I would prefer more short posts in large part because it helps people sort of get to the point of what they want if the answer that they came looking for is somewhere buried in the post but when I say short to me a short blog post is never under about a thousand words it oftentimes ends up more like 1500 that's how I write and it's usually because I'm pretty thorough even when I'm writing about something specific but I do like to make sure that each post I write mostly covers one specific thing or it covers my longer posts often cover a broader topic but a little bit more surface level and then links a lot to a bunch of smaller posts that cover those specific aspects of the topic and those smaller posts will link back to the big one or sort of to the next one kind of in line if there's an order to them so for the most part though I do think that specific articles should probably be covering kind of a more specific thing and then Interlink as much as possible as much as makes sense that would be my overall preference it depends a little bit sort of on the topics and the sort of the way that that content makes sense to Cluster so there are exceptions but if I have to choose between one or the other it's generally shorter you know posts that I'll link together why did you choose this theme with this homepage instead of a traditional blog home page when it's just a Blog anyway so I talked about this a little bit in the beginning but I'm happy to cover it again here um I wanted a home I wanted to build out something a little bit more custom because this is a website that I intend to build into a broader brand not just a Blog so the reason for this like I mentioned before for something where I'm gonna mostly just kind of keep it a Blog and write a bunch of content and maybe have some video content too I'm perfectly happy using like this is akabato our WordPress theme and I'm perfectly happy keeping it on like the homepage is a Blog roll we've given a few spots where we can feature specific categories or topics but you know I'm cool with that I think it's fine but when um you know when I want to build it into a more recognizable Brand Build maybe some more authoritativeness in the industry and build it into I guess what a lot of people would call an authority site um then I just I want to build it with a bit more customizability so that it feels more professional now there's a fine line to walk there right we do want to give the feeling that like these this content is written by normal people but oftentimes when a website looks kind of janky maybe a little bit outdated it loses a little bit of credibility with a lot of people especially younger users who are just used to using websites that look good and today with like all of these templates and stuff you don't need to be a designer I don't I can tell when something looks good or bad but I don't design well that's not my thing it's hard for me to create something that I'm like that's what I wanted I create something and I say that's the gist of what I want and then I ask someone with a better eye tell me how to make that better but when I see these templates it's just like voila thank you and by the way I didn't show this but if I wanted to add like let's say here I'm like or anywhere here uh you know I want to add another maybe I'll add another row here or another section it's fine um okay and I'm like you know uh let's see oh there we go I I don't know like I know kind of what I want but I don't know how to build it and make it look good that's a good that's a good question so I'll just click here on the design Library and it gives me a bunch of pages I could choose from um oh I need to re-sync this but it's also got um patterns tons of patterns and it's like oh well here's patterns for columns well some of these look pretty cool maybe because if I'm looking for a three column layout oh you know something like this maybe that's kind of what I'm looking for um oh counters and stats oh cool I don't have to just build out this whole grid with nine counters in it or nine stats I can just kind of take this template and it already looks nice right forms oh cool I could actually take one of these and add it to the page where I um where I was going to put it at the bottom and maybe I take this but I like that other background better and that's fine I'll just insert this and I'll just move this stuff down um into sort of that background in that area at the bottom that I that I liked um galleries accordions it's just got all these layouts and stuff for me and I can literally click one and just insert it into my page it just helps so much and so anyway those are the reasons why it's mostly just because I want to build more of a brand with this website so for our newer websites in fact the two big projects I'm working on right now this is our project charity site but also my project double time site I'm taking this route I'm trying to build something that's not just a Blog okay cool um there's my long answer to your question um Holly golf says what colors you prefer to work with for a theme my color scheme I usually base it on like a logo so the color scheme I choose oftentimes will have a lot to do with what the topic is and the feel that I'm going for so with off-roading um I've what we've decided is we we kind of want to go with the green um maybe even kind of the Browns and tans feel more so and and more of a nature green less of like an army green or hunter green um and not so much like the orange the bright orange uh and yellow that are usually more they give you more of a feeling of like high energy they you know and so it's it we're since we're going more for sort of the experiencing nature getting to cool places and enjoying that adventure and less on like the thrill seeking side of which is cool it's just not kind of the direction we're going um we've decided to go with colors that sort of tie with that and then what we'll do is we'll um we'll we'll build out some logo designs and play around with colors in that and then come up with the logo we really like and then I'll build we'll build a color palette and then once we've sort of built our color palette we'll build it in so here under customize um I'll build it in to this I'll replace the colors in the global palette um I mean they give you these different palettes that you can choose from but I'll just replace these colors and basically it'll update um buttons fonts backgrounds all sorts of things with the color scheme that we choose so there's not specific colors I always like to use I like Blues it's a color I really like we use it a lot for income school and channel makers and stuff in large part because it's a color that sort of makes people feel calm and more trusting I guess there's so there's some psychology to colors too that that plays into sort of where I start but then I kind of go down the design side on logos and stuff before I settle on colors let's see what do you think of displaying products like Ecommerce site for an affiliate site instead of the blog review format I think that there can be a good reason to do that the one thing that I'm careful of is I usually don't want to make like especially the home page but I usually don't want to make my blog look like it's a store when when people you know click on a product and then it takes them to a page that kind of looks like a product page right and then they um then they click like they want to buy it and it takes them somewhere else entirely uh I I think that could kind of throw people so I usually try to make it really clear from not just the way I talk about the products but also from my design and stuff that these are products that I'm recommending they're not buying them from me and so I usually won't make it look like a store okay um NZ play says would you suggest a futuristic 3D type homepage or a simple minimalist home page design um I think it really depends on your Niche for a lot of niches I'm going with something more um I'm just going to leave here and I'm going with something a little bit more minimalist you'll notice that they're like while there's design and stuff there's also kind of a lot of space around things extra space if this were on like my iMac you'd see a lot there's you know space out to the left and right um you know it just it's not over the top and that's what people are comfortable with right now and one of the things I like is that um you know I can update the design over time pretty easily to kind of keep up with what's current what people are doing I'll notice a lot that even on like high-tech type sites they'll use different colors different images and stuff that feel really techy even some like 3D kind of stuff or whatever but the overall feel of the site is still a little bit more minimalist sites that just pack way too much they just pack in a lot of stuff on the home page especially uh that busy feel is I don't think it's just doing that well with users that well right now what is the most customizable WordPress template that you came across if by template you mean theme WordPress themes there are several that are basically totally customizable I really like Cadence divi's super customizable I just am not happy with speeds and stuff their their whole page builder system is not built around Gutenberg blocks um and I don't know that when it's ever going to be and so it's really slow to work on but customizability is there if you have more developer skills then there are some really good ones I think generate press is one we talked about that earlier in this live that gives you just a ton of room my developers have one and I can't remember if it's generate press or if it's another that is kind of it's kind of looks bare but because of that it's just left the door open for complete customizability and so they say they use that theme but then they use Elementor for the building for the design and everything like that and it just leaves toe total customizability so depending on what you mean by customizability if we if we're talking customizability for design you know Astra Cadence generate press um Divi from a design standpoint really only their pretty open to being able to make it look however you want in terms of functionality I think we're still talking Cadence and Astra and like generate press where it's just a lot easier you're not going to have as much interaction with plugins and stuff you're going to be able to do a lot more custom development or plugins and things without it breaking stuff Divi I'm having trouble with it breaking stuff on income school right now all right let's see I think let's see what's a good free blog layout if you're looking free [Music] um then I think uh I don't know I haven't played with a lot of free ones I actually don't have too much of a problem with the ones that WordPress is just giving us because we now have full site editing capability you can actually edit the headers and the Footers and everything and so it doesn't like you can do a lot just with like 2023 their theme but um I don't know I'm playing around with it it's just not nearly as easy to make it look how I want it to look as when I use a theme like Cadence but I recognize as well that the pro version of cadence isn't cheap um they do have a free version though so that's kind of nice you can get a lot of these templates for free there's just a lot of templates and some of the the blocks and stuff that you get are pro you have to pay for um awesome uh all right cool I think we're good we've gotten a bit long today but I really wanted to get to show you how to do this as well as get to answer some questions so thanks everybody for joining us I hope you were able to learn some some cool stuff today or at least get to see um somebody doing things maybe a different way so thanks for joining and I hope to see you next time I hope to be able to spend a little bit more time with you guys live but we also have a lot of kind of our regularly planned and produced videos coming up on this channel too so we'll see you all soon

As found on YouTube

Get Your Resources Here: