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hello my friends welcome back to income school today we're going to be taking this website this is outdoor tr.com it's a website I built we had writers we put a lot of content on it I've written over 50 articles on this website myself this was pre the days of AI anyway this website is now owned by a friend and now I'm helping him to turn it into something great because after Ai and after the helpful content update it has suffered so we're going today to turn this website into a business there are a lot of steps involved we've talked about some of that here on the site we've talked about some of the ways to improve the content and there are other things that I want to do but today we're going to focus specifically on the design of the website mostly the homepage but we'll talk a little bit about the structure of the website too and make some changes here in real time so you can see exactly how I'm going to do it I want to start by saying this video today is sponsored by cloudways we'll talk a little bit more about them a little bit later but for now let's dive into the actual website and tell you exactly what it is that we want to change about it this is the website today it's using the aquaba WordPress theme which we built it's an income School owned theme and it looks pretty good but it's pretty basic it's a pretty standard blog roll which is fine for a lot of websites but this is a website with hundreds and hundreds of Articles honestly I mean just look here we're featuring here six different kind of main topics but look across the menu they actually have nine of them everything's broken into nine and each one has a ton of content with subcategories we want this content to be easier for people to find and honestly for the amount of stuff that's on here and the resources available I want this website to feel less like a Blog and more like maybe a magazine and a place where people would go for real information but also for potentially products and other things as well so we're going to set that up by giving this a much more professional looking homepage to get started with that what I usually like to do is get some inspiration so I went and looked for other like magazine type websites that are based on outdoor topics here's one this is outside magazine now they have a space here at the very top that's literally just for ads we're going to not worry about that one for right now but we could put a spot there just for ads but really if you imagine this is more like the top of the website something like this could work really well for us if I look at their menu bar too it just feels for some reason it just feels a little bit more Pro you'll notice a lot of professional websites will also have this top bar that's usually used for some kind of like promo things that kind of stand out and then they got their logo here all the categories here across the top you'll notice the little search thing over here an AI chatbot and then sign in because it's a membership it's a magazine right there's a lot of stuff there that you can access if you're a paid member they've also got like this little side thing that they you can follow them you can subscribe to the newsletter all sorts of things latest blog posts obviously we want that that's standard a normal blog R is going to have that we already have that but we want it to look a little bit better here they've got a sticky sidebar ad so they've got a Blog roll with a sidebar but they've also got like these categories notice we had six that were featured but we have nine major categories on the website and here they're showing some editors picks articles just kind of in a list format right they're on the homepage for various categories they got this bar here um different apps that they have that their brand has we don't have apps yet for this website so maybe we won't do that if we had a YouTube channel and a podcast we could feature those like they've done here and then they've just got an article boom right there and then the latest issue of their magazine and then a call to action to join so a lot of cool things on the website but it's also really focused I'm really focused on the design but their homepage is definitely focused on content but then trying to steer people toward signing up right there at the at the top you know free trial try it free give yourself the gift they're really trying to get me to sign up for their magazine let's look at another example this is outdoor life this has a pretty typical magazine feel they've got kind of this side bar thing here at the very top so they're featuring one big article but then they've kind of got this sidebar with five other articles with the different categories that they're in here they've got kind of their top level categories with all the subcategories kind of like that where the sub menu opens up and it's wider so that it doesn't have to be super long that's pretty great look they got their social stuff here across the top so you can see how many subscribers they have at each one I kind of like that and then the little search bar newsletter sign up if we have a newsletter we'll do that merch all these things I kind of like with the categories and subcategories they're able to do that and fit kind of more stuff here in the menu so you can get merch and things across the top they're Gear reviews they're featuring a few specific things guns they're featuring some specific articles but then I can view all and then here they're featuring a few categories with a few of the more recent articles and then view all for each of the categories I kind of like that we have a lot of categories I think we could do something like this feel with a list of a couple recent posts and then a view all button that could be cool and maybe we do for all nine I kind of like that here they've got a call out here this call to action sign up for the newsletter and then they've got their Adventure category view all so it's a it feels a little bit kind of mismatched like some of the categories are here like this and some of the categories are broken out with more of the Articles this way and then this is their actual magazine itself and then kind of an about I like that with sort of meet the authors meet the experts these are the people that write on the blog probably do something like that I kind of like this about and then read our story that's going to take you what to a main about page here they've got all their categories and subcategories all built out in the footer menu I don't know if I want that or if I want something super simple like this well no just kidding they've got it too so maybe that is something we ought to do so that's what we're going to build I'm going to get started I'm using the Cadence WordPress theme with the Cadence Pro theme and the Cadence blocks and Cadence blocks Pro plugins and that's going to allow me to do a ton of really cool design stuff so I'm doing this on the staging site so you won't be able to see it live yet yet but the staging site today I've already switched the theme and so it's already broken all the stuff in aabad and here's what it looks like on the staging site now speaking of staging sites look at that pretty good segue speaking of staging sites cloudways make staging sites super easy cloudways is who I use to host all of my websites and they do more than just make staging sites easy I can add new websites super easy it's super fast honestly the very best value I've ever gotten out of any host for my word press websites has been with cloudways I've used really inexpensive hosts and those worked fine when my websites were Tiny But as they got bigger those companies needed to charge me a lot more to be able to handle the hosting so then we moved up to other expensive hosting and it just got more and more and more expensive and then I landed on cloudways and I cut my hosting Bill more than in half in fact for what it was costing me just to host income school.com I now host incom school.com and over 20 other websites including some client websites for literally half of what I used to pay just to host that one they have best-in-class security and stuff a lot of these things just built in or for a nominal cost because they're able to take Enterprise level capabilities and features and they're able to provide them to us even with even customers with only a single little website and they're able to provide those services to us kind of broken down for just a fraction of what it would cost us to try to get those exact same services from those same companies on our own cloudways is really looking out for us and providing us with best-in-class service if you're looking for a WordPress host it's time to change or you're just starting a website definitely check out cloudways I'll put a link in the description of this video and I'll pin it in a comment as well so check out cloudways all right back to the design we're going to go ahead and I'm just going to make a bunch of changes and I'm going to let you watch me do a bunch of this stuff and then we'll talk about where I ended up and why I chose to do it the way I did at the end [Music] what do you say this whole town could be read by the end of the day if you feel all right we can throw it and drive with the radio so loud they can hear m [Music] nothing to do these days they come and [Music] go me you [Music] nothing all right now here we are at the end once again I want to show you this is where we started this is on alabado it's a nice clean look but it's just a Blog and we definitely want to give this website more of a feel of something more professional now this alone is not going to completely fix this website's issues and make it feel like it's a real business this is one step to give a perception that this is bigger than just a personal blog okay so that's why we did what we did we switched to Cadence theme and now here is the homepage similar feel I'm using the same imagery the menu now has this outdoor troop right there in the center with our social media icons right there at the top and our search and then similar menu as before I mentioned before having the bigger dropdowns to be able to show all the sub categories and that is something that I think we will do the footer we'll get to in a second but let's look at the homepage I have a big welcome banner I don't know that we'll keep that but then near the top this has a little bit more of a magazine style feel I have the most recent article on the website is what will show up here and be featured we could change that to a pinned article so it's just something specific that we know users really like and then the other more recent articles as well and so we've got six total most recent articles showing up right here then I've got the categories like we said across the top here we have a bunch of categories and so we've got them broken out here showing the most recent ones from each of those categories with a link to the main page for each one then because there were nine of them I broke it up four and then I did cabins and then I did four more so I've got that I don't like that I have three articles here that have such similar featured images I could just go change the featured images on those articles and fix that or I could just choose different articles but this is just showing the most recent ones and then we've just got a footer I went with a very simple footer menu very similar to some of the other websites went with the big logo here in the center as well as the social icons and then the copyright at the very bottom I could include an affiliate statement disclaimer at the bottom I don't know that it really does much there the other thing that I would like to include in the photo and just haven't yet is a business address and contact information I'll probably put that over here on the left side to balance it out that's another way to signal to Google and to people that this is a legitimate organization and not just a Blog that was potentially created by someone anywhere in the world who may or may not know anything about the outdoors by adding a physical address some legitimate contact information that levels us up so we'll put that there I just need to establish with the site owner what information to put there and then we'll make it happen this is a a significant step forward I think but like I said it's one step of several we have some more redesigned stuff we've talked about some in past videos you can go check out this video here where we talked about serial content which I think is huge and we're going to be doing more of that on this website and then we're going to do more of some of the things that will establish us as a legitimate business we'll do that in another video because there's more than just putting our address in the footer so for now here's the updated outdoor troop I hope you enjoyed this video we'll see you in the next one