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You might have noticed that there is a LOT of settings to go through in your Wordpress dashboard. For the complete beginner, this can be overwhelming. It doesn't have to be, though. Like any other task, we're going to start at the beginning and work through them one at a time. Most of the choices boil down to personal preference. Some hinge on your risk tolerance. A few others need to be set a specific way depending on how you plan to use Wordpress. In today's videos, we go over all the settings, what they mean and how I typically set them for websites I create. Reviewing the General Settings Tab When I originally recorded this video, I covered all the settings tabs, which made for a very long video. I decided to break the tabs down into individual videos. I hope that keeps things from being overwhelming. What you'll find inside the General tab: Site Title Tagline Wordpress Address (URL) Site Address (URL) Email Address Membership New User Default Role Timezone Date Format Week Starts On Reviewing the Writing Settings Tab What you'll find inside the Writing tab: Formatting Default Post Category Default Post Format Press This Post via e-mail Mail Server Login Name Password Default Mail Category Update Services Reviewing the Reading Settings Tab What you'll find in the Reading tab: Front page displays (latest posts or static page) Blog pages show at most "X" posts Syndication feeds show the most recent "X" items For each article in a feed show (full text or summary) Search Engine Visibility Reviewing the Discussion Settings Tab What you'll find in the Discussion tab: Default articles settings Other comment settings E-mail me whenever Before a comment appears Comment Moderation Comment Blacklist Avatars Avatar Display Maximum Rating Default Avatar Reviewing the Media Settings Tab What you'll find in the Media tab: Image sizes Thumbnail size Medium size Large size Uploading Files Reviewing the Permalink Settings Tab What you'll find in the Permalinks tab: Common Settings Default Day and name Month and name Numeric Post name Custom Structure Optional Category base Tag base Listen on the go! For your convenience, the oringinal video is available in audio format. Action to take now Read the above article Watch the videos Go through your Wordpress dashboard settings and make changes as needed for your website Now it's time to get some content on the site! To add pages and posts go to

While much about Wordpress is intuitive to the new user, one common confusion is knowing the difference between pages and posts. Both get created almost the exact same way, except you use the Posts option from the dashboard to create posts and you use the Pages option to create pages. Pages and posts defined Posts are what you create for your blog entries. Until you tell Wordpress you want a static page to be your homepage instead of your blog (or dynamic page), your blog is your home page. You can see every blog post you created by scrolling down your home page. When you create pages, they show up in your menu navigation most often across the top of your site near the header.   Common pages to have are About, Contact, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Disclosure, Services, Products, etc. Creating Pages and Posts In today's video, we cover how to create pages and posts. We also go over how to set a static page to be the home page instead of your blog. Not sure if a static home page is best for you? We'll cover that in the next article. Let's get some content on your site! Listen on the go! For your convenience this video is also available in audio format. Action to take now Read the above article Watch the above video Create pages and posts from the content you created in this article. The link for the next step in your journey is right here! Your turn How is your website building journey going? Are you excited to have some basic content on your site? Is there anything you're confused about? Please share your experience and questions in the comments below!

What to do when you start spinning your wheels Invariably it happens. You reach a point where you don’t feel like you’re making any forward progress. Perhaps you find yourself staring at your monitor for long periods of time only to realize you can’t remember what you planned to do next. Perhaps you hit a technical glitch and don’t know how to fix it. Or maybe it seems like the solution should be simple but you can’t wrap your brain around it. This is called spinning your wheels Sooner or later, it happens to all of us. We lose momentum and things become hard. We feel like we’re putting in more and more time on our projects yet we’re getting less done for the effort. When this happens, there’s only one thing to do. Take a break! For this website, I needed to figure out how to make Wishlist Member, WP Courseware and Aweber all interact and connect with each other. The videos showing me how to make that happen were awesome. They seemed pushbutton easy. I went through video after video making selections for the settings I needed. The only problem was when I started testing the registration process for The Vault, things weren’t behaving as planned. I honestly didn’t know why not. Did I miss a step? Did I set something wrong? Was something glitched? I thought I would need to go through all the videos again to figure out where I went wrong. I felt frustrated. As a result, I found myself procrastinating the task. I bounced around a few setting tabs but nothing struck me as the potential problem. I’d go back to the registration page again and it still didn’t show up properly. I’d bounce around the setting tabs again. Around and around I went. I was getting nowhere. Finally, I realized the best thing I could was to take a break. I went for a walk. I did some housework. I read a book. I went to bed early and got a good night’s sleep. The following day didn’t go much better. Now I started to feel panicked. After all, I was losing precious time, right? It was the weekend and soon I’d be back at work with just an hour or two per day to work on my site. Then what? Keeping your nose to the grindstone is rarely the solution Again for another day I busied myself with other tasks I otherwise would have neglected if I had been working on my site. I took another walk. I made a special breakfast and spent some time with my kids. Monday night when I got home from work, I sat down to my site. I decided to do a Google search on m

Welcome to the land of the free… It's kinda funny how the term free has polarized opposite meanings depending on how you use it. Everybody wants to be free. free to choose free to explore free from schedule free to create free to think and believe how we want Yet free can also mean significant limitations that take away all of the above. This happens when we want to do something free from cost. In this sense, free can be very stifling. Wordpress.com's version of free Going with free hosting is no exception. Here are the limitations you face when choosing hosting that is free from cost. No use of Domain Name & Mapping Limited to 3GB of space for your website/blog Wordpress will place ads that benefit them on your web pages and posts You will not be able to custom design your site Videopress is not available The place for free Don't get me wrong, though. Free from cost does have its place. When used properly, it can expand your ability to explore, create, think…and perhaps most importantly, the ability to choose. What do I mean by that? To use an example, let's say you're in a restaurant famous for its selection of beer. Tonight's specials are three beers you've never heard of before. How do you choose? Your waitress could attempt to explain how each beer is similar to other popular beer you've had. This could leave you sitting on the fence, frozen by indecision in which case you might order nothing or just one of your usual drinks. OR…she could bring you shot glass samples of each giving you the ability to taste and compare them for yourself…for free. You decide shot glass number three is excellent and buy two glasses of it while eating your meal. So what happened here? By giving you the ability to test your experience with unfamiliar products, you were able to move forward with more confidence in not only making a selection but in making purchases as well. Wordpress.com hopes to do the same thing by allowing you to try out some of its features and capabilities for free. You get to discover setting up a website and blogging isn't as hard as you thought it would be. You get to find out if having a website is right for you. You get to figure out if you're going to be as committed to this new project and idea as you hope you are. Wordpress then hopes you'll take the next natural step and upgrade into their paid products. You're happy because now you're moving forward with confidence. Wordpress is happy, because now they're

Congratulations on choosing to buy your own domain name and hosting! If you already know what you want your domain name to be, scroll down to watch a video that explains how to find out if it is available and purchase it if it is. If you’re all tied up in knots trying to decide what domain name to choose, read on. This next section is for you. What domain name should I choose? If deciding whether or not you should buy hosting was tough, even tougher is deciding what you want your domain name to be. Maybe you identify with the following thoughts or questions: Is it better to use my name? Should my website name be search engine friendly? What if somebody else is already using the name I want to use? What if I buy a domain now and quickly discover it’s all wrong for my idea? What if I grow tired of my original idea and take my website in a new direction that no longer fits? These questions and others can keep you from taking the next step for a very long time if you let them. The problem is we don’t have a crystal ball to know what life has in store for us. I can tell you from my experience that you’re likely to encounter just about every situation above. My personal story At first, I wanted some anonymity so I didn’t use my name as my domain name. I came up with a play on words to mean “Happy place all one’s own.” Originally, I wrote about mindfulness and stress reduction. Within a month, I wanted to change direction. Fortunately, the site name still fit since my next idea was to focus more on what makes us happy and how to achieve happiness. Within six months, I realized I had my fill of reading books about happiness and passing on what I learned to others. I also wasn’t seeing much in the way of visitors. I didn’t know what I could create in the way of an informational product to sell and my adsense ads and affiliate links weren’t generating any revenue. Clearly, I needed a new direction. I’m passionate about healthy eating and nutrition so I thought I’d head in that direction next, but my new direction didn’t fit well with my first site’s name.  I felt my new idea needed a new home, but what to call it? Afraid of buying another name I would grow out of within six months, I decided to go with my own name as my domain name. I had an outline in my mind of everything I wanted to cover and how I wanted to cover it. It helped that I had a few pounds of my own to lose so my new website was as much for me as it was

The very first question you need to answer is; should you get a free website or a paid one. What I mean by that is; do you want to avoid paying for a domain name and hosting? Now right away, there are two terms you might not understand. What are domains and hosting? What function do they have? And why do you care? If you go the free route, you really don’t need to know what these terms mean. But don’t let taking the path of least resistance make the choice for you. Free has trade-offs that can cost you somewhere down the line. So the more you arm yourself with knowledge and understanding now, the better. What is a domain and hosting? In the simplest terms, a domain is the url you type into your browser’s address bar to find a website. It looks like this: http://www.howtostartawebsite2.com/ That is this website’s address or domain name. It lets the internet know where to find this website. But having a domain name is not enough. If all you have is a domain name but no hosting, it’s like showing up to a mailbox with no house sitting behind it. Your house acts as a storage place for all your belongings. Hosting behaves the same way. Hosting is storage space rented to you to house or store all the pages, posts, images, and so on that make up your website. Once you build your house and then erect your mailbox in front of it, the internet knows where to find your home. What do domains and hosting cost? For someone just starting out, your needs are not very big. You don’t need anything elaborate. It’s okay to go as cheaply as possible. It’s easy to upgrade to more features if your website becomes very popular and receives lots of guests every day. As a worst case scenario, a domain name will cost about $15 per year. I also recommend getting Domain Whois Privacy (this keeps your name and personal contact information private in the Whois registry), which is another $10 per year. Hosting shouldn’t cost any more than $7 per month or $84 per year. Like I stated, these are worst case scenario costs. You can find better deals or sales that will lower these costs. But either way, having your own house with the name you want and decorated precisely the way you like it can be all yours for roughly $100 per year. What about that free option? One of the most popular sites to blog for free is wordpress.com. I started with a free site on wordpress.com. I didn't know what I wanted to have an online business about yet, but I wanted to practice writing

I’m excited you’re here! With all the noise on the internet, it’s always exciting when somebody new discovers my website, connects, and searches out the first article and video in my tutorial series. Before we get started in earnest, let’s talk a little bit about what you’ll find in the days and weeks to come. I want to make absolutely sure I’m not becoming another shiny new object for you to chase. Your time is precious. It’s the one thing you’ll never get back after you’ve spent it. If my website can’t help you, I don’t want to waste your time. What How to Start a Website 2.0 doesn’t cover I focus on helping you start your first website and the mindset challenges that come along with that territory. In order to focus so narrowly, I make the following assumptions: You know why you want a website You know what you want your website to be about You know what audience you’re trying to reach You know how you want to monetize your site or you know what you intend to sell There are plenty of gurus available in the how to start an online business niche. If you don’t have answers to the above assumptions, they’ll help you figure that out. What most of them DON’T tell you is how to create a website from scratch. They’ll tell you what should be on your about page and where to put opt-in forms, buy they rarely tell you the technical details of how to go about actually getting that stuff onto your site. That’s where How to Start a Website 2.0 comes in Whether you’re going it alone or you're a member of a tribe learning how to make money with a website, my goal is to get you up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible. I’ll give you enough information so you have a basic understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing, but I’m going to assume you mostly need step-by-step instructions of what buttons to push on your keyboard just to get the job done so you can move on to the next task. As often as possible, I provide both free options to accomplish these tasks that I either use now or have used in the past, and I share the paid options I use that I feel are worthy of promotion. If I don’t believe in a product I use, you won’t hear about it. I’m not here to push affiliate links on you with the hopes of making a few bucks at any cost. I want your trust and your faith that I can help you through this task. The only way to do that is to be careful about what I choose to promote. Introducing your