Blog Setup – Part 1 – Your About Page

Video Transcript

This and the next few classes are going to cover the basics of preparing your Site to start a blog.

Now there are many things to consider when writing a blog, like crafting a title that will get readers’ attention and good SEO or search engine optimization. They will get the search engines attention and things within the post that’ll keep the attention of the readers once they get to your post. Things like images, videos, bullet points, asking the reader to do something, also known as call to action, like clicking a button to get a free eBook or watch the hidden video. Like I said, there are many things to consider. Now what your readers are looking for from you is your genuine voice, your writing style. You’re kind of wit or humor, or if you’re not funny or witty, then that is still you. That’s your voice. That is your writing style.

Don’t be someone, you’re not. Save that for your fiction novels. Now, there are plenty of online tools and tutorials that you can access to help in developing the perfect title or how to choose the perfect color scheme or perfect image for your posts. So you’re probably going to be using Google quite a bit if all this stuff is new to you, but as for setting up your WordPress site for your blog, that’s what we’re going to be doing in this and the next several classes.
Now there are a couple of new pages we need to create and a couple of plugins we need to install and this process will spill over into a few different classes rather than just one long 30 minute class. So let’s get started. Now by default, your WordPress site is set up to have a homepage display all of your posts in what’s called reverse chronological order, meaning the recent posts is up top and the further down you scroll, the older they get.

Now if you want to dedicate a different page for your blog post, then you do that in the settings section in your admin area under reading, and we covered this in a previous class so we’re not going to dive any deeper into this and what we just did, but for this demonstration we’re going to leave things as they are and keep our homepage for our blog post.

Now in this and the next class we’re going to be creating and about and contact us page, but depending upon your site you will likely need more pages than just these two like the terms of service and copyright policy just to name a couple of the legal pages most sites need nowadays, but again we’re just focused on the blog starting pages in this class, so let’s do the about page first. Once you’ve logged into your admin area over here on the left sidebar under pages, click on add new and you want to give your about page a title like about or about me or whatever works for your site so long as it gives your readers the idea that this page describes you and or your site.

Then in the next block you want to add your content. I’m just going to pay some dummy content in here. Not quite possibly. The about page is one of the more important pages on your site because if someone is new to your site, they will likely look for and go to your about page to learn about you. The purpose of an about page is to connect with your readers. So tell the about you in a way that reflects your site’s mission. Now for example, if your site is mainly about quantum physics, then your about page will probably have a bunch of big words that are like a foreign language to anyone that is not interested in quantum physics.

This will quickly tell that reader that you are someone that they definitely want to follow and learn more from. Or if it were me, I’d know very quickly that I’m on the wrong site.

Now for more details on the perfect about page, let’s use our friend Google and do a Google search for something like about me page template or about me page examples or something along those lines to get some inspiration on what you can have being displayed on your about page. And remember you’re not chiseling this in stone so you can always come back later and make some adjustments if you want to. And after you done crafting your about page, go ahead and Click on publish and publish.

And then if you want, go ahead and click on view page to see what your about page it looks like in the browser. But that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on creating our about page. And the next class we’re going to create our contact page, install and activate a contact form plugin, and then add our new pages to a menu for our site visitors to easily locate. Thanks for checking out this class and I’ll see you in the next one.