Let’s set up that blog!

This is an exciting day! We’re going to launch your website together!! Woo-hoo! For the sake of your sanity, I’m not going to force you to watch a 3-hour video to follow along with.

(phew!)

Instead, let’s take this process step by step and build our website out together. I’ve kept the videos below brief and my goal is to get you to the finish line with zero gray hairs or curse words!

There will be a ton more content to help you customize and make your website your own down in the bonus trainings. But I warn you, it’s far more important to get a strong foundational blog built out before tinkering with other goodies.

So let’s get this thing up and running!

Step 1: Setting up our hosting account and launching our website

Before we can build our virtual home, we need to buy a small plot of land in the cloud, so that’s what we’ll cover first:

In the video above we are going to cover:

• • Setting up our hosting account

• • Deciding which server & plan is right for you

• • Launching our first website

Step 2: Setting up your Theme and basic website Housekeeping

Now that we have the basic website built on Cloudways, it’s time for us to choose a “floor plan” for the home and start to sweep out any bits of dust that the builder might have left behind when they handed us the keys. Is my housing metaphor getting old yet?

In this video we will be covering:

• • Setting up our free theme

• • Get a super quick tour of your website’s main menu

• • Update our site permalinks to make our website more attractive to Google and our readers

• • Clear out the sample pages and posts that our website came with, so we have a blank canvas to work with.

Step 3: Connecting our custom domain name to our website

Now with that annoyingly pink disclaimer message out of the way, let’s set up our custom domain for this new website!

Step 4: Securing your new website

When you first connect your website’s domain, you’re likely going to see scary warning messages all over the place. That’s completely normal. We just have to install a “SSL” to tell the world that we are a shenanigan-free zone. Here’s how to do it:

Aaaand, we’re live!

If you’ve followed along to this point… WOW! You’re a (virtual) homeowner! Congratulations!

Now Suzi is going to walk you through the beautiful world of blogging. I’ll meet back up with you throughout the course and bonuses to get geeky and turn our basic site into a beautiful blog!

Great job!