Day 4 – Paving the way to Blogging

This is part 4 of a 5 part series. You can read the intro here, and the links to part 1, part 2 and part 3.

You’ve just bought your domain and hosting package, so today, we’re going to be doing a bit of pre-work and template design on your blog, and ensuring you have your foundational basics covered to put you in a good path forward to success!

Choose/amend your theme

First up, let’s log in to your new blog (yoursite.com/wp-admin), and choose a theme, if you haven’t already done so yesterday, or if you’ve had chosen a theme, but would like to take a closer look at it. Afterall, themes are what make up the aesthetics of any wordpress site, and you want to be very mindful with it. Themes can be very customisable, but it’s the starting blocks of any new blog. 

Once logged in, you’ll see your main menu on the left hand side of the screen. 

Go to Appearance > Themes, and you’ll be able to start searching for your theme. You can easily filter by featured, popular or latest themes. 

What I like to do is go to the feature filter, and filter for features I absolutely want to have in my theme.

Once you find a suitable theme, you can also hover over it and click on a quick preview just to make sure it looks as close to what you envision your blog to be. Once you’re happy, simply click install. 

Once installed, you can start customizing the appearance of it by adding things like header images, blog name and tagline, as well as social media links and buttons.

Adding Google Analytics

Before we go any further, I want to stress the importance of being able to track, right off the bat, how your site does. Plus, this is a one-time, set and (mostly) forget item to do, and it’s easier to just get it checked off at the start. 

If you already have a gmail account, you can go to analytics.google.com to set up a google analytics account. Once you’re in Google Analytics, go to the admin section (the gear icon at the bottom of the screen), create a new account and property (site). 

Click on Tracking Info, Tracking Code, and  you’ll see a javascript tag as well as a tracking ID. If you’re using a wordpress site, there are many plugins available for you, where all you need to do is plug in the tracking ID, and you’re done. Once you’re done, you can even send test traffic to the site and check that Google Analytics is recording it correctly. 

Now you’re all set!