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This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives.0:15
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and today we’re going to go into how to design your blog. So if you guys are new to this channel, welcome, I’m all about teaching you how to build passive income become financially free and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified on my latest videos. So let’s just get right into it. So if you don’t know this already, I have made a free course for you guys on how to start your blog, design your blog, write the perfect post and start getting traffic and monetizing your blog basically all in our free crash course that I’m going to link down below. We also have a paid course called blog launch profit for people who want to go more granular on how to start making your first thousand dollars a month through your blog. But basically in this episode, I1:00
I’m going to go over how to design your blog. I’m going to take it from the free Crash Course we offer in the link below. I’m going to put the part about designing your blog onto this video. So I’m going to screen share that now and hope you guys enjoy. Hey guys, it’s Sharon Tseung from digital nomad quest, and welcome to day three, we’re going to talk about designing your blog. So in this video, we’re going to talk about the following. We’re going to talk about what a theme is, we’re gonna go over what to look for when choosing a theme. We’re also going to talk about how to install your theme. We’re going to talk about different types of blog styles, and then we’re going to talk about design tips. So first off, what is a theme? So a theme displays the look and style of your website and it includes multiple things. For example, you can include your font types and sizes, your color scheme, your overall aesthetics of your site, the display every logo menu and footer menu and ability to display your blog posts on the homepage. So basically, the theme is the design of your website. You can choose from free2:00
themes or paid themes. Generally free themes have less customizable features, but paid themes give you more ability to customize. And basically, the theme lets you not code the whole website trade up. You don’t even need to learn coding with a lot of these themes. You can actually customize different features through the WordPress theme without knowing any coding knowledge, which is really convenient. So when you’re choosing a theme know that the theme can change. So when I first started, I was so worried about design that I wasn’t sure if I should get a paid theme or free theme right off the bat. And if it would affect things, I start off with a free theme, but just know that the theme can change. You don’t have to worry too much about that. And then just know that your theme will change. So as your blog grows, and as you learn more and more about blogging and building an audience, an email list, you’re probably going to change your blog theme multiple times to satisfy your needs. You’re gonna understand what your audience needs and what your menu should be.3:00
Look like what your website should look like, what should be featured on your homepage and things like that based off of what your audience wants. And that only comes with that experience. So yeah, you should just basically get started because your theme will change and know that it can change, you don’t have to worry too much about what theme you’re choosing right off the bat. But when you’re first starting out, you shouldn’t make sure your theme is simple, it should be legible, should be easy to read, easy to digest, and then again, don’t get stuck and just go for it. So a lot of people have that action paralysis, which really leads you to not starting and actually starting is what leads you to all that experience and all that learning and growth, where you learn what you want for a theme for your website. Now each theme will have limitations. Again, as I mentioned, the free theme. Usually free themes don’t let you customize as much as paid themes, and they also don’t have as much support for you whereas paid themes will have dedicated support usually4:00
So you might not be able to replicate what someone’s blog looks like Exactly. But if you want to have a more customizable template to work off of paid themes generally allow you to do that more. So coding knowledge helps. But if you don’t really have that coding knowledge, especially, these themes are basically templates, where it’ll have these limitations so that you can’t really customize it past what the theme allows you to. But again, don’t worry too much about it. You don’t really need coding knowledge to get started at all. You don’t need to worry too much about that type of stuff, just get started. So Jason kind of went over how to get set up with your hosting and your domain and stuff like that. And then also get you to the WordPress dashboard, right. So now what you’re going to do in order to look at themes, you’d go to appearance and themes, and then you can actually go look for some free themes that WordPress already has included. So if you click add new, you’re going to be able to see different themes that WordPress offers.5:00
There’s way more than the featured featured only have 15. But here, if you look at popular is 4000 of them, there’s so many different ones and it can be overwhelming to go through. But basically there actually is like a good amount of them here. They might not offer as much customizability. But if they’re in the free themes within WordPress, you know that they’re high quality. So one of the first free themes I use when I first started out was morning theme.

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And what you can do is basically you install it here

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you can look at the live preview, so when you look at the preview is not going to look exactly like what the example showed.

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But I can just activate it and publish it and you can see right now, so if you go on blogging and mi.com you’re going to see it’s already like this. So that’s basically your theme, and then we’re gonna start customizing it a bit. So if you go into

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Customize, you’ll be able to start editing some of these things. So homepage settings, this kind of means, do you want to show your recent blog posts or a static homepage, if you want to do a static page, you can go into the WordPress dashboard and go into pages and add new page and you can basically attach that page here. I wouldn’t recommend doing that for now just go for the latest posts, it’s easier. Then for site identity. This is called blogging and me.

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And you can you can say, learn how to build and monetize your blog. So I’m just putting some filler text here, but that’s basically what it would edit, and you can publish it when you’re ready. If you want the social media icons, go into social media icons here and then go into basically you’ll write like what your Twitter is, you know, and then it will show right here. So it really depends on your theme where it’s going to show but this is basically

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what it would be like, and then you can publish it. So if you want a search bar, you can also show or hide it. These are all dependent on what your theme allows. So publish that. So as you can see, your customize section will allow you to customize some of these levers. Go ahead and click Publish when you’re ready. You can also have a sidebar here. So if you want to do that, you can put that under widgets. So you go to appearance and widgets. And you can maybe put your, you can put some text here, this is how you do it. You drag some text over, you can put an image here, maybe you want to put an image of myself. So let’s do that. Let’s see if I have one. Okay, so let’s put this one here just to show you guys.

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You can add this here. You can add some text. Hey there.

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I am sharing at blogging and me will teach you

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how to set up your blog and monetize it.

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So now that you’ve, you have this, you click save, you can reload this and you can see that it appears as a as a sidebar. So this is basically how you would design your website. You also want to create your menu. So when you’re doing your menu you want to do something like about

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and then if you want to add more, you can

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create a page here.

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So you go into pages, and then you click add new, and then you can make it about

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and then

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you can also make a contact page. So let’s publish that.

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And then when you go into appearance and menus, you can attach those over here.

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So let’s remove this I don’t even know what this page is.

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So these are the new ones right? So once you save that

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You can go into customizing in. As you can see, menu one is already attached. So this will show up right here. So that’s basically how you do it. hope that makes sense. This is basically how you install your theme. So again, the free theme that we showed you was morning. Another if you want a paid theme, the one I use for my own website, digital nomad quest calm is called x theme. So I bought x theme on theme forest. And you can go ahead and look for that. So this is x theme. So it requires some more customization. As you can see, the great thing about x theme is they have like six months of support, and I just asked them all the questions and they basically helped me make this happen. So it does require some more work. But if you’re just starting out and you don’t want to learn too much about that, you should just go in with a free theme. So here I went back to wayback machine so I could show you guys what my blog is to look like and then this

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Basically the morning theme again, and then I put my recent posts and just started off this way, right? It looks like not that great, but it already kind of gives you an idea of where you’re gonna get out of it. So it’s all doable within the free theme. But then as you grow, you can make it prettier and prettier. So that’s basically how it works. So this is just demonstrating the morning theme. So hopefully this all made sense. This is basically how you install your WordPress theme and how you navigate it and customize it. Alright, so I want to screen share two examples of blog styles that I see really commonly. So one is basically way more influencer focus where it highlights one person. The second one would be more of a repository for information in your niche, and multiple contributors can contribute to the website for example. So let’s let’s start with my example. So when I first started out, I’m using a site called wayback machine. So when you use wayback

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machine you can see back in like 2000, you know 2015 to 2019 what my website look like so this is what my website look like basically a year ago. And Glee I highlighted myself a lot more as you can see right I’m really prominent in the header image I am highlighting myself I’m talking about myself in the header

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and I talk about my life and my life journey and things like that my travels and that’s really highlighted more so on my old website, I decided to change that and make it more of a repository so I removed myself from the header and I made it more a header image that represents the whole digital nomad life. I still talk about myself I still have an about me section, but ultimately I was trying to make it more open so that you can basically have whatever contributors go on the website and right for as you can see multiple people write for my website now. So I hire multiple writers for me

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This kind of allows me to do that more so. So as you can see here, I put in the header image I talked about where I’ve been featured on to kind of give it credibility. I talked about you know, I want to manage my finances I want to make passive income I want to become a digital nomad, I basically make it about you where it’s highlighting, okay, what do you want to learn and then you can click the different options in order to learn the different topics you want. And the same thing with my navigation bar, you can see that it’s very clearly outlined where you’re going to get so want to learn about passive income, you go into the menu and click that or digital nomad stuff, or talk about your money in your finances. So I make this whole thing more about you. Whereas in the past, I talked more about my own journey and my own life. So I thought this was a better thing for myself. But it really depends on what your needs are. If you want to talk about yourself, go ahead. If you want to highlight yourself more, go ahead. And that’s there’s no right or wrong. It just really depends on what you want. And then if you go down, you can see everyone

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Recent Posts, you can see this course I offer to teach you how to build passive income. I talked about the three different steps in order to create freedom for yourself, because my whole website is all about design your life. And that is shown on the header right here in this text. And I want to make sure that I really show what you’re going to get out of my website. So I really highlight that there. And then at the end, I do have an email opt in. Before that I have something about my own story, right. So this is kind of the format I did. It doesn’t mean that you have to follow this, but it’s kind of some basic guidelines. We’ll talk more about design tips later. But ultimately, what I’m trying to show you guys here is the two different types of blog style. So the two different ones is the influencer focus one versus the more of the repository one. Now let’s go into Smart Passive income. And the same thing happens here. So Pat Flynn highlighted himself way more in the past and was tough, talking about himself way more. It’s he’s saying like Hi, I’m Pat Flynn. I’m here.

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To show you this and that, and it is very clear still what you’re going to get from this website, you got the recent posts, you got the section off buttons that tell you, you’re gonna learn affiliate marketing, email marketing and stuff like that trusted resources, book review and the ability to join his community. So in his new website against the header, get started button as featured in kind of like what I had, what do you want to learn today, so you can actually search for different keywords. So as you can see, again, we have a new sort of theme that Pat Flynn has created, where it’s more about highlighting other people and allowing them to contribute on the website. So he does highlight other people. He highlights his courses in his podcast and stuff like that. But ultimately, he’s removed more of himself from the whole website and he’s made it more of a team thing and actually talked to him about

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This and he decided he wanted to change from just being all him focus and making this Smart Passive Income site more of a repository where people can actually put their own courses up around things maybe he doesn’t specialize in, that will open up so many doors and allow him to scale even larger. So now let’s go over some design tips. Hopefully those examples helped I walk through a little bit about what the design entailed. I also talked about the two different types where it’s more influencer focused versus a repository and both are okay. It really depends on what you want. So first of all, make sure everything is clear and concise. You want to make sure your navbar is really clear about what you’re going to get from the website and also the header about you know, the the beginning text that you see I outlined. It’s all about designing your life, build a life and financial freedom for my own website. So make sure the benefits are clear so that the user knows what they can get from the website. Now you also want to make a header image that depicts your

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So as you saw on my website, my previous version was highlighting myself as the header image, which is what I wanted. I wanted to be way more highlighted on my website and then later I changed that to be a general picture that depicted the digital nomad life which matched my brand. Same thing with Pat Flynn, he switched from just himself to more of a team thing where it’s multiple influencers. And then you don’t actually need to have a header image though it’s just it really depends on what you want to go for the show an example. So as you can see on Jason site frugal for less, you don’t even see a header image. I know Jason’s going to change it so that he will have a header image later. So this is kind of an older design, but as you can see, it still gets tons of hits. He has everything really clearly written. So you know that the blog posts are all recent posts, you know that these are his popular kind of posts, and then the menu is very clear to read. As you can see, it doesn’t have the header image but you don’t need a header

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header image to have a blog. Next, you want to choose some colors, you should choose one to two that depict your brand. But really don’t spend too much time here. Because when I first started, I didn’t have colors like I basically just did black and white. So maybe those are kind of my colors. But I definitely didn’t have those colors that represented my brand too much. But then later, I went on Fiverr and I bought a logo design and then they designed it as that blue and green color you might see on my website, and then I decided to follow that theme all over my blog. But honestly, like this can change, your colors can change, so don’t worry too much about it. Just get your blog up and running first.

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Again, don’t worry too much about customization in the beginning. Again, it’ll change. You’ll learn more about what you want and start honing in on that. When you’re first You know, when you’re first blogging, just get it out there and tweak later because it’s always a work in progress. Or your menu should have kind of an about page a blog section.

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Then contact as basic pages. These are just basic ones we see normally you don’t have to do this. But this is what we recommend. For your contact, you could even do a free gmail address, you don’t need to have that@domain.com, whatever yet, you could just do an at gmail, that’s totally fine. Next, you can have your homepage with your recent blog posts. You can maybe even have an About Us section like what I did. And then I also had an email opt in at the end. And then within your blog posts, you want to write up content, put those images within your posts that represent your content, and then put a featured image on it as well. So these are just our recommendations for your design. And then for your footer, you might want to have social media links and legal pages. We’re not going to go in depth with legal here. If you want to have a specific legal page, you might want to speak with a legal adviser but like when you’re first starting out, it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

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And then later, you might you could even copy what other people have on their legal pages. But don’t worry too much about it now, but if you want actual legal advice, you should probably consult with someone for that. Now let’s talk about your action items. So first, I want you to check blog designs you like. So when I first started out, I was looking at different blog designs before I decided what I wanted for myself. So just checking out other examples will help you figure out what you want for your own blog. So you saw how to sort of install your paid theme or your free theme. It’s very easy, just choose one and then go for it. Next, start playing with your homepage, your header, your footer, menu and sidebar. So all of that will live in your WordPress dashboard and you can start customizing there. And then make your blog simple and professional. It’s very important to make sure that it’s very legible. So I see a lot of common mistakes of people making their font way too small. He should make it

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clear and easy to read. So you might look at other blogs and see their fonts and see how big they’re doing it and you can start to emulate theirs. You can even emulate mine. That’s cool. So make sure your blog is you know, simple and professional. That’s really the key. It doesn’t have to be super fancy or anything. It’s usually when it’s like more minimal, easy to digest, that’s when it’s going to do well. So that about wraps up day three, I hope you guys had a clear understanding of design for your website. And you know, it’s secondary to the content you create on your blog, and it’s going to grow over time, what your design is gonna look like. So don’t worry too much about it. But hopefully this gets you going in the right direction. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai