Wix Blog Tutorial (Old Blog)- Let’s Start Design

hello this is Lorraine Lily of let’s start design today I’m going to do a short video on how to introduce a blog to your website and why we should be blogging so just a brief overview a blog is really a series of short essays or postings within a website they are used to inform customers about trends industry knowledge and also can be used to answer frequently asked questions so you can see in this little image here why blog and as I said we
can talk about our industry it informs your customers and creates a credibility with your customers it helps to answer typical questions that also helps to build trust and integrity you should frequently update the content on your website and by doing a blog this is an easy way to do so it improves your Google ranking and helps you to be found more easily when a customer or a potential customer is doing a search online and lastly regular blog
posts can be distributed to your clients either through social media or email and this really reinforces your brand and helps stay in the forefront of their minds so that there might be potential referrals to their friends so that is a quick overview of why we should blog and now we’ll move on to how we actually create our blog on our Wix website the first thing we’ll do is log into Wix calm you will come up with your particular sites so we’re
going to edit this one site here which I created called ultimate design to select site and you’ll see that this page comes up and we can go directly to our blog here or we can go in and manage and edit the site and so it will bring up on the home page and then we’re going to select the blog page or add a blog if you haven’t already got one up here we have our pages which you can see here design services portfolio contact and blog so it does have
already a blog now there are two ways we can go into it we can either click right on the blog here and it will take us to the blog Paige or we can go to my blog which is our blog manager and if we just want to add one single new post you can add a new post or if you want to manage your blog you can just go in here and that takes you to any drafts that you have in your site to close that out and you can see here what the layout is we’re going to
have here is where our posts will be and then there is an element here called featured posts and we can star each post and if if we want it to appear on under featured posts and it they will then scroll through the posts here will be where the most recent ones are and then we can also add tags or categories to our blogs and so when people go to search they can easily be found so let’s start by adding a new post we have a layout here where we’re
going to type in our title and at the top is where you can add images a photo galleries and video etc so we’re going to begin by adding a title and the name of this particular post is going to be called trends kitchen design and we’re going to put in the author name as ultimate design but you can add your name if you prefer if you’re the owner of your company and I’m going to paste in some text from a word document so we’re going to open up our
word file and literally cut and paste it in so that’s been pasted in and we want to also add an image so I’m going to click up the top here in front of the first letter and add an image from wix’s image file and you see this opens up so you either have all your media where you have uploaded images yourself and if you want to upload an image you click here and you will be able to select an image from your your own files so you’ll go to your files
and find your image click on it and then it will bring it in and you will select that but today I’m going to choose something from Wix from their photo database I’m going to token kitchen you will bring up all the photos at our house for kitchens I’m going to choose this and once you’ve selected it you see the tick here and then you hit apply and it will post it into the blog page you can easily resize pictures by clicking in the corner here and
you see that it can be small medium large or extra-large I tend to do large as a size and you also want to here where it says alt text this is really what Google is going to be looking for so it’s really important that you add the alt text so that it appears in Google searches so I’m going to type in ultimate design kitchen and Portland where we located this particular company if you want to edit the text you can just click within it you will see
that a little editor pops up that allows you to either change fonts I would always recommend staying with the font style that is common to the website so you have a consistent theme so if you don’t know what that is check with your designer or just go back to your pages and see what font has been used throughout and you can alter the size of the font by dragging up and down or we you can make it bold by highlighting it and when you write a blog
post I often get asked how many words should I write and you really want to aim for under 600 people have a short attention span there is a statistic that says that people take in 28% of the words on a given page so I always think it’s good to to bold type or to add some bullet points to make really make it stand out and certainly add as many images to convey the message so we’re going to add another image in here image you’re going to do the
same thing again when we go to Wix to upload an image I’ve been kitchen and you choose this one but apply you can resize oops don’t a large and might move this over to the side and then perhaps move this one over to the left side so that we’re going to leave it a little bit great so in our text here I have a link info at ultimate designs it’s an email address so I just want to make that live from my blog post so if I highlight it you get the text
editor that comes up and here we can create a link so if you click here and we want it to be an email address so info ultimate design okay so that’s setup the next thing we’re going to do is add what we called tags and categories which is over here on the right and they really help for somebody who’s coming to the blog for a first-time to be able to look for articles based on certain themes a broader theme is the category so I think if we added
kitchen as a new category and then tags would be almost like a subcategory so we might do wood stainless steel sea lighting okay subcategories and so then when we publish this that will look post to our blog page so now that we have put in our texts and photos and I think it’d be good to just look where we complete view what that post will look like so if we preview here it and it will bring up what it will look like in our post and you can see
the tags down here at the bottom our link which would be live to the email and up here is our broader category now I’m not loving the the gray background and the color of the text so that is something that we can go in and change next so you will notice at the top here that that opened in a separate tab so we’re just going to close that out and go back to where our blog post has been written and we’re going to publish this post so that we can go
in and change some of the of the post published and right now will ask us to would we like to email it through WIC she’ll tell which is a newsletter program built into website or you can post it to Facebook or on to Twitter or on LinkedIn if you’re ready to do that you can you know you can choose to do those or you can just hit maybe later which I often go back and do at a later time so if we just close this out and you can see here when we get
onto our blog page that the first post is here and as I mentioned I’d like to change the settings of what the look is of the post so click on layouts and you see here that we can play around with how it would look I’m kind of liking this kind of look so when it opens up it will look like how we created the blog post but from here down as we put in more posts they’ll all be lined up with this look and I’d like to try and change some of the colors
and we do that through this little brush here which is the design so click on design and we can change all these elements title refers to here the post body refers to here the image of course you see the date and author is here the categories we have there the kitchen and the read more button we can also change the look out and we also change the background design so we can change the color of the background so the first thing we’re going to
change is the background because that may alter the look of all the different colors of the different elements so we’re going to click design and I think we’ll just go with a white box to begin with to see what it looks like but I think it might look better if we add a border to this box so we’re going to although we’ve chosen a white background we’re going to customize the design and at the top here you can see that there are different kinds of
frames or things with drop shadows or gradients that we can add to change the look of our blog so going back to that first one and you can then go in and change different things like the border you can change to a different color if you like that blue that we like and the width refers to the size of the frame so if you go up it becomes a wider frame if you go down it’d be thinner and thinner looks better with our going to contemporary design go
to the brush perhaps change the title and let’s change that color to the brown from our logo and here these are colors that we added earlier every color has a hex code here it’s a six digit code and that can be found by adding color and you can drag up and down the different colors here and within that different colors and the one on the right is the new color the one on the left is the old color and this is the hex code so an just cancel that
post body and go and switch it to that Brown change the read more button and it gives you two options again there are different buttons to choose from but once we’ve chosen I’ve chosen this one that seems to sit off the page a little bit with a little drop shadow here you’ve got the regular color where it’s a white background and the brown font and then when you hover you have the option to change that so we could make that blue as the background
and then let this brown and to see how that looks we could just preview so when you scroll over it turns to blue you save that the top and then every blog post that we add will then have this very it will look just like this I want to change this kitchen one actually as well category customize the design to make it blue changing the text here to brown it’s white so we changed the background it on hover it will be a brown background and the text
color will be white so let’s just preview that to editor and save there are a few more things that we need to do before we finalize this lesson so I’m going to go back into manage posts and choose to edit the post that we did the one thing we haven’t done or talked about SEO so SEO search engine optimization is something that we do so that we enhances the chance of our blog article being found online by the search engines so when we go into
advanced SEO you’ll see here the title and this is one thing that Google will look for and then the description and I think it’s we haven’t done it here but often it’s good to mention within the made a description the name of your company somewhere or keywords related to your business so that you it helps you be found if you’re in a specific area of your business is tied to a geographic area it’s useful to to mention that too so that helps to be
found B this is done automatically the app set here is a piece from your text so what we need to do is go in and just highlight a piece of text command C to copy it go back into advanced SEO and we can paste it in here hit done and you can see here what the preview is so once we finish doing the advanced SEO we’re going to make this particular post a featured post and you do that by just clicking on the star here you wouldn’t do that with every
post but if you think you’ve written something that is key to your business you might want to highlight four or five posts over the course of a couple of months in terms of how many posts you should do I think at any business if they are doing at least once a month preferably twice a month they’re blogging it would really help and I think any if it’s sometimes too much blogs distributed to your clients might turn off your clients so I think once
or twice a month is a good balance one of the tips I would have for you is to put a reminder in your calendar each month to go in and do update a blog post if you can just get in the habit of doing it once a month you might then be encouraged to do it twice a month or if you have a spare moment if you’re on a plane or you’re commuting to work on a train you can just omit you know write your blog email it to yourself and then when you’re ready you
can create it and you can just save it as a draft and you can you know schedule it to be sent two weeks later if that works for you so really find time within your business but to do it and I think you’ll really be rewarded we updated this by saying that is a featured post I’m just going to update the post so you can see what that looks like maybe later and close out of this and you’ll see then here on the right on your blog page your featured
posts will be when you have several featured posts this will scroll through so you can see the different um posts so I hope you enjoyed this lesson if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email me at Lorain let’s start design comm or you can visit my website at www.att.com/biz