How to building a wedding website: Publish content for your website

Once all the content from my site inventory has been created, it's time to move that content into the live site and build out the structure and framework of the site itself. I've set up a standard WordPress site on our SiteGround account. You can see it right here and you can visit it at wedding.wpdiy.net/wp. Right now, there's nothing here that wouldn't have come with WordPress, except for two small configurations. I've given the site a title and a tagline, and I've also changed the permalink structure to display the post name.

Now, all of this was covered in "Wordpress DIY: Setting Up WordPress", so you should be at this point when we get started. In addition, I have a document full of all the content that's going to go on the different pages. Here is where you have the "Home" page, "Our Story" page, and so on, and so on. This information will be copied out from my document and into different pages in WordPress. Finally, I have lots of photos from Capin Photography that I'm going to add into my site. I've even organized them in folders based on the pages that they're going to go at, so when I start adding it into my site, it'll be really easy going.

Now, all this may seem like a lot of extra work, but trust me, when you're managing something like this, especially if you're planning something like a wedding or another big event, it's important to stay organized so you don't sit there and wonder, "Now, where did those images go?" and "In what document is this image supposed to be at?" Everything is planned out and ready to go and all I need to do is just slot it in to the correct pages. The first two pages I want to add are the "Home" page that I then want to make into the front page, and then "Our Story". So, I'll start off by going to my WordPress site.

I am logged in already, so I'm going to go to the WordPress toolbar, and select, "New" and "Page". So, this is going to become the "Home" page, and here I'm going to give it the title, "You're Invited", and then I'll go to my Word document and find the text for the front page. Now, there's not a lot of text for the front page, and you'll see later on why I don't need a lot of text. Now here I'm going to copy this text out, then go back to WordPress and paste the text in. But I'm not going to just paste it in. I'm going to use this tool here called, "Paste as text".

Now, if you don't see the second toolbar, go click on the "Toolbar Toggle" on the first toolbar and you'll get the second row of options. The "Paste as text" option allows me to paste and text and at the same time, strip off any extra styling that comes from wherever the source of that text is. Microsoft Word and other websites will add in lots of extra styling content to text, and I need to remove all that when I put in on my own site, otherwise things can get broken really easily. So, now that I've activated "Paste as text", I'm going to paste the text in, and click "Publish".

Now, I can go in and view the page and see what it looks like in my current theme, which admittedly is quite boring now. I don't have any images and I haven't done any customization, but at least the text appears. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is move this to the front page. And if you've done this before, you know you can change what the front page displays in Wordpress either from the "Reading" settings in the admin panel under "Settings and reading", or by using the customizer. So, I'm going to use the customizer. I'll go to the toolbar, select "Customize" and then at the bottom here, it says "Static Front Page".

Now, when I open this, I can choose "Front page displays", either "Your latest post", which is your blog, or "A static page". Now, here's the trick. Normally, if you use a static page you would create two pages, one that is going to be the front page and another that's going to stand in for the blog page. So, if you made a page called "Blog", and then assigned it as the "Posts" page, that would then become the "Blog index". But, in my project, I don't want to have a blog just yet, so I'm just going to assign a page as the "Front page", and leave the "Posts page" alone.

That means, there will be no "Blog index", so there's no way for people to find the blog posts, which is fine because I don't have any blog posts. So, I'll select "A static page", and then go to "Front page", and select "You're Invited". Now, I'll click, "Save and publish", close the customizer, and click on the site title, and here you see, I now have my static front page. Now, when I scroll down here, you see I also have a "Comments" section, so I need to turn that off. So, I'll go back and edit the page, go up to "Screen options" and activate "Discussion", then I can scroll down and toggle off "Allow comments" and "Allow trackbacks and pingbacks".

Now, we'll do this for almost all the pages we're going to create, because we don't want comments on regular pages. And you can also do that globally for the site under "Settings" and "Discussion", if you want to. Now that I've created the front page, I'm going to add an additional page, so I'll click "Add new". This time, I'm going to add this "Our Story" page, so I'll start by copying out the text and call it "Our Story". Again, click on "Paste as text", and here you'll see the formatting will strip away so when I paste this in, all the formatting from the document disappeared, and I have to add it back in, so I'll add bold here, and bold here, and bold here, and bold here, and then I realized I also need to add some headings here, so I'll say first, "How we met", make that a heading, too, and then for the second section, "How he proposed", make that a heading, too.

Again, once I've formatted my text, I click, "Publish", I go down and turn off "Comments", if I don't want them, and update my page. And then I can go view the page on the front end and see that everything works properly. It looks nice and this is pretty much where I want to be at this point. Now, later in the course, we're going to work on this "Our Story" page some more, and we'll work on the front page and other sections. But by watching this, you'll get a general idea of how you can add in content to the site.