Enhancing Your Basic Site with Theme and Content
Before You Start
You'll find later on in this lesson that you are going to need a business logo.
Check the resource below Create Your Logo and build one now for free so that you are ready.
WordPress installs some default pages and posts.
You don't need these. so you may as well get rid of them now.
It's simply a matter of hovering the mouse pointer over the default page or post and clicking on Trash.
Do the same for each default post and page.
The Thrive Suite
Your purchase of this course came with a 1 year subscription to The Thrive Suite, which is going to make everything easier for you.
We are going to start using Thrive now.
The first thing to do is log in to the administrative area of your new website.
You do this by entering your domain name, followed by /wp-admin.
So for Goldilocks Coffee, it's goldilockscoffee.com/wp-admin.
Enter the username and password that you used to set up the site in Lesson 3.
Check the Remember Me box if you would like your browser to remember the password and enter it automatically in future. (Depending on your browser, this may also required you to click another button in the next step).
This will bring up your site's WordPress back office. This is where you will be doing all of your work on the site.
The first thing you are going to do is install The Thrive Suite.
Click on the Resource Plugins and Thrive at the end of this lesson for detailed instructions on plugins in general and Thrive in particular.
If you've implemented the steps covered in Plugins and Thrive, you should have the Thrive Product Manager as a WordPress menu item.
Click on the menu item Product Manager.
This will bring up a list of Thrive products that you can install.
At this stage, you are going to install Thrive Theme Builder (so you can set up how your website is going to look) and Thrive Architect (so that you can create attractive pages and posts easily).
Click the check boxes next to these two products.
Click the Install Selected Products (2) button.
After a little while, you should see that Thrive Architect is installed and ready to use and that Thrive Theme Builder is installed and ready to be activated.
Click the Activate Thrive Theme Builder button.
When the Thrive Theme Builder is activated, click on the Thrive Dashboard in the WordPress menu to the left.
This will show you the two installed Thrive products, Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme.
Click the Theme Options button.
Your first option is to use a theme to base your theme builder on.
You can experiment with these options further down the track, but for the purposes of illustration, we are going to use the Kwik theme.
On the Kwik theme image, click the Choose button.
You are now ready to run the Theme Builder wizard.
There are many, many options that you can choose here to make your website attractive and unique.
In order to get going quickly, I'm going to run through the wizard in the next lesson using particular selections that should work nicely for you.
You can change any of these at any time and they will have immediate site-wide effect. This means you can easily make changes that improve your entire site as you learn and grow.
Click the Get Started button and proceed to the next lesson Using the Thrive Theme Builder.
Outcomes
At the end of this lesson, you should have
- Created a business logo
- Deleted the WordPress default page and post
- Installed the Thrive Product Manager
- Used the Thrive Product Manager to Install the Thrive Theme Builder and Thrive Architect.