How to create a blog on WordPress free using Cenote theme?
Blogging is an integral part of online content these days. Sharing information, personal experiences, opinions, achievements and more has never been easier and ensuring that this content is read by other people is an important part of blogging.
So in order to improve the presentation factor, accessibility of your content and the overall satisfaction of any of your readers, ThemeGrill presents you with a modern and beautiful blogging-oriented theme, Cenote.
Cenote is the product of ThemeGrill’s effort to create a magnificent and modern theme capable of easy allowing any blog author to create various types of content from videos to photos to textual blogs and ensuring that this blog can be presented in an inspiring yet easy to read manner.
The theme is filled with multiple tools and features, from demo importers to color options to customizations and we here at Beautiful Themes will be looking at these features and the way to implement them on your blogs.
Cenote and its strength
Cenote is, in essence, a blogging theme and thus it is filled with elements created for blog sites. Thus we’ll be looking at the basic process of building a blog using all its features in this post. The core features Cenote provides us with are :
- Elegant and highly responsive theme
- Highly customizable theme design
- Multiple Typography options
- Pre-built content layouts, designs, and formats
- Individual customization of content order for both pages and posts
- Various header and footer customization features
How to create a blog on WordPress
First of let’s create the base to build our blog. Once you have your domain name chosen and bought, choose a hosting service. These articles list a few great suggestions from our side:
Once your site is ready, you can go ahead and install WordPress on your website. This article of ours provides a great amount of information about it and you can consider reading this if you are new to WordPress.
Once WordPress is ready to go, we can install Cenote. First, download the theme file from here. To install it, refer to the Appearance section of the Wp-admin page and click on Add New button the top of the page.
Then click on Upload theme and use the Choose file button to browse the downloaded file and finish by clicking on Install now. Once it is done, activate the theme to start working on your blog.
If you need more details about the process of installing themes, refer to here.
Importing demos:
If you want, you can use ThemeGrill’s Demo importer plugin to instantly use pre-made site designs, images, theme settings and widgets and modify them to instantly start working on your website.
Once you are done installing, you will be prompted to install ThemeGrill demo importer. Simply click on the Begin installing plugin to install it. Then activate it to start importing your customized demos.
Once the plugin is activated, you can use the Demo importer by using the Demo Importer section on the Appearance page. For explaining the entire process involved in importing demos using this plugin, we’ve created a short video you can watch:
Customizing the Blog
Now that you have imported the demo, we’re ready to start customizing the blog to your preferences. Open the customizer for your theme to get started.
The main elements we modify for our blog using this theme are:
Social:
Here we insert our social media links such as Facebook, Twitter. By default we are given the social icons for Twitter and Facebook, you can simply insert your page URLs for the respective websites to enable these links.
If you want to add more, simply use the Add new Social profile button and insert Profile name, URL link and respective website’s icon to create the link. Multiple icon options have given for various sites such as Deviantart, Blogger, Google plus, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. Cenote also lets you use a custom image for the icons as well. Thus, using this section you can glorify the social media aspect of your website.
Header:
Headers are a core part of your website as they are the first thing your viewers lay their eyes on. So essentially you want it to be as attractive and full of important links as possible.
Cenote allows you to hide or show the Header top. This top can be modified to have links to various pages and posts on your website using the menus section in the customizer. Furthermore, you can re-arrange the order of the items in the header top as well.
Cenote also comes with a sticky menu you can enable or disable using this section as well as a search icon. Header layout can be changed to have a distinctive line between the menu and after the header section as well.
Color:
Here you can change the primary color or the accent color of your website. This can have quite an impact on the presentation of your website and by using the right kind of typography and font design you can create an amazing blog using this.
Breadcrumbs:
The theme comes with an inbuilt feature to enable Breadcrumb trails on your website. You can enable or disable it through this section. Breadcrumbs can be quite helpful on blogs with a large amount of content so that your readers won’t be lost In the myriad of posts and are aware of the section of content they are reading.
Layout:
Next, we can select the default layout for your pages and posts. Cenote lets you individually choose the layout for archive/blog layouts, single posts as well as site-wide layout. You can choose boxed or wide layouts as well as the position of the sidebar here.
Typography:
Textual content can be a major part of your blogs, our blog could be a good example here. Thus beautifying your logo and texts can go a long way to impress your readers. Cenote lets you easily change the font of both your headings as well as your body using the Typography section of the theme options.
You can choose from multiple fonts as well as their variants to choose what fits your website and its nature of posts.
Blog/Archive:
This section allows you to choose the style in which your blogs and archives are displayed. You can choose 3 different styles as well as add more modification to the styles such as Drop cap for the first text on a post and change column number.
Page Content Order
Here can simply drag and drop the items inside a page to reorder their arrangement. You can choose the order of your Title, Thumbnail, Content, and footer and change them according to the design in your mind.
Single post
These are modifications you can apply to the items inside a Single post. This includes re-arrangement of the item order, a drop cap option to Capitalize and Bold the first letter of the post as well as enabling Author boxes and Related posts section.
These fields can be quite useful In blogs, and the theme streamlines the process to enable or disable them.
Footer style:
The theme also lets you choose between two Footer styles and enable a Back to Top button on the right.
These are the core options the theme provides that you can change for your website. The rest of the options can be modified to define your website:
Site identity:
This section lets you define your website’s identification details. This includes website name, Logo, tagline as well as Site icon.
Colors:
Here you can choose the background color of your website.
Header image:
The header image section lets you change the header image and add/modify the description box to the header. You can change the description Title, Text as well as add a button for a specific action on the description box.
Background image:
As the name suggests, this section exists to allow you add a background image on your website instead of a simple background color.
Menus:
Here you can add various menus and menu items. Separate headers can be made for the header top section as well as a primary section.
Widgets:
This section lets you add widgets to distinct sections of your website. You can choose from 4 footer options and sidebar as the location. To learn about the process of using and installing widgets you can consider reading this article.
Homepage settings:
Here you can choose whether your home page shows a static page that you can define yourself or a list of latest posts on your websites. You can also choose what the home page and blog page can be from here if you choose to use a static page.
Concluding:
Thus by using all these details and options provided by Cenote you can easily build a magnificent WordPress blog capable of fulfilling any possible purpose. You can also use the provided post formats to build various different content types on your website and diversify your posts.
Furthermore, if you find yourself in confusing regarding any part of the theme or its options, you can refer to its detailed documentation to solve your issues.
If you finish the entire process, you should have a functioning blog website on your hands, ready to be filled with all the ideas, concepts and experiences you can come up with. However, there are many other things you can improve upon, many of which we will explore on our blog ourselves. For starters, some of the articles you can take a look at are:
- How to add Header images in WordPress?
- Disabling Comments in a WordPress post
- How to change the Font size in WordPress?
