Hello and welcome to our series of technology-related blog posts about hosting a piano studio website on SiteGround. This is the last part of the series. Following our tutorials, you have successfully created a hosting account, configured it and installed WordPress. All that is left is to upload your content, but before doing so you need to configure WordPress first. And thanks to developers from SiteGround you have everything you need for that. It is called WordPress Starter. And it is another wizard-like configuration tool.
Theme
First and foremost you pick a theme for your piano studio website. The idea is not to find a theme with the right content for your piano studio as all the content will be replaced by you anyway, but rather the right layout. The collection of fancy designs can be overwhelming at first, but take your time and check them all out one by one before you make your final decision.
You can click on the theme and review it first before clicking Select. You will also be able to change your theme later, therefore, pick the one you like the most today and tomorrow you can change it again!
Once you click the Select button you might see a dialogue like the one below. Do not panic as this is just another nice feature of the Starter tool which guides you through the installation process. In this particular case installation of the Elementor plugin which is used by the theme.
Plugins
One of the most powerful features of WordPress is its open plug-in architecture. There are thousands of plugins out there and each one of them can bring various great features to your piano studio website. WordPress Starter gives you a list of recommended ones. The theme you have picked might have a few options.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we go with Contact Form and Calendar as those are the most probable features you need on a piano studio website and your list might be slightly different.
Jetpack plugin
Another useful plugin is Jetpack. This plugin is from WordPress itself and it brings a lot of basic functionality to your website. Most of it is invisible to the customers but very visible to you. The earlier you register for it the earlier you can start collecting valuable statistics. It also helps to optimize and secure your website. And all that for free. You won’t regret it, go for it!
Marketing Plugins
Another step brings up a couple of marketing-related plugins. Marketing plugins are not required immediately, but their importance cannot be overrated and we suggest you pick Google Analytics and Optimize for SEO. Note that they will require a few more steps to set up.
Click Complete and wait for a few minutes while WordPress Starter is configuring everything for you.
Once everything is installed and configured you are going to see congratulatory message telling you that your piano studio website is ready! Click on View Site and you will see it with your own eyes.
Coming soon…
WordPress Starter primes your piano studio website with sample data. It is the right time to display a “coming soon…” message on the home page of your brand-new website. This is a good practice to hide the website under construction with sample content until you feel fully confident that your website is ready for public launch. We have a step-by-step tutorial on how you can do that by the way.
Are we done?
Congratulations! You have achieved your goal and configured the piano studio website on SiteGround. We are really proud of you as you have done an amazing job setting up a hosting account and installing WordPress with its plugins. Your piano studio website is up and running now. The next step would be going through all the sample content and replacing it with your own. It is an important and tedious job. It will also take some time if you haven’t worked with WordPress before. The good news is all WordPress themes are very similar to one another and you just need to learn them once.
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned! Perhaps one day we write a more detailed series of tutorials on how to navigate WordPress and work with content, however, it is beyond the scope of this series of tutorials. Hope you enjoyed it and if so leave us a comment below and talk about us on social media. Thank you for your support!
