Category: Blog

The current best BlueHost promo is $1.99 per month for 12 months of the Basic plan.

The Basic plan has everything you need to start your website or blog:

• Free domain registration (for the first year)
• Free personalized email addresses
• Free SSL
• Hosting for up to 10 websites

1. Click here to get the BlueHost discount price of $1.99 per month and then click “get started now”.

Disclosure: The Blog Starter receives a commission when you purchase with the above BlueHost coupon code link.

2. Select your plan. The BlueHost Basic plan is the one I recommend for anyone starting a new website or blog. Click “Select” to choose your plan.

3. Type in your domain name and then click “next” to see if it is available.

4. If the domain is unavailable you will be given a list of similar domain names that are available. You can choose one of the suggested domains or you can continue without selecting a domain for now.

5. Next you will need to put in your account and billing details.

6. The you will need to choose your service term. Select the 12 month package to get the promotional price. No need to add a coupon code, as it is already applied.

Here is a full video walkthrough of the process of using a BlueHost coupon to get a discount on your hosting package:

For help installing and configuring WordPress on your new BlueHost account, you can follow one of my free tutorials here:

• WordPress website tutorial
• WordPress blog tutorial

One of the benefits of having your own domain for your blog is that you can setup a custom email address with your domain name. So if your domain name is “PatsBlog.com” you can create an address like pat@patsblog.com or info@patsblog.com. This is a professional email address that is great for all bloggers, but especially those looking for a business email address to give to customers.

If you used the process I outline in Step 2 to setup your blog, you can create personalized email addresses for no additional charge. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the BlueHost homepage and click the “Login” tab on the top right.

2. Enter your details to login to your BlueHost cPanel.

• Keep in mind that your password for your BlueHost account may be different than for your WordPress blog.
• If you don’t remember your password you can always use the “forgot password” link on this page to reset it.

3. Once you are logged-in click the “Advanced” tab in the left sidebar.

4. Scroll down and click “Email Accounts”

5. Click the blue “+CREATE” button on the right.

6. Enter the details for your new email account and click the “+CREATE” button at the bottom of the page.

• 100MB storage space is enough to start, and will last you awhile unless you are getting lots of emails with large attachments.

7. Now that your account is created you can login to start using it.

• The easiest way to do that is to go back to the BlueHost homepage. Just click the login tab at the top right, and then choose the “webmail login” option.

If you are feeling more technically adventurous, you can also checkout the “forwarding” and “autoresponders” sections in the BlueHost email manager. These are very useful tools that I will go over in a future blog post.

This article goes into the details of how to start a food blog. You will want to have your basic blog set up before reading this article. For the basics of creating a new blog of any kind (including a food blog), check out my free blogging tutorial first, and then come back to this article later.

If you have a passion for cooking or exploring new culinary venues, food blogging can turn out to be a fun and profitable way to become part of an active community of others who share your favorite hobby. If you have some good writing skills, there’s no reason you can’t succeed in this increasingly popular niche, particularly if you focus on a specific area and a carefully targeted audience.

Just like many other popular niches, such as travel or fashion, food is a broad topic, and with the right approach and a well-formulated plan, you should be able to find your unique voice and fill a gap in the marketplace. Food blogging is not just about posting recipes: other content, such as restaurant reviews, tips and tricks, shopping guides and even purely visual content can also find a place on a successful blog.

Why Start a Food Blog?

There are many pros and cons of starting a food blog but, with the right approach, many of the drawbacks can also be seen as advantages. Since everyone’s tastes are very different when it comes to food, you’re bound to end up dealing with both praise and criticism in more-or-less equal measures, but it’s a highly social subject that people love to talk about. Most importantly, blogging about food presents the perfect complement to your hobby, since it motivates you to experiment more in the kitchen and further your knowledge in the subject. You’ll get ideas and inspiration during your research as well as through the comments your readers leave on posts. Once your blog becomes widely known, you might even have businesses offering you a free meal in return for a write-up. Alternative, you may even end up being able to use your website as a base from which to write a cookbook or take advantage of other opportunities such as writing for a newspaper or magazine.

Who Should Publish a Food Blog?

Some people are great writers and others are great cooks or food connoisseurs, but you don’t need to be either to have a successful food blog.  What is necessary is a genuine passion in your hobby that will keep you cooking and sharing your experiences with your readers. For a wider reach, you can often merge food with another niche, such as travel or lifestyle, to narrow your focus.

In terms of the more technical aspects, such as registering a web address and setting up WordPress, starting a food blog is just like starting any other blog. However, unlike some niches, food is particularly visual in nature. If you’re planning to show off your own recipes and ideas, you’ll really need to hone your photography skills, since you won’t be able to simply lift images from elsewhere on the Web. You’ll also need to clearly define your target audience and be wary of deviating from your established plan. Finally, and most importantly, you’ll need to keep on cooking so that your readers will have fresh content on a regular basis.

How to Start Your Food Blog

Once you’ve decided on a specific topic to blog about, you’ll be ready to register your domain name and purchase a hosting package. To help maximize your visibility in the search engines, be sure to choose a short and relevant domain name that people won’t have any trouble remembering. An excellent domain name for your food blog should be creative while also being descriptive.  See Step #1 of my guide for more info on finding a good blog name.

Having a self-hosted WordPress site is by far the best choice for starting a blog. Powering around a fifth of all websites, WordPress is the most popular and user-friendly publishing platform for bloggers. It features numerous themes and plugins, and it’s completely free thanks to its open-source nature. To make things easier, many major hosting companies, such as Bluehost, provide a one-click WordPress hosting service whereby your blog will be up and running as soon as you’ve registered a domain and chosen your hosting package.

A self-hosted WordPress blog provides numerous advantages including excellent customization options. In fact, WordPress is used not only for blogs, but also for e-commerce stores, online news portals, static webpages and much more. Being open-source and frequently updated, WordPress sites also tend to do well in the search engines. You can further enhance the platform’s search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities by installing the free plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast. Just make sure to keep the platform and any themes and plugins you use up-to-date at all times. You will receive an alert in your administrator dashboard whenever new updates are available.

Recommended Themes for Your Food Blog

Once you have WordPress up and running, you’ll be ready to start customizing your site and publishing content but, before you get started, you’ll want to improve its user experience and give it a distinct look and feel by choosing the perfect theme. There are literally thousands available, including a number of premium themes. The sheer amount of options can make it difficult to find the right theme, so feel free to experiment a bit. Most importantly, always stick with responsive themes that scale automatically to different screen sizes so your blog remains user-friendly and easily readable on all Internet-enabled devices. If you’re having trouble finding a suitable theme for your food blog, take a look at the following for some inspiration:

Food Blog

One of the few premium themes specifically designed for food bloggers, the aptly named ‘Food Blog’ theme is fully responsive and built using the latest HTML5 technology. It also comes with the Recipe Card plugin, which can help significantly when it comes to food-related keyword optimization.

Publication

Although this free theme for WordPress is suitable for a wide range of lifestyle-related niches, the large header it provides makes it excellent for food bloggers seeking a magazine-style design featuring an eye-catching header image. Highly visually orientated, it also sports a convenient responsive design.

Foodeez Lite

While designed with restaurants, hotels and other such venues in mind, the highly visual nature of Foodeez Lite also makes it an excellent choice for a food blog, particularly those that deal with image slideshows and other image content. It sports a full-width header image and thumbnail previews for posts.

iCook

Featuring plenty of whitespace to help showcase your posts and recipe photos, this premium theme sports a filterable recipe gallery and a sidebar widget for automatically displaying your most popular recipes. It’s also extensively customizable and responsive.

Zylyz

A free theme specifically designed with food bloggers in mind, Zylyz is an excellent choice for any recipe website. You can display large images of your featured recipes in the slideshow header, and it allows you to create custom post types, taxonomies and meta box data.

Recommended Plugins for Your Food Blog

Plugins can enhance the functionality of your blog in a multitude of ways. While there are some plugins that every blog should have, such as WordPress SEO, XML Sitemaps and W3 Total Cache, there are a few others that are particularly well-suited to food blogs:

WP Ultimate Recipe

The appropriately named WP Ultimate Recipe is one of the most popular free plugins for food bloggers. It provides everything you need to attach recipes to posts and, using shortcodes, you can embed multiple recipes in the same post. You can also add ingredients, courses and cuisine types to your tag cloud widget.

Pinterest Pin It Button for Images

This small and simple plugin provides an essential functionality for your blog in the form of a Pin It button on your images. Rather than relying solely on social sharing buttons at the bottom of posts, this plugin allows your visitors to share images on Pinterest simply by clicking on them.

Nextgen Gallery

Being a visually demanding topic, any plugin that helps to enhance the images and the way they are displayed can be very useful for a food blog. Nextgen Gallery is a powerful tool for uploading and managing your image collections as well as displaying them in the form of slideshows or thumbnails accompanying your posts.

Unit Converter

A successful food blog normally targets a global audience, making it important to provide both metric and imperial measurements. This plugin automatically detects units of measurement written in your posts, and it will convert them automatically when readers mouse over them.

Promoting Your Blog

Starting your food blog is only the first part of the battle. You’ll have to focus on providing regular quality content to your readers as well as publicizing your blog. Becoming a master of the visual social media sites, such as Instagram and Pinterest, is particularly important at this point, and you’ll need to maintain an active presence on both of them to give yourself the best chance of success.  Check out Step #6 of my guide for more info on how to promote your blog.

The theme you’ve chosen to represent your website often has controls in the WordPress customizer allowing you to design the main menu and header to your liking. But sometimes these controls don’t provide everything you need to really make your menu stand out.

Here are some stand-alone tips and tricks to implement to make your main menu look amazing.

Display Hierarchy With a Dropdown Menu

Displaying your menu in a traditional dropdown format is a built-in feature with WordPress. Almost every theme will be compliant with the dropdown feature, enabling you to provide your end users with an easy-to-understand navigation system that helps them find what they’re looking for quickly.

In the backend of WordPress under Appearance > Menus, you can add the selected pages from the left to your main menu on the right. To have selected pages show within a dropdown under another selected page, simply move that page by dragging and dropping it slightly to the right under the selected item.

You can make your dropdown even deeper by adding another item under the first dropdown, indenting this item as well, to increase the hierarchy. The above example would look like this on the live site:

Hovering over Resources drops down to the next set of menu items, and hovering over the first item displays the next set of items to the left.

**Note: How your dropdown displays is theme dependent.**

Add Icons to Your Menu

Adding Font Awesome icons to your menu is easy to do and makes your menu stand out!

First, download and activate the Shortcode in Menus plugin in your plugin manager.

Then download and activate the Font Awesome plugin.

Now it’s time to search for the icons you want to appear in your menu. Go to the Font Awesome website and search for an appropriate icon.

Click on the icon you like and notate the name of this icon. Now, back in your menu settings, add the icon shortcode from the Font Awesome plugin to the navigation label for any menu item.

You can add the shortcode before or after the menu item name. Replace the code below with your page name and your icon name.

Don’t forget to save!

Make Your Menu Sticky

A sticky menu adheres to the top of the pages as the end user scrolls. This keeps the navigation at the user’s fingertips. Many themes will provide a sticky header as an option, but in case that option is not available, you can make your menu sticky with some custom CSS.

In your dashboard, head to Appearance > Customize. Click “Additional CSS” and add the following code:

#main-menu {
   z-index:199;
   margin:0 auto;
   border-bottom:1px solid #000000;
   width:100%;
   position:fixed;
   top:0;
   left:0;
   right:0;
}

Replace #main-menu with the CSS class of your navigation menu which will differ depending on your theme. You can find the class by hovering over your menu and right-clicking on “Inspect”.

If you would rather not deal with CSS, you can simply install the plugin My Sticky Menu for an easy, plug-and-play option to create a sticky menu.

Show/Hide Menu Items Based on User

The most common example of this would be to show a Login and/or Join Now tab in the menu for non-logged-in users, and a Logout tab for logged-in users while any Login or Join Now tabs are hidden for the logged-in user.

In the Plugin Manager of the dashboard, download and activate User Menus – Nav Menu Visibility.

Back in your menu settings, you can create your Login, Join Now, and Log Out Buttons. You may have a separate page for a user login and for joining. For a Logout Button, create a menu item using the “Custom Links” selection.

The universal WordPress logout link to add is:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php?action=logout

Make sure you use your domain name and the correct http version (http vs https).

Once you have these tabs created, you can hide or show them based on the user’s state. Under “Who Can See This Link?”, choose a Logged In or Logged Out User.

Membership sites can hide or show menu items based on user role for further visibility options.

Add Hover Effects

A hover effect can change the menu item tab text or background color – or both! All you need to do is add some custom css in Appearance > Customize > Custom CSS. Here is an example:

#main-menu  li.menu-item a:hover {   background-color:#ffe6f2;   color:#cc0066;   border-radius:5px;   border: 1px solid #cc0066;   padding-top: 20px;   padding-bottom: 20px;   padding-right: 10px;   padding-left: 10px;   Margin-bottom: 10px; }

Replace #main-menu with the CSS class of your navigation menu which will differ depending on your theme. You can find the class by hovering over your menu and right-clicking on “Inspect”.

The example above would produce this hover effect when hovering over the Portfolio tab.

Customize a Single Menu Item

You can easily create custom CSS for a single menu item by assigning that menu item a CSS class. In the menu settings, click on Screen Options at the very top right of the screen.

Tick the box for CSS Classes which is unchecked by default. Then save the menu settings.

There will now be a new text box underneath each menu item. Here, you can assign a different CSS class for each and every menu item. In this example, we added the class “services-menu” to the menu item “Services”.

Now you can add your custom CSS to Appearance > Customize > Custom CSS section. I can use the same CSS above using this class.

**Note: You would not need to add li.menu-item as an identifier since you have already assigned an individual class.**

.services_menu a:hover {
  background-color:#ffe6f2;
  color:#cc0066;
  border-radius:5px;
  border: 1px solid #cc0066;
  padding-top: 20px;
  padding-bottom: 20px;
  padding-right: 10px;
  padding-left: 10px;
  Margin-bottom: 10px;
}

This produces the same result as above, but only for this menu item.

Final Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed this compilation of unique tips and tricks to customize your WordPress menu. Have you tried some of these ideas? Do you have other favorite tricks you like to employ? Let us know in the comments below!