WordPress for Beginners

James Bonham

 @jamesbonham / LinkedIn

What We'll Cover

• What and Why

• Your Visitors

• Install & Setup

• Choose a Theme

• Pages & Posts

• Menus & Widgets

• Get Writing

• Plugins

• Useful Settings

• Useful Links

What

What are you going to create?

• Blog
• News/magazine
• Company profile
• Hobby project
• A community
• A webshop

Start simple.

Why

Why do you need this website? What is the number one aim of the site?

• Deliver information
• Get more leads/sign-ups
• Sell a product
• Personal reflection
• Just to learn WordPress! 

Your Visitors

1. Who are they? (personas)
2. Why do they care?
3. What do they like?
4. What are they currently missing out on?

Install & Setup

• WordPress consists of files (core code) and a database (for storing your content).
• You'll need a domain name and a web host.
• Otherwise, the files can be uploaded by FTP, and a blank database set up in the web hotel admin panel.
• Many web hosts offer 1-click installs.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Choose a Theme

Themes are all about how your content is presented.

Via themes in the administration panel or at https://wordpress.org/themes/

Or a commercial theme provider, like...

WooThemes, Organic Themes, Elma Studio,

Elegant Themes

Or build your own (or get someone else to)!

Pages & Posts

Pages: Usually without date, sometimes updated.

About, Our Services, Contact

Posts: Always dated, rarely updated.

Blog post, News item

Other "Post Types": Extra types beyond pages and posts

Products, Cases, Events, Properties

Menus & Widgets

Menus

1. Custom-built, not automatically generated from the existing pages.
2. Create your content first, then add it to the menu.
3. Can be assigned to a pre-set position in the theme.

Widgets

1. Any extra thing outside the content area that is not a menu is likely to be a widget.
2. It is small chunks of content maintained centrally.

Get Writing

1. Use heading 2 as the first heading level in the text, then heading 3 under that.
2. Use the dedicated buttons for pasting text in from Word or similar. Format your text directly in WordPress.
3. Watch out for stray spaces and empty paragraphs.
4. Find out what image sizes work best for your theme. Landscape 16:9 is often a good start.
5. WordPress automatically crops your images to various size after uploading.
6. WordPress backs up revisions as you type :-)

Plugins

Easily add new features. Suggested first plugins:

Yoast SEO   Sucuri Security

See Plugins in the admin or visit...

https://wordpress.org/plugins/

Be careful with plugins not from the official wordpress.org repository. Always buy premium plugins from the original authors.

Useful Settings

• General: titles, admin e-mail, timezone, date format 
• Reading: Important screen for determining if the blog should be the front page or a regular page. Also for pagination and visibility on search engines.
• Discussion: Comment settings
• Permalinks: What URLs get used. You can change the paths here.
• Customizer: There will likely be useful settings for you theme.

Useful Links

• Set up a your first test site...
  • on your computer: with Bitnami Stack https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress (choose Local Install - and maybe "No Thanks...") 
  • in the cloud: with qSandbox http://qsandbox.com/
• Good beginner resources...
  • Support and docs https://wordpress.org/support/
  • http://www.wpbeginner.com/
  • Lynda.com tutorials http://www.lynda.com/search?q=wordpress
  • Good source of photos http://tinyurl.com/hbrfvks