Adding a New Post in WordPress

Posts are the lifeline of a blog. Once you are done with the initial setup of your blog, most of your time would be spent adding posts to it.

On your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find Posts on the left sidebar, near the top.

In this lesson, we’ll quickly look at the very basic stuff regarding posts (title, formatting etc) first and then go on to actually publish a post so you can see how easy it all is.

Let’s get rolling.

Head to Posts -> Add New. Your screen should look like the one below:

Creating Your First Post

The main stuff first:

Title Box

At the top, is a textbox that says “Enter title here”. This is where you enter the title of your post. To see an example of a post’s title, look above – “Adding a New Post in WordPress” is the title of this post that you are currently reading.

Once you fill in your title, clicking anywhere outside the title box will cause a “permalink” detail to materialize underneath it with a button next to it that says Change Permalinks (unless you’ve already changed that). This permalink is what the web address of your post would be, once you publish it.… ...Continue Reading

Creating Your Site’s Content – WordPress Posts vs Pages

Pages and Posts are the two primary ways of creating content on a WordPress site. While any content can be added both as a page or a post, choosing the more appropriate one for the content in question can make it easier for you to organize and display the information on your site in a visitor-friendly way. This would directly translate to your site’s visitors finding it easier and more intuitive in locating that piece of information on your website.

There are subtle differences between a page and a post and often beginners (and sometimes even seasoned webmasters!) get confused fighting with the ‘post vs page’ dilemma. I discuss more about “types of content” as well as “ways of organizing information” below with examples to make the concept clearer.

For the benefit of complete beginners, I first give a brief background of pages and posts and show how WordPress adopted them. If you aware of it all, feel free to skip over to the properties of pages and posts below.

A Brief Introduction To Pages And Posts

Let’s consider an imaginary furniture business’s website. It has web pages describing the products offered by the company, history of the company, the team behind the business, the shop location and contact details.… ...Continue Reading

Setting Your WordPress Site’s Name and Tagline

Now that you have had an overview of some of the things you can do with your WordPress website, it’s time to get into action.

As a starting point, let’s set the website’s name, which would appear at the top of the site. We will also set the tagline. The tagline is usually a short text that adorns the site’s name.

For example, have a look at this site’s name on the top left of this page – it is “Make A Website” and the tagline that you can see just below it is “Yourself, Like a Pro”.

Based on which installation script you used for installing WordPress, the site name and tagline could already have been set. For example, if you used Softaculous it asks you for your site name and description during installation and hence both of these reflect on your site the very first time you view it. SimpleScripts, on the other hand, just sets your site name and leaves the description to be the default ‘Just another WordPress blog’. Either way, let’s just set it newly so you know how it is done and can do it whenever you want to.

The following is an image of a fresh WordPress installation.… ...Continue Reading

Exploring The WordPress Dashboard

The dashboard is the first thing that greets you when you login to your WordPress website. Much like a car’s dashboard, this screen gives you a quick overview of the important parameters of your site. Everything you’d need while building and maintaining your site can be accessed from here.

WordPress Dashboard Preview

The dashboard invites you to ‘Customize Your Site’ and you could dive into that right away if you want to. However, if this is the first time you’ve setup WordPress, it might serve you better to get an overview of the various sections of the dashboard before you really start tweaking your site.

So let’s look at all the sections one by one. You might come across terms that you don’t understand right away, but that’s ok – we are just having a very brief overview here so you get an idea of the basic things that you can do while building your website. I’ll be covering each one of these in detail in the remaining lessons, so you’ll get a firm understanding of everything.

At the top of the screen is a grey colored bar called the Admin Bar containing a few convenience links while the sidebar on the left is broken down in to a number of sections, each of which deals with a particular action or an aspect of your site.… ...Continue Reading

Logging In To WordPress

Before you can start creating content and modifying your website, you have to login to your WordPress website’s admin area. This is a very small step, nevertheless, some beginners get stumped at this point.

If you installed WordPress on yourdomain.com, head over to:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

You’ll see the following screen asking for a username and password. During the installation, you created an admin username and a password, remember? Use those here on this screen to login.

WordPress Login Screen

Once you login, you will be shown the WordPress dashboard. This is the cockpit from where you control your entire website.

WordPress Dashboard Preview

In the next lesson, we’ll explore the dashboard and the various things we can do from it. Get ready to take off!… ...Continue Reading

How to Install WordPress

There are two ways to install WordPress on your domain name.

The first is to login to your web hosting control panel and install WordPress using an installation script. This is a simple-click-through process.

The other way is slightly more elaborate. It requires manually downloading WordPress from www.wordpress.org, uploading it to your web hosting account space using a file transfer utility and then installing it. You might also have to deal with a few technical things like executing programming commands and the like.

While the second (manual) method allows you to customize a few settings before you do the installation, you run the risk of getting it wrong if you make even a small mistake (like missing a single letter in a command).

Since this tutorial is for beginners, I will show you the easier way of doing it through your web hosting control panel that is less prone to beginners’ mistakes. Some installation scripts don’t allow you to tweak some of the complex settings before or during the installation, but that’s ok – you should be able to do them once the installation is over and I’ll cover those in a later lesson.

What are Installation Scripts?

Installation scripts are “software” that help you install other software like blogging or forum frameworks on your domain name.… ...Continue Reading

Getting Started With WordPress

Before you can create a WordPress blog or website, you will require two things: a domain name and web hosting space.

The domain name is essentially the web address people use to reach your website, just like you use makeawebsite.tv to reach this site you are currently on. I use Namecheap to buy my domain names and you can consider them too. If you have never registered a domain name before and need help, you might find this guide on registering a domain name helpful.

The next thing you need is web hosting. Hosting companies essentially give you the space to store your website and it’s related files on secure servers that are connected to the Internet 24×7, so anyone anywhere can reach your website whenever they want. For WordPress, you’ll require a web host that provides Linux hosting and supports the following:

PHP version 5.2.4 or greater
MySQL version 5.0 or greater

PHP is the programming language in which WordPress is written and MySQL is the database software it uses to store all your website related information. Don’t worry if you don’t know or understand anything about PHP or MySQL. It’s not necessary because we won’t directly deal with them but just make sure that your web host provides them.… ...Continue Reading

How to Link a Domain Name to Your Web Host (or Website)

Point a Domain Name

You have a domain name.

You have web hosting.

You want to “connect” or point your domain name to your web hosting account. And then start building your website.

Neat.

We’ll see how to do that in this article.

Just one small digression though. I sometimes see beginners asking on forums whether they need web hosting in order to create a website. Some of them tend to think that a domain name is all that is needed for a website. Let’s clear the confusion before we venture ahead.

Well, you do need web hosting. Your website is in reality a collection of web pages (or files). In order to keep these website files and make them accessible to anyone on the internet, you need space on a web server. A web server is a powerful computer that is connected to the internet 24×7 often through high bandwidth infrastructure. This space on a web server is provided to you by web hosting companies.

A domain name is just a name, nothing more.

However, there are free blogging and other services like wordpress.com, Tumblr and Blogger that allow you to create a blog or a site on their own web servers.… ...Continue Reading

How to Register a Domain Name

Registering a Domain Name

Getting a domain name is the first step in launching a website. It plays a central part – it’s what visitors use to reach your website. It has to be unique (and hopefully easy to remember) and once you start a website, you won’t usually change it’s domain name for the website’s lifetime.

The most popular domain name extension (the ending of a domain name) is .com (“dot com”). There are a whole lot of other domain extensions like .net, .org, .co.uk and so on. Formally, these domain extensions are called Top Level Domains (TLD).

Each of these domain extensions carries a meaning: .com stands for ‘company’ or ‘commercial’, .net stands for ‘network’ and .org stands for ‘organisation’. There are also extensions which represent country or geographical regions. For example, .co.uk represents UK, .com.au stands for Australia, .de stands for Germany, co.in stands for India and so on. These country/region specific TLDs are called ccTLDs (“country code top level domains”).

You should decide on what extension you want before you register a domain name. For example, abc.com is a different domain from abc.net or abc.co.uk and hence each of these domain names could lead to different websites and could be owned by different people.… ...Continue Reading

The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Domain Name

The Domain Name Dilemma

…for your business, personal website or your cat’s online journal.

The domain name is an important aspect of any website. It’s like a person’s name. Once made official, you’re pretty much stuck with it for life (or the website’s life). Changing it in the midst is possible, but comes with a truckload of issues.

That makes it only reasonable that you put in some diligent thought in choosing a good domain name for your website.

This article, I hope, will help you do that.

One point though. There are no hard rules or laws that determine the goodness of a domain name. There is no science behind it. There are only guidelines, or more correctly, opinions. This article has mine. Ultimately it’s what you make it to be.

Things evolve over time. The world of domain names has changed a lot in the past decade and it will in the next one as well. New trends will emerge. Rules will change.

That said, I do believe that these factors have the potential to give an initial edge to your website and to make a positive difference to it’s success.

Sometimes, the importance of a guideline also varies depending upon the type of website you want to create.… ...Continue Reading

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