Word press to go how to build a wordpress website ( pdf drive )...

WordPress To Go
How To Build A WordPress Website On Your
Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A
Complete Beginner
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Table of Contents
Introduction
QUICK START GUIDE – YOUROWN WEBSITE IN 8 EASY
LESSONS
Lesson 1. Register Your Domain And Sign Up For Web Hosting
Lesson 2. Install Wordpress On Your Domain
Lesson 3. How To Log In And Out Of Wordpress
Lesson 4. The Design Of Your Wordpress Website
Lesson 5. First Steps To A Perfect Website
Lesson 6. Add Your First Wordpress Page
Lesson 7. Add Your First Wordpress Post
Lesson 8. All About Widgets
IN-DEPTH GUIDE – DRILL DOWN TO THE WONDERS OF
WORDPRESS
Lesson 9. Add Images To Your Wordpress Website
Lesson 10. Add A VideoTo Your Website
Lesson 11. The Power Of Text Widgets
Lesson 12. Custom Menus And Why You Should Use Them
Lesson 13. Set The Home Page Of Your Wordpress Website
Lesson 14. Choose And Change Your Wordpress Theme
Lesson 15. The Power Of Plugins
Lesson 16. Comments: Start A Dialogue With Your Visitors
Lesson 17. Users And Their Capabilities
Lesson 18. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Lesson 19. Behind The Scenes With HTML
Lesson 20. How To Be A Winning Wordpress Webmaster
Conclusion
About The Author
Introduction
Welcome!
Welcome to this WordPress beginner’s guide.

You are aboutto join thousands of other webmasters who have
used this book to build their own WordPress websites, from scratch,
even if they were complete beginners!
Before we start, let’s make one thing quite clear. This book is
deliberatelyshort.That’s because I want to take you through the
basicsof building your own website in the quickest manner possible.
I want you to learn speedily without getting distracted by
non-essentials or trivia. Sure, you can buy a 1,000-page bumper
WordPress guide that will turn you into a worldauthority(!) but it
won’thelp you get online any quicker.
What I will promise you is that, if you follow along the
lessons in this book, do exactly as I tell you (yes, Ma’am!),
step by step, then you’ll end up with your very own website that you
built yourself, even if this is the first time you have ever ventured
into the online world.
Why should I buildmy own website when I can easily
get online for free?
Having your own web presence is now pretty much essential in
today’s online world. Even teenagers have their own pageson
sites such as Facebook and the many other social networks. But the
problem is that these free site-building services can come and go,
change the rules without notice, and impose restrictions.Some
free services can shut your site down if they don’t approve of
your content.
Many will clutter up your site with trashy ads and your free
site can disappear overnight if the service goes bust or gets taken
over. And they offer little or no technical support when you really
need it.
So why should I buildmy own website on my own
domain?
The answer is that, with your own privately registered domain
and hosting account, YOU own and control the website, not
anybody else. You can put whatever you like on your site (within
the bounds of legality) and no-one can tell you otherwise.
You are your own boss.
And, with your own website, you can build your own distinctive ‘brand’,
whether you are a business or a community group, an
individual, or whatever… You can make your site look and behave
how you like, whether for e-commerce, or for publicity

purposes, as an information resource - or just a personal
blog.
Your domain becomes your very own exclusive web address, your
own piece of online virtual ‘real estate’ that plays its part in
publicizing your mission or message.
Thesedays, if you don’t have your own online web presence, you
are invisible.
You can print your domain address on your business cards,add it
to your email signature and quotein all your offline literature.
Your own website on your own domain gives you identity, visibility
and, indeed, status.
But don’t I needa professional web designer to make
a goodjob of building a website?
No, definitely not! This used to be the case in the early days of
the Internet because only a few tech-savvy geeks knew and understood
the computer language (HTML) that translated your words and
pictures into the code that browsers understand.
But as the technology has advanced, so have the tools to build
websites become more accessible. WordPress is one of these tools
and WordPress is the subject of this book.
What if I’m not a technical wizard – will I
understand all the jargon about web-building?
With this book you don’t need to know any jargon or gobbledygook
– I explain it all in plain English as we go along.
As you use the system it will begin to click into place and
you’ll understand what you need to know and what you don’t.
If you can use a word processor you can build your own
WordPress website – it’s that simple - I promise!
How much will it cost to do it all myself?
Peanuts. The only thing you absolutely have to spendmoney on is
web hosting and you can get this for a few dollars a
month.
For less than $10 per month you can get your web hosting
account from one of the top hosting companies on the planet.
Of course you can spendmoney on other tools and services if
you want, but, for a simple website that you build yourself you
really don’t need to spendany more money than that.
What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a powerful (and free!) package of software that
sits in the background on your web server (the remote
computer where your domain is hosted) and performs all
the technical processing that delivers your content to your visitor
on their local computer. Once WordPress is installed on your domain
you don’t need to do anything to make it work. It just sits
there and performs its magicentirely behind the scenes.
WordPress provides a WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you
get’) interface to you, the webmaster, that bypasses the need to
know any HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL or any other coding
language.
Once the hangout of hobbyists and bloggers, WordPress has now
evolved into a powerful and sophisticated web platform that
supports a host of features both for professional and do-it-
yourself webmasters.
The terms‘blog’ and ‘website’ are now effectively synonymous as far
as our usageof WordPress is concerned. Pundits use the two
termsinterchangeably because the technology platform behind both is
exactly the same.
WordPress is now actually used by some of the majorplayers on
the Internet as a complete
Content Management System (CMS). Think CNN, The New York
Times, About.com, the White House, US Post Office, and Ford
Motors - they all make use of WordPress.
And, in addition to the experts, millions of ordinary people
and small businesses around the worldalso use WordPress as their platform
of choice to get a presence on the web.
What’s so special aboutWordPress?
WordPress is FREE and open-source
WordPress is stableand maintained by an army of experts
WordPress contains numerous behind-the-scenes features that
make creating your own website a breeze
WordPress is wonderful, but it has a reputation for being difficult.
This is, in part, due to thedocumentation.
WordPress was originally written by programmers, for programmers,
and the instructions (‘codex’, as it’s termed) are often written in
tech-speak and seem to assume that you know what they are talking
aboutin the first place.This has improved in recent versions,

but it can still be a challenge if you are not a fully paid-up
techie.
I know all this. I’m a computer programmer myself. I
actually am a techie (and proudof it!) but I can also write
plain English. In this tutorial, I just concentrateon the basic
essentials of WordPress and ignore all the complications that
you don’t need to know when you’re first starting out.
How To Use This Tutorial
The best way to use this tutorial is to sit down at your PC
with this book beside you and follow each lesson, step by step.
Because WordPress is now so sophisticated and flexible, it
can sometimes be difficult for newcomers to see the wood from
the trees. So I have broken this tutorial down into two levels:
Quick Start Guide
In-Depth Guide.
The Quick Start Guide, covering Lessons 1 – 8, is intended
to get you up and running, building your own WordPress website,
mostly using the default settings, and avoiding as many of
the technicalities as possible.
Whenyou have completed lessons 1 – 8 you will have a
basic, working website that you can continue to build and use
without any further tweaking. For many people, this is all they
may ever need.
The In-Depth Guidetakes you further than just the basicsand
introduces some of the more sophisticated and functional options
that WordPress provides to help you make your website more efficient
and unique. Lessons 9 – 20 take the basic website that
you built in theQuick Start Guideand help you develop it on to
become a feature-richresource, tailored for your purposes.
FAQs (Frequently AskedQuestions) appear at the end of each lesson
and cover the main queries people often ask when they’ve read
the lesson. The FAQs may not be relevant to you but they
could just add a little bit of extra know-how when it is needed.
Whenyou’ve completed all twenty lessons you will have learned
all the basicsof building a WordPress website. You’ll be well-equipped
to discover for yourself any of the more advanced features
that you may wish to investigate.

And, when you’ve built your website, you are always welcome to
visit my website http://www.wordpress2go.com for more ideas and
resources.
Right, let’s get started!

QUICK START GUIDE – YOUR OWN WEBSITE IN 8
EASY LESSONS
Lesson 1. Register Your Domain And Sign Up For Web Hosting
This is the first step to getting your own web presence. But if
you already have a domain andhosting account you can skip
this lesson and go on to Lesson 2.
As I’ve already stated, this is the first and only place in
this tutorial where you will need to spend any money. Having
a reliable company to host your website is an essential
investment and it doesn’t cost mega-bucks. Once you have your
hosting account set up you can forget all aboutthe very
complex communications technology needed to support your website
because you’re paying somebody to provide it for you.
And, I promise you, if you go with the web hosting company
that I recommend, you will get a very good deal indeed.
If you have never done any of this before and you’re a bit
intimidated by all the jargon and tech-speak, don’t panic.Thereis a
mass of incomprehensiblegobbledygook associated with web hosting
and Internet technology but the good news is that you don’t need to
understand nor care aboutmost of it. Let me take you by the
hand and I will explain just what you do need to know as we
go along. To coin a cliché, it’s not rocket science.
Trust me.
Whenyou’ve completed this lesson you will have taken your first
giant leap into the online worldof web-building…

Choose Your Domain
OK, to begin, you need to decide on a domain. Your
domain name is your unique web address and it’s what people
will type into their browser to reach your website. So it’s a good
idea to make it a name that’s easy to remember and easy to
spell and that tells people what your website is all about. So
what sort of domain name should you have?
It is better to have a domain like ‘keepingchickens.com’
rather than ‘xyz101.com’ because it spells out to the worldprecisely
what your site is about. But your domain could be your own
name or nickname, or your business name or maybe a slogan
that describes your mission.
The .com extension is the most universally recognized suffix to a
domain name, but you could also have .net or .org, the latter
especially if you are a non-business organization. The .net
extension can be handy if the .com version of your domain
is already taken. And there’s also .us, .co, .biz, .info (and more)if
you want to look different. Plus, there are the country-specific domain
name extensions such as .uk, .au, .de - it’s your call.
You can register your chosen domain at the same time as
you sign up for web hosting.
Sign Up For Web Hosting
The hosting company that I recommendfor WordPress websites is
Hostgator
(www.hostgator4u.com). They have an awesome reputation for
reliability and customer service and they also offer very competitivepricing.
And they have the added advantage that they provide a handy
script for automatically installing WordPress on your domain. This is
really usefuland will save you a lot of time.
Hostgator offersseveral hosting plans and you can sign up for
periods of between 1 month and 3 years.If you sign up for
1 month you will pay your hosting fees monthly. If you
sign up for 1 year you will pay your hosting fees annually. As
you mightexpect, the longer you sign up for, the cheaper it
becomes. And you can pay via credit/debitcard or PayPal.

So, to set up your WordPress hosting with Hostgator, go to
www.hostgator4u.com (Figure
1.1) and click on ‘View Web Hosting Plans’
Now you have to choose whichhosting plan you want.
The’ Hatchling’ is the very cheapest plan, allowing you to
host just one domain on the service.
The ‘Baby’ plan is essentially the same service as the
Hatchling but with the Baby you can host an unlimited number
of domains on the same account without paying any extra.
This is for you to decide. If you decide to start off
with Hatchling, you can upgrade to Baby if you want to at
some time in the future.
Hostgator has a habit of offering amazing discounts on their
services and these may vary from time to time. But if you quote
the coupon code ‘WORDPRESS2GO’ Hostgator will know that you
are a reader of this book and they will give you the
maximum possible discount available at the time!

So, choose eitherthe ‘Hatchling’ or ‘Baby’ plan and click on
‘Order Now’.Enter your chosen domain name and don’t forget to
enter WORDPRESS2GO as the coupon code.
Then follow the prompts to complete the purchase process. I
recommendthat you select privacy protection for your domain because
this hides your identity from spammers.
You did it! You’ve nearly completed Lesson 1.
You’ve got your domain and a hosting account. Whenyou’ve
signed up with Hostgator, check your email. You’ll receive an
email from them with your account sign-in and password. It’s a
good idea to keep this email (or even print it out) so that you
have a record of your hosting details.
For security reasons Hostgator may want to telephone you after
you register to verify that you are the person who opened
the account, so please provide them with an easily accessible
phone number. (Or they mightask you to call them).
Don’t worry; they won’ttry to sell you anything: all they want is
to know that the account was opened by you (or with your
permission) and that you are a real person and not a robot.
This step is essential before you can access your account
and get started.
___
In the remainder of this tutorial I’m going to take you through
the creation of a WordPress website using my domain
‘1.keepingchickens.net’ as an example. I’ll start right at the beginning
and you’ll watchthe website unfold, lesson by lesson. If
you work alongside me, you can build your own site at the same
pace.
Lesson 2 assumes that you are starting out with a
Hostgator hosting account and that you don’t have the WordPress
software installed already.
I’ll show you how to installWordPress with just a few clicks of
the mouse and then you’ll be all set to begin building a
WordPress website!
FAQ
I live in the UK and I would rather use a UK-
based hosting company. Do I have to use the American
Hostgator?No, I can recommenda company calledJustHost who

are basedin the UK. They offer .uk domain names (as well as
those above) and all billingis in GBP (pounds sterling).
JustHost provides high-quality, low-priced hosting equivalent to
the Hostgator Hatchling plan and their user-interface is very similar
so you should be able to follow this tutorial without any
trouble.
To use JustHost go to http://www.justhost4u.com/ (Figure 1.2)
and click the ‘Sign-Up’ button.
I already have a domain that I registeredwith another
registrar. Can I still use the domain with Hostgator?
Yes – you can still set up Hostgator hosting for a pre-
registered domain but, in these circumstances, you must change
your domain’s Domain NameServers (DNS) to indicate that your
website will be hosted on Hostgator.
This is necessary so that the domain name system (which
drivesthe Internet) can translate your domain name into a specific
IP (Internet Protocol) address that identifies the specific bit of
hardware that hosts your website. I admitthat that sounds a bit
technical but it’s really quite simple.
All you’ve got to do is change two fields on your domain
registrar’s screen and you’re done. Here’s how.

Whenyou sign up for a Hostgator hosting account you will
receive a welcome email whichwill tell you what name servers to
use. This will be a pair of codesthat look like ns????.hostgator.com
(where???? are numbers allocated by Hostgator).
You will need to log into your account at the registrar you
used when you bought the domain.Thereshould be somewhere fairly
obvious on their screen labeled ‘Set your DNS’ (or something
like that). Enter the two codesHostgator supplied and save the settings.
The changes may take place immediately or you may have to
wait several hours (or more) before you can access the domain
at Hostgator. This is because the informationhas to propagate
out to all the networks on the Internet that need to know
where to find your website and this is not always
immediate.
If you can’t find out how to change your DNS then try
accessing your registrar’s FAQ page or knowledgebase. If all else
fails, contact their Tech Support and ask them to help.

Lesson 2. Install Wordpress On Your Domain
What we’re going to do now is installthe WordPress software on
your domain and hosting account. The good news is that you only
have to do this once, so just get through this step and you’re
on your way to a great website!
I have given instructions here for Hostgator. If you have a hosting
account with another provider, check whether they have the cPanel
(stands for ‘control panel’) interface. If so, this set of
instructions will likely apply to your host, too.
If you are with a different host and they don’t have cPanel,
ask their Technical Support for instructions on how to install
WordPress.
Install Wordpress With‘Quickinstall’
If you’re still with me, log in to Hostgator with the
username and password that they emailed to you. You will be
passed on to the cPanel interface (Figure 2.1). This is
where you access all the resources and services that Hostgator
provides for you.
Scroll down this page until you see the section headed
‘Software/Services’ (Figure 2.2).

Click on ‘QuickInstall’ and then on the ‘WordPress’link under‘Blog
Software’.
Then click ‘Continue’ and you’ll see a screen like the one in
Figure 2.3. Enter the name of your domain alongside ‘http://’
and then enter your email, the title of your website and your
first and last name. This is the minimum informationWordPress
needsto create a website. You can change any of this
informationlater. Then click ‘Install Now!’and wait for the script to
finish.
Then it’s done. WordPress is installed on your domain - easy
peasy! Checkyour email to getyour WordPress username and password.
If all this went well, congratulations - you can now skip to
the next lesson.
Install Wordpress With‘Fantastico’
If you don’t have access to QuickInstall you can use the other
tool called‘Fantasico’ to install WordPress automatically. Thereare several
versions of this tool so what you see may vary slightly from

what I am showing you here, but most of it is self-
explanatory.
First, click on the icon labeled ‘Fantastico’.You’ll see this screen in
Figure 2.4:
Click on ‘WordPress’in the left panel. Then on the next screen
click ‘New Installation’.
Click on your domain name in the drop-down box and then enter
your administratorusername and password (can be anything but
remember what you typed!), nickname, email address, site name and
description. You can change any of these entries later when you log
in to your WordPress website. Then click on the ‘Install
WordPress’ button. Wait for a short while and it’s done!
Checkyour email for a confirmation that WordPress has been installed
on your domain andsave this (or print it out) for security
purposes.
___
Congratulations! Whenyou’ve completed this lesson you have an
empty WordPress website on your domain just waiting for
you to make it your own!

FAQ
Help!I installed WordPress but I’ve made a complete
messof everything and I wantto start again. Can I
uninstall WordPress on my domain?
Yes, you can. Log in to Hostgator’s cPanel and go back into
QuickInstall (see Figure 2.3).
Click on the button at the top of the screen that says
‘Manage Installations’. You will see a small red cross to the
right of your domain name. Click this and an option will
appear labeled ‘Uninstall’.
Follow the prompts and your WordPress installation will disappear. You can
then start over.
Lesson 3. How To Log In And Out Of Wordpress
Now let’s deal with a few of the basicsand begin with logging
into and out of WordPress.
Log Into Wordpress
Whenever you want to work on your website you need to login
into WordPress by typing the following into your browser:
http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin (where ‘yourdomain.com’is your actual
domain name. In my case this is keepingchickens.net)
You’ll see the familiar WordPress login screen as in Figure
3.1:

Enter the username and password that you were given when you installed
WordPress and click ‘Log In’.
It’s a good idea to bookmark this login because you’ll be using it
a lot.
If you have a computer-generated password you can change
this to something else after we get started. As soon as you
feel familiar enough with the WordPress dashboard, go to Lesson 17
and that will explain how to change the log-in password.
Whenyou first log in, you’ll be passed to the Dashboard (Figure
3.2) whichis where all the action starts:

The top of the screen is all about‘Jetpack’ whichis one of
WordPress’ latest gizmos which we are not going to use in this
tutorial and whichwe’ll deactivate later. So ignore that for the
time being.
The welcome messages shown on this screen vary from time so
don’t worryif the body of your screen looks a little bit different
from this.
If you see ‘Welcome to WordPress’ box, you can click ‘Dismiss’ in
the top right corner of thebox because we’re not going to use
that, either.
What we are really interested in at this stage is the vertical
menudown the left-hand side of the screen headed ‘Dashboard’,
whichis where all the behind-the-scenes action takes place.
We’regoing to be using this set of dashboard drop-down menus to
access the inner workings of WordPress to build a website.
Whenever I say ‘from the dashboard…’ I will be directing
you to click on one of these left-side menuitems. I will
explain each one that you need to use as we go along.
Updating Wordpress
Just a quick digression here. The WordPress development team has an
on-going mission to improve and expand its capabilities and they
release new versions of the software at regular intervals.
So when you log into your site and see a message abovethe
dashboard saying that a new releaseof WordPress is available, it’s
OK to click to update the software.
Just follow the prompts and the update will overwrite the
version you currently use. You usually don’t need to do anything

else but you should check out whether there are new features
that you mighttake advantage of. Therewill typically be something
announced in thebody of the dashboard and you can also check out
www.wordpress.org for news on the latest release.
And, if you are with Hostgator, they now run an automatic
WordPress update whenever a newversion is released. They don’t
always do this immediately but if you don’t update your
WordPress installation, Hostgator will do it behind the scenes by
default.
ViewYour Website As The World Sees It
Anytime you want to see what your site currently looks like, from
the dashboard, hover your mouse over the site title up in the
top left corner of the screen and click ‘Visit Site’. The whole
site will be displayed and you can view it as a visitor
will see it. You will have to click the back button to get
back to the dashboard.
Log Out Of Wordpress
To log out of WordPress, look at the top right corner of
the screen where it says ‘Howdy …’, hoveryour mouse over
this and click ‘Log Out’ on the drop-down menu. WordPress logs
you out of your website but leaves the log-on box on
the screen in case you want to go back in.
FAQ
What aboutall the other incomprehensiblestuff I can see in the
body of the dashboard screen?
You can ignore most of it for now, but when you get your
website up and going you will find one or two of the panels
quite useful. The ‘RightNow’ panel gives you an up-to-date summary of
the statusof your website and we’ll come to the QuickPress Panel in
Lesson 7.
If you really don’t want to see the geeky‘WordPress Blog’ or ‘Other
WordPress News’ (or any other dashboard panel) then click on
‘Screen Options’ on the top right of the screen and uncheck
these items. They will then disappear.
And, if you want, you can rearrange the panels on the
dashboard by clicking and dragging them up and down.
Lesson 4. The Design Of Your Wordpress Website
Right then – here’s where it starts to get interesting…

The visual appearance of a WordPress website is governed by a
design template calleda ‘theme’. The theme determines the overall
appearance and layout of the site, the color scheme, the fonts,
and the style – in fact, the whole overall look and feel of
the site. Think of it as a ‘skin’.
One of the wonders of WordPress is that you can change
the theme of your site with a few clicks of the mouse
and everything will (usually) click into place with a brand-new visual
style.
The default theme provided by WordPress on new installationsis
the minimalist ‘Twenty Twelve’ theme, whichis what is illustrated
below.
Figure4.1 shows what my Chicken Keeping website looks like
straight out of the box:
This is the default look and style of Twenty Twelve and I
admitthat it doesn’t look very interesting as yet – but I’m
aboutto change all that.
I’m going to recommendthat you stick with this theme to start
with as it will be easierto follow the lessons if you do. If
you want to, you can change it later when you know what you
are doing.

In this lesson I’ll show you how to tweakTwenty Twelve so
that you can explore for yourself the options that this theme
provides.
Sketch Out A Blueprint For Your Website
Before going much further, it would be a good idea for
you to sketch out on paperroughly what you want your website
to look like and how you want it to behave so that, as we
work through the tutorial, you can be putting your design
into practice.
Figure4.2 shows the outline of a typical website and
one that Twenty Twelve follows:
What you need to sketch out is what you want to go where
and approximately what you want your site to look like.
At this stage,I suggest you design the layout of your
website to be as simple as possible because, if you can
live with the simple Twenty Twelve WordPress layout for
now, you will find it quicker to build your own site.
The Twenty Twelve architecture provides many of the typical
features that are foundon most websites:

The header is at the top of the page and this can be
an image, or a block of text, or both. The text would
consist of the site title with an optional extra tagline.
The header normally appears at the top of every page.
Below the title is the ‘menu’ whichis a horizontal bar
containing tabs whichlink to thevarious pagesin your website.
Twenty Twelve actually puts the menuabovethe header but
many themes put it below.
The main body of each page contains an article (page or
post) with a title at the top.
The body of the article can contain text or images or
a mixture of both.
The sidebar on the right side of the page contains ‘widgets’
(see Lesson 8) which typically contain navigationallinks to
guide the user to other parts of your website. Widgets can also
contain text or images.
The footer is at the bottom of the page. The footer
is optional and can also contain widgets.
It often helps to start by deciding what you want your front page to
look like. Is this going to be a static ‘splash’ page introducing
your organization or company? Or do you want a blog-type site
where the first thing your visitors will see is your latest news or
opinion?
What page links do you want to go across the top horizontal
menubar? Again, this will usually remain the same as users click
from page to page.
Now think aboutthe header. Do you want a header image? Do
you want to upload your own graphic or logo?
What do you want to see in the sidebar? Note that the sidebar
is generally used to provide navigation to other parts of your
website (or maybe other websites).
Do you want to use footers and, if so, what do you want in
them?
As you can probably appreciate, the more work you can do at
this stage to plan the layout of your website, the easierand quicker
it will be to actually build it.
At this stage your WordPress website is empty except for
the sample content (‘Hello world!’) that WordPress inserts
automatically. We’ll be deleting that stuff in the next lesson.For

now, we’ll focus on some of the thingsyou can do to begin making
Twenty Twelve look and feel the way you want.
So, log in to your website’s dashboard (see Lesson 3) and
follow along with me:
Add A Site Title
From the dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’, ‘Themes’ and, for Twenty
Twelve, you’ll see ‘Customize’, ‘Header’ and ‘Background’ as options.
(Ignore Widgets and Menus because these will come into future
lessons).
Click on ‘Customize’ and you’ll see some drop-down menus on the
left side. Now click on ‘Site Title & Tagline’. Here you’ll enter the
title and tagline of your website that will be displayed at
the top of every page.
Enter whatever is appropriatefor your website (you can change it
later if necessary) and click on the blue ‘Save and Publish’ button
at the top left as in Figure 4.3.
You can see that this text will now appear in the header of
every page of your site.
Select A ColorScheme
Now click on ‘Colors’. As you can see, you can change the
Header Text color - the color of the text you just typedin. If
you have a color-scheme in mind for your website you can
begin to make it take shapehere. Play around with the color palette
box to selectthe color you want.

In the same dialogue box you can also change the background
color. This is set by default to a bluish-gray color but you can
change it to whatever fits in with your ideas.I’m going to
change my background to black (#000000), because I think it
will help my content to stand out on the user’sscreen. But
you can choose whatever color suits your plan – or white
(#FFFFFF) if you want to keep it plain and simple. Whendone,
click on the blue ‘Save and Publish’ button at the top left.
Add A Background Image
As you can see, there is also a ‘Background Image’ dialogue
where you can upload an image instead of having a
plain background color. The background imagewill display in theempty
area around and outside the page borders. Whatever graphic
you use will repeat itselfacross, around and behind your web
pages.
If you are going to create a particularly jazzy site where
the design graphics are an integral part of the imageyou
wish to portray then you mightwant to explore this option.
I tend not to use background images because I think they
can make the screen look too cluttered and can distract the
user from reading my sparkling prose(!) – but the facility is
there if you want to use it.
Add A Header Image
If you want your site to have a header imageyou can upload
it here. The Twenty Twelve theme does not provide any inbuilt
header images and, by default, will not display one. But if
you have a graphic that you want to display across your
website as a header you can either resizeit to 960 pixels
widthby 250 pixels height on your computer, or upload a graphic
of any other size and crop it within this screen. (Ignore
the references to the ‘Media Library’ for now because we will be
coming on to that in Lesson 9).
To upload an image, click on the ‘Browse’ button and
navigate to the imageon your computer. Then click on ‘Open’
and ‘Upload’. If the imageis not 960 x 250 pixels you will be
given the opportunityto crop it here. Then scroll down and click on
‘Save
Changes’. You mightwant to note here that you can upload a
seriesof header graphics and tell WordPress to display a
different header on each page. This could be a great idea if
you want a particularly visual-looking website…

I uploaded a header graphic to my demosite and Figure
4.4 shows what the site now looks like:
Can you see how the site is beginning to take shape? A
few simple tweaks will enable you to begin making your
site look how you want.
I suggest that you experiment with all the options in this
lesson to see how you can change the theme to make it
look suitable for the sort of website you want to build. Anything
you change here will be effective immediately but you can change
thingsas often as you like, so nothing is cast in stone.
Whenyou’ve finished customizingyour settings, click on the ‘Close’
button in the top left and this will uncover the dashboard
menuitems down the left side of the screen.
I’m going to illustrate the rest of the tutorial by using this
theme and it will make it easier for you to follow if I
keep it as simple as this. And for the sake of further
simplicity I have removed the header imageabovebecause it
will make the illustrations in this tutorial easier to follow.
I will leave my demowebsite http://1.keepingchickens.net up on
the Internet so that you can go in and browse it to
see what it looks like after completing this tutorial. (Please note
that I know little to nothing aboutactually keeping chickens so
I ask you to cut me a bit of slack on the content…)

FAQ
I can’t decide what I want my website to look like! How
can I get started?
One way of getting some creative ideas is simply to look at
other websites. Find a website that you like the look of and
have a good browse around. Note the color scheme and the
fonts. Checkout the header. See how the site navigation works.
How does the site use pictures? Does the site have ads?
Note what you like (and don’t like) and see whether you can organize
your ideas into a simple structure for your own site. Warning – do
not copy other websites or you could be in trouble. And don’t get
too complicated to begin with. As your site evolves you can
add more bells and whistles but when you are starting out the
KISS (‘Keep It Simple Stupid’) principle certainly applies!

Lesson 5. First Steps To A Perfect Website
There’s one final job to do before you can start to create
a website that is all your own and that’s to do a bit of
housekeeping and configuration. You need to do this basic setting
up so that you clear out the sample content and configure
WordPress to work the way you want it.
At this stage don’t worryif the details look unfamiliar and puzzling,
just follow along and do it and it will all make sense
eventually, I promise.
This won’ttake long and then we can get on with the interesting
stuff.
Delete The Junk (Sample Content)
For every new installation, WordPress provides some sample content
whichyou don’t really need and whichwe’re going to delete.
Whenyou look at your site you’ll see that WordPress has provided
the following items on the site:
Recent comments: Mr WordPress on Hello world!
Recent posts:Hello world!
SamplePage
We’regoing to delete all that and start again.So, from the
dashboard, Click on ‘Comments’. You’ll see the comment displayed as in
Figure 5.1:
Now, hoveryour mouse over ‘Mr WordPress’ and a command line
will magically appear underneath the comment. Click on ‘Trash’
and, hey presto, the comment’s gone.
Next, from the dashboard, click ‘Posts’. You’ll see the ‘Helloworld’
box appear. Again, hover your mouse over it and click ‘Trash’.
That’sgone, too.

Finally, from the dashboard, click ‘Pages’. You’ll see ‘Sample Page’
displayed. Hoverand trash that, too.
Finally, we’ll get rid of a few plugins that we don’t need.
From the dashboard, click on ‘Plugins’ and you’ll see an item for
Jetpack. Click ‘Deactivate’ and that will make it disappear.
And do the same with ‘HelloDolly’. Delete this plugin and
delete all the files. (Hello Dolly is a left-over from the
WordPress blogging days and is of no use to us).
We’ll deal more with Plugins in Lesson 15 but, for now, that’s all
you need to do.
Configure Wordpress To Behave How You Want
Finally, here’s where we check out a few settings to be
sure that WordPress is going to behave as we want. Again, don’t
worryif you don’t understand all of this – just do it…
From the dashboard, click on ‘Settings’, ‘Permalinks’. Under
‘Common Settings’ click the radio button ‘Post name’ if it is
not already clicked. Then hit ‘Save Changes’.
Now you have to decide whether you want to allow your visitors
to leave comments on your website. This has become a mixed
blessing these days because the comments box has becomea magnet
for spammers and this can be a considerable nuisance. So, I
advise you think carefully aboutwhether you really do want to
allow visitors to leave comments.
If you do allow visitors to add comments to your pages, by
default, a comment box will automatically be displayed at the
foot of each page. You have the option of moderating these
comments but, if approved, the comments then become an integral
part of your website.

To block comments, from the dashboard, go to ‘Settings’, ‘Discussion’
and uncheck
‘Allowpeople to post comments on new articles’. Then scroll down
and click on ‘Save Changes’. That’sall you have to do on this
page because now all the other settings will be ignored.
However, if you do want comments to appear on your site,
check out Lesson 16 where I recommend how to deal with
them.
___
Now you’ve got a completely empty WordPress website ready
and waiting for you to populate with your own stuff. And the good
news is that, once you have completed Lessons 1 – 5, you
don’t need to any of this work ever again.
So, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get moving!
FAQ
Say I want to display a comment box on some pagesbut
not others – is this possible?
Yes – I answer this question in Lesson 16.

Lesson 6. Add Your First Wordpress Page
Now, before we begin this lesson, let me just give a brief
outline of how you should use ‘Pages’ as opposed to ‘Posts’,
whichwe will get into in Lesson 7.
Pages are intended to be the ‘static’ elements of your website,
containing content that you always want to be available to your
visitors and which, typically, are accessible via a tab on
the horizontal menubar. Think of this as the ‘backbone’ information.
You would typically have an ‘About Us’ page, possibly a
‘Welcome’ page, preferably a ‘Contact Us’ page and, along with that, a
‘Privacy’ page. Pagesdo not change very much and you may only
need one or two pages.
Most serious websites will have an ‘About’ page and I
recommendthat you, too, put up an ‘About’ page, because it will
enhance the credibility of your site.
Add An ‘About’ Page
Log in to your WordPress website and from the dashboard, click on
‘Pages’, ‘Add New’. Figure 6.1 shows what you’ll see:
Enter ‘About Us’ (or something equivalent) in the top blank box
where you can see the cursor flashing. Then, in the blank box
headed by the ‘Visual’ tab, type some text that describes you or
your website or your business. Don’t copy and paste the text from
somewhere else just yet (I’ll tell you why later in this lesson) –
just manually type in some text so that you can see how this all
hangstogether. As you type you’ll see that the words wrap round,
just like a word processor. If you hit ‘Enter’, you’ll get a
new paragraph. Just keep typing until you’ve got enough text to

play around with. Don’t worryabouthow perfectit is, you can edit
the page later.
After you’ve entered a bit of text it’s a good idea to
click on ‘Save Draft’. This is handy when you are setting up
a complicated page because it enables you to save your
work when you get something right and return to the last draft if
(when!) you foul it up at a later stage. I encourage you to
use this feature, especially while you are learning. A page saved
only in draft is not yet visible to anyone except you.
Now look at the icons on the toolbar abovethe text, as shown
in Figure 6.2. You’ll probably recognize them from other regular
text-processing programs that you use.
You can see bold, italic, strikeout, bullets, etc. If two rows of
icons don’t show,click on the far right icon on the top row and
the second row will toggle into view.
The best way to find out what functions these icons represent is to
hoveryour mouse over each of them and then experiment with them.If
you hoveryour mouse over an icon you’ll see an explanation of
what its purpose is.
The way these (mostly) work is that you selectsome text, click on an
icon and you’ll see that change take place.In most cases the
operation of these icons is self-explanatory and so I won’tinclude
a lot of unnecessary detail here but will let you play around
and explore them for yourself. No changes will be made to
your website until you click on ‘Save Draft’ or ‘Publish’.
I encourage you to try out the blockquote,spellchecker and
links.
To add a link to text in a web page, selecta few words
in your text where you want the link to appear. You will
notice that the little ‘chain’ icon becomes live and, when you
click on that, a small pop-up dialogue will appear prompting
you to enter the targetURL of the link. See Figure 6.3:

The text you selected then becomes a ‘hot link’ which, when
the user clicks on it, will take them to another page, eitherwithin
your website or to another site.
To see the results of your changes, click on the ‘Preview’
button over on the top right of thepage. You’ll then see the web
page displayed exactly how it will look on your website.
This ‘preview’ view will usually open in a new tab in your
browser. Whenyou’ve checked thepage over you can close the tab
and return to the page where you set it up.
Now, before you publish your page, there is one more feature
that you need to check out. The Twenty Twelve theme offers
you three different templates for your page layout:
Default
Front Page
Full-width No Sidebar
Theseare accessible from the ‘Page Attributes’, ‘Template’ drop-down box. Try
these out one by one and choose the template you want for
this page.
Whenthe page is formatted as you want it, you can click ‘Publish’
and the page will be added to your site for the worldto see.
You should also notice that WordPress has magically added

the page tab to the menubar aboveyour site header, whichis
where it should belong.
I now encourage you to think aboutand add as many pagesas
relevant to your site. As you add each page you are gradually
filling out your site and making it your own!
If your website will consist of a small,finite number of
pagesthen you mightbe tempted to leave it at that and not make
use of posts.But that could severely limit the effectiveness of your
website, particularly in relation to search engine optimization
(SEO).Posts have a number of very usefulfeatures that Pagesdon’t have.
Before we go on to the next lesson, here’s the usefultip
I promised you to help when copying and pasting text:
How To CopyAnd Paste Text The Right Way
As you can imagine, it is often easierand quicker to type up
your website text offline, in a word-processor such as Microsoft
Word or a text-processor like NotePad. But, be aware, just copying
and pasting right into the text box on the WordPress page can
have unintended consequences.
This is because, when you copy text from your computer to your
clipboard, your operating system will often copy not only the text but
also the formatting (including fonts)as well. Microsoft Word contains a
lot of complicated formatting behind the scenes and this
can confuseWordPress because it wantsto format the text
according to the theme you have chosen and copying
unwanted formatting can make it appear all screwy.
So, type up your text offline however you want and copy it to
your clipboard as usual. Then,when you get into your WordPress page,
click on one of the two little ‘T’ or ‘W’ icons in the toolbar
(‘Paste as Plain Text’ or ‘PasteFrom Word’) and a pop-up
window willappear:

Paste your text into this box, click ‘Insert’ and the text will drop in
just like you typedit. This feature applies both to both Pages
and Posts.
And there’s one more feature that you mightlike to take
advantage of: Parent and Child pages.
Making Use Of Parent Pages And ChildPages
If you have already published at least one page you will see
that, under‘Page Attributes’, you have the option of selecting a
previously published page to be the parent of the one you
are currently adding or editing. This means that you can
have a hierarchy of pagesthat you can nest to several levels.
If you are planning on building a website with many pages
ranging over a wide range of topicsthis is a feature you
mightwant to use. Parent/child pages appear as such in drop-
down navigation menus and can be an easy way of creating a
hierarchical structure to steer users around your site.
___
That’saboutit for Pages; let’s find out all aboutPosts in the
next lesson.
FAQ
I want to stop anyone from seeing my website while I’m
still setting it up. How do I do that?

As a webmaster,you need to be aware that the prospective
audience for your website is both human and robot (search
engines). In practice, your website will get few, if any, visitorsin
the early days and, because of that, I wouldn’t fret too much
aboutwho can see what.
Ultimately, you will want both humans and robots to flock to
your website but, if you really do want to block both of these
types until you are ready, you can create an ‘Under Construction’
page. This page displays to visitors while you get on with setting
up the site behind the scenes.
Create An ‘Under Construction’ Page
The easiest way to do this is to use a plugin called
‘Under Construction’. I deal with how to add plugins in
Lesson 15, so come back here when you’ve completed that lesson.
After you’ve installed the plugin, from the dashboard, click
‘Settings’, ‘Under Construction’. Set ‘Activate or Deactivate’ to ‘on’,
and leave all the other settings as default. Then click ‘Save Changes’.
This now places an Under Construction page between you
and your visitors. You won’tbe able to see this page while you
are logged into your website yourself so log out and just
view the domain URL if you want to see what it looks like.
To prevent the search engines from looking at your setting
up efforts, from the dashboard, go to ‘Settings’, ‘Reading’ and
check the box labeled ‘Discourage search engines from indexing
this site’. Then click ‘Save Changes’. This will tell Google (and the
other search engines) that you don’t want them to ‘crawl’ your site to
put it in their search results – yet.
And don’t forget to undo all of this when you are ready to
launch your website!
What if I want to change something on a page after I’ve
published it?
Simple. From the dashboard, go to ‘Pages’, ‘All Pages’, and you’ll see all the
pages you’ve already published, listed out in date order. Hover your mouse over the
page you want to edit and click on the ‘Edit’ command that pops up.
This will take you back to the original page where you can make whatever
changes what you want. Then click ‘Update’. That’s all you have to do. You
can edit a page as often as you like.
Lesson 7. Add Your First Wordpress Post
You have now added one or more Pagesto your website and
these provide the static, background informationto tell the world
aboutyou and your website. Now it’s time to start adding content

in the form of Posts,whichis what will become a more on-going
process as you build your website over time.
You will, I hope,be relieved to hear that adding posts is
almost the same as adding pages. So I’m not going to repeat
all the stuff in Lesson 6. To add a post, just follow
the same instructions,substitutingthe word ‘post’ for the word ‘page’and
you’ll get there.
The Essential DifferenceBetween Posts And Pages
What I’m going to do in this lesson is point out a few of
the differences between posts and pages whichmighthelp you make up
your mind how the two different types of entries can contribute to
your website.
Posts are designed to be a more chronological, dynamic way to
present content to your visitors. In the olden days, when
WordPress was used primarily for blogging, each post would become
the latest in the blogger’s stream of news/comments/events.
(…’Emily laid one egg today but dear old Jane seems to be
getting broody again’…) The latest post would occupy the top
position on the page and earlier posts would scroll down beneath
it.
Suppose you wanted to have a website where you
displayed topical information, or some sort of journal, or
news,you’d want to make use of posts.Typically, a website that
uses posts also has some static pages(as above) but the Post content
includes a seriesof entries that you add to on a regular
basis and whichadds further, timely content to the website.
But the real power of Posts is that they also have handy
features called‘categories’ and ‘tags’ whichI will now explain.

How To Make Use Of Categories And Tags
As you will learn,posts don’t have to appear on the front page of
your website (see
Lesson 13). You could have your ‘Welcome’ page as the front page
and, in your sidebar, you could have a seriesof navigation links
filtering your posts by category.
Categories are a way to classify your content into topicsso
that your visitors can access all the posts you have written on
a particular subject. To take my chicken site as an example,
I could write a number of posts on broadcategories such as
‘chicken food’,‘chicken houses’, ‘breeds of chicken’ etc.
As I write each post, I would choose one or more
appropriatecategories for the subject matter. This would then
automatically provide a filter of all the posts in the same
category so that my visitors can easily find their way through the
site without having to read posts on topicsthat don’t interest
them.
If you know what categories you are going to use you can set
them up in advance. From the dashboard, go to ‘Posts’,
‘Categories’and add them there.But you can also add categories as
you go by adding a new category at the time you add a
post, as shown in Figure 7.1.
Tags are a looser way of categorizingyour material that will
help the search engines associate certain keywords with your posts.
Every time you add a post you should add two or three tags
whichcontain keywords or phrases to help the search engines
classify your site. And one way to use the tags you have coded
is to have a ‘tag cloud’in your sidebar. I’ll show you how to do
that in the next lesson.
Before I leave the subject of posts,let me share another
neat feature of WordPress: the ability to pre- and post-date entries.
How To Go Back (Or Forward) In Time
If you simply want your post to be datedat the date and
time you published it then just leave it. But if you want to
backdate an entry,you can change the date of publication to a
prior date.
Just abovethe ‘Publish’ button, where it says ‘Publish
immediately’, click on ‘Edit’ and you can change the date and
time to whatever you want. Change the date/time as shown in
Figure 7.2 and click on ‘OK’. That’sthe date/time that will appear
on your website.

And, hey, you can even schedule WordPress to publish a post at
some date/time in the future. Just change the date (as in Figure
7.2) to a date in the future, click ‘OK’ and ‘Schedule’.
WordPress will hold the post until that date/time occurs and then it
will automatically publish it as if you had hit the button
yourself. Magic!
Using Quickpress
As we have seen, there is a shortcut you can use to add
new posts.From the dashboard, look at the box marked ‘QuickPress’,
as shown in Figure 7.3.
You can quickly add a new post with title, text, tags and even a
picture and publish this immediately.
So, now you can begin adding Posts to your website, complete
with categories and tags, continuing to add them until you have the
range of content you need to display a full and rich website.
___
Next, we’re going into the final lesson of the Quick Start Guidewhere
I’ll show you how to use Widgets to enhance your WordPress
website.

FAQ
I’ve added some posts and now I realize that they should
reallybe pages. Can I convert a post into a page (and the
other way round)?
Sadly no. The way out of this is to copy the text from the
unwanted post/page, add a new post/page and paste the text that
you just copied. Then delete the unwanted page/post.
How do I delete a post or page?
See Lesson 5 (Delete The Junk).
Lesson 8. All About Widgets
Now that you have your website loaded up with some content, it’s
time to add a few refinements to make your site appear useful
and well-designed. You can do this by inserting widgets in the
sidebar of your website.
What are ‘widgets’? Widgets are very handy little chunks of
functionality that perform common tasks. You, the webmaster,choose
whichwidgets you want to use to perform additional tasks to
improve your website’s appearance and performance.
Examples of widgets include:
List of categories in your website
Links to your latest posts
Custom menus
All these widgets are clickable hotlinks that guide your visitors
around your website.
As you can see in Figure 8.1, I have put into the sidebar
of keepingchickens.net the Categories, Recent Posts,Archives and
Tag Cloudwidgets. It’s up to you what you use on your site
because, as you can see, there are a lot of widgets to
choose from.

One of the primary functions of widgets is to provide
different ways of navigating your site. But you can also add text
widgets that not only display text but whichcan contain computer
code. We’ll cover these text widgets in Lesson 11.
The number and position of the widgets you can use will
depend on the theme you are using. The Twenty Twelve
theme allows you to insert widgets into your sidebar and,
optionally, in up to two footer areas across the bottom of
a static front page.
Other themes may allow you to put widgets in your header
area or at the bottom of individual pages.
Here’s how to set up widgets:
From the dashboard, click on ‘Appearance’, ‘Widgets’. The ‘Widgets’
screen is shown in Figure 8.2:

Add Some Sidebar Widgets
In the previous lesson we discussed using categories when writing
posts.You can group all your posts into categories by placing a
‘Categories’widget in your sidebar. Whena visitor clicks on a
category they will be shown only your latest posts in this category
– they won’tsee posts in other categories that do not interest
them.
The really neat thing aboutthis widget is that it all works
completely automatically. You don’t have to do anything except to
code your posts with the required category: WordPress takes care of all
the sorting and filtering for you and the widget will update
automatically.
I encourage you to experiment for yourself and see what the
widgets fit in with your ideas for your own site.
To insert a widget into the sidebar simply click and drag it
from the main body of the screen to the ‘MainSidebar’ box over on
the right. Whenyou do this, a ‘Save’button will pop up and all
you have to do is click that and you’re done. You will see
that there are often options with widgets and you can usually
insert your own titles. Whenyou have saved a widget, click ‘Close’.
If you want to rearrange the order of the widgets in the
sidebar simply drag and drop them, up and down, until you
have them as you want. You don’t even need to save the sidebar: it
stays as you last left it!
Please note that widgets won’twork unless you have already set
up the content that you want to display. For example, a
‘Recent Posts’widget won’tdisplay anything until you have actually
added some posts to your website.

The easiest way for you to find out what widgets can do for
your website it to experiment.
Play around by clicking and dragging widgets into the Sidebar
and Footer Areas and see how it looks.You can add and delete
widgets as much as you wish.
Delete UnwantedWidgets
If you want to delete a widget from your sidebar, simply
click on it and then click ‘Delete’ andit will disappear. You can
always add the widget back in again if you change your
mind.
FAQ
Can I have different sidebar widgets on every page?
By default, WordPress will display the same widgets on the
sidebar of every post or page. There is a good reason for
this: it provides a consistent visual ‘map’ of your site to your
visitors so that they can more easily find their way around
regardless of where they browse.
But some themes do enable you to design more than one
sidebar and then choose how and when to display them,so
this is not cast in stone.
If your theme doesn’t provide this and you have a good
reason for wanting to display different widgets in the sidebar
on different pagesof your website, there is a usefulplugin called
‘Custom Sidebars’ that you can use to achieve this. Plugins
are covered in Lesson 15.
What if I don’t want a sidebar on my website?
Then just delete all the widgets. If you don’t have any widgets,
no sidebar will be displayed.
___
That’s it for the QuickStart Guide. Have you made a start on
your website yet? NO? Lessons 1 - 8 are all you need to
get your website up and running, albeit in a very simple format.
So I urge you to go back to Lesson 1, make a start
and just do it. It gets easieronce you make a start, I promise.
Building a website may seem an uphill challenge but, actually, it’s
quite good fun and you’ll get a great sense of achievement when
you see your very own domain come to life…
If you have made a start on your website, then congratulations –
welcome to the community of WordPress webmasters! The In-Depth

Guide will take your web buildingskills to the next level. See you in
Lesson 9!
IN-DEPTH GUIDE – DRILL DOWN TO THE WONDERS
OF WORDPRESS
Lesson 9. Add Images To Your Wordpress Website
WordPress has some very powerful and flexible ways of handling
media on a website and, in this lesson, we are going to
look at several ways of doing so
First, some background information. WordPress provides a folderwithin
your website called the ‘Media Library’ (Figure 9.1) whichcan
contain images, documents, downloadable files etc. This is the
depository of all of the images (and other media) that you
have uploaded for use in your website.
Media files are labeled either‘Attached’ or ‘Unattached’,
depending on whether or not you have actually used the media
by linking to it from one of your posts or pages.
Adding a picture into a post or page to illustrate your
text is one way of making your webpage look attractive and
relevant. If you upload the picture when adding a post or
page WordPress automatically loads it into the Media Library
and it becomes an ‘attached’ image.
If you want to add an imagefor use later, you can upload it
directly into the Media Library as an ‘unattached’ imageand
then call it whenever you want it.

To add an imageto a page or post, you need to have the
imagefile stored on your computer as a JPEG, GIF or PNG file
type, sized in pixels that will fit on your page and generally less
than 8 megabytes in size.
WordPress is quite flexible in handling images and will happily
resizeyour picture to fit theavailable space in a post or page.
But it’s worthjust checking out the default settings for imagesizes
because your website will look more professional if you present
your imagesin consistent shapes and sizes.
To do this, from the dashboard, go to ‘Settings’, ‘Media’ (Figure
9.2) and check out the pixel dimensions that WordPress will use when
displaying your pictures. The standard
‘medium’ size is maximum 300 pixels height and width. If
your theme is wider than about 1000 pixels you may want to increase
this to 400 or 500 pixels to display your images larger.
If you change the Media Settings be aware that the
settings will apply only to images you insert after this: WordPress
won’tretrospectively apply the settings to any images you have
already inserted on posts or pages.
Add A Picture To A Post Or Page
To add an imageto a post or page, first click on the point in
your text where you want the image to appear. This can be
anywhere within the text: right at the beginning, or in the
middle of a text block or after the end. The imagewill be
embedded exactly at the point you selecthere.

Then click on the button labeled ‘Add Media’. A pop-up
box appears, prompting you to locate the file you want to upload.
You’ll see that there are two tabs, ‘Upload Files’ and ‘Media Library’.
Click on ‘Upload Files’ if this is not already displayed.
As you can see from Figure 9.3, you can actually drag and
drop the file(s) you want to insert but I’ll demonstrate the
alternative, whichis to upload from your computer.
Click on ‘Select Files’ and navigate to where you have stored
the imageon your computer. Click on the file you want to upload,
and then click ‘Open’. A screen as in Figure 9.4 appears:
Here you can see that the screen displays all the images I
have already uploaded to my Media Library, with the latest one
checked on the left and the ‘Attachment Details’ for the
latest imageon the right.

Now you can enter the title of the image, optionally a caption,
alt text (alternative text to display on devices that don’t display
images) and description. Entering descriptive details in these boxeswill
help the search engines index and classify your images and
relatethem to the text that you enter in your posts and pages.
Beneath this is the ‘Attachment Display Settings’. Here you
can specify the alignment of theimage– left, right, center or
none. I encourage you to experiment with alignments because you
can get some very striking effects with the right imagein the
right place.
You will also see that there is a ‘Link To’ box. This is where
the visitor would be taken if they clicked on the image.
You can change this link to anything you like: if this was a
product you were selling you mightreplace this with a link to
your order page.
If you leave the ‘Link URL’ unchanged and the visitor clicks on
the imagethey will see a full-pixel version of the imageon their
screen. If you don’t want the imageto be a link then click on
‘None’.
Finally, you can choose the size of the imagewithin the
post or page. Your options here are determined by the settings
you specified earlier in this lesson. Again, experiment with this
to get the effects that you want for your website.
Then click on ‘Insert into Post’ and Figure 9.5 shows what
the page will look like:

Now let’s have a look at uploading images directly into the
Media Library for use later.
Add A Media File To The Media Library
Sometimes you will want to add an image(or some other media) to
be displayed somewhere on your website other than a post or a
page. In that case, you need to upload it to the Media Library
before you can use it.
For example, I have a graphic file on my computer that is
actually a little banner that I want to place in my sidebar
to advertise a product that I want to promote on my
website. I will cover how get the imageinto the sidebar in Lesson
11 but here I’ll briefly show you how to upload the imageto
the Media Library:
From the dashboard, click on ‘Media’ / ‘Add New’.
Click on ‘Select Files’ and upload the imageas before.
As before, it is good practice to enter a title, alternate
text and description, whichwill help with SEO (see Lesson 18) then
click on ‘Save all changes’. That’sit. The file is now stored on
your WordPress Media Library, ready for when you need it.
Add A Featured Image
This is a relatively new WordPress facility whichlets you associate
an imagewith a post or page. At the time of writing, featured
images are not used in every theme and different themes use
them in different ways. However, Twenty Twelve does use featured
images and this is how to use them:
Essentially, the featured imagefacility in Twenty Twelve enables
you to insert an image above the post/page title and below
the header image(if present) and site title. If you do not
have a header imagefor your site and you upload a similar-
sized image(960px x 250px) as a featured imageto a post or
page, it will effectively become the header for that post/page
only.
In the screen where you add or update a post or
page, you will see at the bottom of the right-hand menua
box labeled ‘Featured Image’. Click ‘Set featured image’ and
you will be taken to a screen similar to the ones
illustrated above, where you can eitherupload an image or
use one from your Media Library. Click on ‘Set featured image’
and you will see the imagethumbnail appear on your post/page.
That’sall – save/update your post/page but do not insert the
same imageinto your post/page or it will display twice!

Whenyou view the page you will see your imageat the top.
Add A Picture Gallery
If you are a photographer or an artist or anyone who
wantsto display a lot of pictures, you might want to add a
gallery of pictures to a page or post. A ‘gallery’ is a
way of displaying thumbnails of images on a page in a
rectangular grid and when a visitor clicks on an image they can
see it full size.
In this case, it is preferable to prepare the images first on
your own computer, so that they are all the same orientation and
size (in pixel dimensions). That way the gallery display will look
professional.
Before adding a gallery you should decide what size
you want to display thumbnail images. By default, the
thumbnails will be 150 pixels x 150 pixels. But you can change
this by going from the dashboard to ‘Settings’, ‘Media’. This will
display the Media Settings screen and you can change the
dimensions of how WordPress will display thumbnail images on your
site.
Then, from the page or post where you want to display the
gallery, click on the ‘Add Media’button as before, but this
time selectmultiple files to upload. You will see WordPress upload
them one at a time to the Media Library.
Make sure that all the pictures you want are checked and then
click ‘Create Gallery’ over on the top left of the screen.
Then click ‘Create a new gallery’ in the bottom right of
the box, then ‘Insert Gallery’. The big blue gallery icon will be
displayed. You can add text before or after this icon.
Then Save or Publish your post or page and you can then view
the page to see the gallery, as in Figure 9.6:

As you can imagine from what you’ve seen, there are actually a
great many options for displaying images and other media in
WordPress, some of whichare rather specialized and would be of
interest to people like photographers and graphic artists
etc.
Also, there are a number of very fancy plugins you can use to
display images in a slideshow or gallery that go way beyond
the basic facilities shown here. And some themes offer a ‘slider’
function that can include some very dramatic effects.
___
In this lesson I have shown the basic methods of adding
images and media that you are most likely to use in a
regular website. As ever, I encourage you to explore the
options further for yourself if you want to be a bit more
adventurous.
FAQ
I added an image to my post but how can I move it
to a different position?
In the ‘Edit Post’ page, click on the imagethat you want to move
and drag it to where you want it. If that doesn’t work,
click on the imageand then click on the small ‘Edit Image’ icon that
appears in the far top left of the picture. This displays a

pop-up whichallows you to edit the alignment, link, title, caption
etc. Make what changes you want and then click the ‘Update’ button.
Or, if you want to start over, click on the image, hit the
delete key on your keyboard, insert the cursor where you
want the imageto appear in your text and insert the imageover
again.
Then click ‘Update’ to update the post or page.
How can I get one of those moving slideshows on my
website?
There are a number of very good plugins that will display a
slideshow of images and it is worth experimenting with several
to find the one that suits you. Some slideshow plugins will display
the gallery (see above) associated with a post or page while
others will require you to upload your images separately.
One slideshow plugin that I currently like is called ‘Portfolio Slideshow’
because it is relatively easy to set up and there is also a
low-cost ‘pro’ version of it available. See Lesson 15 for how to find
and install plugins.

Lesson 10. Add A Video To Your Website
Videos are now a popular feature of many websites and
WordPress makes it quite easy to include them in posts or pages.
For reasons whichI explain in the FAQ below, I do
not recommendthat you upload videos to your Media Library.
Instead, I suggest that you upload the video to YouTube (or
one of theother white-listedvideo-sharing websites) and link to it
from your website.
WordPress now provides a very easy way to display a video on
your website from thirdparty video sites. Here’s how.
First of all, find the YouTube (or wherever) video that you want to
use (yours or someone else’s) and click on it:
In your browser’s menubar you will see the URL of your chosen
video. It will look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgZg_6oq3EU
Copy this URL to your clipboard.
Then go to the post or page where you want to display
the video and, on a line of its own, paste the URL of the
video just where you want the video to appear.

Don’t make this into a hyperlink: just leave it as a line in
the text.
WordPress knows that this is an approved video site and will
translate the URL into an embedded video. Magic, or what?
Whenyou view the page it will look something like Figure 10.2:
The frameof the video is shown in the content of the
post/page and when the visitor clicks on the ‘Play’ button the
sound and picture plays from YouTube.
FAQ
How can I add a video that I recorded myself?
It is possible to embed your own video files into a
WordPress website but you do need to be aware that videos
can be very large files and there is a file size limit of 8
megabytes that you can upload via WordPress into your Media

Library. This restriction severely limits your options for displaying
self-hosted videos.
And, because video files are usually very large and eat up
bandwidth, if you have a basic hosting plan you may find that
your hosting provider will want to charge you extra if you
want to host your own videos on your own website.
The easiest way to show videos on your site is to upload
the file to YouTube or Flickr (or any of the many other free
video hosting sites) and use the code that they provide (as example
shown above) to embed the file into your post or page as
shown above. But if you really do need commercial video hosting
there is always Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) who, for a
fee, will provide a powerful video serving facility that is used
by many of top-name webmasters.
If you don’t want to do it this way and your file size is
less than 8mb then I suggest you search for plugins that will do
the job (see Lesson 15). I won’trecommendany particular plugin
because there are new ones coming out all the time and they all
differ in what they can do and how. But spendsome time experimenting
with plugins until you find what you want.
Be aware that you may need to use HTMLto do this job
and so you should also study Lesson 19 where I show
you how to do this.
___
In the next lesson we’ll be looking at how to enhance
your website with text widgets. This cool feature gives you endless
options of adding more functionality and making your site
unique.

Lesson 11. The Power Of Text Widgets
We looked at the basicsof Widgets in Lesson 8 but
there are a number of other thingsyou can do with widgets
that will provide much more functionality.
The best way to see what widgets in general can do is to
experiment with the options available (from the dashboard, click ‘Appearance’,
‘Widgets’…)and view the results. As before, all you usually have to
do is drag the widget into the appropriatearea on the sidebar,
configure the options and save it. If you don’t like it, you
can delete it.
But there is one widget that will provide almost endless
variations and possibilities and that is the Text Widget.
Basically, the text widget enables you to insert text into your
sidebar or other areas of your website, but the good news is
that the text can also be computer code: HTMLand JavaScript in
particular, instead of simply plain text. WhenWordPress sees that
the text is actually computer code, it executes it and renders
the results where you have placed the text widget.
This facility can, for example, enable you to display graphics
and ads in your sidebar and here I’ll show you how.
Add An Image Using A Text Widget
There isn’t, as yet, a simple WordPress widget that lets you
place a picture in the sidebar but it can be done easily enough
with a bit of HTML. This example will include an easy
piece of HTMLcode that you can copy and edit into a text widget
that will place a graphic in your own site.
The first thing you need to do is upload the imagefile to
your Media Library (see Lesson 9) and copy the File URL of
the imagefile to your clipboard.
The easiest way to construct the HTMLfor this to type it
into a text editorsuch as NotePad.So type this piece of text
(exactly!) into NotePad:
<img src=“ “ />
and then place your cursor between the two quotation marksand
paste the File URL you just copied to the clipboard into that
space. This is what this looks like for my chicken keeping site:
<img
src=“http://1.keepingchickens.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/01/keepingchickens.jpg”
/>

Now, go to ‘Appearance’, ‘Widgets’ and drag a text widget to
the sidebar where you want to display that file. Then copy
and paste the snippet of NotePad text into the text widget, ‘Save’
and ‘Close’.
View your site to see the results. Figure 11.1 shows what my
site now looks like, with a little graphic imagein the sidebar:
Use A Text Widget To Display A Banner Ad
One of thingsthat webmasters like to do is to use space on
their website to advertise products, eithertheir own or someone
else’s. They want to place a small graphic (a ‘banner’) in the
sidebar of their website whichis clickable, and whichwill send
the visitor through to a sales or order page.
If you are advertising a third-party product, the merchant or
agent will often provide the complete code to display the ad. All
you have to do is to copy and paste it into a Text widget,
as in the previous example. Then click ‘Save’and ‘Close’ and
the banner will display where you placed it.
But what if the product or service you are advertising is
your own, or the advertiser wants you to host their graphic on
your website?

Advertisers sometimes do this because it saves them bandwidth. What
you need to do in thiscase is to download the banner graphic
from their website and upload it to your site’s MediaLibrary
(see Lesson 9).
The method of displaying the banner graphic is the same as
the previous example but the difference is that you want the
imageto be ‘clickable’, that is, the code must include a link.
I will illustrate this by actually making the imageon my
website a clickable link. I’ll make the targetof the link a
sales page of a product that my visitor could buy.
The advertisers have given me the URL of the link I need to
use to directthe visitor to their sales page.
The outline HTMLcode to display a clickable imagelooks like
this:
<a href=“ “ ><img src=“ “ /></a>
In between the first set of quotation marksyou need to paste
the URL of the webpage where you want to send your visitors
when they click on the image. Between the second set of
quotation markspaste the File URL of the imagein your Media
Library.
So, the HTMLfor this on my chicken keeping site is:
<a href=“http://tuetwo.chickcoop.hop.clickbank.net” ><img
src=“http://1.keepingchickens.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/01/keepingchickens.jpg”
/> </a>
This is illustrated in Figure 11.2:

I leave you to play around and experiment with text widgets on
your website. All you have to do (in most cases) is to
drag and drop the widget into your sidebar, ‘Save’and ‘Close’.
FAQ
How do I show Google Adsense ads in my sidebar?
AdSense ads are the little the chunks of code links you see on
many websites which advertise goodsand services available from third
parties. This is a program run by Google where people
pay them to display ads and Google pays web publishers (you!)to
display them.
You have to sign up with Google as an AdSense publisher
and then you are allowed to display AdSense ads on your site
and (hopefully) get paid for doing so.
You have to have a completed website whichis getting some
trafficbefore Google will allow you to sign up to AdSense.
But once accepted you can display ads on any site registered to
you.
Google provides snippets of Javascript code for you to display
text and imageads in various shapes and sizes, depending on where
on your site you want to display the ads. A ‘skyscraper’ or
other narrow vertical format would be suitable for a
sidebar.
Drag and drop a text widget into your sidebar (or anywhere
else you want to display ads), copy the Javascript code and paste it
into the text widget. Then click ‘Save’and ‘Close’. Google then displays
ads related to the content of the page it is displayed
on.
___
Now let’s get on to another vital element of a successful
WordPress website: Custom Menus.

Lesson 12. Custom Menus And Why You Should Use Them
Custom Menus are a relatively new feature of WordPress
but they add a lot of flexibility and power to the design
of a WordPress website.
What Is A Custom Menu?
If you look at most websites you will see that they have
somewhere a row of tabs which consist of links to pagesor
areas within the site. This row of tabs is calleda ‘menu’.
As shown in Figure 12.1, menus are often in a
prominent position at the top of the page and their labelsprovide
clues as to where you will be taken if you click on them.
Before Custom Menus were introduced, WordPress would
automatically create a menu from all of the pagesin your
website and, every time you added a page, another tab would be
added to the menu. The menuwould be displayed
wherever the theme placed it, usually somewhere across
the top of the page.
The problem was that, if you had a lot of pages(or pages
with long titles), your menu would become very crowded and
could even confuse your visitors.

By default, this is how WordPress will still behave. If you
have only a few pagesin your website then maybe this is
sufficient and you may not need to have Custom Menus.
But if you want to choose what goes in your menuand/or
decide whether to have more than one menu, then you should
make use of custom menus.
How To Create A Primary Menu
A ‘Primary Menu’ is one that your theme has already
configured into its design. The Twenty Twelve theme has built
the primary menuinto the horizontal menubar at the top ofthe
page, as shown in Figure 12.2. Otherthemes may designate
the primary menuas links or buttons down the right or left
sidebar, or elsewhere on the site.
To construct your primary menu, from the dashboard, click on
‘Appearance’, ‘Menus’. In thebox labeled ‘Menu Name’ type a
name for the menu(it doesn’t matter what the name is) and
click ‘Create Menu’. I’ve created a menucalled‘blank’ in
Figure 12.3:

You can see that there are a number of options here that
make this a very powerful feature:
‘CustomLinks’ are links to anywhere you like: a page, post or
even a picture inside your site, or a link to another
website. Type the full URL of the location you want to link
to, enter the ‘Label’, whichis the text that will appear on
the menutab and click ‘Add to Menu’. You can add as
many of these as you like to the menu.
‘Pages’ enables you to pick and choose from the pagesyou
have so far published. The beauty of this option is
that you can put some pagesin one menuand some in another
and you can also order them however you want. Checkthe pages
that you want to include on this menuand click ‘Add to
Menu’.
‘Categories’ refersto the categories recorded on Posts.If your
website consists mostly of posts you can have a menuthat
enables your user to browse selected categories from your
menu.
As you can see, you have to check the items that you want to
include on the menuand click ‘Add to Menu’. You can mix
and match the different types of menuitems in one menu if
you like.
If you want, you can also change the ‘Navigation Label’to a
different title than the one that would appear as default.
Expand the menuitem by clicking on the down arrowto see the
box where you can do this.
The items within the menucan be dragged and dropped into
the order you want them to appear, and another neat option is
that, if you have a lot of items in the menu, you can
arrange them into a hierarchy by simply dragging pagesslightly
to the right and they will nest beneath the ones above.
Whenthe menuitems are assembled how you want, just click ‘Save Menu’
and it’s done.
Now you must tell WordPress that you want this menuto appear as
your site’s ‘Primary Navigation’ which, in the case of the Twenty
Twelve theme, is horizontally across the top ofthe page. Under
‘Theme Locations’, selectthe menuthat you just created from the
drop-down list and click on ‘Save’.

How To Create A SecondaryCustom Menu
In addition to the Primary Menu, you can create a
secondary menu(and additional menus) thatyou can display in the
sidebar or other areas of your site. Whenyou have a lot of pages,
or categories, or other destinations where you want to send
your visitors, this can be a usefulway of dividing the
navigation of your site into more meaningful sections.
For example, you could have the more important and interesting pagesin
the Primary
Menuup at the top but other, less important, pagessuch as
Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Site Map as a
secondary menuin less visible locations such as the sidebar or
front-page footer (see Lesson 13).
To create another Custom Menu, from the dashboard, click
‘Appearance’, ‘Menu’ and click the tab marked with a + at
the top of the screen. (See Figure 12.3)
Then enter another menuname, as before, and click ‘Create
Menu’. You can then populate that menuwith the pages, Custom
Links or categories that you want and click ‘Save Menu’.
Position Your Custom Menus Using Widgets
Whenyou have created a secondary custom menuyou can position
it where you want it by using the ‘Custom Menu’ widget.
To do this, from the dashboard, click ‘Appearance’, ‘Widgets’ and
drag a Custom Menu widget into the sidebar or other widget
area provided by your theme, as shown in Figure 12.4:
Selectthe menuto appear in that space and then click ‘Save’.
As you can imagine, the possible combinations and variations on
how you can use this are endless.
___

I hope I have demonstrated some of the ways you can use
Custom Menus, but you can experiment for yourself and discover
how you can use this feature to make your website look and
behave the way you want.
FAQ
Help - I have just changed the theme on my website
and my custom menuhas disappeared! What’s happened?
First, you need to check that your new theme actually supports
custom menus. Most up-todate themes do, but there may be a
few who have yet to catch up with this recent feature.
If your theme does support custom menus then read on.
When you change your WordPress theme the new theme may not automatically
registerthat you have set up a custom menu so you have re-set the
primarymenu.
From the dashboard, click ‘Appearance’, ‘Menus’, ‘Theme Locations’. Select your
primarymenu from the drop-down list and click on ‘Save’. That tells the theme that
you do have a custom menu and it should then display it, as required.
Lesson 13. Set The Home Page Of Your Wordpress
Website
One of the differences between building a WordPress website
and creating one using traditional HTML-type tools is that WordPress
lets you choose whichpage you want as your front (home) page.
This is the first page that visitors will see when they land on
your domain.
Traditional webmasters sometimes have difficulty getting their head
around this: if you are one of them,just forget everything
you ever knew aboutindex.html…
By default, WordPress will choose to display your latest posts.
This is fine if you have a ‘journal’ or ‘latest news’or ‘blog’
type of website. If you leave it as the default or if
you choose ‘your latest post’, your front page will be updated every time
you add another post. This was how it worked when WordPress
was (and still is) used for a traditional blog.
But if you want a static page as your front page you have to
say whichpage you want.
Set An Existing PageAs Your Home Page
To set your front page, from the dashboard, click ‘Settings’, ‘Reading’.

To set an existing (static) page as your front page, click the
appropriateradio button as shown in Figure 13.1, selectthe required
page from the drop-down box and click ‘Save Changes’. This page will
then become your homepage. Note that if you haven’t created this
page yet, it won’tappear in the drop-down!
2012 Front PageTemplate
The 2012 WordPress theme provides an optional special template
for you to use for your front page. This does not have a sidebar
but instead has two separate footer widget areas beneath
the main article on the page.
What this means is that you could,for example, construct a
‘welcome’-type page and then show a sub-set of navigation
links in the two lower widget areas.You can then lead your
visitor into the areas of the site that you would like them to
visit first.
I have done this on the front page of my chicken keeping
site as shown in Figure 13.2:

Group Your Posts On To TheirOwn Page
There’s also another optional, handy feature that I like to
make use of. If you set a static page as your front page then
you can have all your posts grouped together on another ‘container’
page whichcan then appear as a tab on the menubar. This
means that you don’t then need to have a widget in the
sidebar to show the latest posts.
To do this, just create a blank page with the heading you
want as its title and publish it, either as a blank page or
maybe a small amount of text as an introduction.
You could,for example, create a blank page with the title ‘News’
or ‘Blog’ or something equivalent. Then, on ‘Settings’, ‘Reading’, select
that page from the ‘Postspage’ dropdown box. This is illustrated in
Figure 13.1.

Then, whenever you add a post, it will automatically be added
to that page.
Set The Number Of Posts To Scroll
Whenever you add another post to your website, by default,
the latest post will occupy the space at the top of the posts
page and all older posts will scroll down beneath it. Because of this it
is a good idea to decide just how many posts you want to
see scrolling down the page. If you want your website to look
more like a conventional website maybe one will be enough.
WordPress initially sets this number to ten whichis probably
too many for most purposes.
So, to set the number of posts per page view, from the
dashboard, click on ‘Settings, ‘Reading’ and set the indicator labeled
‘Blog pagesshow at most’ to the number of posts you want to
see on the page.
Again,this is illustrated in Figure 13.1 where you can see
that I have set my ‘News’ page to display three posts.
This setting will be applied whether or not you have a
static front page.
Whenyou’re done,click on ‘Save Changes’.
Set A Sticky Post
Another usefulfeature of posts is that you can designate one of
your posts to be ‘sticky’, which means that it will always
appear aboveother posts of a later date. This can be very handy if
there is some permanent informationthat you always want to display
(‘HowTo Order’…)on the top of your front page but to have later
posts scrolling beneath it.
To make a post sticky, on the Post page, click on ‘Edit’ next to
‘Visibility’ and check ‘stick this post to the front page’.Then click ‘OK’, as
shown in Figure 13.3.

Whenyou publish or update the post, it will always appear
on the front page of your posts.
FAQ
I want a fancy front page with a rectangulargrid showing excerpts
and links to my site’s featured posts.How can I get that?
You are talking aboutwhat is known as a ‘magazine’ theme.
This lets you selecta particular page template to use on your site’s
homepage whichpresents excerpts and thumbnails to selected posts.
Magazine themes usually come with many options to configureand
customize how you want the content to appear and they often
use some advanced WordPress options.
There are some good free magazine themes available on WordPress:
check out Bombax, Pureline and BirdSITE, although there are many more.
If you want to go down this route, I recommend that you experiment
with free themes to start with because there can be a learning curve in
workingout the best way for you to display your particular content.
When you know what you want you can investigate some of the available
premium magazine themes which can provide some truly impressive results.

Lesson 14. Choose And Change Your Wordpress Theme
WordPress themes are the design templates that determine the
appearance of the website. There are hundreds (thousands?) of
free themes to choose from and you can (usually) switch the
theme quite easily if you change your mind aboutwhat you want.
You should be aware that the Twenty Twelve theme
that we have used to illustrate this tutorial only offersa sub-set of
the possible options that WordPress provides to present your
online content.
For example, some themes offer more than one header widget,
others provide sliders and galleries, and some have built-in
functions like opt-inboxeswhile others can format your content in
a magazine-like view.
So, if you think that your requirements are too complex for
WordPress to render, I urge you to think again and explore
some of the more feature-richthemes that some very clever designers
have provided for you.
WordPress offersmany free themes on its website that you can
installwith a few clicks of themouse. Others are offered by
third parties, some for free and some for sale.
You can commissiona professional to create a unique
theme just for you or you can even create your own themes by
the use of drag-and-drop software such as Artisteer.
See the Conclusion of this tutorial to find out where to
read more aboutthese options.

But to illustrate the possibilities, we are going to go to
the WordPress site and pick a free theme.
Install A Free Wordpress Theme
From the dashboard, click on ‘Appearance’, ‘Themes’ and then the
‘Install Themes’ tab.
You’ll see a menuwhere you can search for available themes:
If you know what shapeand color of theme you want, then click on
the appropriatecheck boxesand then click on ‘Find Themes’ to see
what comes up.
Alternatively, you can browse the latest offers. You could click on
the ‘Featured’ tab becausethese themes are usually very striking
and will often suggest ideas for how you might build your site.
Three free themes that I currently use are ‘Responsive’ (see
Figure 14.1), ‘Graphene’ and ‘Pageline’. Theseall get very good reviews
from their users and they have clean and original designs that I happen
to like. If you know the name of the theme you want you can
search for it in the box at the top of the abovescreen.
Whenyou find a theme that you like the look of you can
click on ‘Preview’ to see how the theme will look on the screen.
This will pop up in a new window whichyou can close when
you’ve seen enough. It’s also a good idea to click on the
‘Details’ links to see how many stars the theme has been awarded
by other users – the more the better.
Whenyou’ve founda theme that you like, click on ‘Install’
and then on ‘Install Now’ in thepop-up window. This will

automatically upload the theme to your website. You can now
preview the theme again as it will look on your own website
and, if you like it, click ‘Activate’ and you’re done – you’ve
changed the theme.
You can change the theme of your WordPress website as
often as you like, but it is a good idea to do your
experimenting early on in the development of your site. What
you ideally wantis to find a theme that fits the style and
personality that you want to portray and then settle down when you
are comfortable with it. Your visitors will soon come to
recognize the look and feel of the website with your particular
style.
If you change the theme more than once you will probably
end up with several non-active theme files in the background.
You can, if you wish, go back and re-activate a theme that
you’ve previously installed. But, when you know that you don’t want to
make use of a previouslyinstalled theme, it’s a good idea to
simply delete it because it will just be taking up space on
your web hosting server.
After installing a new theme, have a look at the options it
gives you for changing the header, widgets, colors, or whatever.
The theme’s author may provide a link to their website
where you can find out more aboutthis theme or others
that they may have on offer.
Install A Third-Party Theme FromA Zip File
If you have a theme that you have obtained from a third
party,you will likely have the theme files in a ZIP file sitting
somewhere on your computer, in whichcase do not unzip it.
To installa zipped theme from your computer, from the
dashboard, click on ‘Appearance’, ‘Themes’,‘Install Themes’ and then
click on the ‘Upload’ tab, as in Figure 14.3:

A pop-up box will prompt you to browse your computer to
locate the ZIP file and when you have done so, click on ‘Install
Now’.The theme should then upload and install automatically
from the ZIP file. Activate it, as above, and you’re done.
___
OK, I’ve made it look pretty simple to choose and change
your website’s theme, but there are one or two important provisos
that you need to be aware of.
If you choose a theme and then go on to do a lot
of work on your website (particularly with widgets and menus)
and then decide to change your theme, the new theme
may not automatically pick up all your content and display it
how you want.
It may be just fine, but be aware that this is a
possibility and you may have to reinstall your widgets and/or
menus. This is not usually a big deal but it may just
cause a bit of unexpected work.
WordPress issuesnew software releases from time to time and
sometimes these are major upgrades whichrequire a theme to be
upgraded accordingly.Most reputable theme designers keep their themes up
to date but be aware that you may be forced to change
your theme if your designer’s theme gets out of sync with the
latest WordPress release.
FAQ
How can I design my own theme?
To design your own theme you need to be fairly competent at
CSS, HTMLand PHP, not to mention graphics technology and WordPress. So,

to be realistic, it isn’t easy for a beginner to design their
own WordPress themes.
However, one easy way for a non-geek to create a unique
WordPress theme is via software that lets users design
WordPress themes using a very flexible template whichthey can
then tweak and personalize themselves.I use Artisteer to do this
and I thoroughly recommend it. It takes a bit of practice to
explore all its possibilities but I use it a lot to create
my own, unique themes. See the Conclusion to find out more
details of Artisteer.
What’s a ‘child theme’?
Child themes are rather beyond the scopeof this tutorial,
but I will briefly explain what they are and how they can
become useful.
Essentially, a child theme enables you to create a theme
that inherits most of its characteristics from another theme (the
‘parent’ theme) but whichcontains a few specific changes that
make it different from its parent. For example, if you have a
parent theme that has a sidebar on the right but you want a
sidebar on the left, you can create a child theme that specifies
sidebars on the left.
You do this by creating a small style sheet file (style.css) that
contains the changes that you want to override the corresponding
lines in the equivalent parent theme’s style sheet.
The principle is that the original parent theme remains
unchanged and can be subject to updates and enhancements but
the child theme’s style sheet will always be linkedinto the parent
and the changes will still apply at run-time.
This is a relatively new attribute of WordPress and their
development team has stated that child themes will become
more important as future WordPress updates occur. At the
very least, it will probably mean that tools will become available for
non-tech users to tweak and personalize their themes without having
to risk compromising the functionality of the underlying theme.
So, watch out for more announcements from WordPress about child themes.
Lesson 15. The Power Of Plugins
‘Plugins’ is a term for a collection of additional (often
free) pieces of software that provide extra functionality for
WordPress websites. Theseare the ‘optional extras’ that you may, or
may not, need to make your website behave as you want.

They are called‘plugins’ because they do exactly that: if you
installa stand-aloneplugin, WordPressdetects that it’s there and makes
the connection with it automatically. You may have to configure a
few parameters to tailor it to your requirements, but that’s all
you have to do.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins available but, in this
lesson, we’re just going to install a few of the ones that I
consider essential. They are all free. I will explain what they do
and how to use them as we go along.
First, I’ll show you how to installplugins in general. Then, I’ll list
my recommended plugins and show you how to configure them.
How To Install Plugins
From the dashboard, click ‘Plugins’. You should see the list of
currently installed plugins as in Figure 15.1:
To installany plugin, from the dashboard, click ‘Plugins’ then ‘Add
New’ at the top of the screen. You can access the plugins
you need several ways from here, but the quickest way is to
click on the ‘Popular’ tab and see what comes up, as in
Figure 15.2.

You will probably see some of the recommended plugins straight
away.
To installa plugin, all you have to do is click on ‘Install
Now’ on that plugin’s listingand confirmthat you really do want to
installthe plugin. Then WordPress takes over, installs the plugin on
your website automatically and then all you have to do is
activate it.
You should repeat this step for all the recommended plugins
that you can find on the first page of ‘Popular’.
If you can’t find the plugin on the ‘Popular’ page, then the
other way of locating a plugin is to search for it. Instead
of clicking on ‘Popular’, use the ‘Search’ box on the ‘Install
Plugins’ page. Type the exact title of the plugin into the Search
box and click ‘Search Plugins’. You may be presented with more than
one choice so be sure to pick the one that has the exact
title, and then installthe plugin as above.
Recommended Plugins
So, the plugins I recommendare:
Google XML Sitemaps
This popular plugin provides a Google-compliant sitemap for
your website.
What’s a sitemap? Well, it is a file calledsitemap.xml
that sits in the background on your website and whichcontains a

complete list of all your website’s pagesand posts and documents
the connectionsbetween them.
The sitemap file is there for the benefit of the search
engines, to help them find their way around your site and index it
accordingly.Sitemaps are not really for human visitors!
Most professional websites have a sitemap and this plugin is
considered to be essential for effectiveSEO.
The plugin updates the sitemap automatically every time you
add, delete or edit something so, once installed, you don’t have to
do a thing.
All In One SEO Pack
This, in my opinion, is another essential SEO plugin. It
provides all the features you need to optimize your site’s pagesto
rank in the search engines for your chosen keywords.
Whenyou installthe ‘All In One SEO Pack’ plugin and activate it
you will see a red warningprompt at the top of the screen
asking you to configure the plugin. See below for instructions
on how to do this.
Contact Form 7
Having somewhere on your site where your visitors can contact
you is considered good practice and makes you look serious
and trustworthyin your customers’, and the search engines’, eyes.
Simply sticking up an email address on your website is
not a good idea because it will quickly be harvested by the
spam phishers and your email address will rapidly become unusable.
This plugin provides a secure way for people to contact
you privately and will provide the credibility you need to present
a professional face to the world. Later in this lesson I
will show you how to create a ‘Contact’ page.
___
OK, we’re nearly done. Just let’s finish by configuring the plugins we
just installed. If the plugin doesn’t appear below, then the
good news is that there’s nothing more to do on it!
Configure All In One SEO Pack
Click on the link on the red prompt message at the top of
your website page and you’ll get tothe options page for this plugin,
as shown in Figure 15.3:

First, click the radio button next to Plugin Status, ‘Enabled’.
Then look at the three boxes below entitled ‘Home Title’, ‘Home
Description’and ‘Home Keywords’. Theseare the boxes that tell the
search engines what your site is all about.
The text you enter here will show up on the search results
when your site appears on their listings. Figure 15.3 shows
what I entered for my website.
Enter your text and scroll to the bottom of the page and click
‘Update Options’. Thereare a lot of other technical options available
on this page and it is safe to leave the defaults as they
are.
Now that you have installed this plugin you will notice that it
has added some similar boxes to the individual Pagesand Posts
screens:

The fields ‘Title’, ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ shown in Figure
15.4 are what is known in tech-speak as ‘meta-data’. This
informationgets copied to the invisible background of your webpage
and is provided solely for the search engines; your human
visitors will not see this information.
It is good practice to fill these each time you add your pages
and posts.I will cover this topic again in Lesson 18.
Configure Contact Form7
From the dashboard, click ‘Plugins’ and click ‘Settings’ for ‘Contact
Form 7’.
There is nothing really to change here, but it would be a
good idea for you to check that the email address quoted on
this page is the email you want your messages to be sent to.
This will not appear on the contact page and will not be
visible to anyone other than you. If necessary, change this
email address and then click on ‘Save’.
Before leaving the page, copy the shortcode at the top of
the page ([contact-form-7 id=“55” title=“Contact form 1”]) to your
clipboard.
Add A Contact Page
Now, let’s quickly add a ‘Contact Us’ page. From the dashboard,
click ‘Pages’, ‘Add New’. Enter a title such as ‘Contact Us’ and
then paste the shortcode you just copied into the body of the

page. You can add some surroundingtext if you like, and then click
‘Publish’. Easy – you just got yourself a ‘Contact’ page.
While you are going through this exercise you may well see other
plugins that look interesting and that you are tempted to install.
By all means explore what’s available and install more plugins
if you can see a use for them.My advice, when looking for
plugins, is to choose only those with three or more stars and do
not installa plugin that has not been testedwith the version of
WordPress that you are using.
You can find out more abouta plugin by clicking on ‘Details’
against that plugin on the ‘Install Plugins’ page.
___
There are many, many more plugins that you can use and I
leave you to discover and install them yourself. But a quick word of
advice if this is the first WordPress website you have ever
built. Don’t overload your website with plugins if you cannot
justifythat they are necessary for the functionality of your site.
Plugins can clutter up your site and slow it down and can,
from time to time, conflict with one another. And, as with themes,
plugins can become out of date and can stop working if the
plugin’s author has not kept up to date with the current
version of WordPress. So, take it step by step and be a
little self-disciplined in your use of plugins, at least at first.
FAQ
What is the best plugin for keeping track of the number of
visitors to my website?
‘Google Analytics’ is the system used by most professional
webmasters and this provides an extensive breakdown of how many
visitors your site attracts and where they come from.
To use Analytics you need to have a Google account (free,
and easy to set up) and you have to sign up to Analytics. All
this is explained in http://www.google.com/analytics/.
Whenyou have added your website to your Google account,
you are provided with a snippet of tracking code whichyou have to
include on your website. This operates in the background and
invisibly monitors your visitors so that Google can present
you with a detailed breakdown of your website traffic. You can
see the daily results of this by logging into your Google Analytics
account.

There are various plugins whichenable you to add the tracking
code to your website and the one I currently favor is ‘Google
Analytics for WordPress’.Search for this plugin as explained
above, installit and copy and paste your tracking code as directed.
Having said all this, when you first get started Google Analytics
may not be very useful because you may not actually be getting
many visitors. So, you don’t need to rush into this until you have
your site up and running (say, after a month or so).
Lesson 16. Comments: Start A Dialogue WithYour Visitors
You may remember that, in Lesson 5, I cautioned you about
allowing people to comment on your posts and pagesbecause of
the nuisance of spam.Leaving open the opportunity for visitors to
add their own content can turn your website into a magnet for
spammers aroundthe worldto post garbage and, at times, some
seriously offensive material.
Enable Comments
However, if you have a good reason for inviting your visitors
to leave comments on your website, and if you are prepared to
moderate it, here is what I recommendyou do:

explanatory and you can decide for yourself what else you want to
check.
Then click ‘Save Changes’.
That’sall you need to do if you want a comment box to
appear at the foot of every post and page. But you will probably
want to be a bit more selective aboutwhichpagesyou actuallywant to
allow comments on. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to
invite comments on your Contact page.
To set up selective commenting, from the dashboard, go to
‘Pages’, ‘Add New’.Then look over to the top right of the screen
and click on the arrownext to ‘Screen Options’ as in Figure
16.2.
Where it says ‘Showon screen’ make sure the ‘Discussion’ box is
checked.
What this will do is to add a ‘Discussion’ box on the screen
where you add a new page. You can then check or uncheck
whether you actually want a comment box on that page at the
time that you add or update that page.
Do the same with the Screen Options on the ‘Posts’, ‘Add
New’.
Moderate Comments To Banish Spammers
Note that I recommendthat comments must be approved before
appearing on your website.
The way this worksis that, when someone posts a comment via a
page or post on your site, the administrator (you!)will receive an
email informing you that a new comment is awaiting moderation.
You then have to approve the comment before it is
published. Whenyou approve a comment it will appear on the
page where it was originally posted. But if the comment is
spam you can mark it as spam and it will disappear.
If a visitor posts a comment and you approve it, then, if
that visitor ever visits your site again and uses the same email address,
they can post another comment whichwill be automatically approved.

That’sbecause WordPress assumes that you trust this visitor and that
their future comments are going to be OK.
This is generally true but a few people do abusethis so it’s
a good idea to just keep an eye on comments. You can easily
trash any that are unwelcome.
Moderating comments yourself will probably be all you need to do
in the early days of your website because the volume of
user comments will likely be manageable. But what if the spammers
find you and you are suddenly overwhelmed by hundreds of
spam comments?
The answer is to use a plugin to filter the comments
before they even get through to your site. The anti-spam plugins
I use and can recommendare:
Akismet
Spam Free WordPress
GASP
You will only need to use one of these plugins to filter spam.
Akismet is the most popular
(and, in my opinion, the most reliable) but you will have to
pay a small license fee if your website is for commercial
purposes, otherwise it is free.
At the time of writing, each of these plugins is available
and up-to-date but I recommend you check them all out and select
the one that seems most appropriatefor you. To find out more
abouteach of them,search for them by name as described in
Lesson 15.
FAQ
If someone posts a comment on my website, can I post
my own reply to that comment?
Yes. You can, in effect, enter into a dialogue with your
commenting visitors. Whenanyone adds a comment to your
site and you approve it, a ‘reply’ link will appear
alongside it. To enter your own reply to that comment, display
the post/page where the comment appears, click on the ‘reply’
link and another comment box will appear for you to add
your reply.
Help - I have set my site to allow comments but no-one
has ever added a comment! What am I doingwrong?

Relax – in the early days of a website you will probably
not be getting many visitors and those who do visit may just be
passing by. And even when you do get traffic, in most cases
only a very small percentage of visitors will actively contribute
their own comments.
Give it time. Post regularly to your site and try to build up a
regular readership.
Why not add some controversial topic and ask your readers to
have their say? You could even invite your friends to chip in and
start off a discussion. Just keep at it!

Lesson 17. Users And TheirCapabilities
By default, WordPress assigns the role of ‘administrator’ to
the user (you!)who created the WordPress installation. The administrator is
the person who has the capability to do everything with the
website – add, amend, delete pages, posts and media,
change the theme, set passwords, installplugins, manage widgets
and add or delete other users – and more.
As a user, you have a profile. To see yours, from the
dashboard, click ‘Users’, ‘All Users’ and you will see your username
listed.Hoverthe mouse over your username and click ‘Edit’ when it
pops up. You’ll see all the informationthat WordPress knows about
you, as shown in Figure 17.1:
You don’t have to add any more informationif you don’t want to
but, if you do, some of theinformationmay be visible to visitors
to your site.
Note that here, at the bottom of the page (Figure 17.2), is
where you can change your password. This is the password
you need to login to the WordPress dashboard and you can change
this whenever you want to.

Just type in the new password (twice) and then click on ‘Update
Profile’.
If you are the founder of your website and you will be
the only person who ever workson it, then you can now safelyskip
the rest of this lesson.
But if there could be more than one person working on the
site then you will need to know how to create other users.
Add Another User
To add another user, from the dashboard, click ‘Users’, ‘Add New’.As
you can see from the screen, the fields at the top of the
screen (Username, E-mail, First Name, Last Name etc.) are self-
explanatory. Enter all you need to identify that user. At the
bottom of the screen is a drop-down box marked ‘Role’.
This will tell WordPress what that user is, and isnot, allowed to do
on the site:
Administrator - somebody who has access to all the
administration features (the same as you!)
Editor - somebody who can publish and manage posts and
pagesas well as manage other users’posts,etc.
Author - somebody who can publish and manage their own
posts
Contributor - somebody who can write and manage their posts
but not publish them

It is up to you to decide how to allocate the role
and capabilities of each user to suit your organization and team.
Whenall is filled in, click ‘Add New User’ and you’re done. That
person can now login to theWordPress dashboard (see Lesson 3)
with the username and password that you have assigned and will be
given the capabilities that the role permits.
FAQ
I set my friendup as a user on my website so that he
could be a contributor,but he’s forgotten his password. How can I
retrieve the password for him?
The easiest way for you to do this is to set a new
password for him and here’s how to do it.
Log into your website as the administrator. From the dashboard,
click on ‘Users’, ‘All Users’, hoverover your friend’s name and click on
‘Edit’.Scroll down the page and enter a new password (twice). Then
click ‘Update User’.
Then email your friendwith the new password and tell him not, under
any circumstances, to forget it again…

Lesson 18. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As I have mentioned, SEO is a huge topic and is all about
how to optimize your website to attract visitors. Thereis no
point in having a state-of-the-art website with all the bells
and whistles that make it work like a dream if no-one
ever visits it.
So you need traffic, whichis a technical term for real people,
with real eyeballs, eager to view the delectable content you have
prepared for them.
Now when we talk aboutSEO we really mean optimizing websites for
the Google search engine. Google isn’t the only search engine
but it is the biggest, and what Google does, the others follow.
The basic problem that all webmasters face is that there are
literally billions of websites on the Internet all competing for
attention. Whensomeone goes on to Google and performs a search,
they begin by keying in some sort of query, for example,
‘how do I keep chickens in my backyard’.
Google checks its index and instantly displays ten results on
the first page, as in Figure 18.1:

If the user sees what they want they’ll click on a site. If
they don’t,they mightjust move over to the second page, but rarely
beyond that. So, if your website doesn’t show up on the first
couple of pagesof the search, you are invisible.
Now, wouldn’t it be great if your website could appear on
page one or two of the Google search results when someone
types in a queryapplicable to your site? That’sreally what SEO is all
about.
Google has traditionallybeen quite guarded abouthow they decide
whichwebsites deserve to appear prominently on their search
results. Their search algorithms have always been one of the big
trade secrets of this billion dollarenterprise.
But now cannywebmasters have effectively reverse-engineered the
algorithms and found ways of effectively ‘gaming’ the system to
trick Google’s computer robots (that we techies have dubbed
‘spiders’) into artificially boosting their sites.

To deal with this, Google regularly issuesnew versions of its
algorithms and they have lately been a bit more informative aboutwhat we
webmasters can actually do to please their mighty spiders.
So, while I cannot give you all the insider intelligence on
how to definitively optimize your website (nobody outside of
Google can), what follows here is a summary of the latest
tips Google has now magnanimously released…
Firstly, what I can tell you is that Google likes WordPress
websites because the WordPress behind-the-scenes code forces the
site to be neat and tidy, without broken internal links, and
with a spider-friendly structure that makes it easy for them to
crawl the site. So, choosing WordPress is one big plus for you!
BasicWordpress SEO
Thesefew simple steps will optimize your WordPress website so
that Google and the other search engines will have every incentive
to index your site efficiently and thus help you attract targeted traffic.
All these tips start from the dashboard:
‘Settings’, ‘General’
‘Site Title’ is very important. As shown in Figure 18.2, it
should contain (preferably start with) the main keyword that you
want to optimize for. For example, ‘Keeping Chickens’ is much
more precise and descriptive than ‘Joe’s Backyard’.
Once your site begins to attract trafficdon’t change this unless
there is a good reason to do so.
‘Posts’/’Pages’, ‘Add New’

The post or page title is also important. Again, this should
contain one of your site’s main keywords. Make sure that the
permalink accurately records that. Edit it if it doesn’t.
The content of your post/page should be unique and should
contain a sprinkle of words or phrases whichhave a
connection or association with the keyword(s) in the post/page title. The
main keyword(s) should be included in the text a few times
but not to an exaggerated extent.
One of the latest features that Google looks for is whether
your page is usefuland interesting. One of the ways it measures
this is by looking at how long your visitor stays on the
page, how many pagesof your website they read and whether they
share the content with others. If people tweetor like or share
your web pageson social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook
then that boosts Google’s approval.
Google also likes to see the main body of your text abovethe
fold. This means that the user need not have to scroll down the
page to find anything readable. If the top half of your page is
taken up with ads then that’s a downer.
Google also likes the text to be grammatically correct with no
typos or spelling errors.
If you have a long article on your post-page you should
consider using sub-headings, again containing one of your keywords.
Use the drop-down ‘Paragraph’ box to format subheadings as ‘h3’
(not h1 or h2 whichyour theme mightuse for other purposes).
If you have an imageembedded in your text, add your keyword(s) to
the imagetitle, description, alternate text and, optionally, caption.
In the case of Posts,use one or more relevant categories and
add two or three keywords to Post Tags.
Remember that you have to do two thingswhen writing your posts
and pages. You must communicate effectively not only with your
human visitors but also to the computer robots (spiders) that try
to work out what it is that you are talking about.
All in One SEO Pack plugin
This plugin is important for SEO because it specifically adds
what is known as ‘metadata’ to the internal coding of
your site. This is not visible on the page to human visitors
but it’s there, behind the scenes, for the spiders to gobble
up.
In the plugin’s boxeson the Pagesand Posts pages(See Figure
15.4 in Lesson 15), enter the post/page title, a summary of

the post/page content in the description and three or four keywords.
The ‘description’ box is the text whichwill be displayed by
the search engines on the search results page (see Figure
18.1) so you need to write this in plain language, with keyword(s)
appearing naturally in the text and, preferably, a call to action.
(‘Find out how to build a chicken coop here!’)
If you want to know more aboutthis plugin and the ways in
whichit can help with your SEO have a look at the documentation
provided on the plugin’s website.
___
That’sthe basicsfrom me on this topic, but I encourage you to
explore more for yourself because SEO is important for all
webmasters to understand.
FAQ
What’s a ‘keyword’?
A keyword is one or more words that mighttrigger a
match in the Google Search Engine database.
Here’s how this works. Whenyou first build your website, Google
(and all the other search engines) find your website and their
software robots read (‘crawl’) the words on each page,
especially the headings and anything you’ve made a point of
emphasizing. The bots ignore the entireHTMLand technical stuff –
all they’re interested in is the actual words that you have
written in your pagesand posts.
They deliver this data back to Google’s indexing software which
then analyses what you’ve written and decides what your website
is all about. This is very powerful software and it generally
does a pretty good job of impersonating a human reader.
Google then stores the informationaboutyour website in its
vast database, waiting for someone to sit down at their
computer and type a queryinto their search page whichmight match
what your website is all about.
So, if you want your website to be foundby your targetaudience
then it’s important that you optimize your content for the
keywords that they mightuse when searching for information. And that’s
where we come to the other side of the equation.
The term ‘keyword’ also denotes the words that the user types in
as their query.
Google saves every string of words that users type in to find
something and their software calculates the frequency with whichthese

phrases or combinations of words occur, over all the
searches made. Therefore, they can calculate very accurately how
popular a particular topic or phrase is. And, as you can deduce,
the more popular the keyword, the more difficult it is to
get your website to come up on page one because there will be
too many competing websites.
For example, golf is a very popular topic that people want to
search for. But simply typing in the word ‘golf’ is usually a
wasteof time because it is too broad. Millions of people
simply type in the word ‘golf’ and Google does its best to
come up with something relevant but the user could be looking for
anything and the results they get will likely be too broadto be
useful. And it would be virtually impossible for you to
get your website to come up on the first page of Google
when someone simply types in ‘golf’ because there are just so
many other well-established websites competing on the same subject.
But here’s where the ‘optimization’ bit comes in. Canny
surfers have come to learn that they’ll get results quicker if
they search for something more specific, for example, ‘golf shoes’.
But even that is very broad.
It’s much better to look for ‘men’s golf shoes’ or even
‘men’s blue golf shoes’ or ‘men’s blue golf shoessize 10’. That
narrows down the search and the user is more likely to find
what they’re looking for.
So, if you’re selling golf shoes, it will be easierfor
you to rank your website in the search results if you optimize
one or more pagesfor very specific words and phrases to
describe exactly what products you have for sale.
‘Sportco Men’s Blue Leather Golf ShoesSize 10’ tells Google,
and your potential customer, precisely what you have for sale. And
you will have a much better chance of coming up higher in
the search results simply because there is much less
competitionfor these keywords.
But what if you are a small business or organization and
you just want your website to publicize your name and brand?
SEO is much easierif your name is unique (or nearly) because
there is much less competition. If your website is all about‘Clarissa
Clancy Clairvoyant’then it’s much easierto appear on page one of
Google when someone types in your name because you are probably
the only one using that keyword.

But that presupposes that you have done enough publicity to
get your name known outside of Google in the first place –
and that’s quite another topic!
Lesson 19. Behind The Scenes WithHTML
Right at the start of this tutorial I said that you don’t need to
know HTMLto use WordPress. This is true, but you can see from a
couple of the previous lessons that it can be handy to
know how to insert HTMLif you need to use it to display
something not coveredby WordPress.
HTML stands for ‘Hyper-Text Markup Language’ and is the code
that, originally, people had to use to create and maintain a
regular website.
The beauty of WordPress is that it shields you from all
this in its user interface but, behind the scenes, WordPress
generates all the necessary code for you. And it does it (mostly)
very efficiently.
I’m not going to teach you HTMLhere but I’m going to show you
how to use it if you have written any of your own code or
if you have a code snippet provided for you to perform some
function not supported by WordPress.
Add HTML CodeTo A Wordpress Page
WordPress presents you with an alternative window to use on
Posts and Pagesif you want to insert your own code. To do this,
click on the ‘Text’ tab in a post or page, as in Figure 19.1:
Whenyou click on that you are taken to the HTMLwindow and
WordPress expects that there will be some HTMLor other code included
in the text.

You can write any text as normal and WordPress will display it
as normal, but when it encounters any HTMLit will execute it
rather than displaying it as text.
Figure19.2 shows the text box with HTMLcode in it…
… and Figure 19.3 shows what that page looks like to the
visitor:

Whenyou use this Text tab there can be occasions when WordPress
doesn’t render the HTML code as you mightexpect. This is
because it does a further layer of verification before
accepting the code and this can mean that it strips out anything
that it doesn’t like.
This can be annoying, but you can force WordPress to accept
your code if you temporarily change your User profile.
Disable The Visual Editor
From the dashboard, go to ‘Users’, ‘Your Profile’ and you’ll see a
screen like Figure 19.4:

Checkthe ‘Disable the visual editorwhen writing’ box and then scroll
down and click ‘Update Profile’.
Now you can enter the code you want into your post or page and it
should retainthe code ‘as is’ when you publish it.
If you do this, you will have to go back to your User profile
and uncheck this box if you want to re-enable the visual editorfor
use in future posts.
But you’ll have to remember to repeat the disabling if ever
you want to go back to edit the original post because, if you
don’t,WordPress will strip out all your code!
___
I suppose I oughtnot to leave this lesson without a
health warning. Inserting HTMLcode into a WordPress post or
page can have unintended consequences. This can be because the
HTMLcode may contain an error, or maybe something in the
code clashes with the site’s theme, or simply that you are
tryingto do something that WordPress considers to be invalid.
If you get problems with HTMLyou have two choices: remove
the offending code, or call for help from someone who knows
what they are doing.
FAQ
I’m a total non-techie and all this stuff gives me a headache.
Do I reallyneed to know aboutHTML?

No. You don’t have to worryyour pretty little head aboutit at all,
if you don’t want to. You can leave it to WordPress.
Lesson 20. How To Be A Winning Wordpress Webmaster
OK, this section of the book is for when you have completed
Lessons 1-19 and you have a working website up and running.
People in this situation often ask me, ‘Right, I’ve done my
website, now what next?’
Well, I’ll let you into a little secret. Successful websites are
never really finished. The point abouta living website is that it
reflects change through time and it is always up-todate
and fresh when visitors land on it. So, work on a winning
website never really stops.
BuildUp Your Website
So, you should embark on a schedule of constantly adding
new pagesand/or posts and fine-tuning your site navigation so that
visitors can easily find the informationthey are looking for.
The more work you do, the more skilled you will get at it
and you will effectively learn on the job. And, trust me, you will
find it very rewarding to see your website coming to life.
Get Feedback
Whenyou’re ready, ask others to give you an honest
appraisal of your efforts. Find out what else they would like to
see on the site and whether they can offer any positive suggestions
for improvements.
Promote Your Website
Don’t forget the external promotion of your website.
You need to let everyone know aboutyour website by adding
your domain URL to all your publicity material and your email
signature and your business cards and your profile on forums etc.,
etc.
If you are on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn
(or any other social media), make sure that all your friends, followers
and contacts know aboutthe website.
Where possible, ask others with websites to link to yours as
this will help your search engine visibility.
Expand Your Skills
And, as you work away,you will find that your skill-set will grow.
You will discover that you have mastered techniques that you once

thought unfathomable and you will also gain the confidence to
learn even more.That is, essentially, how I learned WordPress and
you can do the same.
Get Help
As it says in the title, I wrote‘WordPress To Go’ as a
guide for beginners, not a definitive work on the whole topic of
WordPress. But I hope that I have equipped and encouraged you to
find out for yourself the answers to questions not covered
here.
WordPress has its own self-contained, contextual ‘Help’system. Look at
the top right of each of the pagesin the dashboard and you
will see a little ‘Help’tag. Whenyou click on that you will see a
drop-down box that contains text and links to provide more
information about the type of page you are on and how to
use it.
In addition to WordPress.org, there are many other websites offering
usefulinformation about WordPress.
Go on to Google and simply type in the question(s) that
you want answered. Make sure you include the word ‘WordPress’
somewhere in the question.
You may be surprised at how much informationthere is out there for
free. You will understand a lot more from that material after you’ve
been through these lessons than you would have done before.
But one warning aboutpicking up WordPress tips from external
websites. Checkthe date of the page or article that you are
referencing because WordPress informationcan quickly go out of date.
If what you are reading is more than one year old, be careful
that the informationyou are reading is still current.
Finally…
So, my message in this final lesson is to keep at it.
Expand and polishyour website. Keep it all fresh and up-to-the-
minute. Keep on learning. And take pride in your achievement.
That’sthe way to become a winning, WordPress webmaster!

Conclusion
WordPress is a huge topic and I hope that you have foundthis
tutorial a usefulguide to getting you started. I have deliberately
kept thingsas simple as possible and, for that reason,I have
not ventured further than the essential first steps.
Thousands of people with no previous web experience have used
this tutorial successfully - and I look forward to you joining
them!
If you’ve reached this page but you haven’t yet made a
start on creating your own website then, please, go back to
the beginning of this book and work through it again.If it all
seems a bit confusing the first time through, then the details
will likely all begin to click into place the second time around.
Give it another shot and you’ll soon be well on your way to
getting your very own website.
If you have followed these lessons and created your own website
on your own domain then congratulations – you did it! You
have made a start in getting your own online presence and you
are now, officially, a WordPress webmaster.You’ve achieved your
objective, and you’re entitled to feel proud.
Further Resources
As I have mentioned, the WordPress scenechanges all the time
with more new updates and features than I can possibly include
in this book. I have tried to cover the very basics in this tutorial
but you can find more tools and tips on my website where I
add any information that I think will be useful.
You can find a load of recommended resources on my website
at http://wordpress2go.com/resources/ where I have listed many more
sources that you can investigate. And if you have a genuine
queryaboutsomething in this book then you can contact me via this
site and I will do my best to answer.
Also on my website I have listed some of the places you
can go to find more WordPress themes, other than the free ones
available from WordPress. I have also provided details of some of
the tools, free and paid, that I have foundusefulin building my
own websites.
I have also left my demosite http://1.keepingchickens.net/online so
that you can view it and see the results of this tutorial in
real time.
Please Review This Book!

Finally, please let me ask you a favor.If you have found
this book useful, please would you go back to ‘WordPress To
Go’ on Amazon
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0072V4EYS) and leave me a review?
Satisfied readers provide the very best advertisement for a product
and I would value your opinion.
We all like to see helpful reviews when we are looking to
buy something and it’s good for everyone if customers are willing
to share their opinions.
___
Again,thank you for using this book. Good luck with your website!
About The Author
Sarah McHarry is a webmaster,programmer and writer. She
has worked as a developer for businesses large and small,on
both sides of the Atlantic, for more years than she cares to brag
about.
She built her first WordPress website in 2008 and, as a
professional webmaster, accustomed to battling with the
intricacies of HTML, PHP and CSS, it was a revelation to her.
Here, at last, was an interface that made web-building accessible to
everyone. Better still, itwas free and available to anyone who
wanted to use it.
Sarah has since built dozens of WordPress sites, both for herself
and for her clients. And one of the unexpected outcomes of
creating all those WordPress websites and blogs for her clients was
that they began to ask how they could set up and maintain
those sites themselves.
This is how this book came into being.
After experimenting with a number of approaches to present
the information, Sarah found that the ‘20 Lessons’ format was
the most effective.
This book is the result.
Sarah now worksat building websites for voluntary organizations in
her local community and teaching others how to do the same.
Whenshe is not fiddling around with her websites, Sarah likes to
play bridge, take photographs and indulge in guerilla gardening.
Sarah is British (but half-Canadian) and she currently lives in
the West Country of England with her cat, Fanny.

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