20-11-2012, 06:12 PM
WordPress Tutorial For Beginners
1WordPress Tutorial.pdf (Size: 897.72 KB / Downloads: 170)
Versions Of WordPress
We will start off by using the free version of WordPress at wordpress.com. This
means that WordPress hosts your blog on its own computers. This is the ‘lite’
version of WordPress: fine for entry-level users and the platform of choice for
many individual bloggers and non-commerical users.
There is another level of WordPress at wordpress.org which you might want to
use if you are a small (or big) business or if you want a blog for any sort of
commerical purpose or if you simply want to build a fully-functioning blog that
makes use of all the more advanced bells and whistles that wordpress.org
provides for you. Under this option, you build a blog under your own domain and
pay for your own hosting. This isn’t free, but it actually doesn’t cost a lot. If you
want to go down this route, then please check out my WordPress2Go video
tutorial which will teach you how to build a self-hosted WordPress blog.
But, even if you do want to build a self-hosted blog and go for the more advanced
option, you should start with this ebook to learn the basics as many of the steps
to building a blog are the same.
You should particularly start with this ebook if you are a newbie because the
video tutorial will be getting into more advanced territory and you’ll find it easier
if you’ve done the beginner’s bit first.
Preamble
So, you want to get yourself a blog? Congratulations, you are about to join
millions of others around the globe who have discovered the power and joys of
blogging!
The first step is sort of obvious but it is actually quite important. You need to
work out what your blog is going to be about and what you want it to accomplish.
If you just spend the time on a little thought and planning you’ll find it easier to
make the decisions as you get your blog under way.
If you want to build a blog that will attract the attention of other Internet visitors
then you want to decide what your ‘niche’ is. Is your blog going to be about a
hobby? Or a daily journal of your fascinating life? Or maybe you want the world to
know what you think about the big issues of the day, or maybe you have
ambitions to found an empire.
Decide on the topic of your blog and work out how you want to present yourself
to the world and how you are going to keep your blog going. What do you want
the main outline of your blog to look like? How important is it that you attract
comments from others? How much of your blog will be static and how much will
be posts? How often will you want to post to your blog?
Getting Started
In this ebook I’m going to walk you through the steps you need to take to set up
a free WordPress.com blog. Why WordPress? Well, because it’s the most powerful
and flexible blogging platform that there is and it’s where the professionals hang
out. OK, you may be an amateur, but you don’t want to look like a complete
dummy, do you? Aim high and you’ll get a better blog.
Writing & Publishing Your Blog
There are certain features which are common to most blogs:
· Pages
· Posts
· About
· Categories
· Blogroll
· Comments
Here I’ll deal with each of these features in order.
Pages
As I discussed earlier, pages are the static part of your blog and I advised you to
plan these out so that you could, say, write one page a day until you’ve got them
in place. One of the advantages of doing your work gradually like this is that it
makes the blog look more ‘natural’, that is, something that you, the author, are
lovingly creating over time and which holds out the promise of more to come.
Posts
Post are the more transient part of your blog, usually the regular, maybe daily,
chunks of text which contain your current news, views, tips, etc. which you
choose to post to keep your blog looking up-to-date and alive. Each new post
appears at the top of your screen, above the previous posts and visitors can scroll
down to see older posts. When there are more posts than can fit on a page, the
posts are archived so that they can be retrieved if someone wants to find them.
Posts are actually the real point of blogging. Posts differentiate a blog from a
website: posts are alive and ever-changing and provide an ongoing narrative of
your life and work, on whatever your blog topic is.
You can post as often as you like and your posts become the body of your blog –
together with all the other components of your blog, your posts become your
distinctive contribution to the blogosphere.
About
Many blog themes have an ‘About’ page. This is where you introduce yourself to
your audience and tell them something about you, your background, your CV,
what makes you special etc. And this is where you can have a picture or logo if
you want. You don’t have to have an ‘About’ page if you prefer to remain
anonymous, and you can use a nickname or pen name if you’d prefer not to
identify yourself.
Blog themes vary in the way they treat ‘About’ so you’ll need to do a bit of
digging. This is where we’ll start exploring some of the many features behind the
scenes of the WordPress platform.
Categories
If you’re planning to post on a range of topics, the chances are that you’ll want to
file your posts under categories. You’ll see on your blog’s sidebar somewhere
where it says ‘Categories’ and underneath that it will say ‘Uncategorized’.
The best way of explaining categories is by example. Going back to our rat
fancier’s blog, she’s probably going to be posting on a different rat-related topic
each day and her posts will cover topics such as ‘rat food’, ‘breeding rats’, ‘my
pet rat’ etc. If she assigns these broad topics as categories in her blog, every
time she creates a post she can choose one or more of these categories to tell her
visitors what that post is about.
Comments & Spam
Comments can be both the joy and the scourge of your blog. By default,
whenever someone visits your blog they can go to the comments box and add
their comments. This may be a delightful contribution by a well-meaning fan or it
can be some nutcase spam merchant selling fake Viagra.
What I would say to start with is ‘don’t panic’. When you start your blog, I
recommend that you leave it open to comment by anyone who finds it but
monitor what is going on. Get WordPress to send you an email whenever anyone
comments.
Adding Pictures To Your Blog
Pictures can enhance a blog in so many ways. The old cliché about a picture being
worth a thousand words still holds true. But I see so many blogs where the
author has gone overboard with so many not-very-wonderful pictures that I
instantly lose interest. There is a balance to be made between text and graphics
and if you get this right your blog will look like a winner.
There are actually two ways to add a picture to your blog and this depends on
where the picture comes from. If you have a picture already on your computer
that you want to use on your blog you can upload it to WordPress. I’ll call this an
‘uploaded’ picture.
If, on the other hand, you want to display a picture that is already stored on
another website or blog then you need to embed that picture in your page or
post. I’ll call this an ‘embedded’ picture.
Uploaded Pictures
The first place you might want to add a picture is your ‘About’ page. You don’t
have to have a picture of yourself here: you could upload a logo or a stock photo
or a jokey cartoon – it’s your call.
I’ll use my ‘About’ page to demonstrate how to upload a picture to a WordPress
page or post.
First, find a picture and save it somewhere on your own computer in a location
where you can easily find it again. This could be a digital photo or a bit of clip art
or a stock image that you have rights to use. Whatever, the size of the image is
important because you’ll want it to display correctly.
Before we upload an image, let me explain how WordPress deals with uploaded
images on the page. You have two choices: you can display an image as a
thumbnail or as a full size image. If you display it as a thumbnail then you have
an additional option of displaying it as a full size image if the visitor clicks on it.
This is how I usually like to display my images because it means that my text
hasn’t been displaced by my images. But if your blog is primarily about pictures
then you’ll maybe want to display the images full sized right from the start.