What Is WordPressThis is the cliff-notes version that will help you decided if WordPress is what you want and whether you want to build the site yourself or hire a WordPress developer.  And, if you decide that you want to build your own WordPress site, you’ll find the basics to get started.

THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU’LL WANT TO KNOW THAT ANSWER ‘WHAT IS WORDPRESS?’

1. What is WordPress?  Here’s the scoop on why you would want to go with WordPress

  • Over 60 million WordPress sites worldwide, it’s very popular!
  • It’s easy to manage your own website so you don’t have to pay a developer.
  • It easy to build a basic WordPress site, and you can select from more than 1,400 free themes from WordPress.org (design templates).
  • You can add endless functionality and manage those yourself. Such as: Video; Audio; Photo Gallery; Data Collection Forms; Image Rotator; Twitter Feed; Event Calendar. There are more than 14,000 plugins that add functionality to WordPress.
  • You can make your WordPress website look like a blogging site, a more static looking site, or a combination of both.

WORDPRESS DEFINITIONS

Theme: Design templates that determine the look of your websites. See examples here.
Plugins: These are ‘add-ons’ that extend the functionality of WordPress. Examples include: Video Player; Data Collection Forms; Photo Gallery. There are more than 13,000 plugins.
Widgets: These are plugins that go into a widget area of a WordPress website, typically these go into the sidebar.

2. How to determine the look and functions of a WordPress site

If you already have developed a brand identity, you will want your website design to be consistent. If this is your situation, you may want to use a blank-canvas theme so you can create a website with the exact look that you have in mind. A blank-canvas theme allows you to apply your own design to WordPress.

These are the most popular blank-canvas themes to consider: Thesis; StudioPress; Woo Themes; Headway; and iThemes

If you’re not worried about matching a brand identity, here are your options:

  • You can select from over 1,300 free themes (design templates) from WordPress.org
  • You can get ideas on website designs that you like by just looking at websites in your business category. Just do a search on in Google with your business category and write down the sites that you like, making notes of the specifics about that site you like.

As far as functions go, think about what would be appropriate for your business. There are nearly 13,000 plugins for WordPress that will extend functionality. So just about anything you want to do, you can probably do it on WordPress. Check out all the plugins here: WordPress.org. Some examples of functions are: Image Rotator; Photo Gallery; Twitter Feed; Video; Audio; Retweet Buttons; Social Media link; and of course a blog.

3. How to pick a WordPress hosting location

There are a handful of hosting companies that do a fantastic job supporting WordPress with their technology and customer support. The one I continue to recommend is Bluehost. Not only are their people there 24/7, but they are incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to WordPress.

Bluehost is also the number one recommended hosting provider by WordPress.org. Here’s what they have to say:

“There are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there, the vast majority of which meet the WordPress minimum requirements, and choosing one from the crowd can be a chore. Just like flowers need the right environment to grow, WordPress works best when it’s in a rich hosting environment.

We’ve dealt with more hosts than you can imagine; in our opinion, the hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the hosting world. If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back—so you can have a great host and support WordPress.org at the same time. If you don’t need the flexibility of a full web host, you may consider getting a free blog on WordPress.com.” Learn more about WordPress.com.

4. How to install WordPress

This is amazingly simple. If you have a good web hosting company you just login to the control panel, scroll down to the section that is “software/services” and click on the WordPress icons, then follow the online directions. If you have a good hosting provider, WordPress will install in less than 30 seconds. Next you’ll seen a screen that gives you the URL to your WordPress dashboard. NOTE: Some hosting providers may have a different method to install WordPress.

5. How to install your WordPress theme

This is equally as easy. In the WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’ and click on ‘Themes’. If the theme you want is a free theme from WordPress.org, click on ‘Install Theme’ at the top of the page. Use the search box to search for your theme. Once you find it, just click on ‘Install’ and then “Activate’.

6. How to add more functionality to your WordPress site with widgets and plugins

To add plugins, just click on ‘Plugins’ on the WordPress dashboard. Click on ‘Add New’ at the top of the page. Search for you plugin or widget. Be sure that your plugin is compatible with the current version of WordPress, the click on ‘Install’. Next, find the plugin in your plugin list and click “Active’ to turn on the plugin. Depending on what you’ve added to your site, it will likely add a link to manage it in the WordPress menu bar. If you added a widget, then you’ll find it by clicking on “Appearance/Widget” on the WordPress menu bar. Once in the widget section, you can drag your new widget into one of the listed section on the far right side of the page. Finally, take a look at your website and you’ll see the new feature.

7. How to create/edit your WordPress posts and pages

Just click on “pages” or “posts” to add a page/post, or to edit an existing page. Once you’re in the page/post, you’ll see it looks a lot like inside Microsoft Word. As you mouse-over each icon in the toolbar, you’ll notice the roll-over text that tells what that toolbar icon does. First, be sure you see both rows of the tool bar. If you don’t, mouse over the icon that says ‘Show/Hide Kitchen Sink”. The will then show an second row in the toolbar.

Most of the toolbar icons are pretty self-explanatory, perhaps with a few exceptions. The icon in the bottom row that is a “W” is really important. If you’re want to paste text from Microsoft Word into WordPress, there is hidden code in Microsoft that will create problem if you paste it directly into the big white box. So instead, paste that Microsoft text into the popup box that appears when you click on the “W” icon, then click on ‘Insert”. This will remove all that evil hidden Microsoft code.

The other toolbar icon that isn’t crystal clear is the one with the “T”. This stands for text. If you’re pasting text from another source, like another website, and you want to covert what you’re pasting to plain text, just paste the text into this popup box and then click ‘Insert’.

8. How to add images and videos to a WordPress site

To add photos to your page, first click your mouse to the top-left of the paragraph that you want your photo to appear. Next, click on the toolbar icon directly to the right of ‘Upload/Insert’. A popup box will appear and you will be able to find a photo from your computer or from the WordPress library. Once you’ve found your photo, click you will probably want to remove the description and the link. Next, indicate where the photo will appear, to the left, center or right and click on ‘Insert Into Post/Page’. Finally, click on ‘Update’ in the far right column of your edit section.

To add a video, I recommend using a plugin to make this process easy. The plugin I recommend is called ‘WordPress Video Plugin’ by Oliver Wunder. All you need to do is install it and active it. Next, paste the appropriate shortcode in your page or post. The appropriate shortcode will be determined based on where you video is hosted. For example, if your video is hosted on YouTube, your shortcode will look like this [youtube -dnrlacEZzs 300 227]. The shortcode includes the brackets and goes in the visual view of you page/post. Once you add the unique ID of your video, it will then stream in from YouTube or where ever you have it hosted.

9. How to make your WordPress site search-engine friendly

There number one thing you can do to make your site search-engine-friendly is to install the ‘All In One SEO’ Pack’ by Michael Torbert. If you have a premium theme, you may not need this plugin since this functionality is probably already there. This plugin allows you to write in the title tag and description tag that actually appears in the search engine results. This in the single most important thing that you can do the improve your search ranking.

One other easy thing that can help is by having friendly permalinks. This means instead of having your page and post links end in ID numbers or dates, they end in the name of the page or post. You can paste this code into your custom permalinks field to get the friendly permalinks: /%year%/%postname%/

If your competition has really got the SEO down, you will have to do even more. If that the case, consider getting the help of an SEO expert.

10. How to backup your WordPress content

Backing up your site’s content is amazingly easy and fast. Click on ‘Tool/Export’ in the WordPress menu bar. Leave all the default filter settings and click on ‘Download File’ at the bottom of the page. This download an XML file to your computer. I usually backup my site on a monthly basis and just save the XML files in a folder titled ‘Website Backup’. By the way, the most common need people have to use their backup is because they forgot to renew their hosting.