Categories When posting blog entries, you should organize them into categories. WordPress allows you to create categories and sub-categories. These categories can be added to a sidebar, or a menu. Take a look at my “Recipes” menu, and you’ll see subcategories of Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, etc. When I enter each recipe, I select the appropriate […]
WordPress Pages Pages are for creating a page that doesn’t change much. These include such pages as “About Me” or “Resources”. They may update over time, but for the most part are pretty static and stand alone. Pages are easy to create. Just click on “Pages- Add New” and give it a name. Once you […]
WordPress Widgets Widgets are plugins that can add features to your blog such as Search capabilities, a link to the Archives, a list of Categories, Recent Posts, and more. Plugins are visible to the general public and usually show up on the sidebar, or above or below the content. You can see on this screenshot […]
WordPress Plugins: WP Plugins are a way to extend the functionality of WordPress. They allow you to add features that are not in the core of WP. There are many developers out there writing code for WP to do things the original code doesn’t cover. Some of the functions that people have written pertain to […]
WordPress Themes: There are thousands of free themes for wordpress out there. You can go to the “Appearance” tab and click on “Themes”. From there, you can “Install Themes” and browse for new ones. I would, however, recommend going a different route. I recommend using one of the custom themes below because they give you […]
WordPress Settings: Once you have your wordpress installed, login using the admin account and take a look around. The dashboard presents an overview of what’s going on your blog right now. I’d recommend taking a look at each item under the Settings tab. At the very minimum, at least look at these: Permalinks First, the […]
Installing WordPress: Once you have the host, you’ll need to install WordPress. I did mine the manual way, by downloading from www.Wordpress.org and uploading it to my server, and configurating the database, etc. That’s because I’ve always done it that way, plus I want to control my database username and passwords. There is a really […]
Hosting: In selecting a self-hosted wordpress solution, the first step is to have a hosting service. I’ve used a few hosts in the past and I recommend the following: Interserver.net* – THIS IS WHERE MY WEBSITES ARE HOSTED. I really love Interserver.net right now. Their customer support is extremely responsive, and their servers are really […]
Getting Started First things first, I believe that you should have a self-hosted wordpress site, that is, wordpress.org. To do so means that you retain control of everything. I’ve seen many people start at wordpress.com and then migrate to their own self hosted site after a while. Why not start out right? Transferring from wordpress.com […]