Ok… You have decided to use WordPress for your website/blog, now what the heck do you do?

The Web Mechanic’s WordPress 101 will be a series of articles on setting up and using WordPress. I plan to write these articles on individual topics and will try to make them as “user-friendly” as I can. If something seems confusing or not explained clearly enough for you, please submit a comment and I’ll try to clarify things.

I don’t plan on having an article on installing WordPress. Different webhosts do things differently and I wouldn’t be able to give you a “one size fits all” instruction, as much as I’d like to. What you’ll want to do is to contact your webhost’s customer service and ask them what you’ll need to do to install WordPress. If you don’t already have a webhost, let me throw in a plug for bluehost.com. I recommend them to my clients. Their rates are great, they are easy to use and their customer service has really impressed me!

While I will pretty much be presenting the WordPress 101 articles in the order of “first do this” and “then do that”, that won’t always be the case, and one of the great things about WordPress is that in general, you don’t need to do things in a defined order… WordPress is very forgiving!

Ok, let’s begin!

Next: I have WordPress installed. Now what?

When WordPress is installed, it has a number of items that are set up generically. In this lesson I’ll go through some of the items you should take care of. Basic Housekeeping, as it were.

When your WordPress was installed you may or may not (depends on your webhost) have been prompted to supply a user name and password. WP will automatically give you a username of “admin” and a complex password if you are not asked to supply them. You should enter your own easy to remember username and password if requested.

Log onto your WordPress. The basic entry into the WP Dashboard will be wp-login.php i.e. www.xyz.com/wp-login.php

Users

On the left side of your WordPress Dashboard, click on the Users button. You will see a drop-down list and the Authors & Users will automatically be shown.  On this page, at the top, click on admin, this will take you to the Edit User page to edit your information for the user, admin.. Fill in the information requested. The admin account  cannot be deleted. At the bottom of the page you’ll see a place to change the WordPress login password.

Edit User

You can now change the admin password that WordPress assigned to you when it was set up. Change it to something that you can remember easily… but remember to make it a strong password for security reasons!

After you have made the changes to this page, be sure to click on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

You may have seen another user listed when you clicked the Users button. You may want to Add a User. Just click the appropriate button and go through the same procedure as you did with the admin account. The only additional thing to look for is on the Edit User page look for the Roll setting. At this point you will likely want to grant administrator rights. The other settings are relevant if other people will be granted various, lesser, privileges. I’ll cover this in a later lesson.

Settings

Now, look over on the left of your WP-Dashboard (WP ver. 2.7 or greater), look for the Settings tab and click it.

You will see a drop-down menu with a number of items (the items will vary – plugins may add their controls here). Select General.

General

At the top of the General page you will see a few places where you can enter the Name of your blog and the Tagline for your blog. These are important to fill in as they will help the search engines know your blog exists!  The next two spaces are for the URL of your website and blog, respectively. They will probably already be filled in correctly. Follow the onscreen instructions to change them, if necessary. Finally, be sure to enter your e-mail address! There are a few other items on this page, but it is unlikely that you’ll need to change them from their defaults.

After you have made the changes to this page, be sure to click on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Back: WordPress IntroNext: Permalinks

So what the heck is a Permalink and why do I care?

Until fairly recently, when you looked at the top of your browser, where you can type in the URLs of sites you want to visit, what you saw up there likely made sense. If you were on the site’s “About” page, at the end of the URL you probably saw … /about.html. If you were on the “Contact” page it said /contact.html. Made sense, didn’t it?

Nowadays what do you see? If its a WordPress site or blog, the end of the URL may say something like   …/post.php?post=447.  What did that mean? Websites all used to be what are called “static” websites. Once a page was up coded and on the web,  its name was there until it needed to change or was taken down. These days many websites and blogs are “dynamic” sites. This means that the content is not fixed and the page is generated on-the-fly as you click around to that page. From a website construction point of view, this makes life a lot easier. For instance – if a website has ten pages and has the same footer information on each page, you don’t have to make those entries on each of the ten pages, you can just write one “footer” file and then just have each page grab that information when it is accessed. (and then with something like WordPress just about everything is actively generated)

Permalink Page

Anyway, those letters, numbers,?’s, etc. mean something to computers… but its mostly gibberish to you and me. The good news is that when WordPress was developed, they put in the capability to change that gobbeldy gook into something decipherable by humans. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t come out of the box set to make use of this. Over on the left side of your Administrator panel, click on “Settings” and then “Permalinks”. At the top of the Permalink page, you’ll see a number of choices, including the one that has been pre-chosen for you. At the bottom of that list you’ll see “Custom”. In the space provided enter the following (without the quotes) “%postname%“. Now, when you write a post, the URL for it will show the name of the post as part of the URL. This makes it easier for people to remember and it will help the search engine robots navigate your site more readily.  (look up at the top of this site ↑) Those robots like English as much as we do!

What about those other options? They might be revalent to your site, especially if it is big.  Check out the WordPress Codex for more extensive Permalink information.

Now, one thing to keep in mind! If you have already made pages or posts in your WordPress, don’t go changing the Permalink setting willy-nilly! You can break your site! WordPress will have already cataloged your pages and posts, and if you change the Permalink setting, WordPress will lose track of the names it has already given them. Don’t worry, there are ways around it and I will have a post about how to change things in the middle of the stream.  If you need assistance on that before I get around to writing that post, drop me a line and I’ll fill you in)

Back: I have WordPress Installed-Now What?