Course outline: WordPress for Noobs

Blog posts and pages

An overview of blog posts and pages, two important elements of your site that have many similarities but some very important differences.

By seeing all the various elements of lists of existing posts and pages in the work area, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of them. And that’ll better prepare you for creating and editing them.

The Dashboard

Navigating and customizing the WordPress Dashboard, so that you’re not distracted by clutter and can navigate faster to the areas you use the most.

The basics of a blog post

Most WordPress-based websites include a blog, even if it’s referred to as something else, e.g., news. A blog is a collection of blog posts or articles, and this screencast starts off with an explanation of the difference between a blog and a blog post, and how common usage is blurring the two. It then shows you all the basic elements and features of for composing a post, taking you all the way through to publishing.

Knowing how to quickly publish a blog post not only helps you keep your site content fresh. But it’s cool to be able to do it on your own, without the time delays and extra costs of a webmaster.

Admin settings

Learning how to change many of the administrative settings of your site sounds boring but there are some biggies (what to name your blog and where to put it, controlling comments, etc) that you’ll want to change right away. You should at least be aware of the other settings so that as you gain experience with your site, you’ll have some clue as to the possibilities.

Bonus: Why and how to make a link in blog posts and pages

This screencast provides an in-depth rationale for making links of words and images in blog posts and pages, and then includes a demonstration on how to do it. The short version of the rationale:

• Search engines like links
• You can link to content on your own site
• Linking to other sites allows your readers to go deeper
• Others will want to link to you

Inserting images and photos

Images within a page or a blog post help to convey the message of your content, while making it visually more compelling. Photos, of course, need no explanation. This screencast covers the basics, including labeling, aligning, and moving the image around.

Once you learn how to quickly add images and photos to your site’s pages and your blog posts, you’re more likely to keep the site updated, inspired by the feedback you get and the increase in traffic.

Themes

Themes allow you to design your site (colors, fonts, layout, and much more) so that your site’s look and feel fits with your content, and is attractive to you and the people who visit.

Because WordPress is a database-driven platform, you can change the look of your entire site in seconds, even if you have thousands of pages and blog posts. The screencast explains how this is possible. You’re then shown the steps for finding and sorting through the available themes and how, with many of the themes, you can easily customize the header and background of your site.

Inserting galleries of images

There are tools that make it possible to display a gallery (album) of images or photos in a blog post or page so that it’s A) less tedious for you; and B) more convenient for your site visitors.

Widgets

All about widgets, handy little doo-dads (gizmos!) that allow you to add content and functionality to your site’s sidebars (and sometimes, footer) without having to know a thing about programming.

If you can drag and drop stuff, you can handle widgets.The more you get engaged with updating and administering your site, the more likely it is that you’ll think of reasons to add to/change what’s on your sidebars.   Widgets make it easy to do.

This screencast is all about the sidebar links widget that’s built into WordPress. The collection of one’s sidebar links is sometimes called a blogroll, though that term seems to be fading since you can link to anything, not just blogs.

Why have links on your sidebar? It’s a way to communicate to your site visitors that these are the organizations, bloggers, websites, pages, posts, etc. that are most relevant to the purpose of your site. Or you might consider the people or organizations to be part of your informal network and therefore the links are a way to make that more obvious. Whatever your purpose for adding links to your sidebar, the WordPress links tool makes it easy to add and manage the them.

Plugins

If you have a WordPress.org-based (self-hosted) site, you’ll need to know the basics of plugins, tools (software code) that allow you to add functionality to your

If you want a widget to add a feature to the visible parts of your site or an additional behind-the-scenes admin feature, you’ll first need to install a plugin.

What’s cool is that you’re adding code to your site to customize it without having to know any programming or having to hire a programmer to do it.

And with over 13,000 plugins currently in the WordPress plugins directory, you’re not likely to be able to think of a needed feature that can’t be met by an available plugin.

Categories and Tags

Categories are the broad subject areas of your blog, whereas Tags are key words and phrases.The better you get at using them, the better it is for:

• You, as you need to find and link to your own blog posts
• Your site visitors, as they use them to both get a feel for what you blog is about, as well as to drill down and find all your blog posts from a particular Category or that have been assigned a special Tag word or phrase
• Search engines, which pay close attention to Tags

Menus

Normally, when you add pages to your WordPress site, they’re automatically added to the menus on your navigation bar.

But now with WordPress, you can not only add pages as sub-menus, you can also add other elements: categories and tags, as well as links to other websites. This screencast shows all the options and how to deploy them. You’ll feel like a webmaster when you’re done.

Embedding video, audio, etc.

This screencast is all about embedding videos, audio, PDFs, PowerPoint slideshows, and other rich media into blog posts and pages.

Knowing how to do this on your own saves you money… no webmaster needed. Plus, you’re more likely to keep the site updated, inspired by the feedback you get and the increase in traffic.

Creating users and assigning roles

Since WordPress is a content management system (CMS), you can allow others to contribute and edit your site’s content: blog posts, pages, and more.

This screencast shows how you can create accounts for selected people and then set the controls for what they’re able to do.

You’ll feel like a managing editor when you’re done.

Profiles and Gravatars

Using your real first and last name with your photo in blog posts and comments help to establish your online identity. Your online voice of authenticity and by extension, your influence, can also be enhanced.

This screencast covers the editing of your WordPress profile name, as well as the creation and use of a Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar), an image that can appear adjacent to your profile name in a blog post or comment.

Installing updates

If you have a WordPress.org-based (self-hosted) site, you’ll need to know how you can install updates to WordPress whenever they’re made available, as well as updates to any plugins that you’ve installed.

By doing these updates regularly, you’ll be able to both take advantage of new features as well as protect yourself from any security issues that may have arisen with previous versions.

And you’ll save money by doing the updates yourself.