Basic Setup

After you have installed your blog, you need to configure it. You will
want to go to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

And this will get you to the WordPress admin page for your blog,
otherwise known as the Dashboard. This is also set up with multiple
columns; the left-most column on this page is the main menu:

The main menu items include:

Dashboard – where you can receive updates and statistics regarding

your website.

Posts – where you create and manage the posts on your blog as
well as the managing tags and categories.

Media – for managing the media content library (things like images,
video, and audio).

Pages – for creating and managing pages on your site.

Comments – used to manage your visitors’ feedback.

Appearance – used to choose your theme, set up widgets, create

custom navigation menus, and more.

Plugins – gives you the power to extend the capabilities of your

website and allows you to manage, activate, and deactivate them.

Users – allows you to manage and view all of the site’s users. It also
allows you to edit your own profile, giving you options to change your
password, email address, and screen name.
Tools – provides some powerful tools plus options for importing and
exporting content.

Settings – where a bulk of your site’s options are maintained (like

your website’s name, privacy, and permalink settings).

Admin Bar – located at the very top of the page; it provides access
to commonly used features and information.

ou’ll want to click “Settings” and make sure all of the information is
correct.

Permalinks

Permalinks are the way the URLs are configured for your blog. It is
important to change this, as the default permalinks setting is not very
search engine friendly. This means you could have trouble ranking well
in the search engines if you leave the default setting.

To change your permalinks setting, click “Permalinks” under the

“Settings” section. It should be set to “Default” on a new installation,
which would make your permalinks look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

Locate the “Custom Structure” area. Click the circle beside “Custom
Structure” to enable custom permalinks, and enter the following in the
box to the right:

%category%/%postname%
It should look like this:

This will make your URLs more search engine friendly, looking like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/category/post-name-here

Theme Installation

Click “Appearance” in your WordPress’s Dashboard and the first option

you’ll be given is to manage your themes:

Click the “Install Themes” tab found at the top of the page and you can
then search for themes that you want to install. For example, if you
searched for “black”, you would find all of the themes that had “black”
as a keyword.

The themes will be presented in a gallery format, each with two links
under a screenshot and the theme name: Install and Preview.
If you click “Install”, a popup will appear and have the “Install Now”
button on the bottom right of the popup. After clicking “Install Now”, it
will give you three choices; you can choose to preview the theme,
activate it, or return to the theme installer:

Plugin Installation

Plugins install just like themes; instead of clicking appearance, you would
click “Plugins” also found on the main menu of your dashboard. After
clicking “Plugins”, it will expand and the link to add new plugins will be
there.

The right side of the page will have a list of plugins already installed
where you can activate or deactivate them. Just because you install a
plugin, it doesn’t mean it’s already activated.

You are also not limited to the “plugins” that you see listed.

One of the reasons WordPress is so incredibly popular is because of the

extremely advanced professional “plugins” made available all over the
web by crack developers looking to make a name for themselves, as
solution solvers or selling specialized plugins for a living.
One plugin that we have discovered, and we highly recommend, for you
to check-out, is the Awesome Slider. This is a plugin for grabbing the
email addresses from visitors to your WordPress Blogs like an
electromagnet and it’s totally free!

Another, incredibly powerful plugin we recommend for online

entrepreneurs will completely manage sales and memberships by
automatically, collecting payments, delivering products and services, and
more, all on autopilot.

It’s called WP Sales Buddy and combined with WordPress it is by far the
simplest and fastest way to set-up an e-commerce system on the web
and start making residual income online, that we have found.
Making Posts and Pages

Making a post in WordPress is really easy and you can get started right
away.

When you click on the “Posts” link from the main menu, you can select
“Add New” and you’ll see the view above. If you’ve used many text
editors before on websites then you pretty much know what you’re
looking at on this page.

When you’re done putting in a title and the text for your post, you can
select “Publish” and your post will be immediately viewable by all who
are visiting your site.

Important Notes

 You can also add categories “on the fly” by clicking the link “Add
New Category”.
  You can assign as many categories as you want to the post.
 Instead of publishing immediately, you can schedule your post by
clicking the “Edit” link after “Publish Immediately”.

 You can set the visibility of your posts to who you want to see it,
i.e., public, password protected, and private.

Creating Pages

A page is basically a “super post”; it’s a post that takes an entire page
and is linked to the front page of your blog. This is accessed by clicking
“Pages” and then “Add New”.
This is called the Dashboard and is the ‘home page’ for a blog for
administrative purposes, including adding content. We’re going to focus
on three parts for this unit: Posts, Pages and Settings. This newer
interface for WordPress has actually made finding the relevant parts so
much easier than in older versions. You will find the Dashboard discussed
in various places in Sabin-Wilson WordPress for Dummies, but the most
relevant chapter for what we are doing is 7. You will also find information
on the WordPress Codex and elsewhere.

There is a range of different tabs that you should explore.

Posts
Posts are the most basic operation in any blog and many traditional blogs
contain no static web pages (static web pages is where we are going to
concentrate, but we’re starting here to put things in perspective). Here is
a typical example at Manchester: http://manling.wordpress.com/, a blog
that is simply hosted on the wordpress.com website.

We will now turn to pages

Pages

New pages can be created by selecting Add New; you then get a screen
like this:
1) In to the dashboard area of your blog.

2) Click on Add New> Page.

3) Enter the title ‘Reading Text’.

4) Copy the text from the open Word document and paste it into the
text area of your WordPress dashboard. You do this via the Word
tool that WordPress provide (you can see this tool on the second
row of icons). This allows you to import any formatting that is
already in the document.

This button turns the second

line of tools on and off

Reading text

The Word tool

5) Save Draft, and then Preview.

6) Have a look at the page, and think about what you want to change
in the formatting in terms of using bold and italics, heading size etc.
These tools work in the same way as with any other editor.

7) Go back to the WordPress dashboard. Above the editing area where

your text is, you will find two tabs, Visual and HTML. Starting in
Visual mode, experiment with adding Paragraph codes, or making
words bold, or italic. Now switch to HTML view and look at the
codes you find there. You can now try changing the page inside the
HTML area, you can type codes in directly, or use the buttons. Just
experiment for the time being. This is one place where knowledge
of HTML code will be very helpful and this knowledge is
 transferrable to other spaces where you might be needing to edit
documents that are produced using HTML. You can start
experimenting with different codes, or adding elements using the
Visual view and then looking at how this works in HTML. You’ll soon
start seeing what happens.

8) When you are happy with the way the page looks, save it, then
Publish the page.

9) Now if you Visit Site you should see two page links in the menu on
the right – About and Reading Text. If you click on Reading Text
you will see your page.

10) To tidy things up you will want to delete the About page, so
select the About page and Edit this Entry.

11) You can delete this page, by clicking the Delete link. You can
also delete via the Dashboard.

12) You should now have a site with one page.

Now we are going to add an image to the page.

Adding images

You will need to download the image from the Resources page of the EDEC
web pages. You will see that this is quite a big file and I recommend that
before you upload it to your WordPress space you edit it in SumoPaint, this
is to keep the picture size down, which will mean that if you are running
your own site you won’t have to keep paying for more space and at the
same time your picture will load more quickly.

Choose a place in the text you would like to add an image and click. Then
click on the Add an image icon.

Browse to find the university-place1.jpg image on your computer and

click ‘Upload’.

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Choose the alignment and size for the image and Insert into post.

Save and View the page. The image should be there.

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