Wordpress Bootcamp: Learning The Basics Of Wordpress (2016)

Chapter 2. First Week: Setup, Dashboard, Admin Bar, Settings, Links and Images

WordPress is easy to learn as long as you are can spare one to two hours every day for two weeks. You only need very basic internet skills and of course the capacity to follow instructions accurately. You don’t even need to learn HTML or other programming languages to create your website. Even though programming and coding skills will come in handy in the future, these are not necessary to start using WordPress.

Millions of individuals around the world started using WordPress from scratch. In fact, most WordPress users don’t even know how to design websites or write a code.

The mere fact that you have reached this Chapter is a good sign that you are willing to learn WordPress. So, let’s start.

Week 1 Day 1 - Learn Initial Setup

The first step is to learn how to install and setup WordPress. You need to choose between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

If you want to build a personal blog and you don’t have any intention to make money from your websites, then it is ideal to choose WordPress.com. But if you want to be a professional blogger, then it is better to use the self-hosted WordPress.org. The latter option will cost you money, but it is actually cost-effective for creating your own site.

For example, let’s assume that you have chosen WordPress.com, and you purchased a custom domain ($17 annually), opted for a custom-design ($30 annually), and paid to remove ads ($29.97 annually). The total cost of $76.97 per year will not provide you full control.

If you have chosen WordPress.org, you can choose to buy hosting from Bluehost (endorsed by WordPress) that will cost $47.4 annually, and it already includes a free domain name. If you choose other web hosting companies, you may need to pay the same price, but you can’t obtain a domain. You can obtain a domain name for only $10 from NameCheap or GoDaddy. The total cost of $57.4 annually will provide you full control.

Click Here to get step by step instructions for setting up your Wordpress site with Bluehost.

You might be a bit concerned if the one is easier to use than the other, don’t worry, their interfaces are similar. It is ideal to use WordPress.org so you can have full control of your website. But still, you need to choose the WordPress platform that is suitable for your preferences and needs.

After choosing the platform, the next step is to select your domain and hosting. Take note that your domain is your web address that a user need to enter into the search bar to visit your page. Then, you need to select web-hosting service, so other internet users can access your site.

After signing up with a web-hosting provider, you can install WordPress using SimpleScripts, especially if you have chosen BlueHost.

Week 1 Day 2 - Dashboard Basics

After installing WordPress, you can start building your custom website or blog. However, before posting any content. It is best to familiarize yourself with the dashboard basics. The dashboard is located on the left side of the screen, which you can easily see after you log in to your wp-admin account. Most users refer to this as the back-end of your website.

Using the Dashboard’s Home Page, you can easily access the content of your website and take a look into other areas of the WordPress platform. The Dashboard presents information in separate blocks called Widgets. The default WordPress widgets are the following: Welcome at a Glance, Quick Draft, Activity, and WordPress News.

The Welcome widget shows the links form the top tasks you can perform in creating a new website.

The At a Glance widget offers a short glimpse of the number of pages, posts, and comments on your website. Every content types are shown in link form, and once you click them you can be directed to the particular area so you can easily manage the content.

The QuickDraft widget allows you to write a new text content easily. You can quickly write a title, add media, enter the content, insert tags, save your draft, or Publish right away.

The Activity widget shows the most recent comments, published posts, and scheduled posts.

The WordPress News widget features the latest news, articles, and announcements from the official blog of WordPress.

You can expand, collapse, and rearrange widgets by hovering the mouse cursor on the title bar. If the mouse transforms into a 4-arrow icon, you can hold the left-mouse button and drag the widget to the area you want to move it. This is known as a drag and drop functionality.

You can also add new widgets through plugins or through a special program code.

Week 1 Day 3 - Admin Bar

The Admin Bar is located at the topmost part of the screen. The WordPress logo is located on the far left of the Dashboard. Hover over the logo, and you will see the links to specific information about WordPress. These links can help you if you need to visit the support forums or provide feedback.

The name of your site is located to the right of the logo. You can hover on this and you will see a submenu to access the front end of your website. The next area provides a quick glimpse for comments.

On the left side, you can find the link for + New. Once you hover over this link, a submenu will appear that will redirect you to the Add New screen for user, page, media, and post. You can also do these things using the navigation on the left area of the Dashboard, but if you want to do things quickly, these links could help you a lot.

You can also see the section displaying the text “Howdy, your name” on the far right area. You can hover over this area to access the submenu, which you can use to log out from your site or edit your profile.

Front End View of the Admin Bar

If you are currently logged into your WordPress website, the Admin Bar is visible on your website’s front-end site. Try hovering over the name of the site, and click visit site, and it will redirect you to your website’s front end.

Once you hover the title of the site section, you can see the links for the dashboard that will take you back to the dashboard home, as well as the links to take you to the header, background, menu, widgets, and themes. Take note that these sections can also be found on the navigation pane on the left area in the dashboard.

How to Turn Off the Admin Bar View

The Admin Toolbar is generally useful, but there are times that you may want to turn it off to see the full view of your website’s front end. Take note that the Admin Bar will only appear if you are logged in to your website as admin.

If you want to turn it off, just click the Edit my Profile function. A screen will appear where you can find a checkbox next to the text: Show Toolbar when viewing site. All you need to do is to uncheck the box, and scroll down to the bottom and click Update profile to save the changes.

Week 1 Day 4 and 5 – Explore WordPress Settings

On the Dashboard, find the Settings menu and hover on top. A sub menu will appear where you can access several options for WordPress settings: General, Reading, Writing, Media, Discussion, and Permalinks.

General Settings

To explore around, you can go first to the General Settings. The first elements that you will see in this option is the Site Title and the Tagline. Make certain that these texts match to your website, because your site title will be used for SEO. As a default, WordPress displays “just another WordPress site” as the tagline. You need to change this tagline to describe your website, as it is important for the SEO of your website.

Next is the WordPress Address (URL). For the website address URL, you can enter the URL address if you want your website homepage separate from the directory where you have WP installed. At this point, it is best not to touch these URLs.

Then, you will also see the Email Address, which you will use for admin purposes, including new user notification. There is also the Membership settings. WordPress allows online users to sign up to your website. This is a useful feature, if membership is crucial for your website.

Meanwhile, the New User Default Role is set to subscriber. Don’t touch this setting for now, because you might accidentally grant admin privileges to anyone who sign up for your website.

Then, there is the Timezone. Browse through the list to choose the city within the same timezone in choosing your preferred date format. Take note that this format will appear on your posts. After you have updated these settings, don’t forget to Save changes.

Reading Settings

The Reading Settings show the settings, which will affect the content display. Here you can tweak the display of your website’s front page – either a static page or your latest blog post. After building several pages, you can list these pages in this setting so they will appear on the front end.

The next setting section will allow you to control the content display in RSS feeds, which includes the max posts to display and if you want only to show a summary or full text. Search engine visibility is the last section. If you want search engines to not index your website, you should check box to Discourage search engines from indexing this site. This is a great setting if you are still on the development phase indexing is still not recommended.

Remember to Save Changes.

Writing Settings

The Writing Settings affect the writing and publishing for your website. The section on the top allows you to control the editor inside the Dashboard, while the other sections allow you to control external publishing methods.

The first section shows the options for default categories formatting and posts format. You will also see the Press This bookmarklet section, which allows you to easily blog about the things you find interesting on the Internet. If you want to use this, you first need to drag the link on the screen to your browser’s bookmark bar. If you are on another site, just click on the bookmarklet to access a popup window to share the content through your blog.

Meanwhile, the Post via email settings will let you send an email to your website with post content. In order to use this setting, you should set up a secret e-mail account using a POP3 access. The last section can be used to update services. Once you publish a new post, WordPress will instantly notify you of the updates. Be sure to Save Changes.

Media Settings

The Media Settings page allows you to set max sizes for images you want to add into the post. These settings will allow you to save time if you want images to be of the same size, if you want to set default settings for image sizes.

The option for Uploading files allows you to choose if you want your uploads to be organized into month or year. Make certain to Save Changes.

Discussion Settings

The Discussion Settings allow you to manage the comments and links to your posts and pages.

The first section is the default article settings. The first setting allows you to manage links you make to other blogs. The second setting allows you to manage the trackbacks and ping backs or links back to your site. Finally, the third setting allows your site visitors to post comments on new articles. You can uncheck this box if you don’t want your visitors to comment on the posts.

The Other comment settings allows you to choose the guidelines for how visitors post comments and how you manage their comments.

For the email me whenever section, you can select to be notified via email if someone posts a comment or if a comment has been handled by a moderator.

The section for Before a comment appears will allow you to manage the published comments. Through this, you can select if an administrator should approve the comments first or if the comments could be published automatically.

In the section for Comment Moderation, you can change how a comment is managed depending on the number of links. Inside the box, you can include IPs, emails, names, words, and URLs to filter comments for moderation. This feature alongside the comment blacklist are can help you in defending your blog against comments that are inappropriate and spammy.

There is also the Avatar setting. You can enable the avatars of users who posted comments on your website, select a default avatar for users who don’t have their own avatar yet, or filter their comments based on their ratings.

Again, be sure to Save changes.

Permalink Settings

Permalinks refer to the permanent URLs to each age and blog post including tag and category archives. In general, a permalink is the web address that can be used to link to your content. It got its name by combining permanent and link. Hence, permalink.

The Permalink settings in WordPress allows you to manage the default structure of your permalinks. You can either select from common settings or build your customized URL. As a default, WordPress utilizes URLs that have question marks and with numbers. You may want to change the permalinks here to improve its forward compatibility, usability, and aesthetics.

Week 1 Day 6 –Create a WordPress Post

To create your first post, find the Posts menu in the left side of the Dashboard. You can click to expand it to access the submenu or just hover over the link Posts.

In the + New link in the Admin Bar, you can also find the Add New Posts page. Just click the link for the Add New to access the Add New Post page so you can start creating your first WordPress post.

You can enter the title of your post in the first box.

Below that is the post editor or Post formatting section, where you will type or paste the post content. There are two tabs on the right side of the tabs showing two modes of post editing: Text and Visual.

The Text tab will let you access a plain-text HTML version of the post editor. You can use this mode to edit the HTML code of your post. If you are not comfortable with HTML, the visual mode is recommended.

The Visual tab is ideal for developers who are comfortable with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) concept. It comes with a format toolbar with different options to format your posts. Many of these icons will look familiar if you have been using Microsoft Word.

The Publish box is located at the top of the right column of the screen. You can save your post as a draft if you want to save it. The Preview button will allow you to take a glimpse of how the post will actually look once you publish it. The Status will let you know if the post is currently a draft, has been saved, already published or if it is a pending review if you have schedule the post.

The succeeding links allows you to see the post’s visibility or what will the site visitors see. The Publish line shows if the post will be immediately published or at a future date. The next section are for tags and categories assigned to your post. Save this lesson later.

If you want to change the screen options for your editor, you can click the screen options tab found in the upper right. This will expand the link and you will see the options, which will be displayed on the screen’s post editor.

In the post editor, you can just drag or drop the arrangement of these boxes, to change how you want them to appear on the page.

If you need help in adding new posts, you can just click the Help tab found in the upper right. From here, you can easily refer on inserting media, using the editor, helpful tips for adding a post title, and pointers on customizing your post display.

Week 1 Day 7 – Adding Links and Images

Links are important for the SEO of your content, while images are ideal to improve the appeal and readability of your posts. WordPress makes it easy to add these two elements into your website.

Adding Links

In the page editor or WordPress post, choose and highlight the text, which you want to be added with link. Then, click the hyperlink button located in the toolbar. This will reveal a box that you can use to enter the specific URL of the hyperlink as well as the title which will be shown if you hover over the link. Clicking this checkbox will also allow you to access the link in the new tab.

If you prefer linking to an existing content on your site, you can just click to expand this section. With this, you can see a search bar to search your website, as well as a list of present pages or posts.

Choosing one of the items on the list will also change the hyperlink. If your hyperlink is ready, just click the Add Link button. Your chosen text will now have a link. If you want to remove the link, choose the text again and choose the unlink button. You will see that the link has been removed and the text is in normal display again.

Adding Images

Choose the best place in the post to insert your image. On the upper section of the Post editor toolbar, you will see the button Add Media. Click this button to reveal the Insert Media box.

WordPress stores a media library to keep all your media files such as videos and images. In this box, you can select to either upload a new file or use a present file from the media library. If you want to upload an image, click the button Select files and find the image you want to use.

After your image has been uploaded, you will notice that it has been added to the media library. On the right area of the box, you will see the attachment details for the page. In this section, you can see the Description, Alt text, Caption and Title. You can also select the image alignmentsuch as right, left, or center.

Ensure that the image has a checkbox. Click the insert into post button. Now you can see that your image has been inserted into your post.

Once you click the image, you will see two boxes in the upper section of the image. The first is the image icon. When you click this icon, you will see that another box will appear where you can edit all the image details. In this prompt, you can modify the image size based on the percentages or you can change the link URL, caption, alt text, and title. You can also choose the image link or to link the actual file of the image.

In choosing the advanced settings tab, you will see the link of where the image is currently hosted, properties and style that adds padding on the image, the CSS Class, and the actual height and width of the image in pixels.

Next, return to the image. The next icon in the upper corner will let you delete the image from the post. In clicking the Add Media button, you will notice the same insert media box. On the left side, you will see the options to set up a gallery and choose the featured image. If you have enough images in the media library, you can add a whole image gallery into your post.

Featured images are used by some themes. If your chosen theme has the featured image, go ahead and select the image and go back to the post editor. Click the preview button and check if the image has been inserted.