WORDPRESS USER MANUAL FOR BEGINNERS Page | 1 WordPress User Manual for Beginners
Table of Contents 1. Introduction to WordPress ............................................................... 3 1.2 What’s Great about WordPress ................................................................................ 3 1.3 Getting Started.......................................................................................................... 3 2. the Dashboard ................................................................................. 4 2.2 First thing to do – IMPORTANT ..................
1. Introduction to WordPress WordPress has come a long way from the beginning, when users had to know how to write code, upload files etc if they wanted to run their own websites. If they wanted to use a different theme, they’d have to use expensive and difficult to learn packages like Dreamweaver which could require understanding of often difficult to grasp languages and code such as HTML and CSS.
2. The Dashboard Now you're logged in, you'll arrive at the Dashboard which is the Admin section, or “back end” of a WordPress website. You’ll see that it’s a screen that gives a range of information about your website: On here you can quickly go to writing a post, managing your site, your user profile, see which websites are linking to yours, WordPress news, and see comments that are waiting for moderation (that is, approval from admin before publishing).
3. Structuring Your Website One of the most important things to get right with your website is the structure of its content. This can make an incredible difference to the usability of the site – do it well and users will be able to navigate your content easily and quickly. Fortunately, with WordPress the navigation of your site will usually follow a fairly standard route. There are a few rules which it will help you to follow: 1.
3.2 Writing Pages and Getting Some Structure If you’re just playing, it’s easy to simply dive in and play around, but if you’re doing this work for a business purpose you’ll need to consider, using pen and paper, how to structure your static pages. You will want the static content, the pages, to contain the following items names like these – About |Products and Services|Contact Us|.
3.2.1 Creating subordinate pages We’ll now create the first subordinate page to About – for the purpose of this Guide we’ll call it History. In there you can put some information about yourself or your business. You’ll also need to set the page hierarchy accordingly – so… back to Write Write Pages in the Dashboard and populate the content as before. However, before you save, you need to tell WordPress that your new page is a child of the About page.
Category Parent: If you’re creating a subcategory, this allows you to define which category is a parent. Description: Optional, but can be helpful – especially if you have multiple contributors to your site. Explain concisely but clearly what the purpose of the category is. Let’s create three categories – called News, Feedback and Services. If you create a category in error, you can also delete it here by selecting the category you want to delete in the box to the left, then clicking the delete button.
3.5 Managing Links Most websites run a links section. With many it's simply a page or a post full of links and connections. With WordPress you can do this, however, a more powerful feature is to use the proper link management tools. In the Dashboard, click on ‘Manage’ then 'Links' to manage your links, and you will see the following: As you can see, the initial installation is already populated with links.
3.5.4 Link relationship (XFN) Links can be related to your site – you can either create your own relationship, or use one of those attached. They’re mostly ignored and little used, however, and will make little difference to visitor experience. They can, however, help to cement the reason for a link within search engines. 3.5.
4. Adding and Editing Content Once the website is clearly structured, your content becomes the most important thing. WordPress provides a number of tools – for editing, and for image management. It allows you to easily manage your content with a familiar editing interface. You don’t need to learn HTML – just the skills you’ve already acquired using word processors like Microsoft Word. 4.
4.3 Adding images to your posts You can easily add images using the standard WordPress tools. Again, like so much of WordPress, there have been some dramatic improvements in recent versions – including the automatic sizing of images, thumbnailing and image management. To add media to your post, you’ll see a number of tools added. You may find that on a lot of custom installations of WordPress you only have the small button that looks like a sun, on the right.
Once you’ve selected your options, you press the Insert into Post button to add the image to where your cursor was when you chose to Add Images. In this example we’ve gone for a thumbnail to the right, with a caption. In the editor it now looks like this: And on the website, it looks like: It’s worth noting that deleting a captioned image from the post can appear a little tricky at times – but it’s not so bad. First select the image by clicking on it, press the delete button, and you still have the caption.
4.5 Adding video clips to your posts – Other approaches. Let’s create a new post, called Video Clip. Go to Write then Post, and give it a title. The first video we’ll embed is from YouTube. Visit YouTube and you’ll see that in the right there’s an Embed code. Copy this, then select the HTML tab, and paste the code into the appropriate spot.
Page Order By assigning numbers to pages in this field, you can set the order of pages. We suggest you use increments of 10 when setting page orders. That way if you wish to insert a page between one identified as 10 and another identified as 20 you can just use the number 15, rather than finding yourself changing all the page numbers. 4.7 Saving & publishing your post or page Once you’ve written your masterpiece you’ll want to save it… and then, to publish it (ie.
4.8 Publishing Content Created by Other Contributors If you're an Administrator or Editor you can publish the work created by Contributors. Authors can publish their own work but cannot publish the work of other users. As an Editor you'll need to be aware of drafts that are awaiting publication.
5. Administering WordPress This section describes the range of tasks that usually carried out only by Administrators. 5.1 Manage Section The only extra facility that an administrator has in the 'Manage' section of the site, is Media Library, Import and Export 5.2 Managing Users WordPress has the incredibly useful ability to define different levels of users. It doesn't have the level of power that you get with full content management systems where tens of pages of content are being created daily.
There are a number of tasks around users that you may wish to carry out: 1. Update your own details 2. Add new users 3. Remove users 4. Edit the details of a user 5. Manage the content created by a user You can manage and set up users by clicking on the Users tab on the far right of the management interface in the Dashboard: 5.2.1 Remove users To remove a user, select Users, then the Authors & Users tab. In the box marked 'User List by Role' you will see a list of users and the roles which they have.
5.3 Managing Options and Settings The WordPress software allows you to control many settings on your website. Click on Settings, and you will see seven tabs, within which you can change many options. Most are clearly explained on the control panels, but for extra detail we believe you may find useful see below: General allows you to set the title of your website, its tagline, URI (the web address) information and date representation.
5.4 Managing Presentation In WordPress you have the easy facility to switch between different layouts and looks for your site. Select Appearance on the menu bar and in the Themes tab you will see a list of available themes on your installation. Usually that will include the two default themes that are supplied for free with WordPress. The Current theme will be the one you can already see on the internet.
