WP SITES

Each page, post, category, tag and archives uses a unique link.

This is what WordPress calls, a permalink which is short for permanent link.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, it can, as long as you know what you are doing.

You can also choose which type of structure you want to use for your permalinks.

Choosing a Permalink Stucture

Lets take a look at an example what permalink structure you can choose after you first install WordPress.

• Default – http://wpsites.net/?p=123
• Day and name – http://wpsites.net/2012/06/15/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://wpsites.net/2012/06/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://wpsites.net/archives/123
• Post name – http://wpsites.net/sample-post/
• Custom Structure – /%category%/%postname%/

You can use any one of these depending on what you want included in each unique link on your site.

It’s best Not to use the default as it doesn’t really tell the search engines or your readers whats on the page it links to.

Here’s some more resources to help you learn about Permalinks and solve any problems you may encounter down the track.

• Best WordPress Permalink Structure for SEO & Performance
• How To Fix Broken WordPress Links Fast Using Permalink Finder
• Redirect Tool for Changing WordPress Permalink Structure

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Nearly finished folks. Next up we’ll check out other settings i’ll call Misc Settings in WordPress.

Your discussion settings allow you to configure how you want to manage comments.

They also allow you to set a default for displaying of a small image, avatar, next to each comment author.

The settings on this page are very important for managing spam which can be a wiped out if you configure these settings correctly.

Read more about how to stop comment spam using the discussion Settings.

Anti Spam Plugins for Comments

Additionally, WordPress offer a range of free plugins which further enhance and help manage comments & spam better:

• The Best Comment Plugins for WordPress Get More Feedback
• SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Plugin Stops Comment, Registration & Login Form Spam
• Jetpack Comments Integrates Social Media Login Options

Control Comments

Another option, if you want to use WordPress for w static website, is to turn comments off entirely.

If you are not sure if a comment is pam or not and still want to approve the comment, you may choose to edit or remove the link and approve it.

Comment Avatars

Each time a site visitor leaves a comment, a small image will display next to their comment.

This is called an avatar but unfortunatley, not everyone that leaves a comment has or uses one.

Luckily, there’s 3 ways to 3 Ways To Change The Default Avatar Image so 9 times out of ten, they’ll always be an image next to each comment.

Plugins Which Integrate With Social Media

Did you know you can integrate your Facebook comments in WordPress?

This is a great way to share your blog comments on your Facebook page and bring more readers from Facebook to comment on your blog.

Comments to Subscribers

A great plugin for redirecting readers who leave a comment to subscribers is the comment redirect plugin.

This enables you to redirect everyone that leaves a comment to a special page which you create.

This page can include a landing page to help you increase subscribers as well as social media subscribe and follow links.

Next Video

We’re on the home straight now folks and next up we’ll check out what Permalinks are in WordPress.

Ever wanted to turn WordPress into a website for static pages only?

Thought about creating a custom designed page which you want to use on your homepage?

The reading settings in WordPress enable you to do both of these things.

Settings

Front page displays – Choose a page to display on your home page. This can either be your latest post or a static page you have created especially for your front page.

Blog pages show at most – Regardless of where you want to display your latest posts, this setting allows you to determine exactly how may posts you want on each page of your blog.

Syndication feeds show the most recent – This settings allows you to determine how many posts you want displayed in your syndication feed.

Read more about RSS feeds and setting up Feedburner to manage your syndication feed.

For each article in a feed, show – Select to display either a summary of each post or the full text in your RSS feed.

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Next, we’ll take a look at the discussion settings for managing comments in WordPress.

The writing settings enable you to configure the size of your post box and assign new post drafts to a default category.

These are the 2 main settings you should focus on when your first setup your new WordPress installation.

Settings

Size of the post box – The size of the post box refers to how big or small you want the area in your editor to be when writing or editing posts.

Formatting – This settings allows you to Convert emoticons like :-) and :-P to smiley type graphics on display

Default Post Category – After you have created a few main categories, you can use this setting to assign new post drafts to a particular category. If you don’t assign each post to a category, new post will automatically be assigned to this default category.

Post via e-mail – WordPress allows you to setup a secret email address which enable you to post via email.

Remote Publishing – These settings allow you to setup your installation so you can send new post via MS Word or Windows live writer.

Security

Its important that you setup any type of remote publishing or post via e-mail correctly otherwise your site may become vunerable to security breaches.

Allowing remote access also allows access to your Dashboard and therefore, your entire installation.

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Its time to check out the different reading settings WordPress offers.

The general settings enable you to set the name of your site and the tagline.

These settings are crucial to the success of your blog because they determine how your site ranks in the search results.

Other general settings include:

• WordPress Address (URL) – Don’t change unless you know what you are doing
• Site Address (URL) – Don’t change unless you know what you are doing
• E-mail Address – New user notification
• Membership – Leave unchecked or you could suffer from large amounts of spam users
• New User Default Role – Set to subscriber

URL Settings

Its very important that you don’t change any of the URL settings or you may break your site

Membership

You may remember in the previous video about Users and the different capabilities each user role has.

One of the great things about WordPress is that you can create a membership site and also allow guests to post and/or publish new content on your blog.

Spam

One the other hand, there’s a large amount of automated spammers using software to find new blogs and insert links back to their website.

If you allow anybody to join your site as a member before you get to know them, you could suffer from large amounts of spam that can cause damage to your reputation with the search engines.

New User Roles

If you do decide to allow new members to join your site, its best to set the default new user role to subscriber.

Once you have a better understand of user roles and the capabilities of each role, you can then allow your members more responsibility.

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Lets now take a brief look at the settings for writing in WordPress.

WordPress offers a membership  feature to add different types of users for your blog.

The members feature can be further enhanced by installing plugins depending on which type of blog you want to create.

The different types of user roles and their capabilities include:

• Administrator – Full access and capabilities
• Subscriber – Read & manage own profile only
• Author – Publish & manage own posts only
• Editor – Publish posts & pages as well as manage author & contributor posts
• Contributor – Write & manage own posts but not publish

This means you can use WordPress for a variety of different purposes.

You can create new users and assign them to different roles which gives them certain capabilities depending on the role you want them to be responsible for.

Configuring the settings in your user profile page is one of the crucial configurations you should make before you start blogging.

Your User Profile

One of the first things you should do after you install WordPress is create your own profile and add a Bio.

If your theme includes an author box, your Bio will be included in this box.

Go to Users > Your Profile where you’ll find you can also change your password.

Here’s some more resources which will help you learn more about users:

• Changing Your WordPress Username
• How To Add/Remove Custom User Profile Contact Info Links To Your Author Box
• Verifying Author Ownership Of All Your Sites Posts & Testing It Works

Next Video

We’ll now take a look at the General Settings for WordPress.

WordPress is the worlds most popular free blogging platform. Because of this, many existing bloggers want to move their posts, pictures and entire site contents to WordPress.

Normally this would be a huge task, however WordPress has developed some really handy tools to make the transition quick and easy.

Here’s a list of resources which will help you move from another platform to WordPress if needed.

• How To Move Your Blog From WordPress.com To WordPress.org
• For Moving Tumblr to WordPress
• Move Your Site From Blogger To WordPress

Press This

Press This is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web.

Use Press This to clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save or publish it in a post on your site.

Categories and Tags Converter

If you want to convert your categories to tags (or vice versa), use the Categories and Tags Converter available from the Import screen.

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Next i’ll show you how to create different users in WordPress.

Plugins are small software files which add different functions to your WordPress installation.

Think of plugins as like a software addon or extension as they extend WordPress by adding custom functions to your site.

You can choose from a huge range of over 20,000 free plugins or install a premium plugins developed by WordPress programmers.

You’ll find a huge range of different articles on this site showing you whats possible after installing different plugins.

Here’s 3 of the best posts to discover some of the best plugins:

• 7+ Must Have Plugins For New WordPress Bloggers
• Most Popular WordPress Plugins
• Top 50 Best WordPress Plugins
• How to Install a Plugin

Note: Plugins are developed by different developers from all over the world. Some are well written and others aren’t tested properly.

Installing too many plugins or installing a plugin which hasn’t been tested properly, can result in your site breaking.

If this happens, you’ll need to follow these instructions on how to fix errors in WordPress caused by faulty plugins.

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Lets now check out some really useful WordPress tools which may come in handy at some stage.

Every Edit Post and Edit Page screen contains the WordPress editor.

On top of this, there’s additional hidden features you can display and use to enhance your editor further

You can do this by adding code to your theme’s files or simply by installing one of several free plugins developed for this purpose.

Here’s more resources to help you create awesome website pages and blog posts:

• Displaying Hidden Features In Your WordPress Visual Editor
• TinyMce Plugin – The Best Advanced Editor for WordPress
• 3 Advanced Editors Help You Create Professional Looking Content

Did you know you can create posts using Windows Live Writer and Microsoft Word then send it to your WordPress installation as a draft or published post?

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In the next video we’ll take a look at why plugins are the most popular feature in WordPress.

Now that you’ve chosen and installed a theme, its time to start adding different features to your site.

A simple way to display a specific feature added from a plugin, is to use a widget.

By default, you’ll already have use of several widgets which you can view by going to Appearance > Widgets from your Dashboard.

Some of the widgets already included in a new installation are:

• Blogroll to adds links in your sidebar
• Calender of all your posts
• Text widget for adding html and javascript code
• Recent posts
• Comments

Using Widgets

• Widgets can be easily activated by dragging them into any widget area your theme provides
• To deactivate a widget, simply drag it out of your widget area and into the inactive widgets panel

Premium themes generally offer more widget areas than free themes which makes it easy to add features in your header and footer area’s.

Many plugins include a widget which displays in your widget area once you activate the plugin.

This way you can choose from thousands of different features to add to different areas of your site without the need to create and add code to your theme’s template files.

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Lets now take a look at all the features in your WordPress editor.

Now that you’ve learn’t how to manage themes for WordPress, its time to learn how to customize your theme design.

This video shows you how to:

• Find a free theme from the Official WordPress theme directory
• Install a theme using the built in theme installer in your theme admin screen
• Upload and install a premium theme which you have purchased and saved to your local computer
• Install any type of theme you have downloaded to your local computer

Lets also take a look at 2 other ways to install a new theme to your WordPress installation:

Installing a New Theme Using FTP

Sometimes you may need to use FTP as your theme developer doesn’t allow you to simply upload it using the built in installer in your admin panel.

• Download theme to your desktop and extract the files
• Create a new directory on your server named themes at this location wp-content/themes
• Upload the entire unzipped folder from your desktop on your local computer to this new directory
• Login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes and activate the theme

Installing a Theme Using cPanel

If you don’t like or don’t have an FTP program, you can use the built in File Manager your web host provides you in cPanel.

• Download your new theme to your local computer
• Navigate to File manager in cPanel and find this location in your public_html directory:  public_html/wp-content/themes
• Upload the zipped folder into the themes directory
• Extract the zipped folders contents into your themes directory
• Login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes and activate the theme

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Time to check out how to use widgets in WordPress.

When you install WordPress for the very first time, you’ll find it comes with the default theme for WordPress named Twenty Eleven.

Themes are pre built and provide a range of design options which enable you to change the look and feel of your sites appearance.

There’s both free and premium themes which you can install in WordPress.

Here’s more resources which will help you choose and customize the theme you choose to install on your WordPress installation.

• What is a WordPress Theme
• How To Change Themes
• How To Make Your Own Child Theme

Once you play around with different themes, you’ll get a better idea on what you need for your site.

Here’s a few lists of different types of premium and free themes you might find helpful when searching for the ultimate theme for your site.

• 3 Best Premium Theme frameworks
• The Ultimate List of Premium Theme Creators
• The Most Popular Free Themes

Changing Themes

Changing themes down the track can cause problems with left over functions that only work on one particular theme framework.

Choosing a theme built on a solid framework which is made by a developer who provides a large range of themes makes it far easier to change themes down the track.

If you do decide to use a free theme, i suggest you use one which is built on a premium framework. This way you can change to a premium theme down the track without the hassle of leftovers and formatting problems caused by your old theme.

Here’s a list of free themes, built on premium theme frameworks:

• Free Woo Themes for WordPress Include The Premium Woo Framework
• Free Child Themes Built On The Premium Genesis Framework

Next Video

Next up, we’ll check out how to install a theme to your WordPress site.

One of the most important parts of blogging is engagement.

Engagement helps you connect with your readers or audience as some say and built trust and credibility.

Comments also helps you learn more about your readers and gain valuable feedback which you can use to improve your posts and your business sales.

Learn more about managing and preventing comment spam  in WordPress:

• Stop Comment Spam Using The Native WordPress Discussion Settings
• How To Setup Akismet Plugin and Stop WordPress Spam Comments
• Delete WordPress Comments By Date
• Editing WordPress Comment Links

There’s also many plugins which you can install to enhance and customize your comments box:

• Livefyre – The Best Comments Plugin for WordPress Increases Engagement
• How To Add Facebook Comments in WordPress
• 3 Ways To Change The Default WordPress Comments Avatar Image

One of the major differences between static websites and blogs are comments.

With WordPress can get the best of both worlds.

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Next up, we’ll check out themes which help give your site a unique appearance.

WordPress consists of both pages and posts.

This means you can create static content which stays the same and add fresh content as often as you like.

Creating a page in WordPress is pretty much the same as creating a post, however there are differences.

Learn more about using pages in WordPress with these additional resources:

• A Beginners Guide to Pages & Posts
• Create a Custom Sales Page Using a Plugin
• Adding Page Navigation (Pagination) To Your WordPress Theme

Some of the most popular uses for pages include creating a custom homepage.

If you are using WordPress for a business website, you would create page for your cornerstone content and write blogs posts linking back to these static pages.

• How To Install a Custom Page Template
• The Easiest Way to Add a Custom Page in WordPress

Pages are also used for your static commercial type sales copy and the most common pages created in WordPress are:

• Contact page
• About page
• Blog page
• Legal page
• Services page

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Next we’ll check out comments and discussion for bloggers.

This video deals with adding external links in the sidebar of your blog and creating links in posts and pages.

We”ll also create external links which you can list in your sidebar or any other widget area on your site including your footer area.

Learn more about using links in WordPress:

• How To Use Links in WordPress

External links aren’t the only type of links you can insert in your blog.

You can also link internally between pages and posts and:

• Add HTML Links In WordPress Image Captions
• Editing Links in Comments
• Check For Broken Links Using a Plugin

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Its time to learn how to use pages in WordPress.

While you’re editing a post, you may want to assign each one to a specific category or group related posts together using tags. Here’s some helpful resources which you can take a look at if needed.

• Indexing or No Indexing Categories and Tags
• Changing, Moving & Deleting WordPress Categories
• How To Edit, Change & Fix Duplicate Category Slugs in WordPress
• Post Category Tips To Improve The Rank Of Your Archive Pages
• Post Tags Help Navigation, Increase Page Views & SEO For Your Blog 

WordPress uses both categories and tags to group related content together.

• Categories are a bit like the table of contents in a book
• Tags are like keywords you create to group more specific posts together

Its better to keep your categories to a minimum when you first start blogging for different reasons:

• You can always add more categories later on when you have a least 10 posts published with related content
• If you create a large amount of categories first, you’ll suffer from broken links if you decide you don’t need them and delete them.

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Next we’ll take a look at different aspects of links in WordPress.

In the previous video, we looked at how to create a new post in WordPress but what if you make a mistake and need change the content or add something extra?

Here’s some resources to help you learn more about editing posts:

• How To Bulk Edit Multiple Pages & Posts In WordPress
• 3 Advanced WordPress Editors Help You To Create Professional Posts
• Managing Post Revisions In WordPress
• WordPress Screen Options Guide for Newbies

Note: Its best not to edit the unique permalink to each post as this will break any internal or external links to this post.

Next Video

In the next video, we’ll take a look at how to use categories & tags in your WordPress posts.

Once you’ve had a play around in the WordPress dashboard, you may want to create and publish your first blog post.

It’s advisable to correctly setup & configure your WordPress installation before you start blogging.

Once you’ve setup everything properly, you can then start to create your first blog post.

But should you create a page or post?

Here’s a beginners guide to posts and pages in WordPress which will help you understand the difference between the two.

Writing Blog Posts

Posts consist of new content that generally display on your home page or the blog page of your website. In contrast to pages, posts contain comments fields underneath your editor and are included in your site’s RSS feed.

How to write a post:

1. Log in to your Administration Panel (Dashboard).
2. Click on the Posts tab.
3. Click on the Add New tab
4. Start writing in your editor, add images and video if you wish.
5. You may also assign each new posts to a category, add tags, and use all the features displayed on the edit post screen to customize each post.
6. When you have finished creating a new post, click Publish or schedule your post to be published at a future date.

Next Video

Next we’ll take a look at how how to edit posts in WordPress.

The first thing you want to do after successfully installing WordPress, is to login to your new installation and take a look around in whats called the Dashboard.

The dashboard is often referred to as the backend or admin panel, WordPress administration screen not to mention other things.

Here you’ll find all the controls which enable you to setup and configure your blog anyway way you want because you control everything.

Here’s some handy resources which will help you understand and learn more about the Dashboard.

• WordPress Dashboard Widgets
• A Guide To WordPress Administration

Every time you login to your site, you arrive at the dashboard which means you’ll soon become familiar with all the different settings.

You can easily change the layout of your admin screens and choose what to show on this page and what to hide.

Next Video

In the next video, we’ll take a look at how to create and publish your first blog post!