Welcome
Hello and welcome to the Building WordPress websites basic course.
The aim of the course is to teach the basics of setting up a basic WordPress site.
At the end of the course you:
- Will have a functioning WordPress website (test site) and blog.
- Understand the difference between a website and blog.
- Know how to add pages and posts.
- Understand and be able to use the inbuilt editor.
- Understand themes and plugins.
- Know how to change themes
- Know how to add plugins.
- Be able to navigate the control panel and make basic changes.
- Understand widgets and how to add/change them.
- Understand how to Install WordPress and the hosting requirements.
What Others Have Thought |
| Well Steve i finally completed all the classes. Simple and Powerful. Easy to Follow along with the video, text, and of course ‘student’ project site. Perfect instruction that demystifies the WordPress Dashboard – setting perfectly ‘the stage’ for confident beginnings for anyone wanting to learn editing and publishing with WordPress! Thank You, & Be Well My Friend! For a complete beginner I don’t think anything is missing. Too much information at this stage is off putting and intimidating so i think it’s just right- Name witheld |
The course consists of 8 main lessons. Here is Course outline:
- Overview of the Control Panel
- Creating pages and Posts and configuring WordPress as a standard website.
- Adding text and images changing the default page naming.
- Page names,title and Opening Headlines
- Adding and configuring the contact plugin
- Page layout,changing menus and widgets
- Themes-Theme Types,Modify,Install,Change
- Maintenance and General Settings and The SEO Plugin
Requirements
To do the course you will need an hosting account and domain name.
I recommend you use the hosting account provider for the domain name as they usually offer a free domain with the hosting account anyway and it is easier to manage.
The ones I use to host my WordPress sites are:
You can use any hosting provider you want but it should be:
- Hosted on a Linux server
- Support PHP5
- Have a MYSQL database support
The course doesn’t necessarily require a fresh installation of WordPress, but if you do try and use an existing installation you must be aware that you will not necessarily see the exact same screens as you will see in the videos.
Therefore to avoid confusion I would recommend that you either install a test site or that the site you use has had very little modifications.
Creating a Test Site
The easiest way of creating a test site is to use a subdomain.
So if your main site web address is www.mydomain.com then you can have a test site at test.mydomain.com.
The subdomain in this case is called test.
In the following video I will show you how to create the subdomain and associate it with a sub folder.
This sub folder will later contain the wordpress files when we have done the install.
Watch on Youtube and leave comments.
Installing WordPress
If you haven’t already done so you will need to install WordPress either on your test domain or main domain, and depending on your host either using a manual install or a scripted automatic install.
You can find the details here:
Course Start
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You should follow the course in lesson order as the lessons assume that you have completed the previous lesson.
Now that you have finished the course would you mind taking the post course survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9T9X93D
Don’t forget to tell your friends about the course if you think that they would be interested. If you would like to link to the course then here is the HTML.
<a href=”http://www.buildingwordpresswebsites.com/courses/”>WordPress Beginners Course</a>
Bonus Lesson
Now that you are familiar with the basic set up you should make sure that when you create new pages that they are optimized.
The SEO plugin that we installed in an earlier lesson is the first step. In this short WordPress SEO tutorial I cover how you set up the plugin and do basic optimization.
If you have any difficulties please contact me using the contact form.
Rgds
Steve
