Category: WordPress Beginners

Teach Yourself Visually WordPress

A great book for WordPress beginners, on both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress. Readers gave 4.4 of 5 stars.  It truly deserves the rating. By Janet Majure, this 288-page full color WordPress book can work as well as video tutorials if not better. It is easy to follow and can get any beginner up to speed with their new sites using WordPress.

This book's clear directions and visual approach helps you to quickly get started in WordPress and then take full advantage of all its features. Janet Majure, an experienced and popular WordPress user, demonstrates key points with examples from her blogs.

  • Provides visual step-by-step instructions for creating and setting up a WordPress site
  • Explains how to create engaging written and visual content
  • Shares advice on customizing sites through use of plug-ins and themes and custom site editing
  • Details more advanced procedures for self-hosted bloggers, including buying a domain, getting a Web host, and installing WordPress

The blogosphere beckons! Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress Brimming with clear instructions and exciting ideas for building a successful blog on WordPress.

Kindle Version:

I agree with HT's comment: "This book was a valuable companion to me as I wandered into the WordPress world with no experience at all. Like many people, I find it easier to work through a new program on-screen and not by reading about it. However, this book provided "screen shots" and entertaining graphics that led me through every challenge in setting up a WordPress blog. It gives detailed information in an easy to understand and to implement form. It made learning WordPress a fun and easy process. "

Setting Up Permalinks for Better SEO

The default URL settings for WordPress pages or posts are not quite user friendly or SEO friendly.  https://wp89.com/learn/setting-permalinks-seo makes more sense than https://wp89.com/learn/?p=230 ( where I can never figure out what 230 refers to.). Search engines can also make more sense out of the URL with key words too.

Here's the video tutorial showing you how to setup more meaningful URL for your WordPress pages or posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdi7xDzN7a8

Creating Posts for Your Blog or Website

WordPress got famous as a blogging platform, so the default front page is showing the latest blog posts. If we add a post, the latest post will show up on the top of the front page.

Before you create any contents for your WordPress site, you should understand the major differences of between a post and a page in WordPress. For best SEO result, I will try to create most of my new contents with posts instead of pages.

Here's the 1st video tutorials on how to create a new post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY9FxfCEbrk

Install WordPress with Softaculous

Arvixe hosting is great for anyone who wants their own self-hosted WordPress. One of the reasons we love Arvixe is that they give you a free Web application installer called Softaculous. Here's a video tutorial show you how easy to have your own WordPress up and running:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeJ9fHIDGio

Other reasons that we choose Arvixe to host their WordPress sites include:

  • Very affordable.  For only $4/month, you can host up to 6 domains with unlimited space and traffic bandwidth. Other hosting services may look cheaper, but if you choose to pay for the 2 year plan, you end up pay more for less for only one domain. Some hosting services may even charge you extra if you want to have cPanel. You can get lots of other services without pay extra.
  • You have great support community

Why not sign up Arvixe today?

Video Tutorial: Create Pages & Menu Items

This is one the WordPress for Beginners Video Tutorials.

After you understand the differences between a page or post, you can add more menu items by adding more pages. Creating pages and menu items is pretty simple in WordPress CMS.

Here's our Youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yySeHU_j4Z8

Differences between WordPress Page and Post

For most WordPress beginners, they need to learn about the differences between a page and a post. They may ask the question: "Shall I create a new post or page?"

If you use the default theme, or other similar themes, you may notice the following major differences:

  1. If you want to create static page for an item in the menu, you should create a page not a post.
  2. If you want your new article appear in some category like the default page in the front, you need to create a post.
  3. You can put a post under different categories and or put a few tags to it, but you cannot do this with a page (unless you use some special plugins);
  4. When creating a page, you need to select no parent or parent for the menu item. And you can set the order for the page appear as an item in the menu.
  5. Last but not the least, posts appear in the RSS for those who subscribe to your blogs. This can be very important as RSS updates may notify some search engine to get the robots to craw your website.

Other things we need to mention are

  • For front page, you may also create a post and set it as your front page at Settings => Reading;
  • Usually the default order of listing posts in the default front page or post category page is "the latest first",  however, you may also set the post sticky by click "Edit" in the Visibility under Publish section on the right and check the box beside “Stick this post to the front page” so that the post will always stay on the top;

Some video tutorials will show the differences clearly. Stay tuned.

Self-hosted WordPress Websites

The simple truth is that if you can't afford only $4 a month for hosting sevice, forget about making money with WordPress.  The good news is you can really make much more than $4/month with a self-hosted WordPress website.

Here is a short list of a self-hosted WordPress website can do:

  • Run Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads.
  • Put affiliate links (including Amazon, Clickbank, CJ) or any links you like.
  • Putting on new site designs with custom themes, or free themes you can find and modify according to your own tastes and needs;
  • Add any features and functionality you need with the free WordPress plugins and widgets or the custom plugins you or your hired programmers created for you.
  • Use great traffic analysis services such as Google Analytics (free)
  • Embed more videos from more services other than Youtube

Here is what we use WordPress to build with a very affordable hosting services:

Self-hosted WordPress is a great Web development framework that can create almost any kinds of websites. Many successful cases prove that Web development cycle can be greatly shortened with WordPress CMS.

Why WordPress?

Why A Business Use WordPress?

Here we list some top reasons why a business site would use WordPress as the publishing platform?

  • It is so easy to use! If you can type, you can add new contents to the WordPress Website. For bloggers and marketing professionals, they can focus on writing great contents that are most interesting to their readers or customers. It is so easy to upload a photo or image, or create an online album, or embed a video (from Youtube or other video sharing services) to go with the articles.
  • It is powerful and extensible. There are so many free or affordable WordPress plugins to give your business websites the features you need. You can also pay an experienced WordPress developers to add the functions you need when you cannot find the plugins you need and the their services are so affordable compared to others. You can run an online store using WordPress platform; you can get paid via Paypal, Google Checkout or other payment gateway for your online or offline services (for membership websites providing internal contents, or the tuition of your music schools, private preschool or after schools.)
  • WordPress Themes and Template System can give your business site great new looks and interface while keeping your existing contents. There are so many free WordPress themes for those doesn't anything about Web design to choose from. For those with special needs, it is so easy to hire a WordPress designer to create the themes according to exactly what you want.
  • For SEO (search engine optimization), WordPress is the best Web Publish platform that major search engines (such as Google, Bing and Yahoo) love. Just imagine why Matt Cutts, the most famous Google search expert, use only WordPress for his own website ( http://mattcutts.com/blog/ ). Besides the WordPress built-in SEO friendly Website structure and features, you can get lots of free SEO plugins to help you optimize your pages and posts for search engines.
  • WordPress is the best Web development platform with short turn over; it is great for business sites with limited Web development budgets. So many Web developers are turning to WordPress to develop turn-key business websites because it is a very efficient development framework based on PHP & MySQL, the most used Web technology for the most of the websites in the world ( right! ASP, .Net or Java are not as popular as PHP & MySQL). This development framework is proved to have the least learning curve too.
  • this list is growing on and on...

The list above is only the beginning, please submit your reasons to use WordPress for your Web sites in the comments, and you will be surprised how many WordPress users are willing to share their excitement and success with WordPress.

Main Differences of WordPress.com Sites & Self hosted WordPress Web Sites

There are many benefits and disadvantages of the free WordPress.com sites.

The pros first. The advantages of a free WordPress.com site,

  1. You can don't need to pay a penny;
  2. Fast setup! You got rich features already set up for you (e.g.  iPad WPtouch theme plugin for a mobile version of your site.  SEO friendly permanent link was setup for your posts by default, but they put the dates as subfolders in the URL, which is not recommended by Matt Cuts.  http://wp89.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ should be http://wp89.wordpress.com/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ without the date instead. You can only do this with your own hosted WordPress sites.)
  3. It's great to beginners to get familiar with the WordPress interface, features and functions
  4. You don't need to worry about the software upgrade; WordPress takes care of all the upgrades automatically for you.
  5. You are not alone; you can find a huge community of WordPress.com users who love to share experiences and tips on using WordPress.com

The greatest disadvantage of the free WordPress.com sites compared with the self-hosted WordPress sites is that you cannot use the WordPress plugins you create or find free available out there to extend the features and functions. Also you cannot use any themes (custom ones) other than the themes they offer.

Limitations of WordPress.com websites:

  • Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are NOT allowed. You cannot even put the affiliate links like clickbanks.
  • Uploading file formats only allowed: .jpg .jpeg .png .gif .pdf .doc .ppt    ( for security purpose)
  • No custom css (unless you upgrade for $15/year ), no custom themes( or edit themes), no custom plugins
  • Limited upload space: 50MB ( upgradable to 1000MB for $20/year)

For someone who just need a blog for simple task, you may be satisfied with the free WordPress.com service. For some bloggers or serious business site owners,  you must get your own hosting service to run your own WordPress websites with so much more features and functionality to extend.  In our later articles, we are going to talk about how much more we can do with your self-hosted WordPress websites.