by Michael Fletcher

Created on: June 19, 2010   Last Updated: October 28, 2010

Wordpress is a blogging platform.  With each new version Wordpress is becoming a serious contender as a fully fledged Content Management System for  blogging and non-blogging projects alike. Because Wordpress is database driven, unlike traditional HTML websites, users can focus on the quality of content without having any web design knowledge.

Posts and Pages

Wordpress sites are made up of Pages and Posts. Pages are generally for information which needs to be constantly available. Examples of pages are “About” or “Contact pages” these contain information which the author would want to be available regardless of which page they’re on, on the blog.

Posts on the other hand are the standard format of, you guessed it, blog posts. These are typically stored in date order. The most recent posts are stored on the front page of your wordpress blog by default, though this can be changed if needs be.

Posts are organised in Categories and with tags. Categories organise posts into broad sub-topics. Tags are keywords which may be of special interest to readers. They will then be able to view all posts tagged with a particular word which interests them.

For example had this article been on a Wordpress blog about Wordpress blogs, the Category for this post might be called For Beginners, and the tags might be:

Beginner, plugins, pages, posts, themes, dashboard

The Dashboard

Everything in Wordpress is controlled from the Admin area. From the Admin area you can can create posts and pages, install and change themes, install and edit plugins and manage all of your Wordpress settings and administrative tasks.

Plugins - Adding Functionality

Plugins are the custom parts typically written by 3rd party developers that add functionality to your Wordpress blog. Plugins range from solutions to increase the performance of your blog to plugins that will turn your blog into a membership site or e-commerce solution.

Once you’ve installed Wordpress you may be slightly underwhelmed by what it has to offer. It is important to remember that Wordpress provides the basic blogging functionality. In order to emulate the sleek and sexy blogs out there you’ll need to put some time into installing the right plugins to make your wordpress blog work for you.

Plugins can be installed and configured from within the admin area.

Themes – Adding personality

The entire look and feel of your wordpress site is determined by theme files. The best themes have a number of options which can be changed from within the admin area. The less options a theme has the less you will be able to customize it without specialist knowledge and the more likely it is that you will end up with a bland or unoriginal looking site. Good options to look for in a first theme are options to insert a logo and adjust the number or width of columns. If you can find a theme with colour options that is very useful as well, as you’ll be able to change your theme look without having to learn a new set of theme options.

Be a blogger not a web designer

These are the basics of Wordpress. The whole purpose of Wordpress is to make your blog setup as easy as possible so you can focus on content. The beauty of Wordpress lies in the fact that you can be as technical as you want. If you are very interested in the inner workings, you’ll find there are more than enough resources on the web that will show you how to do pretty much anything in Wordpress. If you’re just interested in writing you’ll find that if you put a bit of time into setting Wordpress up correctly you won’t need to do anything but write content until you next decide your blog needs a facelift.

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