WordPress in an Hour or Less: The Get It Done Guide to Installing and Using WordPress (5 page)

At the time of this writing, a default installation of WordPress comes with the ‘Twenty Eleven’ theme as the current theme.  Created by the WordPress development team, it is a flexible, highly customizable theme. If you click on the Customize link underneath the theme’s description, you will see a number of customization options appear at the left side of the screen, as shown in the following illustration.

You can use the Site Title and Tagline drop-downs to modify the site title and tagline. Click Colors to change the overall color scheme (a light vs. dark background) and the colors used to display your text, and click the Layout drop-down to change the overall layout for the content of your site (whether the content appears on the left, on the right, or as a single large column with no sidebar).

Use the Header Image drop-down to select header images you want to see displayed as part of the theme; you can remove any or all of the images supplied, and you can upload a new image. (To remove an image, select the unwanted image, and then scroll to the bottom of the images list and click ‘Remove Image.’ To upload a new image, open the Header Image drop-down, click the Upload New tab, and drag and drop a file from your File Manager window. The Twenty Eleven theme is set to use a rectangular image that measure
s 1000 pixels wide and 288 pixels high; images that are a different size will be scaled to fit automatically.)

You can use the Background Image drop-down to specify a background image that gets applied to the entire content area of your site
.

You can also use the Static Front Page option to choose whether your site displays a static (unchanging) front page, or the latest posts. Set all of these various options to your liking, then click the Save button just above the drop-downs to save your choices.

A Warning About Changing Themes

As an experienced WordPress site developer, I need to warn you about an annoying problem you may encounter as you work with themes. The problem is what I like to call the ‘broken content / missing features’ problem, and with complex sites with lots of content or with extensive use of widgets or plug-ins, this problem is a fact of life when switching themes. Let’s say that you settle on a theme, and build a fairly complex site over a few months or a year or more, with a number of pages, posts, and menu options. Then, after your site has been in existence for some time, you decide that it’s time for a makeover, and you find and apply a new theme to your site. Be prepared for the small but definite possibility that some of your content may not come across correctly under the new theme, and some menu options may not work the way they did under the old theme. You are likely to lose any custom header images, because most themes store custom header images within a ‘headers’ subfolder that is unique to the theme. Plug-ins and widgets (detailed in the next chapter) are particularly sensitive to theme changes, and plug-ins that work with some themes may not work with others. In short, it’s a wise idea to check all the areas of an existing site for content and proper operation when you change a site’s theme.

Now let's stop, take a step back (or perhaps better said, a step in another direction) and talk about pages and posts. 
Pages and posts are what will make up the core of your site.  Both contain content, but they are displayed differently.  Some web sites will use only posts; others will use only pages; and others will use a combination of both.  It is important to understand the difference between the two before you begin to construct your web site using WordPress.

From the start, WordPress was developed to support the concept of blogging, an electronic
diary of sorts published to the web.  Posts support blogging, because posts appear in a chronological order.  Back when blogging to the web got its start, each post in a blog appeared as the most recent written entry in a stream of events or comments.  ("It is July 14, and as our plane touched down in Kalamazoo today...")  Posts are time-based, so the newest post appears in chronological order, and older posts scroll below the newer ones.

A powerful feature that WordPress adds to this concept is the ability to categorize your posts into separate-- you may have guessed--
categories
.  With categories, all posts do not have to appear in the same area of your site.  With categories, you can logically divide the content of your site so that readers can easily find all of the posts written about a particular subject area.  If for example, I am developing a site aimed at drawing fans of computer technology, I might create categories like 'Windows PCs', 'Apple Macs', 'Android Tablets', 'iPads', and 'e-Book Readers.' I could then write various posts about those different subjects, and assign each post to its respective category.  Readers would then be able to easily find the posts that interest them by going to the area of the site where I chose to display posts for their category of interest.

And then there are
pages
.  Unlike posts, pages are more static, more unchanging areas of content that make up a site.  There are plenty of WordPress sites (countless in numbers, actually) that don't use posts at all.  Traditional business web sites which serve as a means of advertising a company’s goods or services on the web are often created in WordPress using a series of pages.  One page, typically called a 'home' page, can be set as the page that always appears when a viewer visits the site.  A series of menu options can then lead viewers to other parts of the site that appear on additional pages.  If there is any information that you want to have readable by a viewer to your site at all times, you will want to place that content on a page.

Before moving on to the topic of creating your site's pages and posts, one
point deserves mentioning.  While a site modeled after the more traditional business web site may have no posts, a site that is purely a blog should have at least one page.  That page would be the 'About Me' or 'About Us' page, so that any reader would always have a clearly labeled place to go to learn just who is behind the blog that they are following.

Adding a page is a simple matter.  Basically, you choose
Pages > Add New
from the Dashboard, you enter a page title and the text of the page in the screen that appears, and you click 'Publish.' If you are following my tutorial example, log into WordPress now and at the Dashboard, click Pages > Add New.  In a moment, you will see the Add New Page screen shown here:

In the first text block (which currently reads 'Enter title here'), you enter a title for the page. For our example, enter 'Home Page' as a title. (NOTE that most WordPress themes will automatically use the titles that you enter as the default names for the menu options, so you will want to keep your titles descriptive, but short.)

After you have entered the title, click in the large box-- this is where you enter the content of your page--and type a few lines of text.  For the sake of our example, it's not important what you type, although if you are using your site for some sort of business presence on the web, it might not be a bad idea to begin typing the text that you want to appear on the home page.  (Do not paste in text from a Microsoft Word document; there is a correct way to do this, which I will detail shortly.) For now, just manually type the text.  If you cannot think of anything in particular, you can use the following for the sake of our example:

Welcome to the Home Page of WordPress
in an Hour or Less. This e-book in the popular "Get It Done" series of books from Amazon will have you publishing your own privately-hosted website using the popular WordPress web publishing platform, and you will be doing so in no time at all.

As you type, you'll note that text entry is just like that in any word processor.  You may also notice a row of icons above the main window; these can be used to apply various aspects of formatting to your content.  (Holding the mouse pointer stationary over each icon will display a tool tip indicating the purpose of that particular icon.)

After you have entered text for the hypothetical home page, find the text box under 'Page Attributes' at the right that is labeled 'Order', and enter a value of 10 in that box.  (I will explain why shortly-- trust me, there is a reason.) Finally, click the 'Publish' button at the right, and WordPress will publish this new page to the website.

For the sake of our example, we will add two additional pages.  Click 'Add New' in the Dashboard, enter
About Us
for a title, and enter the following text (or make up your own)

We are the publishers of the popular “Get It Done series of computer books, available at reasonable prices from the digital bookshelves at Amazon. Our books are available on the Kindle section of Amazon’s site, with none costing more than $4.99. And if you don’t own a Kindle, no problem: you can still read our books using the free Kindle reader application
available from Amazon’s site. The Kindle reader is available for the Apple Mac, for Windows-based PCs, for the iPad and iPhone, and for most Android and Windows-based phones.

When done with the text entry, change the value in the Order box to 20, then click 'Publish' to publish this new page to the web.

Finally, from the Dashboard click 'Add New' once more, enter
Contact Us
for a title, and enter the following text (or make up your own)-

Questions? Comments? We welcome your opinion, and would love to hear from you. You can reach us via e-mail at [email protected].

When done with the text entry, change the entry in the Order box to 30, and click 'Publish' to publish this last page to the web.

Now for a bit of housekeeping: the default installation of WordPress came with a sample page, which is no longer needed.  In the Dashboard, under Pages, click the All Pages link.  In a moment, you'll see this screen, displaying the sample page along with the three additional pages you just created.

Click the check box beside Sample Page to select it, and then click the Trash link underneath the name of the page to delete the page.

Much of your written cont
ent may come from pages in a document you have stored using word processing software, such as Microsoft Word, Open Office, or Google Docs. You should know about the correct (versus the incorrect) way to copy and paste text from your word processor into a WordPress post or page. Word-processing documents—especially those created in Microsoft Word—can have many invisible codes used for formatting the document, and you may not see that formatting, but it can play absolute havoc with a WordPress post or page. Fortunately, WordPress has a “Paste from Word” feature that is designed to deal with this common practice. Use these simple steps whenever you want to copy text from a Microsoft Word document into a WordPress post or page: