WordPress Customization

By Justin Laing
2008-01-09


Introduction To WordPress

Site: http://wordpress.org/

Description

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.”

Benefits

• Easy to use back end for writing content and making other dynamic changes to your site.
• Simple setup, anyone with a little bit of server experience can install it.
• Themes and Plugins are numerous and mostly free.
• Easy to build your own theme or customize an existing one.
• Uses standard/free web server technologies: PHP & MySQL.

Using WordPress

1. Login to the administration features by going to: http://<your blogurl>/wp-admin/
2. To write a post click on the “Write” tab. You can write in a visual editor or you can write straight HTML. I recommend learning HTML and editing pages in it, you’re posts will come out a lot better and be easier to modify later. Choose your editor under My Profile -> “Use visual editor when writing”. If you have a normal sized monitor you may also want to turn up the number of lines you can see at once in the editor at: Options -> Writing -> “Size of the post box”, I recommend setting it to about 30 lines instead of 20.
   
3. General options for your blog are under: Options -> General.
   
4. An important option is: Permalinks. These determine the directory structure of your blog. You probably want to change it from default to custom with structure of something like: “/%category%/%postname%/”. This will help your site rank in Google and other search engines. %category% will be the category you choose for your post. Warning: For SEO optimization give each post only one category. If you use multiple categories Google will find your post in multiple locations and may discard it as duplicate content. Your %postname% comes from the “Post slug” field on the post writing screen. It will default to your post title but you can change it to anything you want, just make sure that it’s something that will be valid as a url (no spaces or weird characters). For example if we categorized our post as “Awesome” and made a slug of “this-is-the-most-awesome-slug” it would show up on our blog at /awesome/this-is-the-most-awesome-slug/ which would rank well in Google for phrases like “awesome slug”.
5. Your theme is chosen under Presentation -> Theme
   

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction To WordPress
» WordPress Themes
» Structure Of A WordPress Theme
» Making Your New Theme
» Modifying The Header
» Blog / Post Templates
» The Post Loop
» Page Templates
» Sidebars
» Meta Data / Custom Fields For Page Customization


Originally posted on Makebeta

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