- By: rockablepress
- Created Last: 1 October 2012
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Format: Written
- File Included: PDF Files
You can grab a copy of this book in ePub or Mobi (Kindle) formats from the Rockable site, or download a sample of the book here.
Want to start using WordPress? Then you’ve come to the right place! In this book you’ll be taken from the absolute basics up to a level where you’ll be able to have a site for your cafe, arts centre, personal business, blog or whatever you want to build a website for.
If you know you want a WordPress site but just don’t know where or how to get started, then this book is for you! No matter how far you want to go, WordPress for Mere Mortals will get you started on your own WordPress journey.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
WordPress for Mere Mortals is a book for people who are mere mortals – just starting out on your journey up Mount Olympus (learning WordPress). I’ll take you from the absolute basics up to a level where you’ll be able to have a site for your cafe, arts centre, packaging business, blog or whatever you want to build a website for.
If you feel like having a website for your project is like reading The Odyssey in ancient Greek, this book is for you – a great way to start on your own journey with WordPress.
HEAR FROM THE AUTHOR
Hello, I’m Marc Thomas and I’m the author of WordPress for Mere Mortals. What’s really exciting about WordPress is that you can get started in just a few minutes and have a fully functional site – or if you want something more advanced, you can take your time and spend ages tweaking/grafting away at your site. It’s entirely up to you.
I’ve been working with WordPress for around about six years now and I’ve gone from using it as a very basic blog to using it for news websites, ticketing websites, arts centres and all kinds of other things.?You can be pretty sure that whatever level you are at, I’ve been at the same level as you at one time or another.
WHAT THE BOOK COVERS
We’ll start of with why WordPress is the tool for your project. Did you know 60% of the internet is powered by the WordPress platform? Everything from your neighbor’s blog about her dog Chuck to the Prime Minister of Great Britain’s website! WordPress is very diverse and you can do anything you want with it.
Then we’ll move on to some very practical guides about buying a domain name, finding a web host and choosing a theme for your site before we take a look at what a post is and how that’s different from a page.
We’ll also go through the process of managing all of the content on your website, uploading pictures. Then we’ll also cover stuff like how to embed video from YouTube. Finally, we’ll have a look at some plugins that will help super charge your site.
Sounds good?
If you want to fly like a pegasus, fight like a trojan and sing like Orpheus, this book is for you. It’s also for you if you’d like to use WordPress like a demi-god. Mostly the latter.
WHAT EACH CHAPTER COVERS
CHAPTER 1
Why would you build a website based on WordPress? Couldn’t you just hire someone to do it for you? Well, sure, but we’ll take a look at how you can save yourself a bunch of money and get a top notch understanding of how to run your own site.
CHAPTER 2
One of the biggest confusions is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at all the intricacies and explain how you can buy a domain name, web space and get a WordPress site up and running in just a couple of hours.
CHAPTER 3
Most people spend a huge amount of time worrying about how they’re going to make their website look exactly like they want without knowing how to write all of that code that people are talking about – not to worry, WordPress made it super easy to change the way your site looks without knowing very much or even any code at all.
CHAPTER 4
Of course, it’s great to have a good looking site with a super cool name, but if you don’t have any content to go with that, you’re up the creek! This chapter will show you how to write posts and also fill them up with great pictures of your business or videos that you’ve created.
CHAPTER 5
Post and pages are another one of those confusing things that people get hung up on. There’s no need to worry, though! We’ll walk through all the differences and by the end you’ll know about when to use a page and when to use a post to publish your information.
CHAPTER 6
Now that you’re familiar with the difference between posts and pages, we should get acquainted with the differences between categories and tags. WordPress is really good at organising content – this is where you’ll get familiar with the inbuilt management system.
CHAPTER 7
Sometimes, you might want to include stuff in your WordPress posts like a menu for your restaurant, an image to sit on the front page of your website or, if you’re blogging, maybe some examples of the music you’re listening to. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at how you can do that using Custom Fields.
CHAPTER 8
Building on everything that you learnt in the last chapter, we’ll look at how you can assign an image to every post and then display that alongside your list of posts on the front page. We’ll also briefly look at the built in function that WordPress has to do this and discuss which way is best for you.
CHAPTER 9
Now that you’ve come so far on your journey of learning WordPress, you should just learn one more thing in order to have all the basics. Just like Themes can make your site look wonderful, plugins are little (or sometimes big) bits of code that help your site run wonderfully.
