WordPress® For Dummies®, 9th Edition
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ISBN 978-1-119-69697-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-69698-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-69696-4 (ebk)
There used to be a program from Microsoft called FrontPage, which was the first visual interface for creating websites that I saw. It worked like Microsoft Word and Publisher, so with very little knowledge, I was able to hack together the world’s worst website in just a few hours without worrying about what was going on under the hood.
Years later, when I look back at that website, I cringe, but at the time, it was incredibly empowering. The software, though crude, helped me publish something anybody in the entire world could see. It opened a world I had never imagined before.
Now, using software like WordPress, you can have a blog or website light years beyond my first one in both functionality and aesthetics. Just as my first web experience whetted my appetite for more, I hope that your experience entices you to explore the thousands of free plugins, themes, and customizations that are possible with WordPress, many of which are explained in this book.
WordPress is more than just software; it’s also a community, a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and a set of philosophies and opinions about how to create the best web experience. When you embrace it, you’ll be in good company. WordPress users include old-media organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, along with millions of personal bloggers like me for whom a WordPress blog is a means of expression.
Matt Mullenweg
Cofounder of WordPress
It was 2003 when I discovered the WordPress blogging software. Way back then (and in Internet years, that’s actually quite a lot of time), I used Movable Type as my blogging platform. A friend introduced me to the WordPress software. “Try it,” she said. “You’ll really like it.”
As a creature of habit, I felt reluctant to make the change. But I haven’t looked back. I’ve been with WordPress ever since.
WordPress started as a tool for blogging. Authors, students, parents, business owners, academics, journalists, hobbyists — you name it — use blogs as a matter of course. Over the past decade, WordPress has emerged as the premier content management system (CMS) available on the Internet. WordPress software currently powers 35 percent of the websites you see.
Today, WordPress is much more than a blogging tool. Individuals, organizations, and corporations are using WordPress to build their entire web presence. WordPress has grown into a valuable solution for everything from selling products on the Internet to running membership sites and blogging. Pretty much anything you think you can do with your website, you can accomplish with WordPress.
To a brand-new user, some aspects of WordPress can be a little bit intimidating. After you start using it, however, you begin to realize how intuitive, friendly, and extensible the software is.
This book presents an insightful look at WordPress. In the book, I cover managing and maintaining your WordPress-powered website through the use of plugins and themes, as well as using the intuitive WordPress Dashboard to manage your content. If you’re interested in taking a detailed look at the website-building tool provided by WordPress, you happen to have just the right book in your hands.
This book covers all the important aspects of WordPress that new users need to know to use the software for their own websites. I cover the software package available at https://wordpress.org by highlighting important topics, such as these:
With WordPress, you can truly tailor a website to your own tastes and needs. Some sites are packaged with the WordPress software; others are third-party plugins and add-ons created by members of the WordPress user community. You need to invest only a little research, knowledge, and time to put together a site that suits your needs and gives your readers an exciting experience that keeps them coming back for more.
I’ll never know what assumptions you’ve made about me at this point, but I can tell you a few things that I already assume about you:
Icons emphasize a point to remember, a danger to be aware of, or information that I think you may find helpful. Those points are illustrated as such:
I’ve put a ton of information between the covers of this book, but at https://www.dummies.com, you can find a Cheat Sheet that lists
When you arrive at https://www.dummies.com, type the book’s title in the Search field to find the Cheat Sheet.
This book is a veritable smorgasbord of WordPress information, ideas, concepts, tools, resources, and instructions. Some parts of the book may apply directly to what you want to do with your WordPress blog. Other parts may deal with topics that you’re only mildly curious about, so feel free to skim (or skip) those pages.
If you already have WordPress installed on your web server, for example, you can skip Chapter 3. If you aren’t interested in digging into the code of a WordPress template and don’t want to find out how to apply CSS or HTML to enhance your design, you can skip Chapters 9 through 12. If you have no interest in running more than one website with WordPress, you can skip Chapter 13.
I don’t intend for you to read this book from cover to cover (unless you’re my mother — then I won’t forgive you if you don’t). Rather, scan the table of contents and the index to find the information you need.
Long story short: Take what you need, and leave the rest.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Seeing how WordPress can benefit you
Participating in the WordPress community
Understanding the different versions of WordPress
In a world in which technology advances in the blink of an eye, WordPress really does make building websites easy — and free! How else can you get your content out to a potential audience of millions worldwide and spend exactly nothing? There may be no such thing as a free lunch in this world, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are free websites and blogs. WordPress serves them all up in one nifty package.
The software’s free price tag, its ease of use, and the speed at which you can get your website up and running are great reasons to use WordPress to power your personal blog or business website. An even greater reason is the incredibly supportive and passionate WordPress community. In this chapter, I introduce you to the WordPress software so that you can begin to discover how effective it is as a tool for creating your website.
I work with first-time website owners all the time — folks who are new to the idea of publishing content on the Internet. One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is “How can I run a website? I don’t even know how to code or create websites.”
Enter WordPress. You no longer need to worry about knowing the code because the WordPress software does the code part for you. When you log in to your website, you have to do only two simple things to publish your thoughts and ideas:
That’s it!
WordPress offers the following competitive advantages as the most popular content management tool on the market:
Diverse options: Two versions of WordPress are available to suit nearly every type of website owner:
I go into detail about each of these versions later in this chapter, in the “Choosing a WordPress Platform” section.
The following sections fill in a few details about these features and point you to places in the book where you can find out more about them.
WordPress is one of the only platforms that can brag about a five-minute installation — and stand behind it! Both versions of WordPress take you approximately the same amount of time to set up.
When you complete the installation, however, the world of WordPress awaits you. The Dashboard is well organized and easy on the eyes. Everything is clear and logical, making it easy for even a first-time user to see where to go to manage settings and options.
The WordPress software surely has enough meat on it to keep the most experienced developer busy and happy. At the same time, however, it’s friendly enough to make a novice user giddy about how easy it is to get started. Each time you use WordPress, you can find out something exciting and new.
I’ve found that the most exciting and fun part of running a WordPress website is exploring the flexibility of the software. Hundreds of plugins and themes (designs) are available to let you create a website that functions the way you need it to.
All WordPress websites are pretty much the same at their core, so by using plugins, you can truly individualize your website by providing additional features and tools that benefit you and your readers. When you come upon a WordPress website that has some really different and cool functions, 98 percent of the time, you can include that function on your own website by using a WordPress plugin. If you don’t know what plugin that website is using, try dropping the website owner an email or leave a comment. WordPress website owners usually are eager to share the great tools they discover.
Most plugins are available at no charge. You can find out more about WordPress plugins and where to get them in Chapter 7. Chapter 15 lists my top ten choices for popular WordPress plugins available for download.
In addition to using plugins, you can embellish your WordPress site with templates and themes. WordPress comes with a very nice default theme to get you started. Figure 1-1 shows the default Twenty Twenty theme, created by the team from WordPress, which is displayed by default after you install and set up your site for the first time.
FIGURE 1-1: Start a new WordPress website with a theme.
The theme’s default style is minimal, with handy settings built into the Customizer that enable you to change the colors and insert an image to use as a header image. (You can find more about tweaking WordPress themes and the Customizer in Chapters 9 through 12.)
Using some of the thousands of plugins and themes available, you can truly manage many kinds of content on your website. WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore (although it does still excel at it!). Although WordPress became well known as a blogging platform, you can use it to power diverse and dynamic websites that allow you to do things like develop an e-commerce site (selling products online), create a members-only site where your content is curated only for those who have registered and become members of your site, or create a large corporate business site like the one you can see in the Microsoft News Center at https://news.microsoft.com.
Using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) frees you from running only a blog on the platform. (See Chapter 12 for more about the technique of designing for WordPress as a CMS.)
Allow me to introduce you to the fiercely loyal folks who make up the user base, better known as the vast WordPress community. This band of merry ladies and gentlemen comes from all around the globe, from California to Cairo, Florida to Florence, and all points in between and beyond.
In March 2005, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress proudly proclaimed that the number of WordPress downloads had reached 900,000 — an amazing landmark in the history of the software. But the real excitement occurred in August 2006, when WordPress logged more than 1 million downloads, and in 2007, when the software had more than 3 million downloads. WordPress downloads have broken the ceiling since then, with more than 30 million downloads by the beginning of 2020, and the number is growing daily. WordPress is easily the most popular CMS available on the web today. By the first half of 2020, it powered approximately 35 percent of all the websites on the Internet in 2020 — roughly two of every six sites you encounter on the World Wide Web.
Don’t let the sheer volume of users fool you: WordPress also has bragging rights to the most helpful community on the web. You can find users helping other users in the support forums at https://wordpress.org/support. You can also find users contributing to the very helpful WordPress Codex (a collection of how-to documents) at https://codex.wordpress.org. Finally, across the Internet, you can find multiple websites about WordPress itself, with users sharing their experiences and war stories in the hope of helping the next person who comes along.
You can subscribe to various mailing lists, too. These lists offer you the opportunity to become involved in various aspects of the WordPress community as well as in the ongoing development of the software.
Joining the WordPress community is easy: Simply start your own website by using one of the two WordPress software options. If you’re already publishing on a different platform, such as Blogger or Movable Type, WordPress enables you to easily migrate your current data from that platform to a new WordPress setup. (See Chapter 14 for information about migrating your existing website to WordPress.)
One of the realities of running a website today is choosing among the veritable feast of software platforms to find the one that performs the way you need. You want to be sure that the platform you choose has all the options you’re looking for. WordPress is unique in that it offers two versions of its software, each designed to meet various needs:
https://wordpress.com.https://wordpress.org. (This book focuses on this version.)Every WordPress website setup has certain features available, whether you’re using the self-hosted software from WordPress.org or the hosted version at WordPress.com. These features include (but aren’t limited to)
Table 1-1 compares the two WordPress versions.
TABLE 1-1 Exploring the Differences between the Two Versions of WordPress
|
Feature |
WordPress.org |
WordPress.com |
|---|---|---|
|
Cost |
Free |
Free |
|
Software download |
Yes |
No |
|
Software installation |
Yes |
No |
|
Web hosting required |
Yes |
No |
|
Custom CSS* control |
Yes |
$96 per year |
|
Template access |
Yes |
$96 per year |
|
Sidebar widgets |
Yes |
Yes |
|
RSS syndication |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Access to core code |
Yes |
No |
|
Ability to install plugins |
Yes |
$300 per year |
|
Theme** installation |
Yes |
$300 per year |
|
Multiauthor support |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Unlimited number of website setups with one account |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Community-based support forums |
Yes |
Yes |
* CSS = Cascading Style Sheets
** Limited selection on WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a free service. If downloading, installing, and using software on a web server sound like Greek to you — and like things you’d rather avoid — the WordPress folks provide a solution for you at WordPress.com.
WordPress.com is a hosted solution, which means that it has no software requirement, no downloads, and no installation or server configurations. Everything’s done for you on the back end, behind the scenes. You don’t even have to worry about how the process happens; it happens quickly, and before you know it, you’re making your first post using a WordPress.com solution.
WordPress.com has some limitations, though. You can’t install plugins or custom themes, for example, and you can’t customize the base code files. Neither are you able to sell advertising or monetize your site at all on WordPress.com unless you pay a $300 annual fee. Also, WordPress.com displays advertisements on your posts and pages to users who aren’t logged in to the WordPress.com network (https://wordpress.com/support/no-ads). But even with its limitations, WordPress.com is an excellent starting point if you’re brand-new to blogging and a little intimidated by the configuration requirements of the self-installed WordPress.org software.
If you don’t want or need to create a full website for your business or service and just want to create an online diary of sorts, you would typically use WordPress.com, because it excels at allowing you to get a simple site up and running quickly. As I mention previously, however, if you want to use the thousands of plugins and themes available for WordPress — or if you want to customize your own theme for your website — you’re limited to only a few themes on the WordPress.com-hosted service, and you’re not able to install your own plugins on the service, either.
The good news is this: If you ever outgrow your WordPress.com-hosted site and want to make a move to the self-hosted WordPress.org software, you can. You can even take all the content from your WordPress.com-hosted site with you and easily import it into your new setup with the WordPress.org software.
The self-installed version from WordPress.org that I cover in this book requires you to download the software from the WordPress website and install it on a web server. Unless you own your own web server, you need to lease one — or lease space on one.
Using a web server typically is referred to as web hosting, and unless you know someone who knows someone, hosting generally isn’t free. That being said, web hosting doesn’t cost a whole lot. You can usually obtain a good web-hosting service for anywhere from $5 to $20 per month, depending on your needs. (Chapter 3 gives you the important details you need to know about obtaining a web host.)
You need to make sure, however, that any web host you choose to work with has the required software installed on the web server. Currently, the minimum software recommendations for WordPress include
After you have WordPress installed on your web server (see the installation instructions in Chapter 3), you can start using it to publish to your heart’s content. With the WordPress software, you can install several plugins that extend the functionality of the platform, as I describe in Chapter 7.
You also have full control of the core files and code that WordPress is built on. So if you have a knack for PHP and knowledge of MySQL, you can work within the code to create your own themes and plugins that you think would be good for you and your website. Find information about PHP and MySQL in Chapter 2.
You don’t need design ability to make your website look great. Members of the WordPress community have created more than 3,900 WordPress themes, and you can download them for free and install them on your WordPress site. (See Chapter 8.) Additionally, if you’re creatively inclined, like to create designs on your own, and know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you’ll be glad to know that you have full access to the template system within WordPress and can create your own custom themes. (See Part 4.)
Sites that use the WordPress Network options include the following:
https://www.bbcamerica.com): The BBC America site contains all the shows and movies that the TV network offers. It’s a huge WordPress Multisite network, with each show having an individual site.https://www.boisestate.edu): Boise State University is Idaho’s largest institution of higher education, offering nearly 200 degrees and certificates in 7 colleges. The global navigation and emergency notifications are managed centrally, and updates are pushed out to more than 200 separate WordPress multisite instances within minutes.https://blogs.windows.com): Niche-specific blog networks use WordPress to manage the content they publish through various channels on their website about the Windows software — in multiple languages.