Understanding Wordpress: An Overview of its Features « Ben Johnson’s Blog: Succeed With Affiliate Websites & Internet Marketing

Understanding WordPress: An Overview of its Features

Published on 14th February 2009

I want to spend the time in today's post talking about the basic components of WordPress. I know that when you first start using WordPress it can be a little hard to understand, particularly for the newbie web users. I hope this post will make things a little clearer for you and hopefully gives you more confidence to go ahead and start using WordPress.

Installing WordPress

There are two ways to install your WordPress affiliate site, there is the long way and the short way. If you have cpanel web hosting and you have a program called Fantastico installed then installing WordPress will take around 2 minutes, no more than that. If you don't have cpanel web hosting or you don't have Fantastico installed then I'm afraid you will have to install it the long way. This will involve downloading the WordPress script directly from here, once you have done that you will need to follow the installation instructions accompanied along with it. It's not too complicated to install and if you have never installed a web script before you may find it difficult but its worth learning so that you don't have to rely on other people to do it for you in the future.If you do have any problems installing the script then feel free to drop me an email and I will happily try and help you out. There is also a large community of WordPress users and developers over in the WordPress community who I am sure will be more than happy to talk you through any problems which you come across.

Following Your WordPress Install

Once you have installed WordPress on your new domain name then you are ready to get started configuring your WordPress backend. The first thing you need to do is login to your admin area, by default this will have been set to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin unless you changed it during the installation process. Once in your WordPress admin area it's quite a good idea to take the time to familiarise yourself with its overall layout and with some of the main WordPress functions, I will go through most of these during the rest of today's post and also in a future post.

Understanding Your WordPress File Structure

Understanding how your WordPress site is structured in the way of folders, i.e. what goes where, can be quite useful. If you connect to your site via ftp (file transfer protocol) you will see your core files in the root of your WordPress site, the folders you should familiarize yourself with are the 'templates' folder and the 'plugins' folder since these are the ones which you will most probably be uploading to the most. Generally you will locate these folders by navigating through the folders in ftp and looking for:

Plugins - wp-content/plugins
Templates - wp-content/themes

Understanding WordPress Themes

There are a massive range of WordPress themes available for FREE in the WordPress community. By default your site will have two themes already installed, these are both pretty basic themes and so you will probably want to search and find your own theme. If you do a Google search for 'Free WordPress Themes' then you will find there are lots of sites out there offering free WordPress templates for download. All of the themes usually come with full installation instructions, again try and learn to do this yourself as it will save you having to pay or rely on someone else to do it for you. Themes will differ from each other not only in the way that they look, i.e. colors, images etc, but they will also differ in the way they are structured, one example of that is where themes allow you to display widgets. Widgets are essentially blocks which can be added into a section of your site (usually the sidebars) and display & arrange content. You can look at the widgets you have installed by going to the Appearances > Widgets option in your WordPress admin area from the left sidebar content. It's then as easy as clicking add into the section of the theme you want to add your widget to.

Understanding Pages & Posts

In the WordPress platform you can insert content into your site in the form of WordPress posts and WordPress pages but what's the difference? WordPress pages will contain static content, pages do not contain the dates & times when they were created and do not show details of the author who wrote the page. In addition pages do not contain WordPress tags, tags will be discussed shortly. Pages will contain information which will remain static on your site, so this will be something like an 'About Us' page or a 'Contact Us' page. You can easily add a page to your site from the admin area by clicking on the Pages > Add New link in the left hand menu of your site. Most page fields are pretty self explanatory, you will need to add a page title and content, in addition you will see an attributes box over on the right hand side of the screen, this allows you to add a 'page parent' if you want a particular page to appear under the heading of another, it also allows you to set page order. You can display a list of pages in your left or right navigation bar using the 'Pages' widget in the Appearances > Widgets option of your WordPress admin area.

WordPress posts are completely different to pages, posts by default are listed in chronological order in the blog home page. A post will contain the post date, time and author within the top content of the post. Links to your WordPress posts can be displayed in your left navigation bar by using the 'Recent Posts' widget in the Appearances > Widgets option of your WordPress admin area. In addition posts can also be categorised into your own custom categories, these can be managed in the Posts > Categories option of your WordPress admin area, you can then display a list of these categories in your left or right navigation by using the 'Categories' widget which can be added in the Appearances > Widgets option.

WordPress Tags & Categories

WordPress tags are different to WordPress categories but generally it doesn't matter if you use one or the other or both, but what is important is that you use them in the right way. Categories should have longer worded names which help your visitors find categorized information on your site, so for example if you had a site on grill reviews then one of the categories may be Weber Gas Grills or Black Gas Grills.

Tags should be more specific and should only include 1 or 2 keywords which are related to the post you have made, so in the case of the grill site you would have the model name of the grill you were reviewing in that particular post. The most important thing is that you shouldn't be using the same names for your tags as your categories. You can display your tags on your site using a 'Tags' widget which can be added in the same way as a 'Categories' or 'Pages' widget.

Overall these are the main parts of WordPress which you need to know about first. There are other areas which I haven't covered here like 'Custom Fields& 'Trackbacks' but I will cover these another day. What I wanted you to do was to get a basic understanding of WordPress and the WordPress admin area before you start building your site. I know all of this information is going to be a bit daunting but essentially the more you use WordPress the more comfortable with it you will become.

In the next few posts I will be covering setting your WordPress options & choosing the right plugins.