You may have came across short youtube videos claiming to teach website building in 5 minutes but they introduce you to very small part and leave you in the middle in this article we will learn wordpress in detail in the simplest possible way.
WordPress is a free, open source website creation platform. You can create and manage your website easily with the help of wordpress.
Once you buy your web Hosting plan you will be asked to choose your website building platform, most popular choice among the users is wordpress. If you choose to go with wordpress you will have to log in to wordpress, remember log in credentials as you will have to use them every time you want to log in to wordpress to administer your site.
Now you are on dashboard page, The first step is to choose Theme.
Themes are collection of templates(contain designs to decide look of your website), codefiles and style sheets. All this contain specific features of certain different websites like educational website, marketing website, review website etc.
On wordpress you get certain free default themes, one of them is active theme. These themes are not so attractive and lack many features. So, you can add new theme by choosing the option Add New. There are lot of Themes which have both free & premium templates.
- Make list of features you want in your website(for e.g. features like selling products online, blogging purpose etc)
- choose theme according to the features you want in your website.
- choose responsive theme.
- Theme shouldn’t be heavy, remember to choose light theme that takes very less time to load as loading time can affect search engine rankings.
- Remember to check theme font, it shouldn’t be unattractive & so fancy that it’s hard to understand.
- Choose theme with simple colour.
Once you choose your theme, activate it. Then you will be asked to choose website builder, choose Elementor as your website builder- this is one of the most efficient website builder that makes website creation an easy task.
Now go to appearance tab on the left side of your wordpress dashboard, choose sub-option of starter template from it and select your template and download all necessary plugins it asks you to download.
You can choose free version template but this template come with some restrictions, they are not fully editable, (this doesn’t mean they can’t be edited at all, you can edit it with Elementor-a plugin)
If you can buy premium version you should definitely consider buying it, this will give you more editing option and control on your theme.
Now once you have activated a new theme(active theme appears on dashboard options) and chose new template you can delete default wordpress themes- for this
- click on theme you want to delete.
- click on theme details.
- delete option appears at the bottom, either on left or right side
- click on delete.
Introduction to wordpress dashboard
1.Appearance tab
under appearance tab there are certain options
- Themes- you can change/select new theme.
- customize-you can customize/edit current look of your website or add new features, menus etc.
- widgets- It’s an element that helps you to add specific feature to your site like image, paragraph, heading etc.
- Menus-this are list of links(of certain pages) that helps you to navigate to that page. They are typically displayed on the top. simply, when you click on them you are directed to that page.
- Header-you can add or customize header.
- Theme editor-As the name suggests, you can check active theme or add/choose new.
2.Plugins
plugins are programs that start automatically and operate as a part of your browser. In short plug-ins add extra feature to website for e.g. if your current template don’t have table if you want to add table you can search for table theme, install and activate it and now you can add table.
As you read above that there are some restriction to your free template that you can’t add certain features or edit certain areas plugins help you to do that task. But you should be careful, adding many plugins lowers your site performance, decrease its functionality sometimes your website can crash and lessens security. So delete unwanted plugins, remember don’t delete the plugin you have used in your website or the plugins that get downloaded with your theme or else your site will break/crash.
To delete plugin-
- go to plugin tab in dashboard.
- select installed plugins option
- If the plugin you want to delete is active then first deactivate it.(activated but unused plugin)
- after deactivation you will get the option to delete.
- This way, you can delete unwanted extra plugins.
3.Settings
- general- you can edit site title, add tagline to your website, site language etc.
- Reading-You can choose what the home page will display whether new post that you will add or a static/fixed page and add posts to another page under its menu. Here you can also select number of blog posts to be shown at one time on landing page.
- writing-you can adjust size of post box, formatting, default posts, categories etc.
- media-Edit how media appears on your website
- permalinks- you can edit links of your website. From permalinks you can edit links of posts etc, like you can choose the name of your posts link whether it should be date or simply show post name.
4. pages
You can add new page to your website and make it multi-page website. To navigate to the newly added page create navigational menu- which is located under appearance tab (Go to Menus>add new>edit name of you menu>choose location where you want it to display>add).
5.Posts
You can add new posts, edit or update previous posts from this tab. You can also delete/edit/create different Categories to distinguish between your posts like if you write product review posts you can add categories of products like fashion, beauty, electronics etc and then add posts accordingly to their categories. Adding categories will help your users to navigate to desired content, in short categories makes your posts user-friendly.
6. comments
You can check and approve, reply comments on your posts.
At this point of article you have been introduced to all important tabs in wordpress dashboard sidebar. Now you are ready to create/edit your website. To create website Download a plugin called ELEMENTOR- this plugin makes website editing smooth as butter all you have to do is just drag and drop. (drag widgets, features from sidebar and drop on page where you want to add it) Lets learn editing/creating website with Elementor…read more…
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