Wordpress is a powerful platform that serves the hobby blogger all the way to the professional business website. There are two versions of WordPress; this sometimes confuses people. An excellent way to look at the two is how you will use your WordPress site. If you were creating a personal blog for your use or to share with family, you would be just fine with having WordPress host your site for you on WordPress.com. It is entirely free, no need to purchase a domain name or website hosting. You create an account, and they host your site for you. You will be limited to your design and features you can implement, but it will serve as an excellent platform for a personal blog.
If you are after more of a professional website for your business or brand, you will want to purchase your domain name, purchase website hosting and then install WordPress on your hosting platform. Hosting your WordPress site provides you with greater flexibility to customize your site to your liking. For the purpose of this article, we are going to move forward with a site that we are hosting.
WordPress Pages & Posts (and Categories)
Before we move forward, making sure, you understand the structure of a WordPress site. Your site will consist of some different pages; this is the hierarchy structure of your site. Just as you see on DottoTech.com we have the Home, Speaking, Vlogs, Courses, About Us, and Privacy Policy. These are all pages. Pages are permanent homes for your content and can be displayed in the menu of your site. While Pages and Posts control the structure of your site, you also use Categories to group related content together, Categories on the Dotto Tech Site include my Demos, Ask Dotto Tech Shows and Vlogs.
Beyond pages, we have what are called posts. These are where individual blog posts will be created. On DottoTech.com, we have titled our blog page as Vlogs as our content is primarily video. (Vlog – Video Blog)
When you create posts, these will automatically be listed as individual posts to your blog page. Think of it as a diary entry, each entry you make will display on the same page. So you can create a blog post and know that it will automatically show on your blog page. Once you understand that relationship, it makes it quite simple. There are many options for the design of your blog page, how posts show up to the viewer, which will depend on the theme or template that you are using to create your site. You will be able to change these settings in the admin area.
WordPress Themes
Now that we have an understanding of pages and posts lets take a look at themes. Themes are the overall design of your site; it allows you to modify the way the site is displayed without needing to code in all of the elements. We chose to use a Themify (affiliate link) theme. Themify also owns the shopping cart software, Shopify. They have many themes to choose from that you can purchase individually, or you can buy access to all of their themes for a small price annually.WordPress Dashboard
Once you log into your site and the WordPress dashboard, many options will be identical for everyone; the blanket features from WordPress themselves. You will see on the left-hand side a long menu with the different options available. The dashboard is where you will find posts and pages. To create a new page, you just click the page option and start building, same for the posts. Depending on the theme you have chosen to use there will be options specific to your theme.
This is a very basic introduction to WordPress but for many of you it may be the first time you are seeing the backend of the site structure. Please head over to any of our social media channels and leave your questions and comments, we love to interact with you! Don’t forget to scroll down and subscribe to the newsletter to stay up to date on all things Dotto Tech!
Until next time, have fun stormin’ the castle!
