When it comes to easily creating websites and blogs, WordPress has got to be one of the top platforms. With over 74 million sites using WordPress, it’s hard to believe it’s only been around for 12 years.
Whether you’re looking to start a personal blog or an entire business sales page, here’s a brief overview of WordPress usage and terminology to get you started.
What exactly is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source website creation tool, written in PHP – or to put it another way, it’s quite simply the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (CMS) in existence. An overview of terminology includes:
Dashboard
When you first log onto your WordPress account, you’re greeted with your personal control panel. Down the left hand side it will show you a menu bar of everything you need to set up and use WordPress.
Plugins and themes
Put simply, plugins are little snippets of code that do specific things on your site. For example, Akismet is a plugin that will filter out unwanted spam. There are literally thousands of plugins available – some free, others paid. You can search for free plugins through the ‘plugins’ option on your dashboard.
Themes are layouts for your sites appearance. Again, you can select free themes via the dashboard – simply select ‘appearance’, ‘themes’ and then searching for what you’re after. There are also paid for themes available and, like the plugins, you’ll need to search online for those.
Pages and posts
These can sometimes cause confusion. A page is a ‘static’ place to put content that isn’t likely to change very often – for example, an ‘about’ page or ‘contact us’ page. It’s usual for most websites to have the following pages:
- About me/us
- Contact us
- Products
- Services
- The ‘home’ page of your website
Pages can be accessed via the main navigation menu bar on your site and can also use ‘sub’ pages – so your product page may also have separate subpages for your individual products or services.
A post on the other hand, is organised in reverse chronological order, so are meant to be timely. A weekly diary or blog is the perfect example of how to use a post. They can then be shown as a stream of posts on a specific page such as your ‘blog’, ‘news’ or ‘home’ page (this is dictated via the ‘settings’ option of your dashboard).
Categories and tags
Finally, we have categories and tags. Using these will help your readers find content that is similar in nature to what they’re reading, as they are usually displayed before or after your posts, as clickable links.
Think of categories and tags as your keywords. Categories are for broader groups, whereas tags are more specific niches. For example, I could use ‘WordPress’ as a category for this post, whereas I may use tags such as ‘beginner, usage, how to’ and ‘getting started’ to help narrow down what we are discussing that relates to WordPress.
I hope you’ve found this brief overview of WordPress usage and terminology a basis to encourage you to get you started using WordPress. If you’d like any additional help with setting up your WordPress site, why not check out our tutorials and our WordPress Support page?
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