Get Going With WordPress: How to Set Up Your Site
Posted by Brock Nunn | Tutorial, WordPress | One CommentYou’ve done it! Congratulations, you have taken the first step into creating an online identity for yourself of your company by buying your own domain name and getting set up with a hosting company. Perhaps you have even gone as far as to use that handy one click installer and activated WordPress (good choice). Now what? Well, let me walk you through your first hours of WordPress ownership.
Step 1: Pages
Welcome to your new WordPress site. There is a lot to do to get your site set up exactly how you want. Lets get started with adding a few pages. Likely you will have a few pages already in mind, so lets plan on adding a Home, About, Blog and Contact page.
Head in to your dashboard by either selecting the “dashboard” button on the top left hand side of your screen, or you can also simply type in “wp-admin” at the end of your domain. (eg. http://www.mynewsite.com/wp-admin).
Once you have reached the dashboard area of your site, find a link that says “pages” on the left hand side of your screen.
Step 2: Settings
After adding pages to your new WordPress web site, it’s time to make sure that our settings are correct. To do this, head back out to your dashboard and find the “settings” link on your left hand sidebar.
Permalinks:
To find the area of your site wherein you may adjust permalinks (or how links on your site will display in the browser bar) select the permalinks link under the settings tab.
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.
Clean links make for a happy site. With that in mind let’s change our permalinks to “Custom Structure” and then add the following to the input on the right.
/%category%/%postname%/
Step 3: The Menu
To begin setting up your WordPress menu, head back to the dashboard. Find the link “Appearance” and the sub-menu item “Menus”.
Step 4: Posts
Quality blog posts are essential to being discovered on the web. Luckily, WordPress may be the best Content Management System for publishing timely articles on a regular basis. To begin adding posts simply navigate to your dashboard, select posts then select “Add New”. Add a title and content to your post, tag it, add a category and press publish.
Make sure to update the blog on your site often as new posts attract more visitors and result in better search engine rankings.
I hope that this tutorial will encourage you to jump into WordPress. The rabbit hole only gets deeper. With this knowledge in your tool-belt you can begin to experiment with new themes and content types. If you would like any help installing WordPress on your domain, just send us a note and we will get you up and running in no time!
