WordPress Tutorial for Beginners: From Installation to Creating Content

Despite the intuitive nature of WordPress, there’s still a bit of a learning curve when it comes to figuring your way around. If you’re having some trouble with WordPress….just thank god we’re not back in the pure HTML days of website building! You will get past the initial beginners slump soon enough, and you can start by following along with this WordPress tutorial for beginners. I’ll be walking you through as I create the demonstration website: yumyumdessert.siterubix.com

Follow along as I install the yumyumdessert website:

Here I’m using the siterubix.com platform that installs a WordPress website for you. Believe me when I say it couldn’t get any easier. I have a full free website tutorial post that you can go ahead and take a look at if you need additional help.

Note: This is connected to a website called Wealthy Affiliate, which will teach you how to turn your website into your own business. If you are a premium member, you can host as many of your own domains as you want from their servers (they have amazing quality web hosting with full backup!) so if you’re needing a place for web hosting it’s something to consider. Don’t worry though, you can still have 2 free domains on their siterubix platform without being a paying member!

So, website up and running…check! What now?

There are some initial steps you should take before you start writing content for your site. I’m going to walk you through these quickly. I’ve made a video which is will explain to you all the steps I take before I start writing content on my WordPress websites.

I will also walk you through down below the steps outlined within the video

 

1. Within your main dashboard make sure you update WordPress to the latest version

Simply click update now and it’ll do the rest! You always want everything within WordPress to be up to date. Out of date plugins and themes could potentially wreak havoc on your site.

 

2. Activate/Update Plugins

When you install a site using the siterubix.com website builder, (or build your own domain on the Wealthy Affiliate platform) it comes with 4 pre-installed plugins

• Akismet
• All-in-One-SEO
• Exclude Pages from Navigation
• Si-CAPTCHA

To go to your plugins, simply click Plugins–>Installed Plugins within the left options column.

Now you can check them and under bulk actions click “activate”.

Note the All in One SEO Pack plug-in is out of date, make sure you click “update now” before you move on.

3. Delete the “Hello World” and “Sample Page”

WordPress comes with a default post and page. Go ahead and trash these, they will only get in the way later as you try to create your own content.

Go to Pages–>All Pages —> Mouse over the “Sample Page” and click trash. Do that same step for the Hello World post.

 

4. Customize the tagline and set the front page

To find this screen, head over to Appearance —> Customize

Under “Title and Tagline” -There’s a default tagline “just another WordPress site” you want to make sure you delete that. Some themes will not show a tagline and others will. If yours does, you can write something relevant there – a one liner phrase/sentence that describes your site. (Don’t make it too long or awkward). You can just leave it blank if you want.

 

Under “static front page” you can set your website home page to be a static page you create, or set up to display a blogroll. Keep it at “your latest posts” for now because since you have no published pages at this point it won’t let you choose a static page. You can go back and set it to a homepage after you create it if you want (or just leave it on the blog roll).

Depending on the theme you have installed, you can have lots of options for customizing within this bar. I wouldn’t spend too much time messing around with options before you get content written. My rule is write first, play later. It can take a bit of content up on your site before you really get a feel of how it’s all going to look.

You can always change the theme too if you want. (More on that later..)

5. Set up the All in One SEO Pack

 

From the left options column, select All in One SEO – then scroll down the “Home Page Settings”. You want to write a home page title and home page description. This is the default description that will appear within the search engines when people find your site within Google or Yahoo. You can also enter home keywords if you want to, although I just left this blank. (I wouldn’t add more than 1 keyword here).

There isn’t really a whole lot more you need to do within the All in One SEO – it’s pretty much ready to go. Click “update” at the bottom.

 

6. Delete the Meta Widget (and any other widgets you don’t want)

WIthin Appearance –> Widgets you’ll see the widgets that are default with the theme. You can change these by simply dragging and dropping them. You can also reorder them as you wish. I’ll get more in depth with how to use widgets later on, but for now I’m just going to remove the Meta widget because personally I don’t have a use for it and it just takes up space.

 

Awesome! Now your site is up to date, the plugins are ready and you can now start writing out your website’s framework!

 

Any issues with beginning WordPress you’d like to ask or discuss? Drop a comment down below!

 

Wendy
Owner, SurvivingAfterCollege.com