Sarah McHarry - WordPress To Go - How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner

WordPress To Go

How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner

Sarah McHarry

Copyright

Sarah McHarry 2013

All Rights Reserved

No part of this eBook may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of the author, unless otherwise indicated.

Plain language copyright notice:

Do not copy, re-write or plagiarize this book in any shape or form. If you do, you will be reported to Amazon's Copyright Department immediately.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Welcome!

Welcome to this WordPress beginners guide.

You are about to join thousands of other webmasters who have used this book to build their own WordPress websites, from scratch, even if they were complete beginners!

Before we start, lets make one thing quite clear. This book is deliberately short. Thats because I want to take you through the basics of building your own website in the quickest manner possible.

I want you to learn speedily without getting distracted by non-essentials or trivia. Sure, you can buy a 1,000-page bumper WordPress guide that will turn you into a world-authority(!) but it wont help you get online any quicker.

What I will promise you is that, if you follow along the lessons in this book, do exactly as I tell you (yes, Maam!), step by step, then youll end up with your very own website that you built yourself, even if this is the first time you have ever ventured into the online world.

Why should I build my own website when I can easily get online for free?

Having your own web presence is now pretty much essential in todays online world. Even teenagers have their own pages on sites such as Facebook and the many other social networks. But the problem is that these free site-building services can come and go, change the rules without notice, and impose restrictions. Some free services can shut your site down if they dont approve of your content.

Many will clutter up your site with trashy ads and your free site can disappear overnight if the service goes bust or gets taken over. And they offer little or no technical support when you really need it.

So why should I build my own website on my own domain?

The answer is that, with your own privately registered domain and hosting account, YOU own and control the website, not anybody else. You can put whatever you like on your site (within the bounds of legality) and no-one can tell you otherwise. You are your own boss.

And, with your own website, you can build your own distinctive brand, whether you are a business or a community group, an individual, or whatever... You can make your site look and behave how you like, whether for e-commerce, or for publicity purposes, as an information resource - or just a personal blog.

Your domain becomes your very own exclusive web address, your own piece of online virtual real estate that plays its part in publicizing your mission or message.

These days, if you dont have your own online web presence, you are invisible.

You can print your domain address on your business cards, add it to your email signature and quote in all your offline literature. Your own website on your own domain gives you identity, visibility and, indeed, status.

But dont I need a professional web designer to make a good job of building a website?

No, definitely not! This used to be the case in the early days of the Internet because only a few tech-savvy geeks knew and understood the computer language (HTML) that translated your words and pictures into the code that browsers understand.

But as the technology has advanced, so have the tools to build websites become more accessible. WordPress is one of these tools and WordPress is the subject of this book.

What if Im not a technical wizard will I understand all the jargon about web-building?

With this book you dont need to know any jargon or gobbledygook I explain it all in plain English as we go along. As you use the system it will begin to click into place and youll understand what you need to know and what you dont.

If you can use a word processor you can build your own WordPress website its that simple - I promise!

How much will it cost to do it all myself?

Peanuts. The only thing you absolutely have to spend money on is web hosting and you can get this for a few dollars a month.

For less than $10 per month you can get your web hosting account from one of the top hosting companies on the planet.

Of course you can spend money on other tools and services if you want, but, for a simple website that you build yourself you really dont need to spend any more money than that.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a powerful (and free!) package of software that sits in the background on your web server (the remote computer where your domain is hosted) and performs all the technical processing that delivers your content to your visitor on their local computer. Once WordPress is installed on your domain you dont need to do anything to make it work. It just sits there and performs its magic entirely behind the scenes.

WordPress provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to you, the webmaster, that bypasses the need to know any HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL or any other coding language.

Once the hangout of hobbyists and bloggers, WordPress has now evolved into a powerful and sophisticated web platform that supports a host of features both for professional and do-it-yourself webmasters.

The terms blog and website are now effectively synonymous as far as our usage of WordPress is concerned. Pundits use the two terms interchangeably because the technology platform behind both is exactly the same.

WordPress is now actually used by some of the major players on the Internet as a complete Content Management System (CMS). Think CNN, The New York Times, About.com, the White House, US Post Office, and Ford Motors - they all make use of WordPress.

And, in addition to the experts, millions of ordinary people and small businesses around the world also use WordPress as their platform of choice to get a presence on the web.

Whats so special about WordPress?

• WordPress is FREE and open-source
• WordPress is stable and maintained by an army of experts
• WordPress contains numerous behind-the-scenes features that make creating your own website a breeze

WordPress is wonderful, but it has a reputation for being difficult. This is, in part, due to the documentation.

WordPress was originally written by programmers, for programmers, and the instructions (codex, as its termed) are often written in tech-speak and seem to assume that you know what they are talking about in the first place. This has improved in recent versions, but it can still be a challenge if you are not a fully paid-up techie.

I know all this. Im a computer programmer myself. I actually am a techie (and proud of it!) but I can also write plain English. In this tutorial, I just concentrate on the basic essentials of WordPress and ignore all the complications that you dont need to know when youre first starting out.

How To Use This Tutorial

The best way to use this tutorial is to sit down at your PC with this book beside you and follow each lesson, step by step.

Because WordPress is now so sophisticated and flexible, it can sometimes be difficult for newcomers to see the wood from the trees. So I have broken this tutorial down into two levels:

• Quick Start Guide
• In-Depth Guide.

The Quick Start Guide, covering Lessons 1 8, is intended to get you up and running, building your own WordPress website, mostly using the default settings, and avoiding as many of the technicalities as possible.

When you have completed lessons 1 8 you will have a basic, working website that you can continue to build and use without any further tweaking. For many people, this is all they may ever need.