Basic WordPress Tutorial
I’ve recently started diving into WordPress and how it’s used. Today I’m going to show you a little bit about what I have learned. First off, it is helpful to know that there are several editors available in WordPress, the Gutenberg editor is the default which has recently replaced the classic editor. The classic editor was very popular with lots of folks and you can still get the classic editor put you have to download the classic editor plugin.
There are a couple ways you can develop your WordPress site. I used local by flywheel so I can develop it locally without making a live site since I’m still learning it. You can also just got to Wordpress.org and build a live site. Also, if you want to know the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org read this.
Once you created your WordPress account you will be taken to the dashboard. That is where all the magic happens. You will see a navigation bar on the left side of the page and that’s where you will make the changes to your site. The posts and pages sections are will you will make most of you content. You can read about the difference between posts and pages here.
Once of the very nice things about WordPress is the themes that are available in WordPress. Theme make you site look very nice with little to no effort on your part. If you were to style your own website with the same feature a WordPress theme has it would probably take you quite some time. To checkout the available themes you can go to your dashboard then click the appearance section and then themes. Note: There are some themes that are specifically made to work well with the new Gutenberg editor. Most Gutenberg themes will not have a sidebar but they will have a footer with widgets and navigation links. This is because Gutenberg encourages full width design and the sidebar can interfere with that.
Let’s talk about creating your first page in WordPress. To accomplish this you will navigate to your dashboard and there are two ways you can get to the new pages section in WordPress, you will see a + icon with the word “New” next to it. You can use that to create a new page, post, user as well as new media. Alternatively, you can click or hover over the pages link in the navigation bar and click “Add New” Your page will look something like this. Note: Depending on your theme you may notice some differences.
Now I am using the Gutenberg editor which is considered a block editor, so you notice there is a little + icon on my page and I can click that at any time to add a new block. A block is kind of like an element, it separate the content on your page and you can apply particular styling effects to each block. I’m going to add a title to my page “Randy’s 1st WordPress Page” then I will click where it says “Start writing or type / to choose a block” I can start typing whatever I want here. So for instance if this was going to be a portfolio site for me I would maybe add a heading that says Resume. When I type Resume here I get this nice little toolbar that allow me to change how it looks. This is kind of similar to how you would use a typical text editor.
If I wanted this to be a heading I would just click on that paragraph symbol and I will get a list of options. If you don’t see the one you want here, that’s ok they are not all listed here. Just the more popular options. You can type / along with the name of the option you are looking for so for example if I wanted. For example maybe I wanted to add an image of my resume I could type “/im” and see what my option are. See 2nd image below.
As you can see in the image above there are typical tags here such as image but also there are some we may not be used it if you are used to building your own webpages without the assistance of a site builder. Such as Flickr, Animoto etc. There is also an YouTube option. I have added an image here and you’ll notice on the right hand side there are some options, I can make my image style default, rounded, framed or with borders. You can also set a default style for your images. I recommend adding alt text to your image in the image settings because WordPress allows you to search through your images and the alt text can help you find the one you want. also, you can drag the image to move it to a different location on the page and also to change it’s sizing.
Lastly, I’d like to show you how to see what your page will look like before you publish it. As you can see in the photo above there is a preview button, you can hover there and click preview in new tab and this is what your page will look like when you publish it. Once you have the page looking the way you’d like to to look you can publish it and it’ll be available on your site.
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