WordPress is a fabulous, lightweight programme and, once you get the hang of it, you will be updating your site while you sleep. It's easy enough to learn, two or three lessons and you're practically a pro. A week of playing with your site and you are a pro.

Pages and Posts

The hardest thing to grasp is the concept of Pages and Posts

A Page is static. It's used for important things like 'About Us' - you never run a website anonymously.

    This page is used

  • For Personal Sites to state who you are, what your experience is, what you do and why you have this website
  • For Groups and Organisations to state what the group is, what it does (is it incorporated?) and why you have this website

'Contact' is self explantory

'Site Map' Not everyone uses a Site Map but it only makes sense for people to be able to see everything in your site listed in order. Site Map is a plugin that is already added to your site

A Post is what powers your site. Posts are the 'articles' you write and also what the search engines find. You write (almost) everything in your site as Posts.

This can end up a haphazard collection of articles as, for example, on Monday you write a post about how you're coming to grips with your WordPress. On Tuesday you write a post about about the cute photo you took of your dog. On Wednesday you rant about the perfidy of a local politician. On Thursday you review a film you saw last night. On Friday you write about a working bee organised for next week.

This is why we have Categories

To use the examples above, you would create the Categories

  • Site News (and put your Monday post in that category)
  • My Faithful Fido (for your dog stories)
  • Political Opinion (for the article about that nasty MP)
  • Film Reviews (for reviews)
  • Coming Events (for your working bee)

Make sure you don't have an uncategorised post. have a look at your categories on your front page, can you see 'uncategorised'? Go back and edit that post to uncheck the uncategorised box. If you can't find a category to suit that post, make another category called 'Random Thoughts' or whatever takes your fancy

 

 

 

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