Creating Your Own Website with Wordpress

If you are just starting out online, and are looking for a relatively easy solution to being found online, Wordpress is extremely versatile, and can be learned by the average person with some study and guidance.

If you want to create a Wordpress site or blog, (for the remainder of this article, I am going to use the word site), you need to understand how a Wordpress site is put together.  No matter how complex a Wordpress site is, they all have the structure of the back end or operational end in common.

• Basic Wordpress installation: With Wordpress, all sites start the same way.  You install a basic Wordpress.org installation to start off.  The basic package allows you to install all the other features that you need on a Wordpress site.
• Theme:  Every Wordpress site has a theme.  The theme is the look and feel of the public side of the site, and may also include functional features as well.  Themes can be free, but the best themes are paid, like these themes from StudioPress.
• Pages:  Pages are static pages on a Wordpress site, that remain in the position that they are in unless you physically remove or change them.
• Posts:  Posts are essentially blog posts, although they can be extremely complex.  These will continually create a stream that has a feed.  For most sites, the newest post shows at the front or top, with subsequent posts showing afterward.
• Header:  The header is what you see at the top of your pages, and posts, including the front page which usually contains the name of the website on it.
• Footer:  The footer is at the bottom of all pages, and depending on the theme, can have just a few lines of text or several sections with content.
• Plugins:  Plugins or plug ins are little pieces of programming that you can add to your site to increase the functionality.
• Widgets:  Widgets are physical areas on the site, usually in the sidebar, front page, and footer that can be used to show specific functions.  Some of these functions can include a list of recent posts, RSS feed, or links.

The image above shows you an actual Wordpress Dashboard.

At the top of the dashboard, you can see a dark gray bar that gives you a few shortcuts to edit posts, pages, and the appearance of your site.  This bar is optional, and you do not have to include it.

The right sidebar contains links to all of the operational sections of your site.  The more plugins that you install the longer this sidebar will be.  The sidebar is divided into several sections including dashboard, posts, pages, media, links, tools, appearance, and settings.

The rest of the dashboard consists of shortcuts to some of your operations.

Once you upload and activate your Wordpress site, theme, and plugins, you are ready to get started adding content.  Content is the meat and potatoes of any site.  This is what people come to your site for in the first place.

Depending on what this particular site is set up to do, you can really do just about anything on your new Wordpress structure.  Most Wordpress sites have at minimum a stream of posts that show on the front page, however, many sites use other formats that make them look more like an online magazine, or ecommerce site.  Many sites are combinations of both.  I have listed some sites below that are all Wordpress sites, but you can see that each one is completely different than the other.