by Geoff Blake TenTonOnline.com TenTonOnline.com 1
Hey there! Thanks a lot for checking out this WordPress Guide I ve put together. I ve been using and teaching WordPress for a long, long time and use it for all of my web work from small, simple sites to large, intricate, e-commerce sites. It s such a fantastic tool for technical and non-technical users alike, which is why I m excited to dig into it here with you. Here s a rundown of what we ll cover: Let s Get To Know WordPress: In this first section, we ll take a quick look at why WordPress is such a great choice for online publishing for virtually any kind of website. A Rundown of WordPress Features: Here, we ll take a look at some of the top WordPress features and options. This is where we start to really discover the power that WordPress is offering. How To Get Your WordPress Site Online Quickly (The Right Way): In this section, we ll get your web hosting set up, and I ll also walk you through the process of installing WordPress, step-by-step to ensure that your site is installed correctly, the first time! How To Back Up Your WordPress Site: Having gone to all the effort to get our site online, we want to make sure that it s backed up! In this section I ll show you how to do exactly this, but in an automated, hands-off way. So, I hope all this sounds good. Ready? Let s jump into it! 2 TenTonOnline.com
Let s Get To Know WordPress WordPress is a free, very powerful, and easy to use web publishing platform, allowing anyone whether they have technical skills or not to build and maintain their own website. People from all sorts of backgrounds, industries, and technical skill levels use WordPress, including lawyers, artists, writers, small business owners, photographers, marketing teams, designers and developers, support staff...and on and on. You know, when people hear WordPress though, they automatically think blogging. While WordPress started out as a blogging platform, it s capabilities have dramatically expanded to a point where it can handle much, much more than just a simple blog. What kinds of websites can we build with WordPress? Well, WordPress can handle virtually any kind of website that you want. This is one of the reasons why it s so popular. Here s a quick list of some of the different kinds of sites you can build with WordPress: Traditional, static websites Small, personal sites Portfolio websites, for instance for photographers or artists Online stores, selling anything from flowers and books to music and digital downloads A monthly subscription site Large, complex sites with constantly changing content And a whole lot more! Essentially, if you can think it up, WordPress can handle it. People from all over the world in virtually very industry and market are using WordPress for all sorts of different purposes. Large or small, simple or complex, WordPress can handle it! TenTonOnline.com 3
As a matter of fact, here are two WordPress statistics: First, over 18% of all websites are powered by WordPress. Wow, 18%! Second, 22% of all new websites are using WordPress. That s huge. Here s a bonus stat: WordPress is more popular than all other content management system platforms like Joomla and Drupal, combined. That s just nuts! Why WordPress Is Such A Great Choice So as you can see, WordPress is shaping up to be a great choice for publishing your content online. It s easy to use and it s fully customizable. In fact, it s as easy as working with a word processing application. However, at the same time, it has under-the-hood complexity for designers, technical users, and developers. So if you do have a technical background, if you re comfortable with HTML, CSS, and navigating through PHP, then you can get into the guts of WordPress and really start customizing things to your liking. So, WordPress is flexible and powerful and fully customizable while, at the same time, being easy and simple to use. Another side of WordPress is the huge and vibrant online community based around it. There s a strong support forum where you can post questions and learn new things. Many people are developing for WordPress and helping each other put their websites together. 4 TenTonOnline.com
A Rundown of WordPress Features So, we know that WordPress is very powerful and widely used for all sorts of different sites. But what are it s actual features? Below, I ve bulleted out some of the top WordPress features, with a brief description of each. Posts: Posts are used for regularly recurring content, like blog posts, upcoming events, or perhaps news pieces. New posts always appear above older posts so your website content is always going to be new and fresh. You can also make use of something called categories to sort your WordPress posts by topic. Pages: Pages are perfect for creating standalone content for your site, like contact pages or an about us page or, other individual pages you might have on your site. Unlike posts, pages will always be current and they will always be accessible for your visitors. Publishing Options: For both pages and posts, we have a strong set of publication options. We can save our content as a draft, we can schedule the date and time that it s going to get published online, we can set content to be public or private, or even password protected. Pretty cool stuff! Images and Media: WordPress has a really simple user interface for inserting images and multimedia into your posts and your pages. You can resize images, add in captions and alternative text, and all of your media content is stored inside something called the Media Library. At any time, we can go and reuse images and media in the Media Library. Commenting System: WordPress also has a commenting system built in, which you can turn on or shut off. If you decide that you do want to have commenting activated, this is perfect for building a community and building discussions around your content and around your website. Or you could disable commenting for specific pages and posts if you wish. Multiple User Accounts: Here s something else that s really cool We can allow other people to create content for our site and we can set WordPress restrictions on these various accounts, meaning that perhaps their content has to be approved first before it can go live on the web. This is perfect if you re working in a group or with a team who s collaborating on a project. It s very powerful stuff. TenTonOnline.com 5
Themes: Very simply, a WordPress theme is the design, the look and feel, for the website. We can change our website s theme with the click of a button. WordPress s Theme Directory has thousands of themes to choose from, or we can make use of high quality premium themes Yet another option is to build your own custom theme. You could hire a developer to build a custom theme for you, or if you are experienced with HTML and CSS, you could build your own from scratch. I actually created a course called Scratch Building WordPress Themes with Photoshop, which shows you exactly how to do this. Plugins: Here s where the real power of WordPress comes in. Plugins allow us to expand and extend our website s capabilities. With plugins, we can set up things like slideshows, media players, social media, e-commerce, SEO, and much, much more Word-Press s Plugins Directory contains literally thousands of plugins. The possibilities are seemingly endless. If you can dream it up, I ll betcha someone has already built a plugin for it! Okay now, I ve gotta put the brakes on here. There are many more features and options with WordPress, but the ones I ve outlined above are the biggies and if I kept going, we d both be old and grey by the end of it! The above list hopefully gives you a really, really good sense of the kind of heat WordPress is packing. Now, let s find out how to get our WordPress website online. 6 TenTonOnline.com
How To Get Your WordPress Site Online Quickly (The Right Way) There are many web hosting companies that offer WordPress hosting. My recommendation is Web Hosting Hub because their setup process is fast and easy, they have great customer service, and they toss in some extras like a free domain name for the first year, a $75 AdWords credit, and a generous 90-day money back guarantee. And for Ten Ton users, Web Hosting Hub is offering us hosting at a special discount of just $3.99/month. They re tough to beat! Here s how to set up your web hosting with web hosting hub: 1. Head over to tentononline.com/webhostinghub to lock in your special hosting discount. 2. At the top of the Web Hosting Hub homepage, click Create A Website; then on the next page that appears, click the orange Get Started button. TenTonOnline.com 7
3. The next screen brings us to the domain name options. If you already have a domain name, you can enter it on the right. If you want to register a new domain name, use the box over on the left. Whichever way you go, you ll wind up on the Account Information page. 4. On the Account Information page, enter your account and payment information and then click Purchase at the bottom. Web Hosting Hub likes to go the extra mile with their customer service to ensure that your account is set up correctly and securely, so in addition to receiving a confirmation email, you ll also receive a telephone call to confirm your order and answer any questions you may have. Once your account has been set up, you re ready to install WordPress, and that s exactly what we ll do next! 8 TenTonOnline.com
Now Let s Install WordPress Now that your hosting is set up, you re ready to install WordPress. We ll be doing this via your hosting account s control panel, or cpanel. Here s how to install WordPress: 1. Head to yourdomain.com/cpanel 2. Scroll down towards the bottom, and in the Software/Services section click on Softaculous. 3. Once Softaculous loads, move your mouse over the WordPress box and click on Install. If you don t see WordPress when Softaculous loads, click on Blogs on the left-hand side, then click WordPress. Across the top of the screen, click Install. 4. In the Software Setup screen that appears, scroll down to the Admin Account area and set a username and password for your site s primary administrator account. TenTonOnline.com 9
As for the remaining info on this screen, generally it can be left as-is unless your comfortable making some changes. You may want to set a name and description for your site under Site Settings. One other setting you may want to adjust is the In Directory option towards the top in the Software Setup section. Here, you can choose a subdirectory to install your site on in your domain. For example, you could set this field to blog to install WordPress into yourdomain.com/blog. Leave this field blank to install WordPress in the topmost level of your domain. 5. When you re ready, click Install at the bottom. Softaculous goes to work installing WordPress for you. Once the installation is complete you ll be given two links, one to the location of your WordPress installation, and one to your site s back-end admin console, which is typically your domain.com/wp-admin. Go ahead and visit both...congratulations, you now have a WordPress website! Now, let s see how we can ensure that our WordPress site is backed up. 10 TenTonOnline.com
Automatically Backing Up Your WordPress Website Okay, your WordPress site is installed and running. Now, let s make sure that it s backed up! The goal here is to not only back up our site, but make sure that it s backed up on a regular basis in an automated, hands-off kinda way. Before we really dive in, what you need to understand is that there are two parts to a WordPress website. There s the database, which stores all of our site s posts, pages, comments, and so on, and then there are the actual site files, like the PHP files, the CSS, graphics, other media, and so on. When we backup our site, we can choose to back up just the database, or the database plus the site files. Now, in order to automate the backing up of our site we ll be using a WordPress plugin. In fact, there are several plugins that will do this for us, but the one we ll use is called, appropriately, Back Up WordPress. Let s see how to install it and set up a backup schedule. Here s how to backup your WordPress site on an automated schedule: 1. Head to your site s backend admin console. 2. On the left-hand side, head down to Plugins and then choose Add New. 3. In the search field that appears, type in BackupWordPress; then click Search Plugins. 4. In the list of search results, look for Backupwordpress (it should be the first search result-- it s by Human Made Limited) and click Install Now. TenTonOnline.com 11
5. In the confirmation window that appears, click OK; then once WordPress has installed the plugin go ahead and click Activate Plugin. Great, the plugin is now installed and activated on our site. Let s go and set our options for the BackUpWordPress plugin. 6. On the left menu, choose Tools > Backups; then across the top, click on Settings. Sometimes this plugin behaves oddly. If you don t see what I m seeing here, try hitting your browser s back button, then refresh the page and try clicking Settings again. Weird. 7. In the Schedule Settings box that appears, set the options that you d like; then click Update at the bottom. 12 TenTonOnline.com
These settings are pretty powerful. From the Backup menu you can choose what you d like to back up (again, just the database or the database and your site files). Below that, you can set how often you want your site to be backed up. Finally at the bottom, you can set an email notification to let you know when your backups are complete. Pretty cool! So there you are, that s how we can ensure that our site is backed up on a regular basis, and automate the entire process. The Beginning! So there you are! I hope you ve gotten a lot out of this WordPress Guide. We learned a lot about what WordPress is and why it s such a great choice for web publishing. We also had a look at some of the biggest WordPress features I hope that section really opened you up to just how much WordPress has to offer. We took a look at how to get your web hosting set up and how to install WordPress, and finally we made sure our site was backed up on an automated schedule. I hope you enjoyed! Now, I very much hope that the end of this guide isn t the end of your WordPress learning or our time here together. I feel like we ve barely gotten started...there s so much more I d love to show you! So let s keep going. Below, I ve provided you with some links to some additional resources that I d love for you to check out so that you and I can keep going with WordPress! So go ahead and get clickin and I ll see you there in just a second... Why Learn How To Use WordPress? How To Create A Website (Not A Blog) With WordPress How To Get Started with WordPress (3 hour, 29 minute video course) Additional WordPress posts and info TenTonOnline.com 13