This is post #17 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

Now that we have a WordPress website installed and the WordPress software up to date, we have to make sure all the other components stay up to date too.

Yes, even though we updated WordPress, we still have updates to perform. Why? Well, the power of WordPress comes from the vast array of little software add-ons that are available from programmers all over the world. Many of them are free or cheap, very easy to use, and very powerful. In order to take advantage of these add-ons, we need to do a little maintenance work.

Plugins

Plugins add a wide variety of features and functionality to WordPress. Things like adding a Facebook “like” button to your posts, adding the ability to track statistics on the number of visitors to your site and what content they like most, and automatically posting your content to Twitter are just some of the features than can be added via plugins with literally just a few clicks on your part.

So, all of these little addon programs, provided by different programmers, need to be kept up to date. The procedure is quite simple, and can even be done in bulk.

You may not always want to do this in bulk, but let’s go through the process this time to get a feel for it. This is pretty safe since the site has just been setup and is not yet “live.”

Click on the Updates menu option on the dashboard.

You’ll see a section on Plugins.

Click on “Select All” and then “Update Plugins.”

You’ll see a status screen like the following:

Themes

We looked at themes a while back. As you may recall, themes basically control the look, feel, and layout of your site. If your theme needs to be updated, you’ll see that on the dashboard too. And in the themes section:

The procedure is essentially the same, with one big exception. Themes control a lot, and often end up getting customized as your site evolves over time. As that happens, there may be certain settings and files that need to be backed up before updating a theme and then re-applied after the new theme is in place. That’s beyond the scope of this series – you’ll need to review the specific procedures for the theme you select.

Stay up to date

As you can see, the procedures to keep WordPress are very simple and straight-forward. Keep everything up to date to ensure that your site remains runs smoothly and remains secure.

This is post #17 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

This is post #16 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

As you work in WordPress, sooner or later you’ll notice a yellow notice bar appear across the top of the screen. WordPress is always checking to see if a newer version is available for you. If there is, this yellow bar is how it lets you know about it.

Updating WordPress is very simple. It’s totally automated and the update runs very reliably. And keeping up to date is important – many of the updates protect you from newly discovered security issues, fix other problems, or add new features.

On the dashboard screen below you’ll notice the yellow bar notice across the top, and also another tally of updates over on the left.

Click on the “Please update now” link. You’ll see the following screen.

The warning about backups is important, but we’ll cover that in a future post. Also, since we’ve just got a test environment running and the update process is known to run smoothly, let’s just go ahead and click the “Update Automatically” button. That’s the one you’ll use all the time. There’s not really a need to download the update first, so we might as well just have it installed automatically.

After you click the “Update Automatically” button, you’ll see a status screen like the following. The whole process takes just a minute, so you’ll see this pop up pretty quickly.

That’s it! You’re done. WordPress is now up to date and you can click on the “Go to Dashboard” link to bring you back to the dashboard.

When you get there, you’ll notice the “updates” count over on the left has been decremented by 1. Why isn’t is zero? Because there are other components to WordPress that get updated – third party plugins. We’ll cover updating these in a future post.

This is post #16 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

This is post #15 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

Previously we setup some Pages to contain static content on our website. These were automatically added to the sites menu system, making navigation easy. That’s nice, but there isn’t a lot of control over the menu layout in this default mode. So, let’s take a look at the Menus option in WordPress.

WordPress Menus

WordPress menus allow great flexibility over your site’s menu system. Working in concert with your selected theme, the menus feature allows you to customize a lot of little details. And that’s important. Making your site navigation easy and intuitive is critical to a good design.

A simple example will start to make the power of the menu system, and WordPress, clear. The beauty of this bloggy sort of website platform is flexibility, a lot of which can be leveraged via the Categories and Tags feature we looked at previously. As we saw then, Categories and Tags are convenient ways to organize your site content. In addition to tag clouds and category lists, this flexibility can be surfaced directly on the menu system.

Setting up a menu

Let’s say the pet shop website we’ve been working on as an example wants to feature a How To section as an option off of the main menu navigation. By activating the Menus feature, we can accomplish this seamlessly.

To get started, click on Menus on the navigation pane of the WordPress Dashboard. Give your menu a name and click “Create Menu.”

Then, select that menu as your primary navigation.

Now, your automatically generated menu based on the Pages you created are gone. So let’s put them back.

Click on all the pages in the Pages box and click “Add to Menu.”

Notice that the items on your new menu can easily be re-arranged by dragging and dropping. Let’s change the order around a bit to make it flow more logically.

Now for the fun part. Let’s add the How To category as a menu item. Simply select it from the Categories list and click “Add to Menu.”

Once again, we can arrange the menu system by dragging and dropping. Let’s put the new How To option as the second to last choice.

After saving all those changes, we can see that the layout on the live website is just as we set it. Clicking on a menu items that point to a page brings up that page. Clicking on the How To menu selection brings up all posts that are in the How To category. This makes your content automatically appear where it is supposed to on the menu system simply by categorizing it properly.

Keep ‘em separated

Separating content from format is an important premise in making your website work well. As we saw previously with themes, the design, layout, and look and feel of your website can easily be modified without impacting the content. With menus, the navigation of your site (when planned out thoughtfully) can be automatically maintained – even for posts that fall into multiple categories. The possibilities are extensive.

This is post #15 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

This is post #13 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

Look and feel

So far we’ve been building content, and that’s the most important part of your site. Now we want to make sure that it’s presented nicely and in a style consistent with your brand.

Changing the look and feel, the style of your website, is easy with WordPress. WordPress supports themes, which are a nifty little tool to separate the layout, font selections, colors, and more from the content of your site as well as from the all the mechanics of basic website operations.

What does this mean? It means that you can completely upgrade your website’s look and feel in a few minutes, without doing any programming or design work. There are limitations to this approach, of course. Someday you’ll likely need to hire professional help to get things finely tuned to your needs. But for now, you can do an amazing amount on your own. For free and in just a few minutes.

Exploring themes

Click on Themes under the Appearance menu and you’ll see information on your current theme. The Twenty Ten theme is installed by default. It’s a nice looking theme and might be the right choice for your site. But let’s look around first.

To explore themes, click on the Install Themes tab. Here you get a few options to help sort through the overwhelming selection available – most for free – from the large and active community of WordPress developers.

I suggest browsing through Featured and Newest to get a sense of what the various themes look like. Once you’re more familiar with what a theme is and what differentiates one from another, the search function will be more useful.

Checking out a theme

When a theme catches your eye, click on Details to see more information. Here you can see how many times it’s been downloaded and what the average user rating for the theme is.

More interestingly, you can click the Preview link to get a sense of what a theme will look like once it’s installed. You’ll see samples of all sorts of things like different title styles and how it handles different types of lists.

Once you find a theme that looks interesting, install it. (Don’t worry, you can easily switch back to your original theme at any time.) Click on Install and then the Install Now button. You’ll see a status screen like this:

Here the Preview link takes on new meaning. A preview now will show you your site with your data in the preview. This can be handy once your site is live and you want to look at different themes. Since you haven’t launched this new site yet, you can simply Activate your new theme.

Options, options

Depending on the theme you selected, you may see some – or many – new theme-specific options displayed (or added to the WordPress menu bar on the left).

The variety of fine tuning available varies widely from theme to theme. You’ll notice that the differences allow greater control over things like the image displayed in the header of your site, the ability to control how many columns are displayed, and how customizable your menus can be.

This can get a little daunting, so I suggest that you try out several different themes. Get a sense of what a theme is. Explore the variety of design styles. Look at the different types of controls that are offerred. Put some time in, but don’t get stuck here either – remember, a theme can easily be changed any time.

A good approach is to sketch out what you’d like your site to look like. Where does your logo go? What other images do you want to display? How do you want your menus to work? What kinds of things do you want to put in your sidebar? Think through and sketch out as much as you can, and then try to make that vision work with different themes. You’ll find that some things are hard or can’t be done with certain themes, and you’ll find some that seem to fit more “naturally” with your vision for your site. Experiment.

This is post #13 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

This is post #12 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

We’ve spent a lot of time on Posts, and that’s where you’ll spend a lot of time on your site. But pages are important too, especially in the beginning.

Pages are designed to change less frequently, and they have some nice automatic hooks into the menu system. For instance, in our sample site you may have noticed that WordPress installed a page by default, the About page. Clicking on About in the menu and it will bring up that page.

What’s it all about?

An About page is a great place to start working on the Pages of your site. You can edit it by clicking on the Pages link, and then on the Edit link underneath the page title (you can also just click on the page title).

Whatever your website is about – here’s the place to tell the tale. Be brief and to the point, provide bullet points on the highlights, and include testimonials if appropriate. It’s also good to add a picture on your About page. If this is a personal site, make it a nice photo of yourself. If it’s a business, include a photo of the physical location or something else relevant. When you’re done, click the Update button (this button will read Publish when you’re creating a new page from scratch).

Static Cling

Use the same procedure to create additional pages. Any portion of content you want to present where the information doesn’t change all that often (static content) is a good candidate. These are the anchor areas of your site. For our Dorothy’s Pet Shop example, we might create a page about procedures for handling emergencies outside of normal business hours, a staff profile page, and maybe even a frequently asked questions page.

No Comment

Although you have the option to accept comments on Pages, a lot of times this may not make sense (do you really want people commenting on your staff page?). WordPress gives you the option to turn this off. Scroll down to the Discussion section of the Add New Page screen and uncheck the boxes for Allow Comments and Allow Trackbacks and Pingbacks On This Page as shown here:

Cornerstones

Take your time to organize the main pages for your site. This is the content will remain steady and act as the cornerstone of your site. It will set the tone and probably be the basis for how new visitors form first impressions of you, your business and your site.  Craft them carefully.

This is post #12 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.