Ok, let’s post something! For the first 7 posts in this Website 101 series you’ve been busy setting up a domain name, finding a hosting provider, and installing WordPress. It’s time to actually put something on a web page.

From the WordPress admin page, click on “Add New” on the Posts menu.

On the Add New Post screen, type in a title and some text for your post, as shown in this example.

Notice that the title of your post is automatically built into your Permalink. This is because of the configuration changes we made previously in order to help people find the website through search engines like Google.

Titles are important

Your titles should be informative, but you also need to keep in mind the ways you think people might be searching for the content you have to offer. So, if you’re Dorothy and you sell dog food at your pet shop, you may want people who are searching for dog food online to find your website.

People often don’t just buy products, however. They want to buy the benefits a product has to offer. Particularly if they are searching for something new, and not just looking for the best deal on brand x that they always buy. These are your potential new customers.

Instead of using “Dorothy’s Dog Food” as a title, we might choose something like “How To Keep Your Dog Healthy and Happy.” This helps us be found by people who don’t yet know about Dorothy’s Dog Food, but are typing some phrase into Google that includes some combination of key words like dog, healthy, and happy (and “how to”). Of course, one of the ways to keep your dog healthy and happy in the information we provide is going to be by feeding him or her food like Dorothy’s Dog Food.

As you can see, a good title is going to set the tone for our post.  It’s important to approach titles this way. In addition to their importance with search engines, your titles will also show up in all sorts of places, like Twitter, where your title alone must compel a reader to visit your website.

Put a lot of thought into your titles, and try to view them from the perspective of your customers. What would interest them? What might they be searching for? What would they want to read if they only saw the title?

Make your title concise and compelling. One that clearly demonstrates the value proposition of the content of your post. And then deliver!

Content is king

The title promises a lot, the content of your post must deliver. Fulfill the value proposition with good, useful information. Success online is similar to success anywhere else. You are building relationships and building trust over time. And you do that by providing value as part of an ongoing conversation with a community that shares a common interest (healthy pets, for instance). This takes time, so start now. And use this approach with every post.

Some more mechanics

In this series, I’m trying to integrate some social media marketing best practices in with the mechanics of setting up a website. But please don’t get hung up too much on either. It’s most important that you contemplate the larger concepts and keep pressing forward. It will all make more sense down the road, and things can always be tweaked (and you will be tweaking) later on.

Don’t worry about creating the world’s greatest blog post right now. Let’s get back to the mechanics for a minute. Put in a quick title and type up a paragraph about something so you can get a feel for how WordPress works.

Go ahead and click on that big blue Publish button. Congratulations! Your post is “live.” Click on the View Post link to see it in action.

Mechanics are important, too, and there are still a few more important items to review about posting. We’ll pick that up next time.

This is post #8 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101.

Now that your a little bit oriented to the WordPress environment, let’s adjust a few basic settings.

General Settings

Login to the admin page, scroll down to the Settings area on the left and click General.

We’re just going to adjust two things on this screen for now. First, create a tagline for your site. This will show up on the front page near your title (whether and where this is displayed is a function of your theme, which we’ll be tinkering with later). You can also change your site title here if you wish.

Scroll down a bit and adjust the timezone to whatever is appropriate for your geographic area.

Scroll down further and click on the Save Changes button.

Permalink Settings

A little further down the Settings menu, click on the Permalinks link. You’ll see this screen:

Permalinks are the unique web addresses (or uniform resource locators, URLs) for your posts. Every page on the web has it’s own address. As long as it’s unique, things will work fine. However, we have some useful options for Permalink settings that are worth paying a little attention to, because they will affect how easily search engines can find the content you’re writing about.

Simply put, search engines will “read” your entire website and remember everything in a search database. When someone searches for, say, “dog food” the search engine looks through it’s database for mentions of “dog food” and then tries to determine which results to show. One of the factors in making the determination is not only how many times you might mention “dog food” in a particular post, but how prominently this it’s mentioned. And putting it right there smack in the middle of the URL carries more weight than other parts of the page.

Many other factors go into this calculation, of course, like how many people have linked to your post from other web sites and a whole bunch of other things you can’t easily influence. The URL is one that you can easily influence, however. So, you should.

The Permalink Settings page establishes the formula that WordPress will use for creating URLs for your posts. Once set, WordPress will automatically follow this formula every time you create posts from this day forward. Setting this now is easy. Changing it later is a huge hassle.

By default, WordPress uses a formula that makes each post have a unique URL by appending ?p= and the post number to your URL. So, a great post about “12 Ways to Make Your Own Dog Food” shows up as something like http://www.dorothyspetshop.com/?p=123.

There are a few formula options provided, but organizing the links numerically or by date does nothing to help your search engine results. I suggest that you use a simple custom formula that uses the title of your post to form the URL.

Using the formula shown in the screen shot, the URL for our example post would now be http://www.dorothyspetshop.com/12-ways-to-make-your-own-dog-food. Much more search engine friendly! And search engines will likely be a significant source of your website traffic.

So, click on the Custom Structure radio button option and put the formula /%postname%/ and click the Save Settings button.

This is post #7 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101.

Your site is now live! So, let’s check out this WordPress thing and see what’s going on. Use the admin login you setup previously to access the WordPress admin page. It looks like this:

That’s the top half of the screen. The left column is the administrative menu for your WordPress installation. Let’s look at the most important parts briefly. Right there in the top left is the Dashboard, and it’s showing us that there are already 5 updates to apply, even though we just installed the software. You’ll notice that because Dashboard is selected right now, the area to the right is showing us the Dashboard information.

Moving down the left column, you can see the next section contains Posts and Pages – this is the meat and potatoes of your sites content. Pretty much everything you publish to the world will be in the form of a Post or Page. Posts are what’s used for blog entries and similar bits of content. This is where a lot of the action will be. Posts are very flexible in how they can be organized. They can also be published easily in different formats, like via an RSS or email feed (more on these in later posts). They are automatically time and date stamped, include the author’s byline, and accept comments. In short, this is the primary way you’re going to create the more dynamic content of your site.

Pages tend to be a bit more stable; the content on pages changes less frequently. You’ll build out pages to tell someone what your business is about, provide directions to your location or other contact information, and anything else that is relatively static, just like pages of a brochure (sort of). Don’t worry about the Media and Links bits for now. Those will come into play later on.

Below the Post and Pages section is Appearance. This is where you’ll adjust the “look and feel” of your website by selecting and adjusting themes, widgets and more. A theme is the foundation; it establishes all the formatting rules for your site. It dictates the basic layout of your pages, the color schemes and fonts that will be used, and more.

WordPress comes with a default theme – that’s what setup the header image across the top of your site, determined how the pages should look and which fonts to use for titles and text. In addition to the default themes, there are many, many more themes available for WordPress – most of them free. There are also “premium” themes that can be purchased. These add some capabilities beyond the basics and are definitely worth investing in if you have those needs. For this series, we’ll be using a free theme.

In addition to themes, the Appearance section also has widgets, menus and more. We’ll delve into those further later on. For now, let’s take a peek at the bottom half of the WordPress Dashboard page (yes, there’s more).

Let’s look at Plugins next. Plugins are little pieces of software that plug-in to your WordPress software to give it more features, functions and capabilities. The huge WordPress community once again helps us here greatly. Many people share there software writing skills to add all sorts of neat things to WordPress by creating plugins. Really, really useful stuff. We’ll explore plugins much more in future posts.

Users is all about, well, the users of your website. For the purpose of this series, that’s just going to be you. The people who just visit and read the content won’t be setup as users. We’ll circle back to this area later to tweak your profile. This is important because it will be displayed on the posts you create.

There’s nothing to bother with under Tools.

The last little section I’ve highlighted is Settings. That’s going to be an important area in the beginning, as there are a few settings that we’ll want to adjust as part of the initial website setup. Things like how the URL address for your blog posts are structured (file under “boring but important”).

Whew. That’s the basic orientation. Welcome to WordPress administration. It’ll get easier as we go. We’ll take each of these one by one, and soon you’ll master them all.

This is post #6 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101.

You’re almost ready for the fun stuff. You have your own domain name and a server to run your own website. Now, you need some website software.

No programming

Like everything else, there are a ton of options here. We’re not going to use HTML or any other type of “language” that requires a lot of technical know-how to get things functioning. We’ve done enough techie work for the moment just in registering the domain name and getting a hosting service setup.

Instead, we’re going to use a content management system. Essentially, this allows you to separate the content of your website from the format and style of the website.

As you will see more clearly later on, this approach is very powerful. It allows you to create content – the text you want displayed on each page of your website – without worrying about formatting how it is going to be displayed. You just plug in your text and it gets displayed according to the rules set forth by the formatting theme of your website. This also means that you can later experiment with different formatting themes – adjusting the overall look and feel of your site (colors, fonts, layout) – without needing to edit or touch your text at all.

There are tons of content management systems out there, and there are a few very good free ones – Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress are among the top candidates. For this series, I’m going to use WordPress. It’s a great system that was originally designed for blogging but was expanded recently into a full content management system. The WordPress community is huge and there are tons of free extensions to the system available (we’ll learn more about these later on in this series).

Installation

Login to your hosting service (Bluehost in our example) and access cpanel where you will find a WordPress icon like the one below.

Click it to invoke the automated installation utility SimpleScripts and start the installation process. Once SimpleScripts loads, click the WordPress Install button.

Now you’re only 3 steps away! For Step 1, select the most recent stable version of WordPress and the installation directory (in your case, this will be the “root” directory of your website – you won’t need to change the default setting). For Step 2, type in a password for the all-powerful WordPress administrator (“admin”) account – make it good! For Step 3, check the box that agrees to the legal information.

Ta-da! You’re done! The first link displayed will take you to your new website! Go ahead, check it out!

The second link will take you the “behind the scenes” part of your website. This is where we’ll be doing some setup in the next post of the Website 101 series.

Your new website looks like this in its current, default setup:

This is post #5 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are taggedwebsite101.