Learn How to Build a WordPress Blog
| On this page you'll learn how to build a WordPress blog from start to finish.
We show you how to install WordPress onto a custom domain, we show you how add content and how to change the theme. Here are a couple of websites that have been made by our students Krav Maga Bristol & Touched by The Light Bookmark This Page NOW because chances are you'll not see it again if you don't. Feel free to share this information with your friends. We hope you find this information usefull and would appreciate any feedback!! Before you begin, here's how to install WordPress onto a custom domain. *Don't forget, you can always register a free wordpress blog over at WordPress.com |
Lesson 1 - Posting’n'Pages
| 1 Posting Posting is the thing that you are going to be doing most of in this program. It's all about providing content to your audience and helping people out. |
| 2 Categories Give your visitor another method of navigating your blog as well as allowing you to keep your blog organised into categories. |
| 3 Tags Are used to provide our visitor with an additional form of navigability on our site. In future lessons we will be installing a really smooth looking tag cloud for you to showcase the content on your blog. |
| 4 Pictures You're definitely going to want to get familiar with adding pictures to your site. Pictures are a really good method of engaging with people. |
| 5 Videos THE most engaging method of reaching and engaging with people is via VIDEO <-- I underlined it so you could see how important video is  |
| 6 Publishing Options Being able to schedule or post date posts is awesome. You can write a load of posts on a Sunday and have them drip fed to your blog, which drip feeds your social media. |
| 7 Permalinks If you're like me and you've got CDO (supposed to be OCD but I have to put them in the right order or else it proper bugs me) then you're going to want to change your permalinks. |
| 8 Categories & Tags Once you've created your post Categories and Tags, you're probably going to want to either look at or edit them at some point. This video shows you how. |
| 9 Pages Pages are really useful in the functioning of our blog. In this video I take you through creating a Contact Page and all of the stuff you would need to deal with when publishing a page. |
Lesson 2 - Installing Themes
| 1 Free Themes pt 1 - WordPress Themes In the first of our "theme hunting" videos we look at the themes that you can install from within WordPress. These are generally the themes that beginners use. |
| 2 Checking Links This video is REALLY IMPORTANT!! Once you've installed and activated a theme, then you're going to want to inspect it a little. |
| 3 Theme Options This short little video shows you where to find the "theme options" (if there are any). I also show you the place where you can edit the header for the twentyten theme (the default theme). |
| 4 Free themes pt 2 - Tinterweb Themes Now we get a little more adventurous and start exploring the internet for themes. Make sure you inspect them though because in my experience, some WordPress developers are quite sneaky. |
Lesson 3 - Plugins’n'Widgets
| 1 Widgets Widgets literally as easy as dragging and dropping. It's important to have a few VITAL things in our sidebar for our guests to be able to navigate our site and find our content. |
| 2 Akismet Akismet is a vital bit of kit. The way it works is it automatically detects both spam comments, and trackbacks & pingbacks. |
| 3 All in One SEO I’ve done a lot of research into the best plugin to use for SEO and this was the one that kept cropping up so that’s why I’m recommending it. |
| 4 Contact Form It's really important to have give your visitors a method to communicate with you. This doesn't mean you have to have your email on display, all you have to do is create a contact from. |
| 5 Facebook Comments It's a proven fact that a friends recommendation is way more powerful than any other form of marketing. Allowing your guests to comment using Facebook comments will give you the ability to virally promote your business. |
| 6 Digg Digg (Twitter) This is the same plugin that Mashable.com uses on their website. We all know now how important it is to make sharing our content easy and Digg Digg makes doing that easy for us. |
| 7 WP FollowMe This plugin allows your visitors to connect with you on Twitter really easily. It basically put's somethig that resembles a clothes tag on the side of your blog with a link to Twitter. |
| 8 WP Cumulus This is one of my favorite plugins. It doesn't work too well on the site that I used for the demo but it does on other sites. If you've got a wide sidebar (at least 180px) then this is for you. |
| 9 Twitter Widget This is an official Twitter widget and before we can install it into our sidebar we need to get the code. Really good for getting your Twitter account noticed i.e. get more people following you. |
| 10 Facebook Fanpage Widget If you've got a fan page set up on Facebook then you may want to let people who visit your site know about it. This official Facebook Widget will allow people to "like" your fanpage from within your blog. Awesome! |
Lesson 4 - Syndication
| Twitter & LinkedIn This lesson is all about syndicating your content out to your social media profiles. Syndication is important because it saves us time in not having to worry about it. |
| Facebook We look at using the free NetworkedBlogs app to syndicate our content out to Facebook. Facebook is a really powerful platform for us so it's important that you get this step done. |
Lesson 5 - What Now?
Social Media
| NewsFeed In this lesson we look at what a Social Graph. |
| Profile Having a good profile is important in Social Media. Another good pointer would be to not use your business name but YOUR name. |
| Adding People - Twitter This video goes over some really cool methods of finding people on Twitter. |
| Adding People - Facebook This video goes over some really cool methods of finding people on Facebook. |
| Adding People - LinkedIn This video goes over some really cool methods of finding people on LinkedIn. |
Backlinking
| Blog Commenting Blog commenting is a really easy way of building up backlinks to your website. The more hyperlinks you've got leading back to your site the more authority you'll be given on the internet by the search engines. |
