Wordpress in 1 Hour Welcome to the webinar! Webinar Host Paul Teague Digital Development Manager Cumbria Chamber of Commerce
Coming Up … • How to set up a Wordpress website (with no ads) for free • Hints, tips and strategies to make the most of your Wordpress site • Finding your way around a Wordpress site and the essential settings you need to know • These slides and the webinar replay video will be available within 3 hours of this live presentation
Why Wordpress? Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness • Wordpress is what’s known as a CMS system ... which stands for ‘Content Management System’ • A CMS is a database driven system (usually) that doesn’t require any technical knowledge once it’s been installed • CMS is very widely used these days and most people don’t use static websites any more • Before Wordpress came along you were shackled to HTML, php, FTP and all the rest of those techie horrors • Whenever you wanted to make a change to your website, you had to pay your webmaster lots of money to do it • You would never have dared to change even an image on a static website let alone the entire design!
Why Wordpress? Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness • Wordpress is easy to install and simple to maintain • Once installed, updates and complete overhauls take minutes • It’s a WYSIWYG interface and no technical skills are needed (if you can use eBay and Facebook, you can use Wordpress!) • It’s used by 74 million+ other people! • It has an extensive range of supporting plug-ins – many of them free – which allow your to do virtually anything that you can imagine ... and then a bit more • You can add multimedia to Wordpress and it integrates seamlessly with popular social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and affiliate programs like Adsense, Amazon and Clickbank
Notable Wordpress Users Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness Source: https://wordpress. com/notable- users/
Wordpress Options Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness • There are two versions of Wordpress and it’s important that you use the right one! • http://wordpress.com/ is a hosted version of the software ie you don’t have to install it • http://wordpress.org/ is the self-installed version of the software and it’s the option that you should use
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness http://wordpress.com/ is free, very popular and extremely impressive but if you’re serious about blogging long term you’ll find it restrictive quite soon and it’s not best for SEO * Don’t worry if you use this, you can easily export your work and import it to Wordpress.org
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness http://wordpress.org/ is free and quite amazing. Since it moved into version 2 – in my opinion – it’s had no competitors ... it is quite simply the way you should now make your websites* * My personal opinion. Detractors will warn you of security problems. I’ll show you ways around that
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness Registering Your Free Hostinger Account Step 1 : Go to http://hostinger.co.uk Step 2 : Click on Create Account in the top, right hand corner of the site.
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness Reg egister for or a a pa paid id Sit Siteground ac account Go to http://paulteague.com/siteground I I use use 2 x GoGeek accounts You ou ne need a StartUp account You get your domain name free for one year when you sign up for StartUp hosting
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness • WordPress plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site. • Note: One of the primary advantages of using the self-hosted version of WordPress from WordPress.org is the ability to upload and use plugins on your WordPress site. • Plugins can be free or paid. There are many excellent free plugins which do all sorts of amazing things – SEO, social media buttons and so on. You definitely do not need to pay to get great plugins • Plugins are the ‘game changer’ with Wordpress – they allow you to do amazing things in your site – for free – and without the need to get coders involved Source: iThemes
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness Buying Wordpress Themes My favourite sources are: https://themeforest.net https://woocommerce.com/woothemes/ https://ithemes.com/ It’s best to pay for Wordpress themes as free themes often break and developers get fed up with them swiftly! The themes that I uses are OptimizePress, ThriveThemes & Divi
WordPress Widgets Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness • A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. • You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget -ready areas on your web page. • WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.
The WordPress Widget Area Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness
The WordPress Menu Area Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness
WordPress Widgets Usin sing Wordpress • One of the many reasons that I love WP so much are the plug-ins For r Bu Busin iness • You can literally think of anything you want to do on a blog and there’ll be a plug-in available to help you • Many great plug-ins are free! • Each plug-in function would cost you a lot of money to code if you wanted to add it to a regular/static web site • The simple way to think of a plug-in is that it is something that does a job on your blog ie it captures email addresses, it shows your Twitter feed, it lets you put adverts on your blog etc • A plug-in is just a bit of code in a .zip file (to compress the size) which you simply download from a website – upload to your blog – install on your blog ... it’s simple!
Usin ing Wordpress For Busin iness Jetpack is the ideal all-in-one free Wordpress plugin for beginners. There’s a lot of ‘stuff’ packed in there and it helps to make using Wordpress a little more straightforward. I don’t use it – it’s not something that more experienced users would feel the need to use.
Jetpack Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness
Jetpack Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness
Siteground Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness Step 1: You first need to add your domain to Siteground. To begin this process, head for your cpanel, and click on the Addon Domains area [1]
Siteground Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness Step 2: In this process, you ‘connect’ your domain name to your cpanel area. Note in [1] that you don’t use http or www … just enter the domain name. [2] & [3] are auto -filled, use the password generator [4] to create your password, then click [5] to add your domain – that’s it!
Siteground Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness Step 3: Access the Wordpress Installer [2]. Note also that your nameservers are very easy to find [1} if you ever need to transfer your domain name.
Siteground Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness Step 4: This process is almost exactly the same as it was for Hostinger. Make sure that you note down your username and password. Leave the In Directory are blank. Everything else you can change in the Wordpress admin area.
WordPress Plugins Usin sing Wordpress • These are free plug-ins that I use myself For r Bu Busin iness • I would describe these as essential plug-ins on any blog • It’s not a comprehensive list – and I’m saving some for the security section and the SEO part of the coaching • They’re all exactly the same process: Plugins > Add New > Search Plugins > Install Now > Activate > Configure
Search Engine Optimisation Usin sing Wordpress • Put simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is giving your For r Bu Busin iness blog the best chance of showing up in the search engines (Google, Bing etc) • Most people find it really hard to rank their static website in the search engines ... but Google loves quality blogs! • These are simple, basic, effective strategies that cost nothing
Tools to make SEO much simpler Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness My comments: Tends to be most widely used, I’m not keen though, it’s over - complicated in my opinion. https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Tools to make SEO much simpler Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness My comments: My favourite for Wordpress, I’ve used it for years. https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Tools to make SEO much simpler Usin sing Wordpress For r Bu Busin iness My comments: My favourite, I’ve used it for years. https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Tools to make security much simpler Usin sing Wordpress • All websites have security and technical issues - even For r Bu Busin iness simple, static websites • Wordpress is very vulnerable to malicious attack because of its popularity • Make sure you use at least the simple security measures that I give you • In context, my site has remained intact for 9 years ... so far • I pay for Sucuri to monitor and protect my most important WP installations
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