Welcome!
Welcome to this WordPress beginner’s guide. You are about to join thousands of other webmasters who have used this blog to build their own WordPress websites, from scratch, even if they were complete beginners!
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
1. Why should I build my own website when I can easily get online for free?
Having your own web presence is now pretty much essential in today’s online world. Even teenagers have their own pages on sites such as Facebook and many other social networks. But the problem is that these free site-building services can come and go, change the rules without notice, and impose restrictions. Some free services can shut your site down if they don’t approve of your content.
Many will clutter up your site with trashy ads and your free site can disappear overnight if the service goes bust or gets taken over. And they offer little or no technical support when you really need it.
2. So why should I build my own website on my own domain?
The answer is that, with your own privately registered domain and hosting account, YOU own and control the website, not anybody else. You can put whatever you like on your site (within the bounds of legality) and no one can tell you otherwise. You are your own boss.
And, with your own website, you can build your own distinctive ‘brand’, whether you are a business or a community group, an individual, or whatever… You can make your site look and behave how you like, whether for e-commerce or for publicity purposes, as an information resource - or just a personal blog.
Your domain becomes your very own exclusive web address, your own piece of online virtual ‘real estate that plays its part in publicizing your mission or message.
These days, if you don’t have your own online web presence, you are invisible. You can print your domain address on your business cards, add it to your email signature, and quote in all your offline literature. Your own website on your own domain gives you identity, visibility, and, indeed, status.
3. But don’t I need a professional web designer to make a good job of building a website?
No, definitely not! This used to be the case in the early days of the Internet because only a few tech-savvy geeks knew and understood the computer language (HTML) that translated your words and pictures into the code that browsers understand.
But as the technology has advanced, so have the tools to build websites become more accessible. WordPress is one of these tools and WordPress is the subject of this book.
4. What if I’m not a technical wizard – will I understand all the jargon about web-building?
With this book you don’t need to know any jargon or gobbledygook – I explain it all in plain English as we go along. As you use the system it will begin to click into place and you’ll understand what you need to know and what you don’t. If you can use a word processor you can build your own WordPress website – it’s that simple - I promise!
6. How much will it cost to do it all myself?
Peanuts. The only thing you absolutely have to spend money on is web hosting and you can get this for a few dollars a month. For less than $10 per month, you can get your web hosting account from one of the top hosting companies on the planet. Of course, you can spend money on other tools and services if you want, but, for a simple website that you build yourself, you really don’t need to spend any more money than that.
7. What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a powerful (and free!) package of software that sits in the background on your web server (the remote computer where your domain is hosted) and performs all the technical processing that delivers your content to your visitor on their local computer. Once WordPress is installed on your domain you don’t need to do anything to make it work. It just sits there and performs its magic entirely behind the scenes.
WordPress provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to you, the webmaster, that bypasses the need to know any HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, or any other coding language.
Once the hangout of hobbyists and bloggers, WordPress has now evolved into a powerful and sophisticated web platform that supports a host of features both for professional and do-it-yourself webmasters.
The terms ‘blog’ and ‘website’ are now effectively synonymous as far as our usage of
WordPress is concerned. Pundits use the two terms interchangeably because the
technology platform behind both is exactly the same.
WordPress is now actually used by some of the major players on the Internet as a complete
Content Management System (CMS). Think CNN, The New York Times, About.com, the
White House, US Post Office, and Ford Motors - they all make use of WordPress.
And, in addition to the experts, millions of ordinary people and small businesses around
the world also use WordPress as their platform of choice to get a presence on the web.
8. What’s so special about WordPress?
- WordPress is FREE and open-source
- WordPress is stable and maintained by an army of experts
- WordPress contains numerous behind-the-scenes features that make creating your own website a breeze
- WordPress is wonderful, but it has a reputation for being difficult.
This is, in part, due to the documentation.
WordPress was originally written by programmers, for programmers, and the instructions (‘codex’, as it’s termed) are often written in tech-speak and seem to assume that you know what they are talking about in the first place. This has improved in recent versions, but it can still be a challenge if you are not a fully paid-up techie.
I know all this. I’m a computer programmer myself. I actually am a techie (and proud of it!) but I can also write plain English. In this tutorial, I just concentrate on the basic essentials of WordPress and ignore all the complications that you don’t need to know when you’re first starting out.
