What is WordPress? How does it work?

So just what is WordPress?

WordPress powers over 28% of the internet's websites - in it's simplicity, it's a website creation tool i.e. you make websites with it. In fact, a few of the Simplepage suite of sites run upon the Wordpress platform, really for a number of key reasons - 1) It's quick to deploy, 2) cost effective to maintain, 3) new page designs can be delivered very quickly, 4) there are many add-ons (plugins) that can extend the functionality of the website quickly and easily plus many more reasons.

WordPress was originally developed as a blogging engine, somewhere for people to write articles and notes. Over the years, it's evolved into more of what is known as a content management system (CMS), which basically means it allows you to edit your website by logging in, and won't likely need any special skills beyond what you would use to edit a Word or Excel document. As you can see below, the editor is fairly intuitive, with many of the familiar options for bold, italics, bullet points and so on.

‘Front End’ vs ‘Back End’

What is the ‘front end’ of Wordpress?

When people use the term ‘front end’ what they really mean is ‘the publicly available part of the website’ which is what you get when visiting the homepage and navigating between pages in the normal way

What is the ‘back end’ of Wordpress?

When you wish to edit content of your website, all CMS systems (including WordPress) have an admin web address you can visit which will allow you to login.

Wordpress Pages and Posts … What’s the Difference?

Wordpress Pages vs Posts

If you’ve used Wordpress a little, you’ve probably noticed it allows you to create ‘pages’ and ‘posts’ - but what’s the difference? When should you use one over the other?

It really comes down to time. For news, blogs and other status updates, posts are best. They are for things that are time-dependent (i.e. things that will be a lot less important in a few weeks or months time).

Pages on the other hand have a bit more ‘permanence’. They are ideal for what are sometimes called ‘static’ pages such as ‘about our company’ or ‘contact us’ where you are unlikely to change these pages on a day-to-day basis (though you may need to update them once every year or two to keep information up to date).

You may wonder why this division? It really comes down to historical SEO (search engine optimisation). If you use a post, you are more likely to get indexed and ranked more quickly in the search results. But after some time, the rankings of posts will likely taper off. On the other hand, pages may get indexed, but take longer to rank comparatively well. But once ranked, static pages will rank higher for much longer.

Getting Started

The first step to getting started with your WordPress site is to login. To do so follow the steps below:

To open one of these pages, and begin editing simply:

1. In your browser, type in (yourdomainnamehere)/wp-login
2. At the login screen, enter your username and password and click ‘Log In’

You can use the ‘forgotten password’ to reset your login details if you have lost them (provided you still have access to the email address you are using).

View and edit existing pages/posts

By clicking the posts or pages buttons on the left hand side of the dashboard (shown below) you will be taken to the main index that lists all pages (or posts, depending on which one you clicked).

You can begin editing any of these by clicking the names of the posts. If you hover near the title you will also see a few additional options pop up including 'edit, quick edit, bin and view' which do exactly what they say on the tin! There is also a 'trash' you can recover your posts and pages from if you didn't intend to delete them!

Adding a new page

If you click the ‘add new page’ (or post!) button, you will be taken to an empty editor as shown below. You'll see the familiar editing options you would expect fro Microsoft Word, Open Office or your favourite editor. These work exactly as you might expect and can help you format your content and present it in a way that looks great and reflects your brand:

There are a few simple steps to remember when creating a new page or post:

• This is where the page name goes. The page name will be displayed on the website menu and on the website browser.

• You can add and edit content on this page as you would any other document, and this content is what will be displayed in the body of your page when viewing the front end (or public) facing site.

• You can preview what your page will look like before publishing the page by clicking on Preview Changes.
  After creating or editing your page you will need to click the Update button. If you’re creating a new page this button will be called Publish.

• A Permalink is the name for the web address (or URL,) of your blog post. Wordpress allows you to edit this separately from the page heading and name, allowing you set these in a way that complements your SEO efforts where needed.

The Editor Toolbar

You can see the icons just above the editor allow some of the common functions which are (from right to left):

• Text format (i.e. Paragraph, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.)

• Bold, Italic, Strike-through (cross out)

• Bullets – Recommended for lists (unordered)

• Numbering – Recommended for ordered lists

• Block-quote (applied to paragraphs) Primarily used to indicate a block of quoted text or similar.

• Align Left, Align Centre & Right Align – Should be rarely used as your website design should determine this automatically in most cases.

• Insert/Edit Link – Use whenever possible to link text to another web page.

• Unlink – use to remove a link

• Insert More tag – Useful for shortening the display of long blog posts on the blog summary page, by displaying a ‘Read more’ link to view the full post.

• Distraction Free Writing mode enlarges the editing area to fill the browser window. Look for the ‘Exit full-screen’ text link to exit this mode.
• Your Content Goes Here

• Show/Hide Kitchen Sink – Simply turns on and off the display of the second row of buttons. We recommend keeping the second row permanently