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Controlling the Look of a WordPress Blog Using Themes

When you start writing articles on your WordPress blog, you’ll probably want to change its appearance. The look and feel of a WordPress blog is controlled by Themes. A WordPress theme is a collection of files that include PHP Pages, images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and other files. These files create the pages that display the contents of your blog and apply styling and other functionality to the content.

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Add Features to a WordPress Blog with Widgets

Make Your Blog Come to Life When you set up your WordPress blog, you select a Theme to control the look and feel of the site. WordPress themes create a sidebar (or two) on the right and/or left side of your screen. You can add further styling, information, and functionality to your site using Widgets. [...]

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Writing a Blog Aritcle Using the WordPress Web Interface

Publishing Articles in Your WordPress Installation

Now that you have your WordPress Blog installed and configured, you are ready to start writing and publishing articles. WordPress has a web-based interface that allows you to write, edit, and publish articles to your blog.

I’m going to cover the steps involved in publishing your first article from your WordPress Web Interface. You will perform the following steps:

• Log In to your WordPress site
• Navigate to the Add New Post page
• Enter the information for your article
• Publish your article
• Edit and update your article (if necessary)

Accessing the WordPress Post Interface

You need to log in to your WordPress Site Administration panel to begin writing and publishing a blog post.

Click the Log In link under the Meta heading in your site’s sidebar.

Then, enter your Login and Password information on the Login page.

This will bring you to the WordPress Dashboard. You can access the Posts pages from there.

Click the Posts dropdown and select Add New Post from the sidebar.

This will open the Add New Posts page.

Enter Your Article Information

You will enter all of the information and metadata for your article on the Add New Post page. Populate all of the fields with the information for your article.

You can click the Preview button to see what your post currently looks like, before you actually post it. I highly recommend doing this to make sure you get what you expect.

The video below will show you how to use the editing options and add images to your posts.

Publish Your Article

Once you are satisfied with your article, you are ready to publish it. Click the Publish button to make your new article go live. There is also a calendar button that allows you to schedule the date and time that a post will be published.

Edit Your Article

Sometimes after you publish an article, you need to make changes or modifications. You can open the published article and edit any information. Then, you can click the Update Post  button to make your changes go live instantly.

The following video tutorial will walk you through the entire process of publishing your first article on a WordPress blog.

Configure the Settings on a WordPress Blog (Tutorial)

What to do After You have Installed WordPress

After you install the WordPress software on your web server, there are some configuration steps that you need to take to set your blog up. This tutorial will walk you through some of the basic configuration steps that you should perform from the WordPress Dashboard.

The Dashboard is the web based Administration Console that allows you to control and configure settings for your WordPress blog.

You are going to need to configure the following things on your blog:

1. Clean Up the Installation file from your server
2. Create the Categories for to group your articles
3. Create the Static Pages for your site
4. Configure the basic Settings that control certain aspects of how your blog works

Let’s get started!

Cleaning Up your WordPress Installation File

Before you begin configuring any settings, you need to clean up your installation. The file that we ran in the previous tutorial to install the blog (install.php) needs to be deleted from your web server. If this file is ran again, it will completely wipe out your blog and set you back to square one.

Deleting the Install .PHP File from Your Web Server

Perform the following steps:

1. Open your FTP Software and connect to your server
2. Navigate to the WordPress-Admin folder
3. Click on the "install.php" file and delete it.

There are numerous other things that you can and should do to secure your WordPress installation. Here are some good places to get started after you get up and running.

• 11 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Blog – Make Tech Easier
• 9 easy ways to secure your WordPress blog
• How to Secure Your WordPress Blog

Creating Categories to Group your Articles

Categories are used to group and label the articles based on topics. You will need to create the Categories that your articles fit into from the Dashboard.

Click the Posts heading on the right side of the Dashboard page, then the Categories option to open the Category menu.

Populate the Category Name, Category Slug, and Description fields click the Add Category button to create a category.

I recommend creating your list of Categories and their hierarchy and descriptions in a word processor or text editor and then pasting them into the Categories menu. This is a lot quicker and easier than typing it all into the web interface off the top of your head.

The video below shows all of the steps in the process.

Create "Static" Pages

There are certain pages that you will want on your blog. These are not individual articles that each have their own dynamic pages, rather pages that are permanent and don’t get updated (very often). For example, you may want to create a Contact page or an About page that contain information for your readers. These are static pages that are created from the Pages section of the WordPress Dashboard.

Click the Pages heading on the right side of the Dashboard page, then the Add New option to open the Page Creation menu.

Populate the Page Title and Page Body fields and Publish your static page.

The video below shows all of the steps in the process.

Configure the WordPress Settings from the Dashboard

The Settings heading contains may options that allow you to control the way that your WordPress blog looks and functions. You will need to go through all of the Settings options to see which options that you would like to use and how you use them. 

The video below shows all of the steps in the process.

Note: Later on, when I cover using Plugins, there will be many more options under the Settings heading. I will discuss these in a subsequent article.

These are the standard configuration settings that you can use to control how your blog functions. In the next article I will go over the use of Themes, Plugins and Widgets, which will extend the functionality of your blog.

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