WordPress is the most well-known content management system (CMS) right now, and it’s paramount that people learn how to use it. There are other CMS available, like Joomla and Drupal, but WordPress is much easier to use, which is why it’s widely used. WordPress is such a good platform that everyone who’s thinking of getting into the online world full-time should learn how to use it.
Here are five simple tips for beginners who are looking to break into WordPress.
Start a blog in WordPress first to get familiar with the features
From posting content to making use of plugins and so on, the best way to learn is to consult the documentation and start exploring hands-on. If you’re coming from other blogging and CMS platforms, then you should do well with WordPress as it’s designed to be as user-friendly as possible.
Read and watch guides and tutorials online
There are plenty of them posted by the online community in sites like eHow, Expert Village, Youtube, and so on, so make use of them. The thing about them though is that they may convey the same things differently, so watching two or three of the same topic can be helpful as they may contain different approaches to a similar thing. If you’re willing to dedicate time to learning WordPress, then you should be able to read a few articles and watch some videos every day.
If you can afford it, buy hosting early and experiment with WordPress as much as you can
A good training tool is to actually have a website to work on. Even if you’re not a web designer, you should at least know how to install WordPress and set it up so that you can start posting content. The latest version of the WordPress CMS can be downloaded from the official website and easily installed into a website using FTP upload. The good thing about WordPress is that once it’s installed, you can immediately post whatever you want. This ease of use is what won users over in the first place. If you can’t buy web hosting, then try it out in WordPress.com to learn how to use it.
Once you’re used to the basics of WordPress, start planning your intended content to sort out your tags and categories
These two things are what make your content easy to sort out and search through for both you and your readers. Having a search bar in your site is also good, but having categories to click in the first place can help you get your content out to readers more easily since a lot of people would want to read posts of similar topics.
Get a clean and simple template to work on first of all.
If you’re not a designer, you can perhaps get a friend or hire someone to make a design template for you later on. But when you’re still starting, you can just go with a simple template so that you can easily see what you’re doing.
Paul is an experienced WordPress developer who is engrossed in website development topics. He has also written topics about hosting like where to find a cheap dedicated server and why use cPanel VPS hosting.