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Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress
Get your blog up and running with the latest version of WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular, easy-to-use blogging platforms and allows you to create a dynamic and engaging blog, even if you have no programming skills or experience. Ideal for the visual learner, Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress, Second Edition introduces you to the exciting possibilities of the newest version of WordPress and helps you get started, step by step, with creating and setting up a WordPress site. Author and experienced WordPress user Janet Majure shares advice, insight, and best practices for taking full advantage of all that WordPress has to offer.
- Presents completely updated coverage of new mobile blogging solutions
- Shares advice on customizing sites through use of plug-ins and themes and custom site editing
- Details more advanced procedures for self-hosted bloggers, including buying a domain, getting a web host, and installing WordPress
- Demonstrates key points with examples from the author’s own WordPress blogs
Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress, Second Edition clears the air around any blog fog you may find yourself in and gets you started with creating your own dynamic WordPress blog today!
From the Book: Tips and Tricks
Choose and Insert Widgets
(Click image for instructions) |
Recall an Earlier Version of Your Blog Post
(Click image for instructions) |
Upload and Insert an Image While Posting
(Click for instructions) |
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Good for beginners & visual learners; needs a few updates; some structural oddities,
One of my graphic designer friends raved about the first edition of this book, and I can see why. “Visual” is not an understatement with this series: it includes almost more images than text, and in bright full color, too. The illustrations and well-laid-out text boxes are certainly one of the book’s great strengths. Though a few of the screenshots are too small to be read at the size they appear in print, most of the illustrations aid considerably in following the steps in each chapter. The “Tips” boxes that appear at the foot of many pages to answer frequently asked questions are also very helpful.
Chapter 1, “Introducing WordPress,” helps you decide between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (commonly referred to as WordPress.org), explains some core WordPress terms like pages, posts, permalinks, and the dashboard, and provides tips on choosing strong passwords, specific blog topics, and good site names. Many of these are not WordPress-specific tips, but they are important considerations for people who want to build good blogs or websites.
Chapter 2 focuses on setting up a WordPress.com blog. If you already know you want to use self-hosted WordPress, you can skip this. If you’re looking for a book that can help you with your WordPress.com site, however, you’ll be glad to know that this one addresses WordPress.com in all but a few chapters.
Chapter 3 covers both manual and “one-click” (control-panel based) installation of WordPress on your web server, using Bluehost and Simple Scripts for its screenshots. (The process is essentially the same for other hosts using Fantastico or Softaculous.) There’s a troubleshooting section for common installation problems. Then you have an overview of the time and date section of the general settings, followed by a tour of the dashboard home screen, the admin bar, and the user profile page. There’s no mention at this stage of other settings, even privacy (it’s often a good idea to hide a site at such an embryonic stage from search engines). Instead, before moving on to any of those things (they are coming in Chapter 4), the author suggests changing themes.
Really? If you know ahead of time what theme you’re planning to use, fine, activate it. But if you have no idea, you could spend hours down the rabbit hole trying to decide and getting nothing at all done about setting your site up. The theme is one of the easiest things on your site to change, after all, unless you are using a theme that relies heavily on custom post types (an argument for creating those within a plugin). That section of Chapter 3 seems oddly out of place.
Chapter 4, “Know Your Administration Tools,” addresses the rest of the settings (reading, writing, discussion, privacy, and permalinks), though without mentioning the all-important Screen Options tab to control which modules appear on your Dashboard in the first place, and which metaboxes appear on other screens throughout the administrative interface.
Chapter 5, “Create Written Blog Content,” walks you through the creation of pages and posts, including using WordPress.com’s Writing Helper. Here at last we meet the Screen Options tab, without which many once-standard parts of the new post/edit post screen would be hidden from us. (If you’ve used WordPress in the past and suddenly can’t find the Excerpt, Author, Slug, Custom Fields, or something else you’re looking for, check the Screen Options.)
Chapter 5 also covers the Quick Edit feature and the too-often-overlooked Paste from Word button (illustrated on p. 100), QuickPress, PressThis, mobile apps for posting to WordPress, offline blogging clients like Windows Live Writer, and importing posts from Blogger. Credit for thoroughness.
Chapter 6, “Create Visual and Audio Content,” starts by asking the reader to think about file size, load times, and, well, good taste, when it comes to adding media, and then sensibly recommends editing, and particularly re-sizing, images before uploading them to WordPress.
Curiously, there’s no mention of the problem that WordPress has with embed codes in the discussion of embedding slideshows from PictoBuilder (a recommendation made primarily, I think, because the author hasn’t discussed plugins yet) or videos from YouTube. In case you haven’t faced this problem yet, if you switch from the HTML editor to the visual editor after pasting in an embed code, WordPress will try to “clean up” the code, with the result that the code won’t work anymore. Ooops.
Equally curiously, there’s no mention of the oEmbed function ([...]), which allows you to simply copy the URL of a YouTube video (or a video from Vimeo, or a photo from Flickr, or, now, a tweet from Twitter) and paste it into the HTML editor on its own line. Presto, the video (or whatever) appears, sized exactly to fit your content area. A neat trick, first introduced in WordPress 2.9. It’s as if this part of the…
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|Well laid out but nothing enlightening,
I know this is supposed to be a beginner’s guide. When I bought it, I considered myself a WordPress beginner. But this book has nothing in it that you can’t figure out for yourself. You can “teach yourself visually” by looking at the WordPress dashboard. It’s all in front of you. Everything in this book is already explained there, except for the part about setting up a mySQL database. This doesn’t make much sense. If you need the level of hand-holding provided in this book, choose a provider that offers automatic WordPress installation. If you want to deal with FileZilla, mySQL, or PHP, this isn’t the book for you anyway. What I was looking for was something in between. I could figure out how to set up the website for myself. What I needed was a guide to customizing and making the page behave the way I wanted it to. This book showed trivial things like how to create a post, how to format a post, how to move widgets around. I already knew all that. It seems if you can’t figure out the very basics, you should blog on BlogSpot instead of WordPress. I probably should have looked for something advanced, but I was brand new to WordPress and it was driving me crazy. Every time I searched the WordPress forums, they talked about tweaking the php source code and my eyes would glass over. I ended up learning PHP anyway, because it was easier than trying to find a plugin for everything I wanted to do. Nothing I learned about WordPress functionality came from this book. I feel like I wasted an unreasonable amount of money for something that had no value to me.
On the positive side, I have to say that Teach Yourself Visually is very nicely presented. It’s well organized and visually inviting. As a technical writer, I can tell that a lot of skill went into the layout to ensure a user-friendly result. It’s just too bad the content fell flat.
I think the book can be useful only if you’ve never blogged before, have not yet signed up for WordPress, and aren’t sure what the process involves. If that’s the case, then read the whole book before you even consider blogging, because you’ll go into it with a visual reference. If you’ve already started, however, you’ve gotten past the first major humps and won’t have much use for this book. Move on to something more advanced.
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|Will Get You Up and Blogging,
Many moons ago I decided to set up a WordPress blog. It wasn’t hard. In fact it was dead easy and most of what this book tells you about setting up a blog on WordPress dot com you can figure out for yourself.
So why do you need this book? Probably for the same reason that my blog went nowhere. There is more to having a successful blog than just formatting it and posting away and that’s where this book comes in. I should have focused my blog on both something I know a lot about and something others might find interesting, the content should have been appealing. I should have been consistent and there are a lot of other things I should have done but didn’t.
This book will help you decide what to blog about and it’ll help you get readers. It’ll also tell you what not to do. Plus, if you’re not too computer or software savvy, it’ll walk you through setting up and formatting your blog. This book will get you up and blogging. It really will.
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