Congratulations – your website is finally ready, and you can start adding content to it. Here is a brief guide where to start:

As we have seen in previous lessons, you can access your website’s administrative area by logging into it at

http://www.mywebsite.com/wp-admin (replace mywebsite.com with your website’s name).

Once you are logged in you will see your main dashboard that gives you an overview about all settings, plugins and content:

In the menu along the left side you can access all features. You should familiarize yourself with the different areas. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory. In the top area ‘Right Now’ you see your content. By default, WordPress has added a sample post, comment, category and a sample page. You should delete them after you have created your content (note: if you delete them before adding a page or post yourself, your website theme might temporarily not look right as there is nothing to show).

Posts and pages

WordPress is around since about 2006 and was originally written for blogging, but the last years it is more and more used for regular websites (regular websites with an administrative area in WordPress style are also referred to as’ CMS’ = content management sites). Therefore, you can select to write a ‘post’ or create a ‘page’.

Posts are meant to be used by ‘bloggers’, meaning you write about something and give your website visitors the opportunity to comment on. You can organize your posts in ‘categories’.  WordPress will keep track of them and add them to an ‘archive’ that is usually organized by month.

Every time you write a new post, WordPress is by default set up to automatically inform the search engines about it by sending out ‘Pings’ to different sites on the web. You can see the ‘ping’  function in your menu under Settings/Writing/Update Services.

Pages are meant to be used for content that is not changing a lot, e.g. your contact page, your about us page, or your privacy policy. By default, they don’t send out automatic pings after your create one. You can’t set up ‘categories’ for pages, but you can create a ‘parent’ page and add ‘sub’ pages, e.g. Parent Page: Real Estate Services, sub page 1: Commercial Real Estate, sub page 2: Residential Real Estate.

So should you use pages or posts when you use WordPress for a regular website?

If you create your website to present your products or services you will by now probably wonder: posts or pages – what should I use? The answer is: it’s up to you. However, if you use posts, your template will by default automatically add a ‘comment’ form on the bottom. (Make sure your Akismet spam filter plugin is activated when you allow comments!) You can turn off comments in Settings/Discussion, but most templates will usually still show some text like ‘no comments’ or ‘comments closed’. If you don’t want this, you should use pages (or find a PHP savy person that can tweak your theme).

RSS: A huge advantage of WordPress is its RSS functionality. You may have noticed the RSS symbol before on other websites. Our feed can be accessed by clicking on the orange square on top of our sidebar. A feed will always show your last posts (not pages by default) and is accessible at http://www.yourwebsite.com/feed. You can spread the word about your website by submitting your feed to RSS aggregator engines and others can subscribe to your feed using a free RSS reader.

By default, your RSS feed list will not include pages. If you want to only use pages and still be able to use RSS you can install the RSS Includes Pages plugin.

To create a post or page, click either in the main dashboard window or the left dashboard menu on ‘Pages/add new’ or ‘Posts/add new’ and you will get to the page or post editing window.

Menus

Since WordPress 3.0 the ability to create custom menus has be greatly improved. You can create your menu in the left dashboard menu by clicking on ‘Appearance/Menus’.

If you selected a template that is not updated for version 3.0, you will see the message ‘The current theme does not natively support menus’ on top of the page. If that is the case you won’t be able to use the custom menu function for the top menu bar of your theme (because your theme is set up to automatically put all pages or all posts in the top bar), but you can still show your custom menu in the sidebar.

Sidebar

If the template you selected includes a ‘widgetized sidebar’ (most templates do), you can easily add and edit your sidebars content by going to ‘Appearance/Widgets’. You will see a list of available widgets on the left side, and the current content of your sidebar to the right. The widgets are all self-explanatory. Just drag and drop them into your sidebar, or drag them back to the left bottom side if you want to remove one.

This concludes our tutorial ‘How To Make Your Own Website’.

We hope you will by now have a great looking functional website. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave us a comment. Thanks for visiting the San Diego Web Designer Blog.

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Tutorial 'How To Make Your Own Website':

1. Lesson 1 – Overview: What Will You Learn In This Web Design Tutorial?
2. Lesson 2 – What Will I Need To Build My Website?
3. Lesson 3 – Naming Your Website: Find And Buy The Best Domain Name
4. Lesson 4 – Your Website Needs A Home: Getting Your Web Hosting Account
5. Lesson 5 – Connecting Your Domain Name And Hosting Account: Set Your Nameservers
6. Lesson 6 – Installing WordPress: The Famous 3 Minutes Set Up Of Your Website
7. Lesson 7 – Optimizing Your Settings: Update And Get Ready For Google
8. Lesson 8 – Installing Plugins: Add More Functions
9. Lesson 9 – Make It Yours: Selecting Your Website’s Template
10. This article: Lesson 10 – Adding Content: Posts, Pages, Menu, Sidebar

Related posts:

• Lesson 7 – Optimizing Your Settings: Update And Get Ready For Google
• Lesson 9 – Make It Yours: Selecting Your Website’s Template
• Lesson 8 – Installing Plugins: Add More Functions