WordPress is a practical and easy to use content management system for the publication of a professional or commercial website (showcase, corporate, professional blog, online shop). How to publish a website in WordPress? Here's how to get started:
Before publishing a website in WordPress, it is necessary to define the architecture (tree), ergonomics (e.g navigation) and design.
Refer to the following tips:
You can edit a site in WordPress using 2 methods:
- WordPresom: free online publication service, based on the WordPress content management system : it is suitable for profesional blogging and you can enhance its functionality (e.g custom domain name) through paid services.
- The installable version of Wordpress: it is suitable for most professional web sites (e.g, showcase site, corporate blog, e-shops), hosted on a dedicated or custom server.
Choose a domain name (in a registar: Gandiet, GoDaddom)
Choose a suitable web hosting service.
- Opt for a dedicated server (more expensive) for a site that will generate a large audience (eg e-shop)
- Opt for a shared web server for a low or average audience.
- Some hosts offer simplified WordPress installation packages.
To install Wordpress (as from version 3.2), the host must provide:
- PHP 5.2.4 or higher
- MySQL 5.0 (database) or higher.
Link the domain name to the hosting service
Download WordPress and unzip the archive.
Make use of a FTP client (e.g Filezilla) to transfer the contents of the WordPress directory to your website.
Learn how to install WordPress on a remote server.
The dashboard, is the interface where you manage your content and publications (published articles, creation of categories, pages) and access the many features/settings of WordPress. It is very intuitive and includes, the following:
The Content Management menus: Articles (+ categories, keywords), downloaded media libraries, pages and links.
The "Appearance" menu that allows you to install and manage WordPress graphics themes, widgets (e.g the Adsense modules, a social profile badge), change the header and the background of the site.
Users: a very important feature in the context of a collaborative website: it allows to assign "roles" ( management rights are more or less restricted:.
Administrator, author, etc.) to users managing the site.
Extensions: includes all installed plugins that are being used to customize/optimize the operation of the site
Settings, that is to say, the general parameters of the site title, slogan, writing options (e.g publish an article by email), the link structure (SEO), and optionally, extensions.
WordPress offers a gallery of free and premium (paid) themes, installable from the dashboard. (Appearance> Themes)
It is necessary to make the site visible to the search engines so that it can be crawled by the spiders like Googlebot. The published web pages are then indexed (this may take several days).
Go to: Settings> Read and make sure that the "Ask search engines not to index the site" box is unchecked.
The term "permalink" refers to a particular hyperlink structure applied to all the URLs of site. WordPress allows you to choose among different types of link structure, knowing that the default selection is not optimized for SEO.
It is important to change this setting (settings> permalinks) and opt for a more personalized structure (e.g choice of keywords in the URL)
