WordPress 101: A Complete Beginners Guide to WordPress

In this lesson we will be covering how to log into WordPress so we can start to edit our site.

The first time we log into WordPress it will be done through our web hosting account, but then any time after that we just need to visit a certain page on our site.

To get to the login screen for WordPress, we need to visit our domain name with /wp-admin after it. So it would look something like this: www.NewDomain.com/wp-admin

Just replace the NewDomain.com part with your actual domain name.

Anytime we log into our WordPress site, we will be brought to what is known as the WordPress Dashboard, which is also sometimes referred to as the "Back-End" of WordPress.

So in this lesson we will take a quick tour of the dashboard so it makes a little more sense once we get started!

When we install WordPress, the hosting company usually gives us a randomly generated password to use for logging into our site. This will be a great password for security... but hard to remember!

So in this lesson we will be covering how to change our WordPress password.

When we first install WordPress, it comes with some demo content for us to see what it can look like. There is a demo page, a demo post, and a demo comment.

In this lesson we are going to cover how to delete this demo content, so we can start with a completely blank WordPress installation

In this lesson we will be covering how to install themes on WordPress.

Worth Noting: Changing / Installing WordPress themes will NOT delete or remove any of our content (pages, posts, etc). It will only change the style of the site.

If you're totally new to WordPress. I would suggest using the Twenty Sixteen Theme while learning. It's a nice looking, simple theme, which is perfect for beginners (you can always change it later). It's also the theme I will be using for the rest of the course!

Once we have them installed, we can move onto editing WordPress themes to get them looking exactly the way we want (things like colours, fonts, logos, etc).

So in this lesson we will cover how to edit WordPress themes.

In this lesson we will cover how to add pages to WordPress, including text, images, and clickable links.

In this lesson we will cover how to add blog posts to WordPress, including text, images, and clickable links.

In this lesson we will cover how to assign a static front page on WordPress, as well as how to add a separate blog page.

Static Front Page = HomePage 

Normally WordPress but will show a list of our blog posts on the homepage, but we can change this to show a single “static page” instead.

If we do decide to change our homepage to be a static page, we’ll also need to create a new page for our blog posts to show up on.

In this lesson we will be covering how to create Menus on WordPress, which we can use to organise our different pages and posts.

In this lesson we will cover how to use WordPress Widgets to add or change the content that appears on our Sidebar and other Widget Areas.

Worth Noting: Depending on the theme we have installed, we might have more / less Widget Areas available. Although the "Sidebar" and the "Footer" are the most 2 common widget areas.

In this lesson we will be covering how to install plugins on WordPress, which will let us add different things to our site which WordPress doesn’t come with by default.

In this lesson we are going to be covering how to add contact forms on WordPress.

Contact forms are an easy way for our visitors to get in contact with us, and they look great too! 

As WordPress doesn’t come with this feature built in, we will be adding these contact forms using a free plugin called WP Forms.

In this lesson we are going to be covering how to hide specific page titles on WordPress.