– TCDavis

Let’s say you receive a document from a friend who asks you to put it on your WordPress website.  You may be tempted simply to select the whole document, copy it to your clipboard, paste it into an editing window, and then publish it to your website.  On rare occasions this may give you what you want, but usually you will find that what gets published to your site doesn’t look like the document you copied and pasted.  Perhaps pictures are out of place.  Bolding and italics don’t come through.  Indentations are dropped.  Why?  Because the editing program you used, perhaps Windows Live Writer or the post or page editor of your WordPress Dashboard, didn’t recognize the formatting and styling codes which were embedded in the original document. 

The failsafe way to achieve the formatting and styling you want is to paste unformatted text into the editing window and then use the word-processing buttons along the top of the window to apply indentations,  bolding, italics, underlining, and whatever other effects you wish. Then when you click the "publish" or "update" button your copy will display correctly on the Internet.

But let’s say a colleague doesn’t know how important it is to start with unformatted text.  Let’s say he/she emails you a Microsoft Word document, with quite a lot of styling and formatting in it.  How do you take all of that out?  Well, the easiest way is to open the document in a word processor and then go to the File menu and select "save as," and in the "save as type" window select  ".txt".  This will make a new version of the document, a .txt version, which will have no formatting or styling.  Once you have saved that .txt file, double click on it to open it in the word processor you’re using.  Now you will see all the words, but the styling and formatting has dropped out.  All you have left is words, and occasional blank lines where one paragraph ends and another begins.  This is good!  This is what you want! Now select all of that unformatted and unstyled text and copy it to your clipboard.  Then paste it into the editing window which you are using to prepare your WordPress site’s posts and pages.  Now that the text is in your editing window you are ready to insert pictures and apply styling to the text, using the buttons above the editing window.  When your page looks exactly as you wish, click on the "publish" or "update" button.  This publishes the page to your website.

Finally, let’s say you’re working with a group of friends who have agreed to write articles for your website.  If you train them to save their articles as .txt files instead of .doc ones, then you can forget the middle step described in the above paragraph.  When you receive a .txt file from them, you need only copy and paste it into a post or page editing window, then apply the formatting and styling you wish.  You’ll find that this training saves a lot of headaches in getting text to behave on your WordPress website.

1.  Scroll down to the bottom right hand of the website and under the Meta section click on “login”.  Then fill in the user name and the password and click on the “log in” button.  The Dashboard page will open for you if you got the user name and password correct.

2.  Some WordPress sites do not have a login link on the front page.  In this case, first visit the front page with your internet browser, then, in your browser’s url window, just after the url that is already there, add the following:  /wp-admin.  Then press the “Enter” key on your keyboard.
This will give you a prompt to enter the administrator user name and password.  Fill these in and click on the “log in” button.  If you got the user name and password correct you will see the Dashboard page.

View the next post in this series:  Getting Text to Behave on Your WordPress Website

The main page in the back end is called the Dashboard.  In a car the dashboard is where all the controls are.  It’s the same in a WordPress website.  The Dashboard is where the administrator  accesses  links to edit all of the content on the website.

This WordPress Primer post explains most of the links on the left side of the Dashboard.

Site Stats–gives a graphical depiction of how many unique persons clicked on a certain post or page over a day, a week, a month, etc.  “Unique” means a different individual.  When a user clicks on a post or page more than once, only one of those clicks counts as a unique visitor click.

Updates–lists all updates available for the core software of WordPress, plugins, and themes (see definitions below).  Updates should be installed to keep the website secure and to take advantage of new features.  When an update is available the administrator sees a black circle with a number inside it.  The number indicates the total number of updates available for installation.  Before updating one should backup the database of the site and all site files, just in case something goes wrong in the updating process.  There are plugins (see definition below) to make site backup easy.  Clicking on the “update automatically” link updates software easily and quickly.

Posts–Posts are articles published to the blog section of the website.  WordPress, a lean and easy-to-use content management system, was originally designed for blogging, but now is sometimes used to maintain websites without blogs.  Another way to use WordPress, exemplified by Teledavis.com,  is to move the blog posts from the front of the site to one of the inside pages, accessible via the top navigation menu.

All Posts–chronologically lists all blog posts on the site, with the most recent ones on top.

Add New–click on this control link to add a new post to the site.

Categories–click on this control link to see present post categories and add new ones.  After a site has accumulated many posts the administrator assigns a category to each, in order to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.  The administrator creates the categories, according to the topics that would be of interest to visitors. The categories can often be accessed in a pull-down menu that appears in the site sidebar.  See an example at CyberKenBlog.

Post Tags–click on this control link to see all tags that have been put on blog posts  and to add new tags to posts.  A tag is a word or phrase appropriate to the content of a post or page, and which makes your pages and posts easy to index by internet search engines.  If you want  visitors to find o your posts and pages, make sure to tag them abundantly with words or phrases that Googlers would likely use.

Media
Library–a list of all pictures and other files that have been uploaded to the site’s resource bank in order to insert them into pages and posts

Links
All Links–a list of all live links that appear on the site, both in pages, posts, and in sidebars;  these links may connect to content on the site or elsewhere on the internet.
Add New–click on this control link to make a new live link.

Link Categories–click on this control link to see all categories assigned to links, and to add new categories.

Pages
All Pages–a list of all pages on the site.  A page contains content that remains fairly constant and does not need to be changed frequently, such as an “About Us” page, or a “Contact Us” page.
Add New–click on this control link to add a new page to the site.

Comments–a list of all comments left by visitors to the site.  The administrator gets an email when a comment is left, and can then approve or disapprove the comment in the comments section of the Dashboard.  If the administrator approves a comment it will then appear below the post, on the “front end” for all site visitors to see.

Appearance
Themes–Themes are software packages which when installed give a certain look to the site, for instance, the number and layout ofcolumns, and text colors and styles.  Themes also facilitate special features, like the slider at CyberKenBlog.com, which shows excerpts of recent blog posts at the top of the site.  Numerous themes can be installed on the same WordPress site, but only one can be active at a time.  Changes in a site’s appearance take effect immediately when the administrator deactivates one theme and activates another.  There are hundreds of free themes for WordPress, and thousands of commercial ones.
Widgets–Widgets are graphical aids providing easy control of what viewers will see in various areas of a web page.  It’s much easier to show rather than tell how widgets work!  Basically, widgets let an administrator place blocks of content and configure the content that will appear in those blocks.

Plugins–are small software packages that perform specific tasks on the website.  Clicking on the plugins link shows a link to all installed plugins, and lets the administrator add new ones.  Most plugins are free, and are very easy to install and uninstall.  Some plugins continue to be supported by coders after the initial version, but some are not.  Before you download a plugin one should make sure that it is compatible with the version of core WordPress software installed at the site.

Users–lists all the persons who may read, edit, administer the content of a post or page, and leave comments.  The users section lets the administrator control who can do what:  read, edit, administratrate, leave comments.

This post has covered just the major links on a WordPress Dashboard.  Look to CyberKenBlog for more detailed instructions.

In the next post for WordPress Primer I’ll explain how to log in to the “back end” of a WordPress website.

View the next post:  Two Ways to Log In to Back End of a WordPress Website

Other than winning the lottery so that you can hire another webmaster, training a web team is the only solution I know for solving this classic problem.  But how can you train a team of volunteers who have busy lives, and not much time to learn and practice?  How do you keep in touch with them and teach them, and respond to  their questions and coach them as day by day they practice their skills?

This post covers several free resources for communicating with your web team members.  Many of them are Google offerings, so your web team members will benefit from opening a Gmail account.  From the Gmail inbox many of these resources are available by links:

• Google Groups
• Google Photos (uses the free editor, Picasa)
• Google Documents
• Google Chat and Hangouts

In addition to these Google resources this post will cover one more, Join.me.

O.K. now for details:

Google Groups:  At the top left of your Gmail inbox, under the “other” link, select “Groups”, and follow the instructions for opening a Google group.  Google groups are listservs.  A listserv is a speedy and secure way to send and receive email messages within a group of people with common interests and commitments.  Here’s how it works:  An administrator opens the group and invites friends to join.  When they enroll they immediately begin receiving messages sent to the group address, and they can share a message with all group members by addressing an email note to the group address.  All messages sent to the group are archived at the home page of the group.  As new members join they can visit that page and see back messages.  Communicating through a listserv is safer than sending messages by pasting multiple email addresses in an addressee window, because spammers can cull addresses from intercepted messages, but they can’t get at the individual email addresses of listserv members.  You might want to open a Google group for your web team, because back messages will be archived and will be available if a member loses a group message.

Google Photos:  Click on the “photos” link at the top of your Gmail inbox and upload your personal photos to a Google album using the free photo editor, Picasa.  Google photo albums will give your web team members a very handy way to share photos that you may want to use for your website.  If you have some volunteer photographers in your organization, you can give them the url of an album and ask them to upload their photos there.  You can give the album url to the person who makes site posts so that he/she can download photos for web pages.  Thus, Google photo albums is a convenient mid-point between those who take photos and those who use them.

Google Documents:  Click on the Documents link off  your Gmail inbox.  Then, click on the “create” link at the top left of the window.  Notice that you can create several kinds of documents, including word processing documents, presentations (think Power Point), spreadsheets, drawings, and forms.  All of these can be used on websites.  Also notice that on the right side of the Gmail inbox window at the top is a “share” button.  There you can authorize other persons to collaborate with you on these documents.  It’s so hard to work with others on documents when you email the documents  back and forth because it’s hard to keep track of the latest version.  But by collaborating with Google Documents all the co-workers see the same page, edit the same page, the one on the Google server.  If the content on your website requires review and reworking by a team before it reaches the final editing stage, Google Documents is the tool for you!

Google Chat and Hangouts:  Your team members will save time by meeting together online.  Google chat can be done by text, but if your team members can afford webcams, then you can see and hear each other.  Webcams are getting better and better and less expensive, so try to acquire a webcam for each team member.  Google hangouts is a feature of the recently opened Google+ social network.  Hangouts permit up to ten people to video chat with each other for free.  That means they can see and hear each other in real time.  No need to meet together in person.  Call your web team members to a hangout and do your business online!

Finally, one more tool for online meetings:  Join.me.  If you go to Join.me you will see a button for inviting persons to join you for an online meeting.  When you click that button you receive a link to email  the persons whom you want to invite to the meeting.  When they receive that link via email and click on it, in a few moments they will be able to see your Desktop.  As you move your cursor back and forth, they can see that.  They can see whatever you do on your own computer.  If you first establish an audio connection with all meeting members and then establish this Join.me visual connection with them, you then have all the tools you need to conduct a free webinar!  You can play a Google presentation file on your Desktop and they can see it and hear you as you teach.  This is a free way to do distance learning.  Details are explained in this CyberKenBlog post.

View the next post in this series:  The Control Center for a WordPress Website

I know you’re eager to learn about WordPress, but WordPress is just a small piece of a much larger communication system.  To find your way around in that huge system, the internet, you have to learn some names for things.  So, in the next four posts I’ll do my best to teach you the ropes, with this plan:

• Post #1:  Very basic terms
  
• Post#2:  Terms related to networks and communicating
• Post#3:  Terms related to site promotion and social networking
• Post#4:  Terms related specifically to WordPress

Ready to begin?  O.K., here’s starting Post#1:  Very Basic Terms

You are viewing this screen on a computer, or maybe even a smartphone. Much of the information you consume on these digital devices is provided by computers called “servers,” because they serve information to you when you request it, usually by clicking on a live link, which is nothing more than the address of some piece of information residing on a server.  The internet is the HUGE collection of all the servers and corporate and personal digital devices which are networked (tied together) by both wired and wireless connections.

Computers are examples of hardware, that is, manufactured physical devices which make digital communication possible.  Other examples include digital telephones, ipods, garage door openers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), thumb drives . . . .The list grows longer and longer every day.  Software is digital information that is stored on, and often performs some task as it runs on some piece of hardware.  If that information is merely stored and is not organized to perform a task it is called data.  If, on the other hand, it is programmed to perform a task, such as send email, show you a web page, govern how your car runs, it is called an application, or app for short.

Every digital device comes with an operating system, OS for short, a core of programs which enable that device to perform its basic functions.  If you run the Windows OS, perhaps it’s Windows 7, or XP, or Windows 2000.  If you run a Mac, the most recent OS is Lion.  If you don’t like the expense of updating your commercial OS, you can install an absolutely free one based on open source code.  I like Ubuntu, a Gnome version of Linux.

Operating systems are periodically updated to work out bugs (yes, even the most carefully coded programs have some mistakes in them which show up only after much use by many users); and also, to patch holes exploited by malicious users who love to create viruses to destroy others’ data, or to obtain unauthorized access to information.  Whatever operating system you use, make sure you receive notice of security updates, and perform those updates promptly to keep your computer and data secure.

In the early history of personal computing applications resided on your personal computer.  You paid for them and received a license to operate them.   But nowadays,  more and more applications reside on servers.  As more and more data and applications are accessed from servers and not from your personal computer, we’re coming to speak of “the cloud,” which is the sum total of all digital information stored on servers owned and operated by corporations.  Our personal documents,  financial records, photographs, music, everything is getting stored in “the cloud.” Scary, huh?  Yes, we’re trading convenience of access in exchange for a loss of privacy.  But let me not digress.

The popular name for the internet is the World Wide Web, or Web for short.  Most of our online business is done with an application called a web browser, which allows us to send requests (through live links) for information stored on servers, and then see that information displayed on web pages.

Many people think that web pages are stored as total units of information, but actually, web pages are constructed in an instant from pieces of information that are stored on many different servers, some of which may be located on the other side of the world!  Text comes from one server, pictures from another, maybe music or video from another, and so on.  The web browser sends requests to all these sources of information and then assembles them all, almost instantaneously, in a coherent whole.  Slick, huh?  There are many brands of web browser, and because web browsers are so important in managing information and marketing products and services, there is a cut throat competition among the people who code web browsers.  Examples include:  Safari (the browser that comes as part of the operating system for Mac users), Internet Explorer (the OS browser for Windows users), and some free, open source competitors, such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

To communicate with servers via your personal digital device (computer or smart phone) you upload and download information.  Uploading is transferring information from your personal device to the server.  Downloading is receiving information from the server onto your personal device.  When you download a file from the internet, make sure you know to what folder your browser is downloading it.  Otherwise you may not be able to find it easily once the download is completed.  I prefer the Chrome browser, because when you download a file with Chrome you can see an icon for the file in the lower left corner of the browser window.  You can see a pie graph of the downloading file, which tells you the progress of the download.  When the download is completed the icon blinks.  Then you can drag and drop the icon onto your desktop.  This is the absolute best system for downloading, in my humble opinion.

Your personal device stores all information on an internal drive, either on a spinning hard drive, or a no-moving-parts flash drive, or perhaps a hybrid of the two.  If you’re a windows user you can see all the information on your internal drive by clicking on the Start menu in the bottom left corner of your screen, and then click on “Computer”.  There you will see information stored in several preset folders, such as Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.  If you’re a Mac user you access this information under the apple menu at the top left of your screen.

One more term for this post: “url.”  This stands for “uniform resource locator”.  If you look at the top long window in your web browser, that’s where you will see the URL for the information your browser is presently displaying.  A url is simply a web address for some item of information stored on a server, perhaps a web page, a music file, a picture, etc.  Most urls begin with:  http://www.  Http stands for “hypertext transfer protocol,” which tells your browser:  be ready to process this information using HTML tools (standing for hypertext markup language–more on this later).  The “www” tells the browser that this information is available on the World Wide Web, the internet.  What comes next is the domain where the information is stored.  Each web site has a registered domain.  In the case of this page the domain is teledavis.com.  In some URLs you may see a forward slash after the domain, which means that the piece of information is stored within a folder bearing the title that comes after the slash.  Sometimes the file may be nested in a series of folders.  The final entry in the url is the name of the file being accessed.  It might be a web page file, in which case the file would have the suffix .html, or .htm.  Or, it might be a document file, in which case the suffix would be something like .doc, or .txt, or .rtf, or .pdf.  Or, it might be a music file, in which case the suffix is often .mp3.  When your browser accesses that file at the end of the the url it looks for an application on your computer that is designed to display or play that kind of file.  For instance, if the file is a .doc, it will likely open in your preferred word processing application, such as Microsoft Word, or Open Office Writer.  If the file is an .mp3, it will likely open in iTunes, if that’s your default application for playing music files.  And if your browser doesn’t know which application to use to play or display the file, it will open a small browser window to let you search your applications for one that you think will play or display the file correctly.

Well, that’s more than enough information for one lesson!  For the next post on learning the ropes in cyberspace we’ll look at  the names of hardware and software tools which we use to network and communicate.

View the next post:  Free Communication Tools for Your Web Team

When you prepare a page on your personal computer and are ready to share it with the world on the internet, you publish that page.  There is a button in WordPress for publishing.  When you press that button the copy of the document you have been preparing gets uploaded to the computer which serves your web pages.  When that upload is completed, presto, your document is published!

There are two kinds of documents that you can publish with WordPress: posts and pages.  Before we see how they compare, let’s talk about blogging.

Blog is short for web log.  Originally blogs were a simple way to maintain and share journals.  Daily or weekly you journaled, and then shared what you wrote with others.  As blogging became more and more popular the software got more sophisticated, automatically dating entries, and archiving them.  WordPress was originally a blogging software; and it is still used primarily that way, with blog articles appearing on the front page, the most recent one on top.  My blog, CyberKenBlog.com, is a good example of WordPress used in this way.

But WordPress can easily be adjusted so that the blog pages are displayed on the inside, not on the front page.  This site, Teledavis.com, is a good example of WordPress used this way.  You are looking at a blog page, but notice it’s not on the front page of the site.

You can choose to use your blog pages either way, but it’s a good idea to use them in some fashion, because blogging will draw visitors to your site.  More about that later.

Now, I said there are two kinds of documents that WordPress can publish:  posts, and pages:

Posts are blog publications.  The most recent post always appears on the top and front of your site, so that it’s immediately visible to visitors.  If you have published many posts, older ones get automatically archived.  At the bottom of a blog post is a space for visitors to leave comments.  You will want visitors to comment, because this attracts more visitors.  You can control who can and cannot comment, but it’s a good idea to be as open to commenting as you can.  People like friendly bloggers!

Pages are single publications that display information.  They can be edited, but usually the information they contain is stable, for instance, addresses and phone numbers on a “contact us” page.  Pages are usually accessible by click tabs across the top or side of a WordPress site.  Examples on this site are “Designing Your Website,” and “Training Your Members.”
In this course you will learn how to link the posts and pages you have published to menu tabs, so that people can find their way around your site.  WordPress makes menus very easy!

View the next post:  Can You Speak Geek?  Learning the Ropes in Cyberspace

Welcome to the WordPress Primer blog, where you’ll learn the fundamentals of WordPress, a free and easy-to-use online software that was originally developed for blogging, but now is used for many other kinds of websites too.

Through my company, Teledavis, LLC, I help “the little guy” with affordable and user-friendly websites.  Several years ago I began using Google sites and Pbworks for this purpose, but I have come to realize that WordPress is a more flexible tool, slightly more complicated but still easy to use, and also FREE!  So, now Teledavis sites use WordPress exclusively.

Here are some things I love about WordPress:

• It’s free, open source software that’s easy to install and update.
• It’s super easy to make new blog or page posts, and to edit the ones already up.
• It provides an easy and secure way to interact with site visitors by way of comments.
• It’s really easy to change the look of your site through the use of themes, many of which are free.
• With hundreds if not thousands of plugins, it’s easy to make your site do things that aren’t built into the core package.  Many of these plugins help your site to interact with other sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.
• It’s easy with site stats to follow your site’s popularity, and tell which posts are popular and which not.
• It’s easy to install a backup plugin so that your site’s files get backed up on a regular basis.
• WordPress is used by a huge number of people (22 out of every 100 new sites in the U.S., according to a recent study).  A large user base means you have lots of people to go to for learning and problem solving.  It also insures that the software will continue to be developed and improved.

BTW, this blog uses WordPress, so I love it because it enables me to keep posting here, and on the other Teledavis sites (see the home page) with minimal effort!

View the next post:  Publishing Posts and Pages