WordPress for Beginners 2021

Book excerpt: Master WordPress using our proven step-by-step visual approach (over 330 screenshots). This book is a major new release for 2021, covering the latest version of WordPress. If major changes do occur to WordPress during 2021, you can visit our updates web page for details, so you can always be up to date. Building a beautiful, professional-looking WordPress website (or a blog) is no longer the computer geeks' domain. WordPress makes it possible for anyone to create and run a website that looks great on any device - PC, Mac, tablet, and phone. Whether you want to build a business site, an affiliate site, a hobby site, or a blog, WordPress is a great choice, and this book shows you how. The primary goal of this book is to take anyone, even an absolute beginner, from zero to WordPress "guru" in a few short hours. Inside this book, veteran WordPress expert Andy Williams will start at the very beginning. You'll learn essential topics like: - The two different versions of WordPress. - How to set up web hosting and domain registrar the correct way. - Installing WordPress. - A Dashboard overview. - Cleaning out the stuff that is installed by default. - Finding and installing WordPress themes to change the look and feel of your website instantly. - Plugins. What they are and how they can add fabulous features to your site. - How to update WordPress, themes, and plugins. - Understand every single setting. You can use our suggested defaults. - How to find and use the RSS feeds to help search engines find your content. - Importance of user-profiles and assigning an image (Gravatar) to your email address. - Creating great navigation systems on your site, with custom menus, internal linking, and related posts. - Enabling and dealing with visitor comments. - Using the media library for images, video, and more. - The difference between pages and posts, and when to use each one. - Effective use of categories and tags. Misusing these can get your site penalized or even banned from search engines. - How to create content using both the Classic editor and the new Gutenberg editor. - Publish or schedule posts for a future date. - Post revisions. - Two different types of homepage. A blog-style page v a more traditional "static" homepage. - Using widgets on your site to add neat features. - Types of sites you can build with WordPress (blog, business, typical site), with videos on setting these up. We'll also cover a few vital plugins to: - Automatically take backups and get them sent to the cloud. - Automatically create important legal pages on your site, like terms and privacy policy. - Creating a contact page so visitors can contact you. - Add a related posts section to the end of every post to keep visitors on site longer. - Setup good SEO practices. - Setup social sharing buttons on your site, so visitors can easily share your pages with friends. Most people learn better when they can see what they are reading about, so this book isn't shy with screenshots. There are over 330 of them, plus additional videos, showing you precisely what you will see on your screen and prompting you to take specific actions as you learn and master WordPress. You may have heard that WordPress has a steep learning curve. With this book, you won't even notice it. Most chapters end with a "Tasks to Complete" section. By completing these tasks, you'll not only become proficient with WordPress; you'll become confident at using WordPress. By the end of the book, you'll be building great looking, professional WordPress websites that look fantastic on any device. And you'll enjoy doing it! Note: This book covers the self-hosted .org version of WordPress but contains a hack for the .com users to switch their dashboard so they can follow along.