WordPress started in 2003 as a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a rudimentary website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But because it is an “open source” program, a vast number of WordPress programmers have turned WordPress into the most popular website content management system (CMS). According to DeviousMedia.com, it is estimated that 15% of the top 10 million websites have been created with WordPress.
WordPress designs are based on themes. Themes define the layout of a website and define the overall look and functionality of a website through the use of images, menus and cascading style sheet (CSS) webpage layouts. The primary advantage of the themes concept is that it makes it very easy to customize the look-and-feel of a WordPress site. There are thousands of themes available, many of which are free. The disadvantage of themes is that once you select a theme, there are some restrictions to some of the things you can do on the website.
When you login, you are presented with the Dashboard.
There are many things you can do from the Dashboard, but initially I’d suggest only doing things in the following areas:
Media (LCC and LCCA), Pages (LCC and LCCA), Posts (LCC), and Menus (LCC)
The Media area allows you to upload any type of file including images, documents and videos to the Library. The process for uploading to the Library is very straightforward. All you need to do is click on the Add New Link under Media and then select or drag/drop the files into WordPress. Each uploaded file is given a page, but you typically won’t want to view these media files as pages. What you will want is the File URL to use in a web link or image tag (if you want to dig into the HTML). To get the File URL simply “Edit” the file and copy/paste from the box on the right side.
The Pages area allows you to add, edit, or delete a web page. In the add/edit area is where you give a page a title and provide the content for the page. Media content from the Library can be added by simply clicking on the Add Media button. In addition, an in-line editor allows for many features including defining different text formatting features, easily adding web links, the ability to switch to HTML editing mode (this is necessary for 2 column pages) and the capability to paste directly content directly from MS Word. When you create a new page, there are some things you will probably want to “turn off” for each page. At a minimum, you should duplicate what is currently selected/unselected on the existing pages. In order to put any changes into effect, you must “Publish” the page. Before you publish you can preview the page. Also remember that when you create a new page, no one will be able to find it until you place a link to it on the existing site. To link to a page, you just need to identify the page_id of the page and use that in your web address link.
The Posts area works exactly like the Pages area. Adding posts on the LCC site is how the newsfeed gets its content. When creating a new post, you must select the News category for it to be added to the newsfeed.
The Menu area is where you can add/remove/edit the menus on the LCC site. To modify the menu on the LCCA site, you must edit the HTML code on the sidebar.php file accessed via the Appearance -> Editor area.e Appearance -> Editor area.