What is WordPress?
WordPress is one of the applications available in CI Keys and is by far the most popular. It is an online, open source tool for making websites or blogs. Most people who use WordPress are often shocked by how easy it is to use and are complemented by friends and family on their ability to create a website. All of the examples in the “What is CI Keys” video were created using WordPress. The first step to using WordPress is installing it on your domain.
Installing WordPress
WordPress is one of the many, and most used, web applications that you can install within CI Keys. Not only is it one of the most used on CI Keys, but it’s one of the most used web publishing platforms on the internet as a whole. This video will walk you through getting a WordPress site installed on your Keys account.
Tour of WordPress Dashboard
The WordPress dashboard is your control center where you create all the content for your site, make adjustments to the appearance, and control the settings of how it behaves. Watch the video below for an overview.
Selecting a Theme
Themes control the look and feel of your website, sort of like a Template in Microsoft Word. Themes are created by designers to allow you to pop in your content and end up with an aesthetically pleasing, professional-looking site (without knowing a single bit of code). Themes dictate the color of the site, the layout, location of header, font size and color, look and feel of the menu, location and availability of widgets, etc. Something to keep in mind, is that some themes allow you to easily make changes to aspects of the design and some do not. The process of finding and applying a theme is quite simple, selecting a theme can be quite time consuming since there are thousands to choose from. Check out this video for an overview of selecting a theme.
Customize a Theme
Themes are the most unique aspect of WordPress since all of them behave differently, have different features built in, and have different levels of customization. Due to these facts, customizations will vary by theme, but the video below will show you where customizations can be made and some commonalities across the theming world.
Posts vs Pages
Posts and pages are nearly identical in the way that they’re created, but their nature is very different. Think of a post as an update to a constantly evolving feed of information. Pages, on the other hand, are for more static content that is more informative and not as consistently changed, much like this page. The video below explains in more detail.
Creating a Post/Page (and Adding Media to a Page)
As mentioned above, the process for creating a post is nearly identical to creating a page. The video below will walk you through the process of creating a post/page and adding media to a page.