The Basics of a WordPress Site

Josh

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With the current trend in marketing there will soon be a day when everyone will need to have a website, even if it's a basic one. To that point, many people choose to work with a WordPress site because they are relatively easy to build, can look great, and have all of the features you could want from a "normal" website, without the price tag. Sure you can spend thousands of dollars on a WordPress site, but what you would get for it vs a site written in HTML from scratch for the same price is hugely different.

If you are going to build yourself a WordPress site, you'll only need a few things:

1: A domain. I like to register them at expertsrs.com because they're cheap, easy to work with, and include private registration for free. This will cut down on the amount of spam you receive.

2: Hosting. I like hostgator.com and am setup as an affiliate with them. Most website hosts will include cPanel access which will give you at least one installer option for WordPress. Most people use Fantastico De Luxe, but you also have an option in the cPanel with hostgator to use "Quick Install". With Quick Install you can also install vTiger or SugarCRM (free CRM software).

3: Time. There is a lot of support online for WordPress (and other options such as drupal or joomla), including youtube videos and WordPress.org. It can take some getting used to, but even if you have to pay someone else to configure it for you and walk you through it, when you get it up and running it's not much more complicated to update a WordPress site than it is to register for and participate on this forum. The joke I usually make, and it's not really a joke, is that if you can change the font in your email you can probably manage a WordPress site.


Some basic terms with a WordPress site:

1. Dashboard: This is where you have access to the administrative functions of your website, including adding and removing content as well as changing the theme.

2. Theme: This is what determines the look and feel of your site. Some folks will think of it as a template, but it's much more than that. It's really cool because it will let you entirely change the look of your website without having to rewrite the content. When you change themes there will be some things you'll need to adjust because not all themes are created exactly alike, but it's much easier than having to rebuild your entire site.

3. Pages: Pages are about what you'd think. Each area on a site is typically a page, for example, home, about us, contact us, on most sites those are all going to be pages.

4. Posts: This is where WordPress gets a little trixy. The posts are great and can really help with SEO (a discussion for later), but what these do is feed into a blog page as running updates. Think of them like journal entries. For an example of this you can visit Blog . What you'll see is a running list of entries that I've made over the last while. Each time I make an update, rather than it getting it's own page, it just goes into the blog. This makes updating your site much easier because you don't have to think about where to structure each new entry. For example, if you have a site about Medicare products and you want to right an article about the Part B deductible being raised, all you would have to do is login to your dashboard, click "+ Post", and then start writing. This will automatically dump it into whatever page you've listed as your blog and it's a great way of adding content in a more casual way.



I work with WordPress sites every day and manage around 120 of my own as well as those of many clients, so I may have oversimplified this or glazed over some points. I am planning on doing a webinar (hopefully next week) on how to manage a WordPress site once it's already up and running. That being said, if you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions, [email protected].

Happy selling!



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Can a person move from one domain to another...i.e. take your domain to someone else when contract up?

Also, how easy is a Facebook business page to develop and manage?
 
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Can a person move from one domain to another...i.e. take your domain to someone else when contract up?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but the answer is probably. What's involved will vary a but. Just changing the domain is fairly simple and seamless. Moving the hosting is a bit more involved, bit of its WordPress to WordPress it's also relatively easy, but a bit more technical. Even if you can't do that yourself, it's fairly cheap to pay someone to do it, maybe $100 tops.

Does that answer your question?
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Also, how easy is a Facebook business page to develop and manage?

Those are pretty easy (15 minutes or less). Where they get tricky it's in promoting them and time consuming to keep updating. If you don't keep updating them it can send the wrong message, but it just takes a few minutes a few times a week.
 
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If you're talking about moving an entire WP site from one host to another - or just changing domains - Wordpress Backup & Restore Service | blogVault « A Premium WordPress Backup and Restore Solution. - one click, a few seconds and it's done.

And for $9mo for a single site - well worth it. It keeps a live working copy of your site. That means if there's any huge issue with your site, just one click to restore.

The built-on export and import features will do almost the same thing for free. All you have to do is backup the file after every update.
 
I meant if you register your site like mynamedotcom with expertsrs can you move it to godaddy.com, or whatever other domain registration sites there are...and build another we page their with same domain name

Ever hear of cool mojito free service for designing fb bus pg?
 
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I meant if you register your site like mynamedotcom with expertsrs can you move it to godaddy.com, or whatever other domain registration sites there are...and build another we page their with same domain name

It depends on where the hosting is. If it's hosted with Hostgator, but the domain is with Godaddy, moving the domain to expertsrs is very simple (domain transfer) and you don't have to move anything. If it's hosted with Godaddy and the domain is there as well, you'll have to move the site too and that is where it can get tricky.
 
I prefer the $9 "one click and it's done" option:-)

I'm sure you're not alone.

$108/year when worst case scenario you have to pay someone $100 to put your site back together from your backup file doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but that's just my take on it.
 
I'm sure you're not alone.

$108/year when worst case scenario you have to pay someone $100 to put your site back together from your backup file doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but that's just my take on it.

There's no contract. $9 - move the site - cancel. Beats $100:-)
 
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