Previously, we talked about themes. If you missed that you can check it out again here: WordPress Themes
So, we’ve got a WordPress on our own URL with a bit of appearance help (our theme) now we need some content.
Everything is a Post
Funny thing about WordPress is that everything is a post well almost everything. Since everything is a post, that’s good news because I like things to be simple so I can easily understand them. WordPress supports custom posts. The first one that seems pretty important is a page. Yeah, a page is really just a special post that is a page. Many of the plugins you use will create custom posts to support what they do: products, advertisements, portfolios, landing pages.
Knowing that makes it easy to add content to your site. At the top of the page, once you’re logged in, there is the word Add with a “+” to the left of it. Just hover over that and you get a bunch of options for content types to be added to your site: post, media (this is videos and pictures), page, project, and user. Just scroll down and pick one of those and WordPress will open up the form to add your content.
Creating/Editing a Post
In the previous post, we recommended using the Divi Theme (and we provide it to all our WordPress clients). The reason is that it has a beautiful visual and block builder but if you didn’t take our advice, you’ll need to learn the Gutenberg Editor which is actually coming right along in the amount of tools and features it offers. You can check it out here: https://gogutenberg.com/ but if you went with our recommendation, there is a complete suite of helpers you can find at Elegant Themes here:
- overview: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/
- getting started: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/visual-builder/
- layouts: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/premade-layouts/
- modules: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/modules/
Where to Start: Homepage
The first thing you should build is your home page. For many, that is all you need one good page with one good call to action and you can implement a layout from Divi and a module and you’re launched. Now you can start to integrate the power of WordPress for easy updates to add more and more pages and blog posts to your site to provide value to your followers and customers.
Now you should have a page and maybe you’ll get carried away tonight and have a basic 5 page site ready to add a menu to or rather edit the default menu. We’ll get to that shortly but before that, we need a backup strategy for your content. Hopefully this is already done for you but we’ll check that next.
