Guide to Extending with WordPress

You have installed WordPress and you all ready to set up a stellar and beautiful blog. Where do you start?

WordPress is more than a blogging tool. It is a powerful web publishing platform, both easy to use and overwhelming with options. To paraphrase Peter Parker’s uncle:

With great power comes a lot of admin option screens.

This guide will focus on the essential steps for you to get started on the writing and organizing of your new WordPress blog. We will ask you to hold off worrying about the visual appearance (theming) until a bit later. Think of this as building a home; we want to pour the foundation and raise the structural framing before deciding the colors to paint the kitchen.

Entering the Mystery Land of the Wordpress Dashboard

Enter the magic kingdom of managing your Wordpress site, the dashboard, where you pop the hood of your blog and touch the engine.

Adjusting a Few Key Settings

In a new Wordpress site, we first want to twiddle a few knobs and enter some settings that will make your blog engine run smoothly.

Organizing Your Site With Categories and Tags

Wordpress offers two powerful ways to organize your site content. We suggest setting up a system / approach for doing this from the start.

A Few WordPress Resources

• Reclaim Hosting WordPress documentation
• Beginner’s Guide for WordPress
• Getting Started with WordPress (WordPress Codex)
• Learn WordPress (Tutorials Point)

Featured Image: The Art of WordPress flickr photo by mkhmarketing shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license