For the past few days, I’ve been writing about how to register your domain name and how to setup a hosting account, even how to install WordPress on your web server using a simple point and click tool called Fantastico. None of those challenges even come close to what I’m about to ask you to do … write content.
Let’s start with the basics of what your website is going to need and how we can put them together in WordPress.
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Add a New Page in WordPress
The first thing that your website needs is a home page. This is where people land when they come to your site, it’s the most commonly loaded page on your site and … it’s the one Google will index the most often.
Let’s open your WordPress content manager by going to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and logging in. Once you’ve done that, click the Write tab at the top and then select page. WordPress will now prompt you for a title and some content. Make a series of pages for your website, clicking either Save (which saves it for you but hides it from the public) or Publish (which posts it live to the web) after each one. Add each of the following pages:
As you’ll note, I didn’t add an About page because your default WordPress installation already has one. If it’s not there, add an about page as well. Now that we have our pages, we might want to rearrange our default page order (it’s alphabetical right now) or even assign some pages to be the children of others in the menu. For example, maybe the Privacy Policy should be a child page of the About Us page. To do this, let’s click the Manage tab at the top of WordPress and switch to Pages where we’ll see a list of our pages to date. Click the name of any page and you’ll enter the page editor, let’s scroll to the bottom of the page to find some advanced features.
Advanced Features
If we want to change the Parent of our page, simply open the Page Parent accordion and use the pull down menu to switch it to our preferred option. I’ve setup my fictious site with the following page structure:
- Home
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service
If I’d like to change the order of pages in the site, I can use a weight system by opening the Page Order accordion. It’s a little funny it’s really easy to understand. All pages by default have a weight of 0, if you want a page to be float to the beginning of a menu, make it lighter (-1 … -10) if you want it to sink to the bottom, make it heavier (1 … 10).
Now, if you’d like to add some more pages or change / delete the ones we’ve added here you should take the time to setup the pages with the content and in the order you prefer. Spend some time and get it right, on Monday I’ll write about the difference between a Post and a Page, plus we’ll look at how to add a new theme to your WordPress website. Check back tomorrow or sign up for my
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