Quite a few people have (justifiably!) been asking me how to get their site up and running. The site works using ‘Wordpress‘, so you might want to have a brief skim over their documentation if any of them below doesn’t make any sense.

Logging in

When you log into your blog (use the ‘backdoor’ – conservationtoday.org/whateveryoursiteaddressis/wp-admin.php), you’ll see the dashboard – which shows you at a glance what’s going on in your blog. The bar on the left lets you play around with all the various features of your blog.

Making your blog look the way you want

On the left-hand bar is a section called ‘appearance’. Click on it, and you’ll see all the themes that you’ve currently got installed, and you can change your blog to one of those. If you don’t like any of the ones I’ve installed, you can just click ‘add new themes’ in the sub-menu that’s appeared beneath the ‘appearance’ button and search the huge online selection at wordpress.com

The other section, ‘widgets’, sounds a bit more scary. A ‘widget’ is just a clever gadget that does something on a blog – a bit like the various dials and screens on a car’s dashboard. As an example, on my blog I’ve used the ‘twitter’ widget to display posts form my Twitter account at the side of my blog. Just drag and drop any widget from the box in the centre of the screen into a section on the right. Now you can put a search bar, RSS feed or simply a bit of static text wherever you want on your blog. You may find that you want a widget that I haven’t installed yet onto the server – if so, just go to the ‘plugins’ section and click ‘add new’.

Adding Pages

Pages are ’static content’, by which I mean they’re not going to change that often. Unlike a blog, which is constantly updating, your ‘about you’ section isn’t going to change that frequently (…well mine doesn’t anyway). What you’re reading right now is a static page, while the ‘admin blog’ is obviously changing quite frequently!

To add a page, just click the ‘add new’ button. You can type into the editor exactly as you would any other text editor, and you can add pictures by clicking the star to the left of the words ‘add media’ just above the text editor. Note that a page can have a ‘parent’ set in the ‘attributes’ box on the right hand side. This only really matters for your site’s menu, since pages with parents will normally be in sub-menus from that parent. This page has a parent, which is why it’s in a sub-menu on the site.

Blogs

This is where the fun starts. Blogs can be written in exactly the same way as pages (just click ‘add new’ in the ‘posts’ section), but they have two additional features – tags and categories. Tags are words that are associated with that post, and can help your readers navigate your site (especially if you use the ‘tag cloud’ widget), as well as helping search engines find your post when people search for particular things. You can have as many tags as you want, but try to limit yourself to words that you think would help others decide what your post is about and whether they’d want to read it. A post can only be in one category, however. This helps your organise your blog a bit better – for example, I might have entries on my blog that are to do with computer-stuff (like how wonderful Wordpress is) that I don’t want interfering with my conservation articles. So I just put all my nerdy bits in a different category, and then readers can jump to that category if they want to know about those things.

Settings

Your ’settings’ section lets you decide whether or not people can search for your blog entries on Google, whether you’ll let anyone leave comments on your articles, and things like that. Have a play around – you can’t really do any harm.

…Other Things

This very short document can’t really do justice do Wordpress – it’s a very powerful system, and it’s isn’t just for building blogs – you can make static websites with it, as well as portfolios for your photos, songs – anything! If you want to know more have a look on the Wordpress ‘codex’, and if that doesn’t help very much drop me an email. I’m going to try and keep updating these instructions, but I am but one man! Ask me what you need to know and I’ll try to make sure everyone finds out.