I was recently speaking with a web client about WordPress and he asked a fundamental question – what is WordPress. I’ve been developing sites with WordPress for a while now that I forgot about this basic, yet important, questions. So, let’s take a look at what WordPress is.

Let’s go back into ancient web history (like 10 years ago.) At this time all web pages were custom crafted to include both design elements – things like menus, graphics, colors and layout – and content. Every time you wanted to make a change to your page you had to go to the ‘webmaster’ or the person who could make this change for you. It didn’t matter is the change was something as simple as correcting a spelling mistake. The webmaster was all powerful and all changes had to go through that person.

Well, people soon grew tired of having go funnel every change through the webmaster and several solutions were offered to separate the content from the design. At first, these solutions were highly technical and didn’t always work well; however, over time these tools matured and there are several good CMS’s (or Content Management Systems) available today. WordPress is one of these CMS’s.

Interestingly enough, WordPress didn’t start out life as a CMS. It was – and still is – a blogging tool. Initially a key requirement of blogging tool was that it needed to allow anyone – not just the webmaster – enter blogging content. If you could use a word processor, you could add and edit your blog content in WordPress. As WordPress grew it added features beyond basic blogging. The result today is a robust system for developing and maintaining a blog or many other types of web sites.

So how does WordPress work? Let’s dive in!

WordPress has 4 main parts:

• Core
• Database
• Theme
• Plug-In’s

If you’re a technical person you know there are more parts, but these are the major pieces to any WordPress site. These four parts work together to generate the pages that are delivered to your web browser. Let’s look at how these parts work together. (This discussion is focused on hosted WordPress sites. WordPress offers a service to host a site for you, but that solution isn’t as flexible as having your own site so we’re not covering it here.)

WordPress Core

The WordPress core is the basic functionality that is maintained at wordpress.org. The core has undergone a number of revisions over time. As of October 2010 the current version of the WordPress core is 3.0.1. The core is written in php – a programming language that easily integrates with html, the language of web pages. The core contains much of the basic functions that get your content and deliver that content to your web browser. The core also contains the functionality for the WordPress administrative panels. It’s really not a good idea (nor is it really ever needed) to modify the core.

Database

OK, now that we have the core WordPress, where does WordPress go to get the data that’s supposed to be delivered to the browser? It goes to the database. Every WordPress installation has a database. A database is a collection of related information – like all your content – the text, the graphics that display in a page, the comments others leave for you and so on. The WordPress database is stored in a mysql database. Mysql is used because it’s a great open source (free to use) database that’s easily available on almost every web host. The WordPress core contains programming routines that get the correct data from mysql to format your pages. When you add new content, that content is stored in the mysql database. All this happens behind the scenes so you really don’t need to know much about how databases work. There’s no need to (and it’s generally a bad idea to) modify the WordPress database directly.

Theme

Now that we have the basic content the next step is to format it in the way you want. This is where the themecomes into play. A WordPress theme is a collection of files that gives your site the look and feel you want. There are millions of WordPress themes. Some of the themes are free and some of them are licensed.

Themes provide the basic look and feel of a site, but most people want to customize the theme to their needs. Fortunately themes are customizable. Some themes require you to dive deep under the hood and know html, CSS and php to do the customization. Other themes allow you to make many changes via simple administrative panel settings. For example the Tekpals site was developed with the Modularity theme from Graph Paper Press. As you can see from this demo, much of the basic theme functionality is present. However, we extensively modified the theme to give our site the look and feel we wanted. Tekpals has developed customized themes for very specialized applications; however, pre-built themes offer some significant cost savings.

Our experience is that most themes need a combination of customized settings and custom code to work the way you want. Tekpals is well versed in making these customizations for you.

Plug-In’s

The final piece to this puzzle are the plug-ins. A plug-in is custom code that can be added to WordPress to provide additional functionality. Many great (and some not so great) plug-ins are available. Many of these are free. One plug-in that comes with the standard WordPress distribution and we highly recommend is the Akismet plug-in. This plug-in catches spam disguised as a comment and quarantines it for your review. This way spammers won’t be able to clog up your blog with useless and distracting comments.

There are thousands of plug-in and we’re well versed on how to get them up and running and playing nicely together. We’re also able to develop a custom plug-in if you have a highly specialized need that can’t be solved with an available plug-in.

All the search engines care about words. So do your readers. For these reasons, the most important part of search engine placement is your content.

Writing great content takes time and practice. There’s also no absolute right way to write content. Some people advocate a very action oriented page enticing readers to do something. That may also turn other readers off. It all depends on the topic of your site.

The place to begin with your content is to brainstorm about your site. What do you want your readers to find? Break down your services into manageable categories that can be easily understood then write about each of those categories.

For example, Tekpals breaks down into three main categories: technology, accounting and coaching. From each of these three main areas I break in down into more levels of detail.

To be honest, I don’t spend lots of time writing for search engines. What good does it do to write for a search engine if a human can’t read your text? Write for people and the search engines will follow. Make your copy clear and easy to read. Also remember that you’re an expert on what you’re writing about. Your readers aren’t – make it easy for your readers to understand.

Don’t worry about having to be perfect the first time. One of the nice things about the web is that, unlike print, you can edit any time you want to. Write your first ideas then come back to edit what you’ve written later.

Titles, Descriptions and Headlines

Not all your text is equal. The search engines pay more attention to some text than to other text. Let’s take a look at some important text types.

Every web page has a title and the title is probably the most important piece of text on your page.

The title of the Tekpals home page is Technology, Accounting & Coaching – Tekpals. The title shows in your browser in the window title bar (usually along with the name of your browser.)

It’s best to keep your title short and to the point. We recommend including keywords that someone may enter to search for your site in your title. On the other hand don’t stuff your title with lots of keywords that make little sense in context. You’ll most likely be penalized for stuffing!

We strongly recommend that your title come before your company or organization name. Note that the title above has the keyword phrase before the name of the business. This approach weights the keywords more than your business name. Most likely people are searching for the keywords rather than your business name.

Every page should have a description. A description is a meta element – even though it doesn’t directly display on your page, this information is used to describe your page. Let’s look at what this means. There are three primary parts to a search engine listing: the title, the description and the link. The title comes from (you guessed it – your page title). See why the title is important? If your page has not title, you’ll either get the url or the first few characters that appear on your page. Use a title!

The description comes from the text you enter in the description meta element. If there’s no description meta element, most engines default to the first 150 or so characters. Again this probably isn’t what you want. If you have a description meta element, the engine will use this instead.

Take a look at this example from Tekpals. The title is directly from the title of our home page. The description is directly from our description meta element. The html of the element is:

<meta name="description" content="Tekpals offers technology, accounting &amp; business coaching help for entrepreneurs and small businesses." />

This meta element should appear in the head section of your pages. All you need to do for your use is change the text after ‘conent=’; this text becomes your description. In the Tekapls example, since this information was present, the search engine took the description directly from what we wrote! It’s best to keep your description to around 150 characters. Also, don’t be tempted to load your description with keywords you think your users will enter to find you. As we’ll talk about later, this approach will surely backfire!

The final area to take a look at is text headlines; we’ll cover this in the next post.

Uploading and inserting images and other files

Go to the page creation/editing screen of the page in which you want to add an image or file. Above the toolbar you’ll see a few icons next to “Upload/Insert.”

The icons are used to upload an image, video, audio, and media. To add a file, click on the appropriate icon and you’ll see this window popup:

You can add the file from three locations: your computer, a url (an existing web location), or from the media library (more about that later.)

If you want to add a file from your computer, click on the Select Files button and a window will popup allowing you to select the file from your computer. You can select multiple files by holding down the control key while clicking on the file names. Once you select the files, click on Save and the files will be uploaded and saved to your website.

At this point you have several options. You may give the file a name that allows you to find it easily in the “Title” field. This text will also pop up when the image is hovered on. It’s a good practice to enter in some text in the “Alternate Text” field. This is important for accessibility. (For example, there are special browsers for the blind and these systems use to alternative text to describe the image.) If the image contains text, the “Alternate Text” should certainly include that text. You may enter a caption, which will appear below the image when inserted into the content. You may also enter a description if you wish.

If you would like to insert a small image or thumbnail that links to the larger version, click “File URL” (which just links to the larger version) or “Post URL” (which links to the larger version embedded into the framework of the website) next to “Link URL.” You can also manually enter or copy and paste a link into the “Link URL” field to make the image link anywhere. If you do not want the image to be a link, click “None.”

Select how the image should be aligned and finally select a size of the image to show on your page. When you’re done save all your changes and your image is ready.

Inserting Links to Other File Types

This options is often used to link to PDF’s and it works with any file type. Enter the text you would like to be the link to the file in the “Title” field. Then enter a “Caption” or “Description” if you wish. Finally, select “File URL” under “Link URL.” Finally, click “Insert into Post.”

Inserting a File From a URL

This option inserts a file that is already on another web page. Usually the web page is already on your site. You can link to a file on another site, but that file can be unexpectedly moved or deleted and then your link will no longer work. This window is very similar to the previous example.

Media Library

Media is the images, video, recordings, and files, you upload and use in your site. Media is typically uploaded and inserted into the content when writing a Post or writing a Page. Note that the Uploading Setting in the Settings Media SubPanel describes the location and structure of the upload directory (where your media files are stored). If you do need to upload Media, even if that Media is not related to a Post or Page, then you need to use the Media Add New SubPanel.

The Media Library SubPanel allows you to edit, view, and delete Media previously uploaded to your blog. Multiple Media objects can be selected for deletion. Search and filtering ability is also provided to allow you to find the desired Media.

When beginning the process to design a new website, it’s helpful to be clear of what you’re looking for. We use this design checklist to help you identify what you’re looking for from your site.

Site name: ____________________________________________________________________________

Brief description: ______________________________________________________________________

Target market: ________________________________________________________________________

Who is your primary competition: _________________________________________________________

Please list 5 website you like and why you like them:

General
__ I have an existing site and need minor changes
__ I have an existing site and need a complete redesign
__ I have a domain name and I need a site
__ I need everything

Content
__ I will add my own content and have a content manager. Which one? __________________________
__ I want to add my own content and don’t have a content manager.
__ I will supply ___ pages of content and want you to add it for me.
__ I want you to write the content for me.
__ My content will change: __ often, __ sometimes, __seldom
__ I will add new content: __ often, __ sometimes, __seldom
__ I have adult content.

Design & Layout
__ I have a template that needs minor customization.
__ I have a template that needs major customization.
__ I don’t have a template but would be able to pick one I like.
__ I want a custom design.

Graphics
__ I don’t need unique graphics designed for this project.
__ I already have my graphics and need them integrated into the site.
__ I’m familiar with basic photo editing (cropping, resizing, etc.)
__ I don’t have any graphics now but would be able to pick out stock graphics I like.
__ I have audio I want integrated into the site.
__ I have video I want integrated into the site.

E-commerce
__ I want an online store and have _____ SKU’s.
__ I want to offer web access to a __ existing __ new database.
__ I want to be able to process credit cards on my store.
__ I already have a merchant or IPSP account.
__ I want to be able to accept PayPal for payment.

Options
__ Member registration
__ Private members only area
__ Discussion forum
__ Contact me form
__ Internal site search
__ File uploads
__ File downloads
__ Newsletter signup
__ Custom surveys, assessments or quizzes
__ Blog
__ Photo album
__ Consumer reviews
__ Calendar

SEO
__ Search Engine Optimization: ____ pages
__ Sitemap generation & search submission
__ Traffic reporting

Affiliates
__ Adsense
__ Other affiliate programs

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimization.” You can choose to do much of the work to optimize your site yourself or you can hire someone to do this for you. This article will highlight some of the techniques that can be helpful to make your site more visible on the major search engines.

If you decide to hire someone to do your SEO, understand that there are many people doing this work. Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and make things worse. Unethical optimizers may promise to improve your ratings by tricking the search engines to giving you a higher ranking. Most of the time these tricks don’t work and the engines may penalize you by lowering your ranking or removing your site completely from their listings.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work.
You probably know how to do a web search. What happens behind the scenes to deliver the results to you.

There are three key processes in delivering search results to you: crawling, indexing and serving.

Crawling is the process by which the engines discovers new and updated pages to be added to the master index (the card catalog of the web).
All of the search engines have programs that crawl the web looking at web pages. These programs are referred to as robots, bots, or spiders. They determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

The crawl process begins with a list of web pages generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with sitemap data provided by webmasters. A sitemap is a special file that lists all the pages of your website. (Tekpals automatically generates and updates sitemaps for all our sites in the format preferred by the engines.)

So, what does this crawler see? Web pages are designed for humans so many design and graphic elements are incorporated to make the site have a particular look and feel. The crawlers don’t ‘see’ any of this. What they see is primarily text. (If you want to get an idea of what a crawler sees select the ‘view source’ option on your browser.) They generally don’t see your photos, your colors, your fonts or most of your design elements. What they do see is your content.

This leads to the next step, indexing. Each page that is crawled is then indexed. The index processes information in key content areas such as title tags, descriptions, headers and ALT attributes. Crawlers can process many, but not all, content types. For example, they cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

The final step is serving. When a user enters a query, the engines search the index for matching pages and return the results they believe are the most relevant to you. Relevancy is determined by many factors, but there are some common and important elements. An important element is links to your site from other sites (often called linkbacks.) The more links you have to your site the higher the importance the search engines give to your site. Of course, not all links are created equal. The links back to your site need to be relevant and from genuine sources.

Welcome to your new website. I hope you enjoy using it. Your website was designed with WordPress. WordPress started in 2003 and has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything without paying anyone a license fee.

Tekpals took care of installing WordPress for you and all the other technical details of getting it set up on your web server. Now you’re able to add your content and get your website started.

Your Administration Site

In addition to your main website, you’ll be using the administration site quite a bit. Your main website is public – anyone in the world can go to and view your site. Your administrative site is private – you must log on with an id and password to access the administrative site. Only Tekpals and you can log on to the administrative site.

Your administrative site is located at ____________________________________________. Your id is ________________________ and your password is _______________________. When you go to your administrative site you’ll see this logon screen:

Enter your id and password here and click the log in button. If you forget your password, click on the “Lost your password?” link and a new password will be emailed to you.

Once you login you’ll see this site dashboard (yours may look slightly different):

Don’t be overwhelmed by this screen. You’ll be spending most of your time is just a few areas. This guide will show you how to get started. If you want to know more take a look at http://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Panels.

Let’s take a look at a few areas:

The At a Glance screen shows you an overview of your site. We’ll need to introduce a few definitions here:

It’s important for a beginning WordPress author to understand the difference between posts and pages.

Posts are the principal element (or content) of a blog. The Posts are the writings, compositions, discussions, discourses, musings, and, yes, the rantings, of a blog owner and contributors. Posts, in most cases, are the reason a blog exists; without Posts, there is no blog!

Pages are the “static” information on your site. Static means it doesn’t change. A good example of a Page is information you would place on an About Page. A Page should not be confused with the time-oriented objects called posts. Pages are typically “timeless” in nature and live “outside” your blog.

Categories allow the classification of your Posts into groups and subgroups, thereby aiding viewers in the navigation and use of your site. Each Category may be assigned to a Category Parent so that you may set up a hierarchy within the category structure. Using automobiles as an example, a hierarchy might be Car->Ford->Mustang. In creating categories, recognize that each category name must be unique, regardless of hierarchy.

Tags are the keywords you might assign to each post. Not to be confused with Categories, Tags have no hierarchy, meaning there’s no relationship from one Tag to another. But like Categories, Tags provide another means to aid your readers in accessing information on your blog.

Adding a Page

Click on Pages then click on Add New.

Editing a Page

To edit a page, click on Pages then Edit. Then select the page you would like to edit.

Composition/Editing Screen

Whether you’re adding or editing a page, you’ll then notice the composition/editing screen on the right side of the screen.

Give the page a title in the first field. Each page you enter will appear in your menu and this name will be the name that appears in your menu navigation. You’ll then enter your content is the large box. Above this box there’s an icon bar:

These icons above the editing window can be used to add formatting to the text. These icons work just like most word processors. Highlight the text to be formatted, then use the buttons. When the buttons are hovered over, a description of the button will pop up.

The last two buttons are particularly handy. The second to last button toggles full screen mode. This makes entering large amounts of text much easier. The last button toggles a bunch of additional buttons. If you click this button you’ll see:

Notice the button with the clipboard and the “W” icon. This is “Paste from Word” and it’s really handy to paste contents from Microsoft Word. The formatting will be more predictable this way.

If you’re comfortable with HTML, you can use the HTML tab to edit the HTML source of the content, if needed. Use the visual tab to switch back to the normal view. It’s best not to edit HTML directly unless you’re pretty comfortable with the language. It is possible to break functionality by directly editing HTML and your site may not work the way you want.

If there’s something that you want to do and can’t make that happen by editing in the visual tab, just give us a call or send an email.

Click the blue “Publish” button in the right column to make the page go live on your site. Once a page is published, the “Publish” button becomes an “Update” button which you can use to save changes. Other options include “Save Draft” for saving the page to work on later and “Preview” to see how the page will look before publishing. You can also choose to publish you content immediately or at a future date and time.

Creating and Editing Posts

A post is a time oriented object that you add to your site. The more obvious example is a blog. Your blog is made up of many posts that the author(s) writes. Writing and editing posts is very easy in WordPress. Start by selecting the Posts option.

From here you can select to edit an existing post or create a new post. Let’s create a new post. This window works just like the window we used to create or edit pages.

Each post in WordPress is filed under a category. Thoughtful categorization allows posts to be grouped with others of similar content and aids in the navigation of a site.

You can also use tags to describe posts. A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a Post. Think of it like a Category, but smaller in scope. A post may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Like Categories, Tags are usually linked to a page which shows all posts having the same tag. Unlike Categories, Tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field.

Tags can also be displayed in “clouds” which show large numbers of Tags in various sizes, colors, etc. This allows for a sort of total perspective on the blog, allowing people to see the sort of things your blog is about most.

Many people confuse Tags and Categories, but the difference is easy: Categories generally don’t change often, while your Tags usually change with every Post.