Wordpress Tour

Wondering just how you’ll be able to populate and maintain a website without having any coding knowledge whatsoever? Welcome to Wordpress :)

Wordpress was originally developed as a blogging platform, but is extremely flexible and used for all types of content management on the web. Because it is marketed as an “open-source” script, not only is it free for all to use, but it welcomes anyone and everyone to write code (called a “plugin”) that ties into and adds new functions to it. This has resulted in a Plugin directory that currently houses over 6,000 different plugins that add all sorts of new and exciting features to a standard Wordpress installation! Whatever it is that you need your site to do for you, Wordpress can probably do it.

The main elements of your Wordpress powered site will be categories, posts, and pages. In order to organize the information and content on your site in a logical way, it’s very important to understand the differences between these entities, and how best to utilize each.

The meat and potatoes part of your shopping cart enabled site will be posts. In a normal implimentation of Wordpress, these would be blog posts, but the shopping cart enabled design packages we offer all organize the post information in a different way to be displayed as an online store. All information about a specific item will be published in it’s post, including a thumbnail, price, title, and short description (excerpt) for the listing page, any other photos of the item you’d like to display, a full description, and any options that the customer will need to choose between for the specific item.

Categories go hand in hand with posts. All of your posts, or item listings, will be assigned to your choice of categories that you create. As you can see on this site, the categories effectively group the items that we have to offer in a generally logical way, enabling the customer to find what they’re looking for easily.  If your store will only have a few categories, like ours, you might consider having them placed in the top navigation. If you plan to have a more complex category structure for your items (with lots of sub-categories), you probably want them to be listed in the sidebar instead. A third option is to purchase the Shop Category Grid View add on, which will link a “Shop” page in either your top navigation or sidebar, and display your categories with a thumbnail to represent each in a grid view on your Shop page.

Pages are for general information that applies to your entire site (contact info, Sizing info, wash and care info, FAQs, etc.) If the information you need to get to your customers does not need a price and “add to cart” button, consider making it into a page.

You may also decide that the Blog View Category Template add on is something that you’re interested in for keeping visitors up to date with the latest news about your business. In this case, a “blog” category will be created to which you will publish your blogs. The Add On will implement a different template for that specific category, which will display those posts with a timestamp, comment count, and other traditional blog post info, and will link your blog page in the top navigation or sidebar of your site.

The Wordpress Sidebar “Widget” system is also extremely user friendly in that it allows you to rearrange, remove items from, and add items to your sidebar without touching one line of code. The Widgets page in your Wordpress admin area provides many standard modules that give you tons of useful functionality, and all you need to do is drag and drop to place them where you’d like them to display on your site’s sidebar!

Default Wordpress sidebar widgets:

• Page and sub-page listing
• Category and sub-category listing
• Configurable Recent Posts (or w/a shopping cart package, items) listing
• Arbitrary Text or simple HTML
• Blog/item post calendar
• Categorized off site links listing
• Configurable Recent Comments
• RSS feed display (from any site)
• Tag cloud
• Monthly Archives of blog/item posts

All-in-all, if you can use MS Word, any other blogging platform, or an online message board, then you CAN run your own website!

Wordpress admin area screenshots: