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This post aims to give an overview of how to set up a Wordpress website once you've installed the software on your domain.

If you're a beginner and looking for information on how to install a Wordpress website then check out my previous post, Creating a website from start to finish.

Starting out: Planning a Structure

Wordpress is very simple software to use to quickly and easily add content to your site.

Before you start out though, its advisable to come up with a plan for how you're going to structure your site.

Let me explain how adding content to Wordpress works...

First, you have categories. Categories help you organise your content and you can create as many as you like. If for example if you were making a website about Kitchen Design you might have a category called Modern Kitchen Design and another one called Small Kitchen Design and so on.

Then if you wrote an article about something to do with small kitchens you'd add it to the Small Kitchen Design category. Equally, you might write something about small modern kitchens and you'd add it to both categories.

The content you write that can be categorised in this way is called a post.

If you followed this method, when you first came to your website you would see a menu that listed all of the categories and then when you click on one of the categories you would see all the posts that had been added to the category. Get it?

Always remember, posts go into categories.

So you've got categories and posts, but there's a third content term to understand which is pages.

Pages don't go into categories. They're completely indepedent and appear as such on your site. So if you added a page you would just see it in your menu as soon as you went onto the site.

People often use Pages to add things such as an 'About Me' section or a 'Contact Me' page where they list their contact details. These kind of things obviously don't fit into a category so need to be independent.

Just Using Pages

If you're just trying to create a website with literally a few pages on, then you can ditch the idea of categories and posts althogether and just use pages. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this and it's the perfect way to quickly and easily create a simple website with no hassle.

Configure your homepage

A great way to start building your website is to create the homepage i.e. the first page you see when you visit your site. Again, there is more than one way you can set your homepage up using Wordpress.

Firstly, you can tell Wordpress to display your latest posts on your homepage so everytime you add content to your site, that goes to the top of your homepage.

To do this you:

• Log into the dashboard.
• Click the settings button in the top right hand corner.
• Choose 'Reading' from the options along the top.
• In the box that reads Front Page Displays, select 'Your latest posts'.
• Click Save Changes

Now, everytime you write a post that will display at the top of your homepage and older posts will gradually move down.

But I just want a page that stays the same all the time?

No problem.

To create a static homepage do the following.

• Log-in to the dashboard.
• Click on 'Write'
• Click on 'Page' (make sure you're not on Post
• Give your page a title and then write what you want to display on your homepage. The text editor is straightfoward enough to use and you can pictures and other stuff fairly easily. Its worth playing around with it to get used to everything and you'll pick it up before too long.
• When you're happy with what you've written, click Publish.
• Back on the dashboard click settings and then 'Reading' from the options.
• In the box that reads Front Page Displays, select 'a static page' and then from the drop-down menu select the page you just created.
• Click Save Changes.

Now your homepage should proudly display the page you just created.

Branching out

Now you know how to configure your homepage and have an overview of how to structure your site using categories, posts and pages.

What I haven't explained is how to create categories in order for you to start adding posts to them.

• Log-in to the dashboard.
• Click on Manage.
• Click on Categories.
• Scroll down to the part where you can 'Add Categories'.
• Fill in the form. Its very simple, you just give your category a name and a description. Leave the slug and the category parent options. You don't need to understand them at the moment.
• Click Add Category and you should then see the category you've added at the top of the same page.

Now you've added a category, when you go to write a post you'll see it listed on the form and all you have to do is click on the box next to the category to select it.

So when you publish your post it will appear in the category you selected.

Fog starting to clear

With the basic knowledge I've provided on this page you should be able to construct a simple Wordpress website without too much hassle.

If you've followed the steps outlined here the simple structure of your site will look something like this:

Homepage >> Category >> Post

Over time you might well add a few more categories and a few more (if not hundreds of) posts.

As we spoke about you might also have Pages in there that stand alone such as a Contact Page.

You might even have chosen to just have pages on your site and opted against categories and posts

Whichever method you've chosen you now have the fundamental knowledge needed to set up a basic website using Wordpress.

This is where I'll end this post but you can carry on learning with my next offering, Configuring your Wordpress site correctly.