MASTERCLASSES

Friday 17 February 2012

Getting started in Wordpress: previewing Masterclass 44 at MMJ




44A

Before we start – you need to know there are two versions of Wordpress - Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org

There are important differences between the two, and you need to decide which is most appropriate for you.
Wordpress.com is the simple version that you can get to work on without any preliminaries.
Wordpress.org is more sophisticated, and involves downloading and unzipping Wordpress to your computer, and having a hosting provider
There’s a good guide to the pros and cons of each here from the Expand2Web blog, where you'll also find this smart illustration..

With Wordpress.com your ability to change the look and feel of the site you create is limited.
With Wordpress.org you can customise the look and feel of your site. And you can install a wide variety of themes, and add many WordPress plug-ins to extend its functionality.
For a non-techy, looking at what you need to do to install and run .org can be daunting. But it needn’t be. There are a number of hosting services that make it easy, some offering one-click installation of Wordpress. But you do have to pay for their services.
Wordpress.org offers a list of recommended hosts here.
You can also choose your own hosting company. Tell them you want to use the Wordpress operating system and they’ll set you up an account on their server where you can administer your site. We’ll look at that in Masterclass 45: Building Proficiency in Wordpress.
In this Getting Started guide we’ll look only at Wordpress.com, and take the most straightforward approach to getting a Wordpress site up and running.
So this course fits into the first of the three levels of training used in the book version of MMJ, and in this companion website. At times we will refer to material that is covered in other modules of Getting Started, particularly Chapter 2: Creating a Publishing Platform, which starts on page 68.
You'll need to subscribe to MMJ to access the other material referred to. To do that, you have to buy the book, in either print or ebook format. A code given there gets you access to everything on this site. The book costs about £25 from Amazon UK, a few pounds less in Kindle version, or about $40 from Amazon USA.

Next: First essentials, understanding the Wordpress dashboard

No comments: