Hello, this is Rob carbon here. Welcome to my introductory course on WordPress. This is the free PDF that I'm giving away with the course, which contains some basic information and resources and definitions about WordPress. So let's start by talking about what we're not going to talk about in the course, we're not going to talk about the free hosting service@wordpress.com. That is not a great way of using WordPress, it's free, but you don't get hardly any of the functionality that WordPress can give you. So the whole of the course is about having a self hosted wordpress.org installation, and I'll tell you how to do that.

Now. In order to do that you need a domain name. Now if you haven't done this already, then you can go to services like lean domain, search calm and find some dot coms that haven't been taken yet. Here's some suggestions of places where you can register a domain name, name, cheap 123 red, and GoDaddy. Those links in this PDF are affiliate links moving on, you also need web hosting. And if you're just starting out, you haven't got web hosting, I would recommend companies like Bluehost or hostgator.

For some shared hosting plans, you can use a coupon, Rob carbon 25 there to get 25% off. These are affiliate links. Going forward, you may want to have a virtual private server or a managed hosting set up and you can do that at sites like siteground or liquid web. So you need domain name registration and hosting to get WordPress to work. One point here, if you haven't done it already, is to point the name servers at the domain name registrar to your hosting service that connects the two up and once you've done that, you're ready to install WordPress, I show you in the course how to install WordPress with one click, but also how to install it manually, which is the process I would recommend for installation. In order to do this, you need to remember to do three things at your host, you have to create a MySQL database and MySQL username and password and add the user to the database and copy all those details.

And then you're ready to install WordPress manually. But I'll be showing you this in a later video. So quick definition of WordPress, what is WordPress? It's a content management system. Or it's an easy way to create websites. Now WordPress has its fair share of technical terminology.

So first of all widget what is a WordPress widget widgets, add content and features to sidebars and other widget eyes areas to bring a drag and drop functionality to website building plugins. What are plugins plugins are ways to extend the functionality of WordPress. So just about anything that you want to do with a website will probably exist in the form of a plugin. So it adds the ability to do something to the WordPress core software and themes. What are WordPress themes? Well, a theme is a collection of files that produce the design or the skin of the website.

So it's really about design, it can include a little bit of functionality as well, especially when you go on to the commercial themes. So great places to find free plugins and free themes are@wordpress.org slash plugins, or slash themes. I advocate using premium themes not all the time. And of course, I'll be only using free themes. But if you use any sort of theme, it's always good to create a child theme. A child theme will sit on Top of a framework, and then it doesn't have to be updated.

You can update the theme framework when WordPress updates, but you can leave your child theme untouched, which really future proofs your installation. And the way I do that is with magazine pro on my websites, which sits on top of the Genesis theme framework, which is a really good solid cheap option. I'm not saying that you must use it this way. Far from it. There are plenty of other free and premium themes available. I'm just saying this is the best solution I found.

And here are some other premium theme shops for WordPress thesis Elegant Themes and woo themes. Okay, go to gravatar.com and upload your photo then you'll see your photo or any comment you leave on your website or anyone else's website. Now one of WordPress has many advantages. Its ability to attract search engine traffic, because it's quite well optimized for search engines straight out of the box. And there are other things you can do to improve this. Now, what's the keywords?

Keywords are what people type into Google when they're looking for something. So we talk a lot about keywords in the course, as this is an important part of web publishing. And further to this, what is SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and what people are talking about when something's good or bad for SEO, it's good or bad for Google. Basically, there's two parts of SEO on site search engine optimization, and off site search engine optimization. We'll be concentrating in the on site SEO in this course. Now your theme will be used to make your website look great, but you really have to think about design all the way through us.

In your website, and an important part of design is to use great large images. And here are some suggestions of free and played places where you can get good images for your web articles. And an important part of using images is to optimize them correctly for the web when you use them. This is good for SEO good for Google, and good for your visitors. So they don't have to wait ages for the pages to load. And here are some websites where you can optimize and edit images.

Now in the course I basically tell you how to do everything yourself. But as ever, we're all very busy. So it's good idea sometimes to outsource some work that you don't do very well yourself. Now design might be an example of this. So if you want to outsource design work, you can go to Upwork or 99 designs. If you want to outsource development work, you can try Upwork or any of the other Freelancer sites, but if you're doing your logo, here is some texts that I provide that you should paste into the brief to your designer that will help you with that.

Lastly, a word on WordPress security. There's lots to talk about here. But two of the best pieces of advice well, as far as security is concerned, is to remember to regularly change a strong, hard to remember password and keep your WordPress install the WordPress theme and the WordPress plugins you're using all updated regularly to their most recent versions. I hope you enjoyed this course. I'll see you in the next video.