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Welcome to WordPress! Starting your first WordPress powered blog or website is an exciting, and sometimes confusing, time. You are likely worried about making mistakes and also wanting to get up and running as soon as possible. The intention of this article is to do just that. We aim to cut straight to the core of what you’ll need to build a safe and secure site that is custom fit to your needs, and is easy to manage.
As with any website, you should spend very little time updating, tweaking, and troubleshooting, and more time creating content and interacting with customers. With that in mind, let’s jump right into it.
1. Picking and Learning Your Theme
Picking a theme can be daunting, especially considering there are hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. The good news for any WordPress beginner is there are a handful of tried and true WordPress themes that are extremely popular and customizable. Divi and Genesis are great options for beginners. They are user-friendly meaning they don’t require in-depth developer skills, they are affordable, and they have a large community to draw support from.
Beyond choosing the right theme comes learning how it works, and how you can customize it to your individual needs. This is accomplished in two ways:
1. Crack open the setup guide.
It will give you in-depth instructions on how to download your theme, how to install it on your WordPress site, and how to tailor it to your needs. In it you will find resources to troubleshoot common issues and a section of FAQs that you can draw from when you are feeling a little lost. When all else fails, reach out to customer support by opening a support ticket.
2. Find the discussion board.
An active community is crucial when choosing a theme for your WordPress site. Customer support will help you fix your site and make minor customizations, but the user community will be the ones who give you feedback, show you major changes, and steer you to plugins and tools that will make your site look better and perform better.
2. Protect Your Hard Work By Backing Up Your WordPress Site
Being new to WordPress means you’ve likely never seen the white screen of death or have fallen victim to a malicious hacker who has locked you out of your site. Regularly backing up your WordPress site will ensure you can get back up and running when the day comes that you lose access, or your site breaks from some faulty plugin.
Continue reading %7 Setup Tips for WordPress Beginners%
by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint
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