WordPress Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to have a WordPress site?
WordPress software – free. Hosting – can be less than $10 a month. Spam blocker – $5 a month. Domain name – $10-$12 a year. Setup – free because you can learn how to do it.
What does CMS mean?
It means Content Management System. Content means text, multimedia, and other features on a website. WordPress is the internet’s most popular CMS.
What About WordPress and Mobile Devices?
The smartphone and tablet revolution is here now. Is your website ready for viewing on a smartphone?
Is your internet presence ready for the needs of Mobile Technology visitors? Mobile friendly websites and blogs adapt the layout fluidly to the size of the mobile device viewing screen. The design of a mobile friendly site is clean, uncluttered, easy to read and easy to navigate. Learn how to create your own Mobile Responsive site.
How Does WordPress Adapt to Mobile Devices?
Visiting websites on the smaller displays of the smartphones and tablets means your website needs to sense the device used by visitors. It can then respond by rearranging for the best display on the size of the screen on the device. The idea is for it to be easy to read and easy to navigate on a device as small as a smartphone. You can learn to use WordPress to create a Mobile Friendly website design.
How Do You Design a Site for Viewing on Mobile Devices?
You may have noticed website design for mobile technology is clean, uncluttered, easy to see on a small screen. With smartphone and tablet sales way outpacing laptop and desktop sales there is a trend away from designing for those larger screens and huge monitors many of us have been used to using. Compare those with using a smartphone screen.
Who needs a WordPress site?
Traditional businesses with physical locations, online businesses, online sellers, clubs, groups, causes, special interests, individuals for work or hobby, just about anybody.
How is a WordPress site used?
The site can be used as an online business brochure, an online ecommerce site, a membership site, a jobs portal, a portfolio, a professional site, a real estate site, digital products download and sales, as a gallery for photographers or artists, as an author’s site for ebooks, as a group site for club news, as a teaching site with how to content, as a travel blog – the uses are almost endless.
How do You Customize a WordPress site?
WordPress has free add-ons to use for customizing your site. These are called plugins and widgets. There are also various templates, settings, and thousands of themes for every need.
Is WordPress More Than a Blog Software?
Yes. WordPress began as software for blogging and evolved into a flexible software that meets many needs including static websites with fixed homepages and blogs. It’s called a CMS, Content Management System.
Why is Content Important?
“Original Content is King” because it’s why visitors come to your site or link to it. Create your own original, high quality content that makes a positive difference for others.
Search engines punish sites that have duplicate articles, meaning articles that are found on other sites too.
Avoid using article spinners, spammy article factories, or scraping content by rewording someone else’s content. Search engines can now detect those questionable sites and your rankings will be punished.
Embedding videos to share them is not a problem, it’s the duplicate articles that will make search engines punish your site in the rankings.
Also, the days of doing Search Engine Optimization by stuffing keywords into your website are long over according to Matt Cutts of Google.
Quality content means providing information that makes a positive difference for others. Content might be directions to a local business or courses on how to do things. The important priority is for the content to be high quality and useful, not just spam.
Do You Need to Use Code to Use WordPress?
No code is needed. If you can use Word processing programs or email then you are already familiar with icons and menus similar to WordPress.
How Do You Create a Static Website or a Blog From WordPress?
In the newer themes there is a place under Settings in the Dashboard where you click on a button to choose Static for the Homepage instead of having a blog style homepage. You write and format a special Homepage post in a box similar to an email box. There’s a place to click to choose it for your Homepage.
What is a Self-Hosted Website?
There are two WordPress systems. The one at WordPress.com has more support but fewer options. The one at WordPress.org uses Forums and support from other users but has more options. The WordPress.org version uses self-hosting. That means you sign up with a website host and your files are stored there. It only takes a few clicks to install WordPress at the host.
Where Can You Get Help?
WordPress.com has support that you can contact for help. Type your question or the keywords of it into a search engine box or on youtube and various tutorials will show up in the searches. You’ll find many help forums and help groups.
How do you sell products or downloads from a WordPress Site?
Online payment processors such as Paypal supply you wish the code to paste in payment buttons. They also have shopping cart partners so the shopping cart part of the website integrates with the payment processing buttons. You copy and paste to add these to posts, pages or sidebar widgets.
There are also free or paid plugins that you can use. If you are going to have a huge store with a very large number of products then it’s better to set up a whole online store and attach the Wordpress site to it. You can add links on the WordPress site so visitors who land there can jump to the store.
How do you add a newsletter or email marketing to Wordpress?
Sign up with an email marketing company. Adding the newsletter signup to the WordPress site is a matter of copy and paste to add a small bit of code to widgets, posts or pages on your site.