It’s time to install Wordpress! Because of Dreamhost’s 1-click install, the process is made pretty easy. Again, just carefully follow the instructions below.

The first thing to do is to login your Dreamhost Panel. This is your control center for your sites. Head over to https://panel.dreamhost.com. Use your email and the password that you selected when you initially signed up for hosting.

Once you’re in the panel, select  ”Goodies” on the left menu, then “One-Click Installs”.

Welcome to the One-Click Installs page. This is where we can easily add software such as Wordpress and others. For now, we’ll just focus on Wordpress. You’ll notice that there are 2 options – easy and advanced. I recommend that you use the advanced as it will allow you total control over your Wordpress install – the easy one is, well a bit easier but also limited. So select the advanced option.

By default, Wordpress will be selected as the option of choice. But just make sure.

The next step is to specify the domain to install it to. If you only have one so far then that will be the one selected. Leave the second box blank.

The next step will ask you to create the database for Wordpress. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is. Just ented the info exactly as shown in the image (replacing mydomain with yours of course).

Click the “Install it for me now” button. Check your email for instructions from Dreamhost. It usually takes about 10-15 min. Follow the instructions provided and you should end up staring at your Wordpress admin panel!  Good job!

Overview

Throughout this tutorial I will be referencing your domain name by YOURDOMAIN. Just substitute that for your actual domain name.

Let’s start by logging in to your Wordpress administration section. Point your browser to http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin/ (many themes also feature a “Log in” menu entry in the sidebar of the front end of the site which you can also use. Refer to your Dreamhost Wordpress setup email if you experience any issues.

The dashboard

Once you login you will be greeted with the “Dashboard” which grants you a general overview of your Wordpress site. There is a lot of stuff there but don’t get overwhelmed. I’ll walk you through the basics.

Pages vs Posts

Before we start we creating some content for your site (i..e making web pages) let’s stop and discuss the difference between Pages and Posts. You will notice on your admin menu that you have “Posts” and “Pages”, both of which offer submenus to edit current entries as well as add new ones.

Pages and posts are very similar in the sense that they can be both used to create a web page. The primary differences are that pages cannot be placed in categories. They are usually used to create static content such as the “Home”, “About Us” , “Terms of Use” pages. Most sites make use of Pages and if only intend to use your site for a handful of pages then that might be the way to go.

Posts, on the other hand, can be organized by categories and can have tags/keywords. They are often displayed by chronological order (by default, Wordpress usually shows a summary of the most recent posts on the home page unless this setting is changed). Posts can also be exported as RSS feeds (see Resources > Terminology). If your site will have many pages that you would like to organize by categories then you’ll want to use posts.

If you don’t know which to use, then use Pages.

In this section I will walk you trough the basics of creating some content using a Wordpress Page. Feel free to use a Post instead, the differences will be minor.

Click on the “Add New” entry under “Pages” in the admin sidebar menu. You will be presented with a form entitled “Add New Page”.

In the field at the very top, enter the title of your page. This will be both the menu entry as well as the title of the page.

The next box down, with all the buttons, is where the excitement happens. This is the visual editor that will let you create your page, insert images, make links etc..

Try not to directly paste text into the editor (such as from a Word document) as it will also imported undesirable formatting. Use the “Paste as Plain Text” or the “Paste from Word” options on the editor toolbar instead.

First things first… the editor has an advanced toolbar that we’ll want to turn on to get more formatting options. Click on the rightmost button on the toolbar to toggle the second row of buttons.

The use of most buttons should be straightforward. If you hover your mouse above each, you’ll get a brief summary of its use. The editor works like most text processors. Feel free to experiment. You can create and delete all the pages that you want. Please refer to this reference for an overview of each toolbar option.

Before you use any toolbar button, make sure that your cursor is inside the big text box, ready to write.

To preview your work without publishing the page (meaning without letting all your site visitors see the page), click on the “Preview” button near the right side. Once you are satisfied with it, click the “Publish” button. Your page should now appear on some menu on the public side of your site.

What pages do I need?

Ultimately you have to answer this for yourself but to get started, I would recommend a welcome page and an about page. Your business will greatly determine your needs of course. Additionally, a contact form is very useful and I’ll show you how to create one in the next section.

In this section we’ll setup your site with one one of those useful contact forms to allow visitors to reach you. These are nice for a couple of reasons:

Your email address is hidden from spammers who use automation to harvest emails from websites.

Many people use webmail (such as Hotmail, Gmail) and cannot click on an email link and often get confused how to proceed

To create our form we are going to make use of a plugin called Contact-7. There are many form plugins out there but this one is relatively simple, tried and true. So let’s install it! Check out the “Adding a new plugin” section of this eBook and search for “Contact 7”, install and activate it.

Once installed, the next step is to create a basic contact form. This plugin will let you create as many forms as desired but for now we’ll just start with a simple one.

Create a new Page using the “Add New” entry under “Pages”. Title your page “Contact Us” or something appropriate.

In the body of the article just type the following:

[contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]

Now save your page. Go to the public side and you should have a “Contact Us” menu entry somewhere which will load your new contact form.

The contact form can be modified using the “Contact Form 7” entry under the “Tools” menu. You can add many options including a security code to prevent automated submissions. Feel free to experiment and read more about it here: http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/

The email that the result of the form go to is the email associated with your Wordpress user – i.e. the one that you used when you signed up for Dreamhost. You can change this email by going to “Contact Form 7” under the “Tools” menu. You’ll see it somewhere down the page. Don’t forget to save and you changes and send yourself a test email.

Many themes are “widget ready” meaning that you can easily manage the content of the sidebar(s) of your public site. To manage these entries, click on the “Widgets” entry under “Appearance” in the admin menu. By default your site will show a generic selection of widgets. To customize this, just click the “Add” link next to one of the widget entries. You can then drag and drop these entries in the desired order. Many of these widgets have the ability to be customized using the “Edit” link on the blue widget bar.

Embedding a video in your page

There are a few ways to embed videos on a page so I am going to show you the easy one. Can you say YouTube? YouTube videos are of the FLV (Flash Video Format) type which is very well supported across browsers unlike other alternatives such as QuickTime and Windows Media which do not have the same range of support. Also, flash videos load very fast which is always a plus.

YouTube accepts videos in most formats and will convert them for you (Dreamhost actually has encoder available which can be found in the Dreamhost panel under Goodies > Flash Media but the process is more involved).

if you intend to embed someone else’s video from YouTube then you can skip the following section.

Upload a video to YouTube

To upload a video to YouTube head over to http://youtube.com and click on the Upload button. If you do not have an account with them yet, locate the SignUp link and follow the instructions.

Once you’ve signed up you’ll be able to upload most formats of video. You’ll receive an email with a link to your new video once they are done converting it.

Insert a video in your page

To embed a YouTube video, open up a new browser video, go to http://youtube and locate the desired video. If you re using one of your own you can click on the link you received in your email.

Once you are on the correct page on YouTUbe, locate the URL box somewhere on the right sidebar. Copy this URL (Select with mouse, right click, select “Copy”) and go back to your Wordpress admin and open up or create a new page/post to edit. Place your cursor where you would like the video to appear and click on the “Embed Media” button on the toolbar. Paste the URL previously copied (Right click, select “Paste”).  That’s it! Now preview or publish your page and you see your video.

Some videos do now allow embedding which would be indicated by the lack of an “Embed” field next to the video on YouTube.

Where to go from here?

Once you are comfortable with the basics of using Wordpress you might have an interest in exploring some of its more complex features. The Wordpress site itself is a good place to start. Clicking on the “Help” link on the top right corner of your Wordpress admin will provide you with links to further documentation as well as the support forums which is a great place to ask for help.

Overview

Plugins (see “Wordpress plugin” definition for more info) can also be found on the Wordpress site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and are organized by keyword/tags – check out the left sidebar for a list of popular tags. I have also made a list of useful plugins.

Managing existing plugins

To view your existing plugins, click on “Plugins” in the left sidebar menu of admin. This will show you a list of all installed plugins (active and inactive).

Adding a new plugin

Clicking on the “Plugins” sidebar menu entry will display a drop down where you will see a link called “Add New” on the side menu. This will allow you to search and install plugins, both directly from the Wordpress site or from your computer in case you’ve previously downloaded a plugin from another site.

Overview

By default, Dreamhost installs Wordpress with many extra themes. However you may want to install a 3rd party theme or plugin that is not provided by default so I am going to show you where to find these and how to install them.

New themes (see “Wordpress theme” definition for more info) can be found on the Wordpress main site at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ where you will be able to search and refine your selections, Pay attention to the “Most Popular” sidebar list entries. In the Resources section I have made a list of popular themes.

When looking for a theme, make sure that it is widget capable. This will allow you to easily control what features appear on the sidebar(s) of your site such as menu, search box etc… If the site is not widget capable, you might still have sidebar items but will not be able to control them as well.

Managing existing themes

To manage themes, click on the “Appearance” link in the left sidebar menu of admin. You will be greeted by a list of available themes with your current theme highlighted at the top.

Switching themes is extremely easy! Just click on any of the theme images to see a larger preview. If you’d like to try out the theme on your site, click on the “Activate…” link at the top right of your preview box. Open your site (the public side that is) in a new window to see what it looks like.

Adding a new theme

To add a new theme, navigate to the “Add New Themes” option under the “Appearance” section. You’ll have the option to search and install themes from the Wordpress site (using the “Search” link at the top) or, if you found a theme somewhere else on the Internet that you would like to use, using the “Upload” link at the top. Check out this post for some recommended themes.

Official Wordpress documentation

Beginner and advanced topics – a recommended resourceto expand your Wordpress knowledge.

Website: http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

Wordpress user forums

If you have questions related to the use of Wordpress, this is a great place to ask questions. Be sure search for as someone may very likely have posted the same issue.

Website: http://wordpress.org/support/

How do I hide pages from the menu?

If you want to exclude some pages from appearing under your navigation I recommend that you install the Exclude Pages plugin.