Now that you have WordPress installed, let’s get an overview of of how you are going to piece your website together. When you create a website with WordPress, you won’t simply be looking at a page in your Dashboard that looks exactly like how your website will look. Instead, your site is like a puzzle with pieces that you place together. You need to learn about each component available to you in order to understand a WordPress Layout. This will also help you choose a theme (template) for your site.
You will have the main content that you write in a text editor provided by WordPress that is a simplified word processor with the option to switch over to adding HTML. This content is created by adding Pages and/or Posts.
But your site most likely won’t have just your Pages and Posts. It will have other elements, depending on the theme that you choose. As an example, this website has a right hand column next to the Pages and Posts. One is a Search Box, one is a banner ad, and yet another is a list of steps you take to create a website using WordPress. These are called Widgets in an area called the Right Column. WordPress has widgets ready for you to use when you install it, and some themes come with custom widgets. But it doesn’t stop there.
Plugins: programs that you can add to WordPress to add additional function to your site.Many themes have additional features and even plugins. For example, the Main page on this website has areas with tabs and scrolling and such. Nice features to enhance the look of the site. The theme that I chose came with these features and I customized them to fit my needs. Some themes are for a particular industry. It’s layout is very specific and come with plugins for creating a site for classified ads, real estate listings, etc.. These themes most likely even come with widgets for the plugins. For example, if the theme was for real estate listings, it may come with a widget for displaying the most recent houses listed.
To piece your site together, you create your pages, posts and widgets. You’ll customize any additional elements that your theme came with. And optionally, you’ll install plugins and yet more widgets. You will look at your website as you go to see if things look the way you want them to look. If you don’t like how things look, you go back to your Dashboard and edit things until you are satisfied with the end result.
