Making WordPress websites easy for beginners
What is WordPress ? WordPress is software designed for everyone, emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. We believe great software should work with minimum set up, so you can focus on sharing your story, product, or services freely. The basic WordPress software is simple and predictable so you can easily get started. It also offers powerful features for growth and success.
WordPress does have the ability already for people to comment on your post pages but sometimes they may need to contact you in a more private conversation. This is where a contact form comes in. Having said that, WordPress does not have one by default so we need to add one now.
If we go back to where we left off in the last tutorial, we had installed Twenty-Seventeen theme.
You notice that we do have a contact page already if you look at the top menu.
Click on it now and you find this message telling us we need a plugin to create a Contact form.
A child theme allows you to change small aspects of your site’s appearance. Yet still preserve your theme’s look and functionality.
To understand how child themes work, it is first important to understand the relationship between parent and child themes.
A parent theme is a complete theme. It includes all of the required WordPress template files and assets for the theme to work.
All themes – excluding child themes – are considered parent themes.
Confused about how your hosting, WordPress and CPanel work together?
You may ask:-
Lets use this graphic to help understand the structure of how hosting and website interact.
That is you in the Graphic, sitting at your computer.
The lines show:-
In the bottom left we have our Hosting company Servers where we rent space.
Its a big directory and home for thousands of Customer Domains.
Ours is one of them.
All the folders,files,software that make up our site live in our address on that server.
These servers control access to these files.
Our WordPress software is much like an app. It uses the server as its home and utilizes its stored files and database to manifest our website.
A visitors uses a web browser, (lets say they googled our site) to find our Domain Name.
Wordpress tells the browsers what files to request from the server to render the site in the visitors browser window.
In turn visitors view it on their PC or device. They can interact with the site, viewing pages, posts or using apps we make available.
Our WordPress website has an Admin backend only we can access to manage our site and add or change content.
We have a secure login to perform these tasks. We are starting to see how hosting and website interact
We also have a CPanel (control panel) access to the hosted server space .
Here is where we can interact with our raw files, databases, and options our hosting company provides for us.
CPanel is generally there to control your hosting options for the “webspace you rent”. (not WordPress itself)
Common options may be to request extra services. Set up email routing for our website(s).
You can manipulate or backup Databases. And many more functions.
So you have a WordPress website. You found and installed a Theme you particularly like.
But you would like more control over how things appear on pages you make.
Sometimes you want your introductory text full width. But then need two or three columns below it.
Not east to achieve.
Sometimes you may want some blocks of text to have a different background color.
You have seen the Widgets we can use in the sidebar and footer. Great ways of adding automated little apps.
But what if you wanted to load one of those in the body of a page - not in the sidebar? You will be pushed to find the way of doing that.