Basic steps to ready your WordPress website - for beginners

Now I would like to show you a few very basic steps to make WordPress ready for launch. It is not an advance technique but useful for beginner to handy with WordPress.

Take a look on WordPress admin features to make these steps more easy.

Login into the admin. Type http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/ on your browser.

Enter WordPress username and password in text boxes and press login button.

After login we will change the default theme, so to change theme take your mouse pointer on Appearance, then click on theme.

You will see a page with already installed themes list. You can choose any theme among the list.

How to choose or activate theme?

When you will take your mouse pointer on theme image, you will see two buttons "Activate" and "live preview" over there. Click on "Activate" to make theme in use. Here i am taking "twenty thirteen" theme to activate.

Activated theme will come in first row. You can also see a button "customize" over the theme image.

After activating theme let's check the front end of our WordPress website. Open different tab on your browser and type http://www.yoursitename.com/. It will look like this image.

Now let's back to the admin's theme section. Click on "Customize" button, you will see a page with two part. First part in left with customization options and in second part at right you will see preview.

Options can be different with different theme. Here we will look at options available for mostly in all themes.

Site title & Tagline - When you will click on Site title & Tagline two text boxes will open. One for Site title and second for Tagline. You can add/edit title and tagline of site from here.

Colors - When you will click on colors tab, it will show you the option to change the color of header text (title and tagline).

Header image - Now we will change the header image of the website. You can change header image either from here or from the Admin menu.

When you will click on header from admin menu, it will take you to custom header page where you will find a image uploader with header image preview.

Click on "Choose file", a open box will give you a facility to choose file from your computer to upload. Choose image from the open box. Click on Open button or double click on the image.

After this you will see the image name beside "choose file" button. Now click on upload button.

Now you will be redirected to the page where you can crop the image if the uploaded image size is larger than the defined size.

After publishing, you can see the image in preview area of custom header page.

If you want to upload header image from theme's customize option. Click on header image tab. You will find a button Add new image.

When you will click on Add new image button WordPress Media Uploader tool will open, click on select files to upload image.

Choose the image from open box and click on Open button or double click on the image.

After clicking, Image will be uploaded in media gallery. Now select that image and click on select and crop button.

It will show you a box to crop image. Select the area to crop and click on Crop image button.

After this, check the header image in preview section.

Here you can see the header text color is black and it is not displaying clearly over the image. So we have to change the color. For this click on colors tab.

It will ask you to select color.

Click on select color, it will show you a color palate. I have chosen green for my WordPress header but you can choose color of your choice.

After all changes don't forget to click on save & publish.

The work of header part is completed. Now we are going to add sidebar widgets. It is important because it gives extra features to your website like links, categories, tags, search etc.

Click on widget under Appearance.

After clicking you will go to the widgets page.

On this page you will find available widgets area, Inactive widgets area and on the right side you will find the areas where you want to display that widget.

Let's check it with front end. As in the above image, you can see that some widgets have been added in main widget area and secondary widget area is blank. Where will it look on website front page?

The widget position is based on theme support. You can see a description below the heading Main Widget Area is "Appears in the footer section of the site" and below the heading Secondary Widget Area is "Appears on post and pages in the sidebar".

Now we will add some widgets to the sidebar and make some changes in footer widget area. To do this you can drag widgets either from main widget area to secondary widget area or drag widgets from Available widget area.

Likewise you can move some more widget to sidebar area.

Now if you want to remove widget from sidebar or from footer area, click on the title of widget a widget box will open where you will find a link to delete.

Now you can see I have moved some widgets from footer to sidebar and deleted some widgets.

Take a look at front end now.

As shown in above image all widgets are in sidebar and looking good.

Now there are three things are remaining one is post, second is navigation and third is footer copyright section.

How to add post?

Go to the admin menu, take your mouse pointer to post and click on Add new.

After clicking, you will see a page to Add New Post. Enter your post title, text for your post and image. You can also use featured image for your post.

After adding post, click on Publish button to make the post display on frontend. Likewise you can add any number of post from here.

Now we will add top navigation for the posts with the help of categories.

To add menus on the top, first we will create a category and add it to the post.

Again go to the admin menu, take your mouse pointer to post and click on All Post.

Click on edit link of the recently created post.

Now on this page you will find a category section where you can create and add category to that post.

Click on Add New Category, a textbox will open, enter category name in the text box and click on Add New Category button to save category.

After clicking on Add New Category button, you will see a category in All Categories list with already selected check box, you only need to click on update button.

Likewise you can create more categories for more post.

How to add these categories in top menu of the website?

To do this we will go to the menu under Appearance.

Now on Menu page you will see two section. First section where you will find Pages, Links and Categories tab and second is Menu Structure.

Take menus from the options of first section and add them to the menu structure.

In present case, we will take menus from categories. Click on categories tab a box will open now click on View All. Select categories and Click on Add to Menu.

After adding categories click on create menu.

Now you will see Menu Setting, select Navigation Menu and click on Save Menu.

Now your top navigation is ready.

Copyright section - The last part copyright statement, you can change it according to your need with the help of theme files. You will find theme files in Editor under Appearance.

When you will click on Editor, you will see two part on this page. In first part you can edit the file and second where you can see the list of theme's files.