A content management system, or CMS, allows you the client to log in and edit the content on your website, including pages, images, blog posts and more. There are a number of open source, free content management systems, including Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, which we will deal with exclusively on this site.

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You’ll log in to WordPress at a URL your web developer provides to you, which usually looks like this:
http://www.mydomainname.com/wp-login.php

Once you are logged in, your admin home page is called the Dashboard, and will look like this:

View the video and text tutorial below to learn more about logging in, and the WordPress Dashboard, including descriptions and an overview of each of the main sections.

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WordPress Pages are used for content that is not time-sensitive. About Us, Contact Us, Products and Services are good examples of when to use Pages. On the other hand, you will use Posts for time-sensitive information such as blog posts, press releases, news items and events. Follow along with the video and text tutorials below to learn how to create and edit Pages, what Child and Parent Pages are, and how Pages work in the main site navigation.

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WordPress Posts are best used for time-sensitive information, such as blog entries, news stories, press releases and events. On the contrary, you would use Pages for non-time-sensitive information such as About Us, Contact Us, Products and Services. In the following video and text tutorials, we’ll show you how to create and edit Posts, Organize them with Categories, Tags and the Archive, and how to use Quick Edit.

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In WordPress, you can add images to both Pages and Posts, whether its a little image with text wrapped around it, a big image that fills up the entire space, or somewhere in between. The following video and text tutorials will assume you’ve already sized your images properly. We’ll cover resizing in WordPress in another tutorial.

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If you have embedded an image in a Page or Post and want to edit the size, position, etc., first make sure you are in Visual mode in the admin. When editing your Page or Post, look to the upper right of the main content box, and you should see two tabs: Visual and HTML.

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You may want to upload PDF files for download by your visitors. Follow the instructions below to learn how to upload PDF’s through WordPress, and how to link to them with some text, such as “Download PDF” or “Quarterly Report”.

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GoDaddy.com is a “Registrar” – one of the likely places where you registered your domain. Where your domain (i.e. mycoolsite.com) is registered isn’t necessarily the same place that your website is hosted.

Your developer will often arrange for hosting at a specific hosting provider. You will need to log in to GoDaddy in order to “point” your domain to where it will be hosted. Following are two different “pointing” options.

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Thesis is a theme framework that is used as a base design for many WordPress sites. If your site is built on Thesis, and “Thesis Nav Menu” is enabled, you can use the following “basic rules” to manage your Main Navigation Menu. Your site should be upgraded to at least Thesis 1.8.

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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Most people think of SEO as getting higher rankings in search engine results. Basically, the process is adding context to content, so that Google and the other search engines have a better idea of what your text is all about. This tutorial is for WordPress sites that use the Thesis theme framework.

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