In this video, MEWEBHOST.COM is going to show you how to use WordPress widgets and how to use those widgets on your WordPress blog…
Now, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you have installed a WordPress theme that supports WordPress widgets. This should not be a problem if you are downloading a theme that has been recently updated, but older themes may not support WordPress widgets, so make sure you have a theme that supports WordPress widgets. The default WordPress theme supports WordPress widgets, so that’s what I’m going to show you today – an example of how to use widgets using the default theme.
First, you need to click on “Appearance,” and click on “Widgets.” And in this section, you can select which sidebar you want to edit. Some themes may have more than one sidebar. But the default theme has only one sidebar, so you can select the sidebar that you want to edit here, and these are all the widgets that you can add to the sidebar. So you can have a look at all these widgets. I’m going to add the Recent Comments widget. And then I’m going to add Tag Cloud, and Recent Posts…alright. So I’ve added three widgets to my sidebar, and you’ll notice that each of the widgets can be moved to edit the order that the widgets appear on your sidebar. For example, if I want Tag Cloud to appear at the bottom section of my sidebar, I can just move it right to the bottom. And you’ll also notice that most of the widgets can be edited by clicking on the “Edit” link, so I can give this Recent Posts widget a title, and I can also select the amount of posts that I want to show. So if I want to show 10 posts, I’d edit to 10, and click on “Done.” And I can also edit the Recent Comments. So for example, if I want to show eight of the most recent comments, I click on “Done” again, and then when I’m done making the changes, I just click on “Save Changes.” Alright.
And you can see that now, my Recent Posts and my Tag Cloud widget have already been used up, so I cannot edit anymore to any other sidebar, but there are other widgets here that you can have a look at; for example, a Text widget, which is really very useful if you want to add in banners or any type of HTML or even AdSense ads onto your sidebar. You can just use the Text widget.
And you can see, the Text widget is pretty…very flexible, and give it a title, and you can enter anything you want, as long as it’s valid HTML in this section, and click on “Done”.
If you want to remove a widget, just click on the Edit link and click on “Remove,” and the widget has been removed. And then you click on “Save Changes” to save your new widget order. So that’s it.
Now, let’s look at our theme and see how these widgets appear on the sidebar. And you can see here, this is how the default WordPress blog will look like if you have not installed any other WordPress theme. And you can see in the sidebar section, now I have Recent Polls that shows right on top, and Recent Comments. So that’s how you use WordPress widgets. For more visit http://www.blog.mewebhost.com
In this video, we’re going take a look at how to edit your WordPress permalinks for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Now first of all, a permalink is nothing more than a URL. In Wordpress you can define how your URLs will look in the address bar of a person’s browser. For SEO purposes, you want your URLs to contain keywords that are related to your blog/page topics and words that are related to the words that one would use to search for your blog in search engines.
To edit your permalinks, simply click on “Settings,” and you’ll see here a link that says “Permalinks” – click on that. And here, you would see that the default permalink for the WordPress blogs you’re using looks something like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=, and the number of the WordPress posts, or page.
Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with leaving the permalink as it is by default, but if you want to optimize your blog for search engines and get more free traffic from such search engines, then you have to make your permalinks more search-engine friendly. The other three options that are listed here that are actually more search-engine friendly permalink structures.
So let’s select the third one here that will display the month and the postname. So as you can see here, your post would display the year, followed by the month, and followed by the postname. But generally speaking, the year and the month numbers are pretty much redundant and they really don’t help you a lot with search engine optimization. So you may want to delete this entire section here and leave only the postname permalink quotes. And then I’m going to scroll to the bottom and click on “Save Changes.”
And after I did that, you can see I get a message from WordPress saying that “you should update your .htaccess now.” Htaccess is basically a file that controls access permissions to your WordPress blog. There are 2 ways you can edit your htaccess file: No. 1 is using an FTP application or your cPanel file manager. The other way is just contacting support and letting them do it for you. So I’m going show you the first one, which is using FTP. So I will just use my FTP program and connect to my web server, and then I will go to the public_html folder. And here, you can see your .htaccess file. So what you should do is right-click on this, and select “File Permissions.”
And then you can either check all the boxes here to make it 777, or you could simply type in the number you want, and you’ll automatically update the access permissions. Then to edit this file, you need to set this to 777, oo 755 or 766. But in most cases, 777 will do just fine and click on “OK.”
Now, you go back to your WordPress permalink settings and your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Save Changes” again. And it says here that “Permalink structure updated.”
And that’s how easy it is to optimize your permlinks for search engines.
In this video, we’re going take a look at how to customize your WordPress dashboard. And the content that you see here is sorted into different modules which you can actually move about simply by clicking and dragging the content module that you see here, and placing it anywhere you like.
So for example, let’s take this QuickPress module (where you can add content very easily to your WordPress blog.) Let’s say, for example, that your QuickPress function is more important to you than the actual stats of your blog.
You can just drag this portion here and drop it over here, and what you’ll find, is that the stats module has dropped below this. So if you want to keep it there, okay, and if you wanna move it up, you can just move it over here. Alright? And you may want to move your recent drafts over here.
And by doing this, you can actually make WordPress much more user-friendly by grouping all of the things that you use most often right on top,and to the left (where it ’s easiest to access. )
And you can do the same for your “Post” tabs as well when you are writing a new post, so let’s look at that.
So this is your “Add New Post” screen. And this is probably the screen that you’ll use most often for your blog whenever you’re writing a new post.
And as you can see, this screen is also made of of several modules. And the first thing you should know is that you can easily expand or collapse any of these modules simply by putting your mouse over the header section here, and you should see an arrow, and you click this arrow and it will expand or collapse the individual modules here.
Now you may not really need to use every single function in your WordPress “Add New Post” screen. So what you may want to do is to rearrange the modules (also called modules) according to the ones that you use most often.
And you can also do this for the “Sidebar” section of your WordPress “Add New Post” screen.
So for example, let’s say, I’m use tags lot (and I’ll cover tags in greater detail in a future Wordpress Tutorial, but for now let’s say that tags are very important to me.
So I can actually move the “Tags” section up, and you’ll see that the Publish section has dropped down.
And I’ll just release it here; now my Tags module will appear on top, whenever I access this screen until I decide to change it.
And of course, I can also collapse, or expand each individual section to save space and to make things a little bit neater. The whole idea is to make Wordpress easier and faster for you to use. And that’s how easy it is to customize your dashboard!
In this video, you’re going to learn how to clean up a new WordPress blog. If you’ve just installed your WordPress blog, then there are already some default posts, default comments, and default links that will appear in your WordPress blog. Since this the standard default information, it’s important that you remove these entries manually.
One thing you’ll probably notice is that there is already sample comment from Mr. WordPress. Now, Mr. WordPress is just a fictional character, and this default post and comment will appear in every new WordPress blog. So you may want to delete this comment by just clicking on “Delete” here.
Next, you probably want to have a look at the default post, and also delete that post. So you can click on the post link here, and you can see the default post here, which is called “Hello World.”
So I’m just going check that and I can either delete from here, or I can also just put my mouse over the post, and you’ll see some all your options appear, so I’m just going to click on Delete.
Next, you’ll probably wanna have a look at all the default links, so click on the links menu here, and click on “Edit.” So what you see here are all the default links to the WordPress development sites. I want to delete all these links, so I’m just going to check the top checkbox here, which will automatically select all the links and I’m going select “Bulk Actions,” “Delete,” I’m going click on “Apply.”
The next thing I want to do is check out any default WordPress pages and see if I wanna use them or if I want to delete those pages. And you can see that there is a default page called “About.”
Now, if you plan to modify this page and add some information about yourself, then you can just click on “Edit,” then edit that page. But if you do not plan to use the About page, you may just want to delete that page.
And now, your WordPress blog is completely clean, with no posts, no comment, no pages, and most importantly, no links. And that’s how you clean up a new wordpress blog!
