There is a WordPress manual or WordPress tutorial available in this article to shorten your searches for some information on topic.

The first action to start a WordPress blog is to open a hosting account where you’ll have the WordPress application installed. After you do that, you need to log in. If you follow our WordPress tutorial properly, the procedure will not take much time and will pass with no problem. As far as you have your WordPress blog installed, you need to log in to the WordPress administration area – from there you’ll write posts and articles, manage your comments, change your theme, etc. To log in to the WordPress admin panel, go to the WordPress login page or directly type the URL in your browser:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/

The next important question is how to write a post in WordPress. Writing posts and pages is the principal activity in WordPress. According to our WordPress manual, click the ‘Add New’ button located in the ‘Posts’ menu.

You can keep on with entering your content. As soon as you are ready, feel free to publish a new post by clicking the ‘Publish’ button.

Creating separate pages in WordPress is actually similar to publishing a post. You should simply click ‘Add New’ in the ‘Pages’ menu.

Please see information above in our WordPress manual about writing a post. When your page is ready, click ‘Publish’ to save it.

If you want to have your blog in a worthy structure and ease your visitors’ navigation throughout your posts and pages, this WordPress tutorial suggests you organizing your posts into categories.

A new category can be created from the Posts menu -> Categories.

Following instructions of this WordPress tutorial, you should click on ‘Edit’ in the ‘Posts’ menu, hover over the post you wish to edit and click ‘Quick Edit’ in order to move a post from one category to another.

Select the new category (in our case the ‘Test’ one) from the Categories section, and click ‘Update Post’ to save changes.

Please remember that deleting a category does not delete posts from that category. It will simply place them back to the default category ‘Uncategorized’.

There is also an option in WordPress for your visitors to leave comments on your site. This option creates a dynamic interchange between you and your readers.

If it’s necessary, you can moderate your visitors’ comments via the ‘Comments’ menu in the WordPress administrator backend.

You have a list of options to set for your Comments. They are placed under Settings -> Discussion.

This is when the site administrator decides:

• whether comments are allowed
• whether pingbacks and trackbacks are acceptable
• what constitutes Comment Spam

Plugins are special tools that supply your application with additional functionality. If you use them and would like to install a plugin, place the plugin file into your ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory. As soon as the plugin is installed, you may activate or deactivate it any time you want from the ‘Plugins’ menu in your WordPress administration.

According to our WordPress tutorial in WordPress 2.7 and above you can install plugins directly from the admin area. Download the plugin to your computer, log in to your WordPress admin area and go to ‘Plugins -> Add New’. Browse to the plugin archive and select it. Then click ‘Install Now’ and the plugin will be installed promptly.

The removal is also straight-forward in most cases. Simply remove the directory for the plugin you would like to uninstall, and it will be automatically deactivated.

This WordPress tutorial will tell you how to create a simple WordPress theme. When building your own theme, you can use free WordPress themes for reference.

It’s also very easy, so let’s start. Firstly create a sub-folder in the wp-content/themes directory in your WordPress folder. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will call the folder “tutorial_theme”. The name of the folder should correspond with the theme name you want to create. To do this, you can use either your favorite FTP client or the File Manager tool in your cPanel.

Before you create the theme, our WordPress tutorial suggests that you decide how the layout of your website will look like. In this WordPress manual we’ll build a WordPress theme that consists of a header, sidebar, content area and footer.

To do this, we’ll have to create the following files into the tutorial_theme directory:

header.php – This file will contain the code for the header section of the theme;
index.php – This is the main file for the theme. It will contain the code for the ‘Main Area’ and will specify where the other files will be included;
sidebar.php – This file will contain the information about the sidebar;
footer.php – This file will handle your footer;
style.css – This file will handle the styling of your new theme;

You can either create those files locally with a simple text editor (like notepad) or upload them via FTP, or you can use the File Manager tool in your cPanel to create the files directly on your hosting account.

Now let’s take a closer look at each file and what it should contain.

The header.php file

In this file you should add the following code:

<html>
	<head>
		<title>Tutorial theme</title>
		<link rel="stylesheet" 
			href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>">
	</head>
	<body>
		<div id="wrapper">
		<div id="header">
	<h1>HEADER</h1>
</div>

Basically, this is a simple HTML code with a single line containing a php code and a standard WordPress function. As this WordPress manual says, in this file you can specify your meta tags such as the title of your website and meta description and the keywords for your page.

Following our WordPress manual, right after the title the line you must add tells WordPress to load the style.css file. It will handle the styling of your website.

The <?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?> part of the line is a WordPress function that actually loads the stylesheet file.

Next, our WordPress tutorial tells to add the beginning of a “div” with class wrapper which will be the main container of the website. You have set class for it, so you can modify it via the style.css file.

According to our WordPress manual, you add a simple label HEADER wrapped in a “div” with class “header” which will be later specified in the stylesheet file.

The index.php file

<?php get_header(); ?>
	<div id="main">
	<div id="content">
		<h1>Main Area</h1>
		<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) 
					: the_post(); ?>
			<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
			<h4>Posted on <?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></h4>
			<p><?php the_content(__('(more...)')); ?></p>
			<hr>
		<?php endwhile; else: ?>
			<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your 
					criteria.'); ?></p>
		<?php endif; ?>
	</div>
	<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
</div>
<div id="delimiter"></div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The code in this file begins with <?php get_header(); ?> which will include the header.php file and the code in it in the main page. Internal WordPress function is used to do this. We’ll explain this in details later in this WordPress tutorial. Then we have placed Main Area text to specify which section of your theme will be displayed in the area.

The following few lines consist of a PHP code and standard WordPress functionality. This code checks if your blog is filled up with posts via WordPress administrative area and displays them.

Next, our WordPress manual tells we should include the sidebar.php file with this line – <?php get_sidebar(); ?>. In this file you can display your post categories, archives etc.

After this line, you must insert an empty “div” that will separate the Main Area and the Sidebar from the footer.

And finally, our WordPress tutorial says you must add one last line – <?php get_footer(); ?> which will include the footer.php file in your page.

The sidebar.php file

In the sidebar.php we will add the following code:

<div id="sidebar">
	<h2 class="sidebartitle"><?php _e('Categories'); ?></h2>
	<ul class="list-cat">
		<?php wp_list_cats
		('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
	</ul>
 
	<h2 class="sidebartitle"><?php _e('Archives'); ?></h2>
	<ul class="list-archives">
		<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
	</ul>
</div>

In this file our WordPress tutorial suggests using internal WordPress functions to display the Categories and Archives of posts. The WordPress function returns them as items of the list, therefore we have toted the actual functions in unsorted lists (the <ul > tags).

The footer.php file

You should add these lines to the footer.php file:

		<div id="footer">
			<h1>FOOTER</h1>
		</div>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

With the help of this code we add a simple FOOTER label. In other cases you can add links, additional text, the copyright information for your theme and additional objects Instead of this code.

Add the following lines to the style.css file:

body {
	text-align: center;
}
 
#wrapper {
	display: block;
	border: 1px #a2a2a2 solid;
	width:90%;
	margin:0px auto;
} 
 
#header {
	border: 2px #a2a2a2 solid;
}
 
#content {
	width: 75%;
	border: 2px #a2a2a2 solid;
	float: left;
}
 
#sidebar {
	width: 23%;
	border: 2px #a2a2a2 solid;
	float: right;
}
 
#delimiter {
	clear: both;
}
 
#footer {
	border: 2px #a2a2a2 solid;
}
 
.title {
	font-size: 11pt;
	font-family: verdana;
	font-weight: bold;
}

This simple CSS file sets the basic looks of your theme.

As it has been previously mentioned in our WordPress manual, internal WordPress functions are often used in the theme code. To get extra information about each function that you didn’t find in our WordPress tutorial, visit official site of WordPress.

So let’s conclude what we have just learnt. After detailed instructions now you can modify the CSS file, add images, animations and other content to your theme in order to achieve the looks you want for your blog!