Getting Started with WordPress: Design Your Own Blog or Website

by Todd Kelsey

If you're a beginning blogger looking for an easy-to-follow, friendly guide to help you produce an attractively designed blog or website, this is the book for you. You'll learn the basics of WordPress, one-click installs, and customizations. There's also coverage of SEO, categorizing blog posts, and social media promotion strategies, such as importing your blog into a Facebook page. This book's approach starts out simple using step-by-step examples and builds from there, enabling you to gain confidence in building your blog. You'll soon feel comfortable with a variety of helpful techniques: writing the text for your blog, adding pictures to your posts, publicizing your blog, tracking the number of visitors you've had, customizing the look and feel of your blog, managing comment spam, and even exploring ecommerce. You'll see sample blogs in the book and on the companion website so you can get an idea of what other bloggers are doing. Readers await your blog

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2011

Reviews

[Camille Dent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, the author is definitely not exaggerating when he says this book is meant for beginners. When he said that the basics of working a computer was the only prerequisite knowledge necessary, I assumed that included knowing how to make a gmail account, the basic download and install procedure, etc, but Mr. Kelsey very kindly steps through all of these in detail. This book is mainly good resource material for starting points on basic aspects of blogging such as SEO and advertising. If you are a self-taught blogger and you are looking to expand or become more serious about it, WordPress or otherwise, I would not recommend this book. I would have been disappointed if I had spent the full $30 on this book rather than getting it on clearance for $5, because I've never even blogged and I didn't learn any new concepts at all. The main thing to take away from this book is a list helpful plug-ins, but you could easily have found those same plug-in suggestions through a Google search. I did, however, really like the last chapter where they looked at a few blogs to see how they were implementing topics discussed in the previous chapters. Also, the celebratory expressions and mutated garden critters smattered throughout the book did at least make it humorous to read.