To jump start your website, just start writing. Your website is hidden from search engines at startup, so you are safe to experiment away. No one will see your edits until you make it live. Even if you are intent on making a single page website, you may need to work out how to: The…
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Twenty Twenty One
Is our new default theme, i.e. when you fire up a new site. By all means upgrade to Twenty Twenty Two, if that feels right for you or you fear being left out of the full site editing experience, but we’re old fashioned and prefer the old world editing experience and the traditional customizer –…
What’s new in 2021?
Twenty Twenty One (TTO from now on) is the default WordPress theme and looks plain and old fashioned, but tailored around the new Block Editor. First off there’s a selection of default colours that are designed with Dark Mode support in mind. So will suit blog posters whose audience is nocturnal.
Before you make your site live (no one will find you unless they have the link otherwise) …
In our setup the default is to discourage search engines. This is to protect you from accidentally publishing your experimental doodles. In our experience many site owners can take many weeks, months, sometimes years to begin work and then finish their site. For your sanity we recommend you make sure you visit the settings page…
Add a widget in the footer or delete it
Widgets are blocks that appear outside the content area or a page or post. They include sidebars and footers and in some templates may include multiple positions in the header and above or below it. Footers are useful for boring but essential items like a reminder of the legals, privacy, poilcies, social links, basically the…
Adjust the menus or remove them entirely
Managing menus is fairly easy, but there are pitfalls due to the flexibility of the options available. You manage menus first by creating a collection or friendly handle/name for your menu. You may want to have a number of menus which you can swap around, perhaps you are doing a major revision to your site.…
Customise key aspects of your site or switch template
To open up the customizer, select from the top bar or Dashboard > Appearance > Customizer. The customizer provides a key route to modifying many of the website fundamentals, e.g.: Switch template Change colour scheme (template dependent) Change fonts and font styles (template dependent) Modify menus (you can do this also from the Dashboard >…
Switch your front page to any other page and enable a posts page
In the default WordPress setup the front page is set to a preset list of posts. Depending on the template you may get a grid of articles, a simple list or an embellished list, with featured images. Some people prefer a static page to a list of posts as this offers greater layout options –…
Create a new page or post (and the differences) and where it will appear
To create a page or a post you will need to be logged in – if you can see the black bar at the top of the screen you are logged in. From there choose New > Page. A static page has a title and an area for the content. You can configure various Page…