Wordpress Lets You Do That?

The standard Wordpress format is pretty cool to start with, and it’s even free which is amazing. However we want our blogs to do even cooler stuff, so that they not only look nice and pretty, but do some pretty tricky stuff that will help you out as an author, the end user, and most importantly, help us in terms of SEO so that Google demands to put you on its front page.

The type of things we can upload to our server where our Wordpress blog lives, are things such as Themes and Plugins. You’ll get pretty used to these two things and learn to love them.

A theme is a design or layout that is made specifically to work with Wordpress. There are thousands of free themes hanging around on the Internet waiting for you to use. If you want a customised theme to suit you or your business, then it is pretty easy and inexpensive to get one made up on somewhere such as getafreelancer or Elance.

Plugins are backend pieces of code that are designed to do different things but we will get into that later. For now, we need to know how to get these things on to your server.

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol for the geeks among us. A technical term that really says put something from my computer on to a remote computer (server in this case). Very easy to do once you have done it a few times.

First you will need an FTP Client (software) to do this. If you’re a real tech, then you can do this through Windows, but if you are like me, use a separate program designed to do FTP. A fantastic client around at the moment is FileZilla, an open source program (free) that is worth its weight in gold. CuteFTP is another, and if you’re a designer, then you may choose to use Dreamweaver.

Once you have your FTP client, you have to punch in the setting for your server, such as root directory, user name and of course password. Hit connect and if everything is OK you’ll connect to the remote server and be able to see in real time the entire file layout of your blog.

Now as this is a blog, personally I do not get the entire remote site and make a copy on my own computer like I would if it was a static website, but you can, especially if you want to back up the site. The simple thing to do here is to drag your theme and plugin files from your computer and drop them to the correct folders on the remote site. The correct folder is usually found in /wp-content/. Do this for as many themes and plugins that you may want to upload.

It may sound difficult (or maybe it’s the way i explained it that has confused you), but it really is easy once you have done it a couple of times. Uploading is not just limited to these things either. Images, webforms and documents can all be uploaded just like a normal web site.

Soon, we’ll look at what to do with these things that you have uploaded and how to use them.