Thank you for purchasing a Porter & Stout Wordpress theme!
Wordpress.org has a lot of documentation and also because so many people are using Wordpress, there are many discussions on many forums about Wordpress. If you ever run into any problems, a Google search will definitely give you a good answer after a little reading.
You can read the documentation about posting and managing your Wordpress site here, or just keep reading below for a quick overview of the basics.
Return to topWordpress runs off of your server space so you need to set that up first. Buy a domain name and a hosting package from a reputable company.
Once you have that purchased, follow the Wordpress 5 Minute Install. If you are using one of our themes and want some extra help with this, just contact us.
Return to topOnce Wordpress is ready to go, you can add your theme. Go to Appearance > Themes in your Wordpress Dashboard, then click on Add New and Upload. Choose the zipped file of your downloaded theme and it will be added to your Theme Library.
Now you can go to Appearance > Themes and it will appear in the list along with the default Wordpress themes. Click on Activate to apply it to your blog.
Return to topBy default, the posts you write will be listed on your home page. Add a new post by going to Posts > Add New. There are many option on this page but the most essentail are the title and content area. Type your post title in the first area and then type out your post in the content area.
There are a lot of formatting tools in the content editor that should all be familiar to you if you have used a document editor like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. You can do things like bold type, create hyperlinks and insert images. Play around with the buttons to see what they all do. An important one to note that you may not have seen before is the Insert More Tag, this button will insert the 'Read more' button you see on the homepage. It is a good way to have an introductory paragraph on the homepage, so you don't have many long posts filling up the page. When experimenting, click on the Preview button in the upper right corner of the Add New Post page to see what it will look like when you actually publish your post.
After you have written your post, checked your spelling and re-read it to make sure everything is correct, his Publish to push it live. You can always edit something if you notice a mistake later, but it is best to not make them in the first place.
Return to topWhen you create a new post, there are two sections on the right of the Add New Post page called Category and Tags. These are extremely useful for sorting your posts. Let's pretend your blog is like a cookbook.
Categories are the big sections. For example your cookbook (blog) could be organized into Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. Every recipe (post) would fall under a category. A site visitor could flip to (click on) Summer and see everything filed under that category.
Tags are micro-categories, more like the index of a cookbook. When you want to make something with chocolate, you can look up chocolate in the index and see all the pages that have chocolate on them.
Add as many tags to a post as you like, try to keep them relevant to your blog.
Return to topPages are created much the same way as blog posts, except without the Categories and Tags.
Go to Pages > Add New, and enter your page title and the page content then hit Publish to push your new page live.
Return to topWidgets are the small changeable blocks of content that appear in the sidebar of some or all of your blog pages.
To manage them go to Appearance > Widgets. You will see a list of widgets that are ready to go and on the right some labeled sections of widgetized areas on your blog.
You will at least have one widgetized area in your Porter & Stout theme and probably your footer area will be ready for widgets as well.
Drag and drop widgets you want into the areas you want. For example, to add a list of Categories to the sidebar, click on Categories in the list of available widgets and drag the label to the labeled section Sidebar.
These are very easy to add, move and remove, so play with these as well until to get what you like. Remember you don't want to be too redundant—you don't need a Tag Cloud in your sidebar and footer.
Return to topIf your theme comes with a few different options, you can customize these options under Appearance > Theme Options. Check your specific Theme Documentation on the staged version or in your download for details.
Return to topIf after reading the documentation you have any issues installing and using this theme, please email us at contact@porterandstout.com.
Don't forget this page will always be at www.porterandstout.com/wordpress-doc.html if you have printed it out and need the online version again.