When starting on a new project, whether it is sewing a new dress together, building a cabinet, or baking cookies, there is always a preset pattern or even design that you use. You might change the fabic of the dress, or add dark chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate chips. However, the basic structure of…

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” ― Isaac Asimov It is hard to imagine sitting down and reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, much less the whole of Wikipedia. However, we make reference to these resources and others when we have questions about historical happenings, are curious about the way…

Backing up your website is a great, proactive way to make sure that your website and content will always be available in the case of some kind of hacker or malicious attack. However, it is also just as important to prevent those attacks from happening in the first place. Reason There are several default settings…

Imagine waking up and finding that you website has been hacked, compromised, or your domain has expired and your website is down. Or, imagine that you’ve been messing with some PHP code and didn’t enter the code just right and now your website is broken! Reason There are several ways to break or crash a…

Your website is probably not ready to go right “out of the box”. There are different things that you would like for it to do that it doesn’t automatically do at the install with the standard features. This is where plugins come in. Reason There are so many different plugins, and so much your website…

The beautiful thing about content on the internet is that it innately sharable. Web 2.0 formats have made it possible for easy sharing of media formats across different platforms. With HTML5, embedding is getting even easier. Reason YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google (yes, beating out Bing and Yahoo!). You will probably…

There will always be a few things that you want to get tweaked “just right”. While there are several ways to make site-wide tweaks, you might want to do this specifically per post or page. Reason Eventually, you’ll want to get familiar with HTML and CSS. It’s better to go ahead and try out small…

After installing some plugins and adding content, you might notice that your screen is getting crowded with options. Or you might need some more immediate help with questions that are coming up as you work on your website. Reason Part of the goal of this series is to help you add functionality and become more…

The last part of our Basics section! Once everything is basically set up and you’ve been creating content, it’s time to review what the front end looks like. Reason You can do all of the tweaking and adding of content you like on the back end, but if the front end of your site does…