Once you have received your login information you will be ready to start building your web page. The process is quite simple but I will walk you through the steps in this document. First off, you will need to login to your administration panel, to do this go to www.hometheaterjoint.com/nameofyourtheater/wp-admin you will obviously need to change nameofyourtheater to the name you chose when you signed up. Once you are logged in you will be presented with the Wordpress Dashboard which looks like this:
At the top you will notice the navigation. This is how you get around your administration panel.
The choices in the navigation are fairly self explanatory. Go to Write to write new content for your site, go to Manage to manage your content whether it be editing already written posts or moderating comments left by your readers. Or choose Profile to update information about yourself or change your password. Now lets take a closer look at these features. If you choose Write your navigation will change to look like the following:
You will notice you have two options, you can either write a page or you can write a post. Writing a post is like writing in a blog, on your home page (www.hometheaterjoint.com/yourname) is where your blog, and posts, will show up. An example of a post could be something like a movie review, a good deal on a piece of home theater equipment you stumbled across, or news you would like to inform your readers on. When you write a post it will appear on your home page, when you write an additional post your previous post will bump down and your new post will appear above it, see the example below.
First I wrote the bottom post titled “This is a movie review” I then made another post titled “Great deal on widgets at Best Buy”. If I were to write another new post it would appear above the Widgets post and so on. We will take a closer look at writing the actual posts a little bit later. Pages are different than posts. Pages are standalone articles and where you will probably do the bulk of your writing. An example of a page would be a look at the specific pieces of equipment in your home theater. So you will probably have a page about your television, a separate page discussing your speakers, a page for your receiver, etc. What you are reading right now is a “Page” as are the “About HTJ” and “Terms of Service” Hopefully that is all clear, lets move on and take a look at the Manage tab. When we choose the manage tab you will see that we get a few new options.
First off you get Posts. These are the same posts we were just talking about a minute ago, this is where you will be able to edit the posts you have already written. You can also search for posts and delete posts. The next choice is Pages. Again, these are the same pages we were just discussing, this is where you will be able to go back into an already published page to make any changes or delete any pages. The next choice is Comments. This will be where you can search for and edit any comments that users leave for you. So if a bad user decides to come in and spam your posts you will be able to go in and delete their comments quickly and easily using this feature. The final choice is Awaiting Moderation, this is not applicable to us. Finally, we have the Profile Tab.
This one should be pretty self explanatory. This is where you can change your personal information as well as your password. Now that you know how to navigate around and know what does what lets take a closer look at actually writing some content for you page. Writing posts and pages is very similar so we will only discuss one, we will work with pages but realize that almost everything here will apply to writing posts as well. When you open the Write Page tab you will get a screen like this one:
If you have ever used a word processor most of this should be fairly self evident. Lets take a closer look at some of the options though. The page title is obvious, it will be the title of your page, the other thing to remember though is this is also what will appear in your sites navigation. For instance, the page you are reading right now is title “How To” and you will notice that this title appears both at the top of this article as well as in the sites Navigation under “Information”.
The page content window is where you do the bulk of your writing, obviously. Above the window you will see a bunch of little icons, lets take a look at what they do.
Starting from the left we have bold, you can either press this, then type. Whatever you type will be in bold, when you want to stop the bold text press the Bold again. Or you can write the text then go back in and highlight the text that you want to be bold and then press the bold button. Either way works. Next we have italic followed by strike through, these both work exactly like Bold. Next we have a way to make lists, the first choice is an unordered list. Press the button and you will get a bullet point, then type your content and hit return, you will continue to get bulleted points until you hit the unordered list button again. Here is an example of an unordered list.
- one
- two
- there
The next choice is the an ordered list, this is the same as above but you will get a numbered list like the following.
- one
- two
- there
Next we have outdent and indent. You can use indent to indent your text and then use the outdent to return to normal. To be perfectly honest this is a feature I never use so I am not all that familiar with it. Next we have the align buttons. You have three choices align left, align center and align right. You can use these features on both text and images.
This text is aligned left
This image and text is aligned center
This Text is aligned Right
Next we have the link tool. To make a link you need to type out the word that you want the link to appear on. For instance, lets say I want to link to the sign up page and I want the link to appear using the words “Sign up Today!” I would type out the words “Sign up Today!” and then highlight them. I would then press the link button in the toolbar which brings up this window:
In the Link URL field you just put the address of the page that you would like to link to, the easiest way to do this is to just go to the page that you want to link to and copy the address from the address bar then come back here and paste it in. In the Target drop down menu you have two choices; open link in the same window or open in a new window. This is pretty obvious, if you choose a new window a new browser will open and you will have both your page open and the page that you linked to. If you chose the same window your browser will just go to the page you linked to. You will most likely be opening in the same window 99% of the time. In the Title field you can type something that will appear when someone hovers their mouse above a link.
Here is a sample of what it should look like when filled out correctly:
This is what the link would lool like - Sign up Today!
The unlink button just undos your link.
Next we have insert image. There are a couple of ways to go about inserting an image onto your webpage. The most important thing is that you need to take the image from your computer and place it online. This is easy to do and I supply you with space to host your images. To take an image from your computer and place it online so that it can be displayed on your page you will need to scroll down a bit and find the upload area. It looks like this:
First hit “Browse” you will then need to navigate to where you have stored the image that you want to upload and select it there. You also have the “Title” field as well as a “Description” field. These two fields are optional and are mostly used for image browswers that don’t display images or for accessibility reasons (for a blind person using a speech browser the text you input will be read to them). I wouldn’t worry about these too much and if you do fill anything in I would just describe the picture. So if you are uploading an image of your speakers you may want to put your model name/number in there.
After you have chosen the picture and filled in the fields (optional) hit “Upload”. You will now see a thumbnail of the image that you have uploaded and you will also be able to view the image you uploaded in the following directory www.hometheaterjoint.com/yourtheatername/wp-content/uploads/ since this webpage is run at hometheaterjoint.com and not hometheaterjoint.com/yourname here you would find these uploaded images at http://hometheaterjoint.com/wp-content/uploads/. Notice that during the upload process there was a thumbnail automatically generated for you.
You now have your image uploaded on the net and ready to be placed into your webpage. There are a couple of ways to place an image into your pages, lets use the toolbar method first. All you have to do is press the “Insert Image” button on the toolbar which will popup a window:
Filling in these fields is very similar to the steps we used when making a link. You need to know where you uploaded the image to, this would be in the www.hometheaterjoint.com/yourtheatername/wp-content/uploads/ directory. Go to that directory and find the image that you want to place in your post, when you are viewing the image in your browser copy the address of the image from the address bar it will be something like http://www.hometheaterjoint.com/yourtheatername/wp-content/uploads/imagename.jpg . Now go back in and paste the address into the box pictured above. You can enter the image description here if you’d like, it’s not necessary. Choose how you’d like to align your image and press insert, your image will now appear in your page.
You can also place images via the upload area.
Click the thumbnail of the image that you just uploaded, when you do so a menu will appear on the thumbnail.
There are a few options on this menu. The top options switches between “Using Thumbnail” and “Using Original” clicking it will switch between the two. If you want to place a thumbnail size image in your post choose “Using Thumbnail” if you want to use the full size image choose “Using Original”. You should try and keep your full size images no larger than about 500-600 pixels wide. You can always link to much larger image size if you’d like. Next you have the ability to link the image. You have three different choices, “Not Linked”, “Linked to Image” and “Linked to Page”. “Not linked” makes your image not linked to anything, “Linked to Image” will make it so that when you click the image it will open to the full sized image in a completely new window, “Linked to Page” makes opens the image in a page that looks like the rest of your pages. For example of the these three click the images below. From left to right I have used “Not Linked”, “Linked to Image” and “Linked to Page”:
Next we have the “Send to Editor” command. Essentially this is what will send the image to your page after you have made your choices above. So first you decide if you want to display a thumbnail or the full size image. Then you decide if you want to make the image linked to something, either an empty page or to a page that looks like the rest of your site and then you press the “Send to Editor” command it places the image in your page.
The “Delete” option will delete the image from the server. The “Close Options” command just hides the menu.
Next up on the toolbar is “Split Post” I will be totally honest and tell you I don’t know what this one does nor how to use it. Sorry 
Next we have undo and redo, these are totally obvious and I really hope they don’t need any explanation.
The “Edit HTML” button probably shouldn’t be used unless you are familiar with writing in HTML, you should be able to do everything that you need without having to go into the HTML. If you do decide to dabble in this area you are on your own, there is tons of useful links to learn HTML online and I do encourage you to do so, it’s an easy language to learn.
The last button is “Help”, I have found that the built in help is pretty weak, it may be able to answer some of your questions but you are probably better off either contacting me or doing a websearch.
Along the right side we have a few more options. Starting from the top we have “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings”. If you want people to be allowed to comment on what you write leave “Allow Comments” checked, if you’d rather your readers kept their opinion to themselves than uncheck this box. You should keep “Allow Pings” checked.
Next, you can password protect a post if you want to. This is more for when you have multiple people writing on the same site and you want to keep users out of something you have written. For your uses this is probably something you will never have to use.
You can make a page sibling of another page, I am not exactly sure why one would want to do this, if you can think of a good reason let me know and I will update this page.
Post slug is used to clean up your post title in the link. I would recommend not worrying about this, it is not neccassary to change and is probably apt to cause confusion if you do.
Post Author is used to change the author. If you do have more than one person writing on your webpage you can change the author in this field. Just choose the author from the drop down menu.
The final option “Page Order” is another one that you don’t have to worry about.
That about covers it, you should have enough knowledge to make your site with relatively no problems. If you do have any problems feel free to contact me at any time and I will do my best to assist you.