WordPress

Getting Started with WordPress

Note: This brief tutorial is specifically for HIST 502 students at California State University San Marcos.

The Library Technology Initiatives team has sent you an email inviting you to activate your WordPress site. Find that email in your inbox and activate your site. Note that this is the same site that you will use for the duration of your time at CSUSM, so try to keep it neatly organized from the start. The library team also created this quick start guide specifically for M.A. students.

WordPress (WP) is fairly intuitive once you get to know its dashboard and capabilities. Get started with this introductory tutorial.

Once you've read through the basics above, let's set up a couple of things right away.

1. Let's select an appropriate theme

• When you select a theme for your site, make sure that it does not have page width restrictions. Some themes have a narrow main body; what you want to do is select a theme whose width occupies the entire screen. To change your theme, log in to WP, find your Dashboard (the grey left-hand menu column), hover over Appearance, and click on Themes. When you hover over the different themes, you can click Live Preview to see what your site would look like if you were to select a particular theme and you can edit the various elements you see. This is what my site would look like if I chose the "Polite" theme.

• Right away, I notice that the theme comes with the unnecessary Archives/Categories sidebar. I can click the pencil next to each and remove them. However, even with the sidebar removed, I can tell that the main page content is going to be width-restricted. 

• Let's Live Preview another theme: this time, I'll select the "Better Health" theme.

• It did some funny things to my header image by shrinking it and moving it to the side, and it has an unnecessary Make Appointment button, but I can see that the width of the main text on the home page is looking better than the previous theme. I will once again remove the Archives and Categories from the sidebar, adjust the Footer, and remove the silly button. Overall, this seems like a fine theme to start with, so once I've made changes, I'll click Activate & Publish. You should experiment with other themes and select the one that you like most, while keeping in mind the best practices for web accessibility.

• Fun fact: you can customize most things with most themes by using custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is one of the options in the side-bar of the preview window. For example, if I wanted to stick with the "Polite" theme, I would click on Additional CSS and use a customizable CSS code to change the width of my main content area. For now, though, I won't worry about that and get into more theme tweaks as I develop my site.

2. Let's create a separate blog page

• Starting in week 2 of HIST 502, you will be adding new pages to the site. Might as well add one of them right away. Instead of creating a new content page for each of the assignments due in this class, you will be creating a series of blog pages. Here is how to enable the blog page category (use Method 1 in this tutorial).

3. Let's activate the plugins

• Some of the assignments require that you embed iFrame code into your blog posts. There is a known glitch with embedding, which we will troubleshoot when the time comes using the library's workaround guide. For now, go ahead and activate the following Plugins available to you under the WP Dashboard menu: Advanced iFrame and Elementor.

If any of the above didn't work, don't get discouraged—we can troubleshoot some of it during our first class meeting and/or address it in the class Slack channel, which we'll set up on the first day of class. Welcome to HIST 502!