How To Build A Poker Web Site

Posts – Posts are the heart of WordPress. Posts are what you will be writing on a regular basis to increase traffic to your website. Posts have 1 major advantage over a Page – the RSS feed. An RSS feed is like a sitemap. It keeps track of your posts and allows other websites to publish your latest updates. If you’ve ever seen a yoursite.wordpress.com site before, or a hubpage, or a ning network, or a blogger blog, a linkedin profile, or facebook updates that come from a website, that’s an RSS feed. The person has told that network to pull their latest and greatest and use it on their website. The title of your website and your latest posts all link back to your website, meaning you can gain more traffic by allowing others to put up your feed (or you can create your own Hubpage, blogger blog, linkedin profile, add the feed to Facebook, etc and add your feed to it, giving you a network of websites.)

RSS – Really Simple Syndication. You will find your RSS feed at yoursite.com/feed/ in most cases. If you have multiple WordPress blogs on one site (like in the case of Poker money clips) your RSS feed will be located at yoursite.com/folder/feed. Google has also created something known as Google Reader where people can subscribe to your RSS feed and keep up with your latest posts. Google also has a search engine dedicated to only blogs, which uses this RSS feed.

• Edit Posts – This feature allows you to go back and change certain elements of your posts. You have a few different options available to you when you highlight your post title.
  1. Edit – This option allows you to go back into your post and update everything. It takes you to the same screen as “Add New” only your content is already on the screen.
  2. Quick Edit – This option allows you to change almost every element of a post – minus the content and excerpt.
  3. Trash – As it sounds, delete the post.
  4. View – As it sounds, view your post.

• Add New Post – This is where you go to write your new post. In “Add New” you have the option of choosing the title, writing the content, writing an excerpt, tags, and choosing a category.

• Post Tags – This shows you a visual representation of your most popular tags on the left hand side. This is known as a “tag cloud.” You also have the option of creating new tags for future use. On the right hand side is a list of all your current tags and the number of times you’ve used them on your site.
  1. Name – This feature is used in “Post Tags,” “Categories,” and “Links – Add New.” The name is simply the name you want to have displayed on screen to your visitors.
  2. Slug – The search engine friendly version of the name. This does not apply to “Links.” For links you would use the full URL to the website. For post tags or categories if you have 2 of more words you need to separate them with a “-” as opposed to a space. The space is fine for the name but in the slug it must be a dash. Example – If the name is “poker tips” the slug would be “poker-tips.”
  3. Categories – You can create new categories in “Posts – Add New” or you can simply click on Categories and type in the name of your new category. This is also where you would come to delete categories of edit them as well.

Media – Media is exactly like it sounds, your collection of pictures and PDF files. This is the storage area for your jpgs, gifs, and png files as well as any pdf documents you want to put online.

• Library – This is your control area to delete media already on your site, or change things around such as the title or alt text. Alt text is simply a description of your image. If your picture is of Phil Hellmuth Jr. then your alt text would be something like Phil Hellmuth Jr.

• Add New – Simply click add new and you can upload pictures from your computer to your WordPress Blog.

Links – This controls your “outbound” linking. Outbound simply means linking to other websites. Yoursite.com is yoursite.com. Theirsite.com is an outbound link.

• Edit – Update links you already have on your website
• Add New – This is where you would place a new link on your website. You have the option of selecting the name, url, description, whether or not a new window will open, your relationship to the person, what category to place the link in to keep your link page organized, and whether or not you would like to include an image.
• Link Categories – You can manage your link categories here. Add new ones or change preexisting ones.

Pages – Pages are static. Pages would be subjects such as About You, Your Purpose, Privacy Policy, Contact, Links (there’s a plug-in to control this that will be mentioned in the must have plug-in’s page), etc. Pages do not appear in the RSS feed. If you don’t plan on changing the content very often and don’t want it to appear on an RSS feed you should use a page. Pages can also be used for a static home page, as opposed to seeing all your latest posts. This will be described in a future post as well as further down this dictionary page.

• Edit – Exactly as the name sounds, edit your pages. You can also delete pages here.
• Add New – Again, exactly as the name sounds, create a new page.

Comments – Users can post comments on posts and pages unless you disable the option. When editing a post or page you will see an area labeled “Discussion” toward the bottom. If you don’t want people to be able to post comments to your page or post simply uncheck the box. You can do this in “Quick Edit” as well. You can apply this globally in your “Settings” under the “Discussion” tab that we’ll be discussing further down the page.

Appearance – This is where you control the look of your WordPress Blog. There are many features available here.

• Themes – The look of your WordPress blog is based on the Theme you are currently using. There are thousands of themes available at WordPress – Free WordPress Themes. Once you’ve downloaded several themes you will be able to manage them here.
• Widgets – Widgets are very functional tabs that work in certain areas defined by the theme. Some can be placed on the left side of the page, some can be placed on the right, some both, some on the footer, some in the header. It really depends on the theme of where you can place your widget. Widgets are also used for displaying ads. If you sign up for an account to promote Full Tilt Poker you would use the code Full Tilt gives you in a “Text Widget.” The text widget will display the code for you, no html necessary, just copy and paste.
• Editor – If you have html or php knowledge you can change around the look of your page here. If you have no coding experience leave this section alone.
• Add New Themes – This is the best part of WordPress. When you click on this you will have the option of adding new themes to your site.
  1. Search – You can search for a new theme to use on your website from the Wordpress.org theme directory (which is also linked above)
  2. Upload – If you’ve downloaded a WordPress theme from wordpress.org or another WordPress theme site you can upload the zip file and have it installed to your directory without having to learn what FTP is or using the file manager.
  3. Featured – The most downloaded WordPress themes are stored in this category.
  4. Newest – The latest WordPress themes are stored in this category.
  5. Recently Updated – Themes get updated as does WordPress. If someone just put out a newer version of a theme it’ll appear here.

• When you click on any of the 5 above tabs you will be taken to a screen that shows WordPress themes. When you see one you like simply click “Install.” A new window will appear showing you the theme. Scroll down to “Install Now.” You will then be given 3 actions – Preview | Activate | Return to Theme Installer. Preview will show you how your blog will look, Activate will make that theme go live (meaning your site will now look like that) and Return to Theme Installer will take you back to the above 5 options.

Plugins – This is where all the great features of WordPress really come alive. If you want something done there is going to be a plugin for it. If you want your site to be search engine friendly there’s a plugin for it. If you want to know how many visitors are coming to your site, there’s a plugin for that. Think the Iphone and all it’s apps. That’s basically what a plugin is.

• Installed – This is a list of currently installed Plugins on your website. You can activate and deactivate plugins here.
• Add New – Works in the same fashion as adding a new theme. If you would like to add a new plugin simply click “Add New.” The options are the same as with the Themes. You can read about all the functions of plugins at Wordpress – WordPress Plugins
• Editor – Leave this alone. You’ll break your plugin if you try to edit it unless you really know what you’re doing.

Users – This is the area where you control who can log in to your WordPress Dashboard. If more than one person is writing for your site you can control this here.

• Authors and Users – shows a list of people who have access to the Dashboard. You can edit privileges here.
• Add New – Manually add a new user to have access to your WordPress Dashboard. You can also choose the access level someone has to your blog.
  1. Subscriber – Can read posts and can log into your dashboard. Can’t edit anything
  2. Contributor – Can write posts. These posts will not be published until someone with a higher level approves them.
  3. Author – Can write and publish their own posts.
  4. Editor – Can write and publish their own posts as well as publish and edit other’s posts. Can also create and edit pages.
  5. Administrator – Has access to everything on the WordPress dashboard.

• Your Profile – Think of this like a Facebook profile. You can write a little about yourself here.