 me well. Good. Okay. Thanks for coming. I thought we don't have a lot of people for this presentation because this is introduction to WordPress and I believe a lot of people here maybe know WordPress but thanks for for being here like 9 30 in the morning. So probably when you my name is Rafael Scapina. I work at Dawson College since 2008. I work with educational technology over there and I also teach WordPress. I teach two courses there. Introduction to WordPress and how to create an online store using WordPress. We use WooCommerce and I will tell you about this at the end. So probably when you see this if you'd see this in the internet you'd think this title would be a clickbait or fake news like 30 minutes. How can I learn WordPress? It's not so it's kind of true. I'll do my best to understand WordPress. So how are you today? Are you lost or very lost regarding WordPress? Okay. How many of you here have tried in the past to use WordPress? Raise your hands. So you know WordPress a little bit. So you've been working with WordPress. Good. Good to know. Okay. So what you're going to see today is I asked some questions that my students usually have when I give my course. Like where do I start? Do I need to host my website? Yes or no? Website or blog or both? How can I choose a template? How can I add a menu? How can I add multimedia to my presentation, to my WordPress? And I'll open two questions. So where do I start? First question. I want to use WordPress for free. If you need this, if you don't want to pay anything, then you go to WordPress.com. Okay. The thing there like they give you a free account like yourname.wordpress.com. So this is free. So I want to host my WordPress website. Then you need to pay. Then you need to basically buy a domain name and choosing a hosting provider. We're going to cover this in a few minutes. How many of you here have a domain name? Bought a domain name. How many of you here hosting? Oh, some people are hosting. Amazing. Okay. So if you want to use WordPress for free, you just go to WordPress.com. They give you like you choose a name and then you start either a website, a blog or both. There's some cons though. There's limited theme support because it's free. You cannot install plugins for some secure reasons. And limited monetization. You cannot sell ads over there. Limited SEO, search engine optimization control, and limited analytics. Okay. So there's some cons, but because it's free, I mean, it's okay. You know, you're not paying anything. They're giving it for free and it's fine. And by the way, many people start like this. They start with a free account. And sometime later, they upgrade, they start to hosting with WordPress. So that's one of the way they monetize the thing. Okay. So you can do this if you want. But if you want to host your WordPress, then you need a domain name and you need to buy a domain name and you're going to need a hosting provider. Okay. The pros, you have full theme support. You can install any plugins you want. You have, you can monetize your stuff. There's no issue. You can use all SEO features you want. And you can install like very powerful analytics inside. Okay. So that's basically the difference, the pros and cons of both. Buy a domain name. This is many of my students, they ask me, you know, I want to start my website when I buy a nice domain name. So domain name is like this. You have a name, you call the domain name, and you have a domain extension. Of course, the most used one are .com, .net, .org. And they start in the States. There's no reference to country. If I buy a .com, I don't know which country it is. And some people say that when Americans started this, because they're the center of the universe, they didn't need to put the .us. So, but in fact, there is a .us. Not a lot of people use this in the States, but it exists. In Canada, you can only have nowadays .ca. In the past, you used to have the provincial ones, .on, .ca for Ontario, .qc, .ca for Quebec, but nowadays they don't exist anymore. And the reason for this, I sent an email to sira.ca in Canada asking this question, why you don't have, let's say a .com, .ca, .net, .ca, something like this. They replied back, say, you know, we're going to keep it simple. That was their answer. Which's fair. So, but you don't have. So if you're going to start a .ca today, it's only .ca. There's no .com, no .net, anything. And then you have these specific ones, .info, .mobile, .tv, .fm, .asia, .jobs, .trupox, .info. There is one .info in Montreal, probably you guys use every day or once in a while. Do you know which one it is? In Montreal, .info. There is a .info website in Montreal. No, STM.info. Yay, we have a .info in Montreal. Many people use it. Do you know where is .tv from? .tv? No, .tv is from a country and they make revenue selling this extension, .tv. It's a tiny little island in the Pacific, close to Australia, to Valo. Okay, imagine a tiny little island, they sell their domain to other countries and they make revenue. Okay, the same for .fm. It's another country, Federation of Micronesia. Okay, it's another island in the Pacific too. Okay, so we have many. And in Canada, you can register domain names using French characters like the Sidile and with the accents. For example, if you want to create a website like sava.ca, you can register the Sidile. Okay, but what I tell people, if you can register both without also the accent, it's good because let's say some people, they don't know how to, or their keyboard doesn't have the Sidile. They have no idea how to make the Sidile. So if you want to do this, please buy both if it's available. Okay, otherwise change the name because, but we have it here in Canada. And in Quebec, starting in 2014, you can buy a .kebac. Okay, so you can have a name, .kebac. Personally, I think it's too big. Like, imagine if Saskatchewan decided to do something like this, you know, a .saskatchewan, I don't think it's gonna work. So, but for many years, they started in Quebec like to look for three letters only because autonomous regions, they have three letters. Countries have two letters and autonomous regions like catalunia.cat, C-A-T. Many people use the .cat for their pets. So if you have a cat, you can create a website for your cat. But in Quebec, years ago, they tried a QBC. It didn't work for obvious reasons in French because when you read QBC in French, it's not good, right? So they decided, okay, let's go .kebac. It's since 2014. Plus, besides this, we have other zillions, more than 500 new domain extensions. Okay, so some are quite expensive. Okay, some are kind of $1,000 per year, which, but on average, they're in the $50, $100, some are expensive. For example, imagine .yoga, .family, .fun, .tech, .guru, . whatever. There's even a .college. Recently, Dawson College bought Dawson .college. So we have this. It redirects to our website. Okay, so there are many new ones. And to buy a domain name, you just go to either a registrar. There are many. I forgot to put hover here. I'm so sorry. But hover is one of our sponsors. It's also a registrar. So we have GoDaddy, Namecheap, Gundy. Gundy is one of the biggest ones. They have more than 500 extensions. So you can only go there and check your, something you can do. Also, you can buy what we call a vanity extension, vanity domain name. You take the last two letters of your last name, for example, and see if it's available. For example, my last name is Kapin, S-C-A-P-I-N. I-N is for India. So I bought my vanity extension, S-C-A-P dot I-N. So I can have my email, Raphael, at S-C-A-P dot I-N. But I use this for my, it's my URL shortener for Twitter. So I have my Scap dot I-N slash, but instead of Bitly, whatever, I use my personal one. So you can do this. Take the last two letters and see if it's available. You can buy your vanity domain for your, to use. And a hosting provider. We have many hosting providers available. The ones here are our partners here, Blue Host, Planet Hostor, GoDaddy, Dream Host, WP Engine, SiteGround, and Web Host in Canada. Most of them, when you host, they also give you for free your domain. They register the domain for you. And they also, as long as you keep them hosting with them, the domain is free. So you can do this. Okay. Personally, I like to go to a registrar and shop around for a hosting provider. This is the way I do. But you guys are free to, to do this if you want. Then people tell me, okay, but how much I'm going to pay to host? Is it expensive? You can always, I start with what we call the shared hosting plan. Currently, you're going to pay, let's say, $5 a month for this kind of thing. And what's the big difference between a shared hosting and a dedicated hosting? A shared hosting, imagine a company has a big computer, like a server, it slides the server for different users. So let's say in one server, you can have 1,000 domains living there. So that's the reason it's not expensive. Whereas a dedicated hosting, it's a big server for just you. So you manage like this big server for your domain. That's the big difference. So like price-wise, this is from a web host Canada. You can have a $3.99 a month. We're talking about Canadian dollars, okay? Because if it was the West, it would be like 100 Canadian. Just kidding, going down here. And then the pro, like they have a 50-59. So you can start like this. And look at that. For the pro one, you have a free domain, okay? On the right side, they give you a free domain. So you don't need to pay the fees for the domain registration. Okay? So it's not expensive to start. So when you start and you have your hosting provider, this is what you're going to do. You need to install WordPress. WordPress like a software. Imagine you install a software in your computer. Okay? But in this case, you're installing a software in a big computer called a server. Okay? So the first time you go to the dashboard of your hosting provider, you're going to need to look for WordPress. And there is WordPress over there. You click and then you install. You're going to see a screen like this. And they're going to ask you where you're going to install WordPress. You can install your WordPress in the entire domain. Okay? This is my personal domain name, scaping.org. Or you can select a folder or directory over there. Let's say I want to install my xyz.ca slash test. I can do this. Or I can install the entire domain. It's up to you. The default, of course, is to install in your entire domain, like you're going to see over there. Like here. Okay? So when you do this, you're going to have, this is just an example, your xyz.ca. By the way, this domain is taken. I don't know who writes their xyz.ca, but it's taken. When you install WordPress, to go to your website, you just type of course xyz.ca. You go to your website. But to have access to the dashboard, to start to work with WordPress, you need to go to slash wp-admin. Okay? So when you go to slash wp-admin, you're going to see this login screen. You're going to see a username and password over there. So when you do this, you're logging there. You're going to see your dashboard. Okay? So you're going to see posts, media pages, comments, forms, appearance, plugins, users, settings. And the first setting you guys need to do is to go to settings, reading, and tell WordPress if your website is going to be a real website or just a blog or both. Okay? You do this here. So you log into the dashboard, settings, reading, and then you choose my website. My homepage is going to display a static page. Could be my homepage. And a post page. If I don't want a blog, I leave it blank, the post page, but I can have both. Okay? So this is the first setup you guys need to do. The second one is to choose a theme. And there are many, many themes available for WordPress. If you click themes over there, you're going to see some default ones. The free ones, the 2013, 2015, 2014, 2017, 2016, all the 20 free themes that we have, you can choose a free one. Or if you want to go to WordPress.org slash themes, you see a list of all those themes. Or you can buy one if you want. What's the big difference? The interface, the usability, they're more user-friendly to use than the free ones. They have more features, in fact. So we have the biggest repositories are Themeforest, Mojo, Colorlib, and many, many others. Okay? So you can go there and pay. And the price is not so expensive. Like, you're going to pay, let's say, 40 bucks, 50 bucks for a theme. It's not expensive at all. It's a good investment for your new website. Okay? And after you install a theme, you start to work, please install an under construction plugin. This, why? Because when people are going to visit your domain, they don't want people to see, like, oh, my God, I'm still working here. It's not ready yet. So you put, like, a cover to the front page. And then you can choose any layout you want. For example, this is a great plugin called under construction that creates this. So you can choose, like, different layouts. Or you can even put, like, your, the social media links for your website or leave, like, a space for an email so people can contact you. And then when you're ready to launch, you send an email to everybody. Hi, guys. Next week, it's going to be the official launching of my website. So you can collect emails as well. So people don't see what you're doing. Of course, you see what you're doing, but people don't. So this is, like, cover to your website. Content creation. So it's very simple to use to create content in WordPress. So when you go to the dashboard, for example, you're going to create a page. You click on the left sidebar. There's pages. You're going to add a new page. Just put the name of the page. Put some content. This is the editor, the editor for 15 years. This is being, like, the way WordPress is. But WordPress is changing. So there is going to be in version five, we're currently in version 498. In version five, it's coming in the next months, we're going to have the new editor called Gutenberg. You can install Gutenberg as a plugin right now, but let's say if you don't want to use this in your website, there's a website you can test Gutenberg. It's called testgutenberg.com. So you go there, you can play around, you can see the new things. This is going to be the new editor coming to WordPress. The biggest change in 15 years in WordPress. There's a lot of division in the WordPress community. Some people, oh, I love it. I hate it. Currently, if you go to check, they start ratings like two and a half. So half-half. So some people, yeah. But I mean, personally, I think it's a nice change. So I've been playing around and I like it. But feel free to go and test yourselves. The other thing is how to create a navigation menu. Of course, you need people to navigate your website. You have your menu. Very simple to it. So you go to your dashboard, appearance, and menus. All the pages you create are going to be on the left side. You're going to see over there. So I have, let's say, about home and blog. I click create a new menu and then the menu is going to appear over there. So let me show you briefly how to do that. This is my personal website. I have currently three pages about blog and home. I'm going to create a menu right now. So I go over here. There's no menu. I'm going to create a menu, click in menu. I'm going to call it just menu. I see my page on the left side bar. I just check all of them. I'm going to add those pages to my menu. Okay. They appear over here. Okay. They appear over here. I can drag and drop. Okay. To move around, I'm going to save my menu. Another thing I need to do here, some themes they have different menus. So I need to change your, which one you're going to use. I'm going to use only the primary menu over here. So I select it over here and I click change, save change. So let me check how this is going to look like. Look, my menu is over there. Okay. Very simple about and everything. Okay. Another thing that people ask me, can I add like images, audio and videos? Let's say I have a video from YouTube. I want to put over there from Vimeo or audio from SoundCloud. You can. Another thing you tell you, if you have videos, don't upload videos to WordPress because they're big files. Okay. It takes a lot of time. They're not compressed. What I suggest to you, use a third party company like YouTube or Vimeo to host because they compress, they give everything for you plus you can share those videos. They give you like a script to share. So let's say I want to go to WordPress right now to, sorry, to YouTube right now. And I want to grab a video over there to put inside my website. Let's say WordCamp. Let's see if they have something. Montréal. Look at that. I have one from WordCamp here. Okay. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go share and bad. I put a show more here. I always uncheck the show suggested videos when the video finished because I have no control about this. I don't want to get embarrassed when, you know, Google shows something, you know, so I just uncheck here. I can select the size, but the size is okay. So I'm going to grab this script over here, go back to my WordPress, go to my pages. Let's say I'm going to put this on my about page. Under text, there's visual and text because this script, I must put it here like a script, paste, update. And let's take a look. Voila. I can run the video inside my page. Okay. It's very useful. So very simple to do. And for audio is the same. SoundCloud, for example, SoundCloud is an audio repository to have music. You can even create your own channel. You can record your stuff. You can upload your stuff. It's the same idea. They give you a script and then you can do this over there. Okay. Let me see something. Yeah. Talking about the resources, people ask me, okay, how can I, I'm going to start with WordPress in Montreal? What kind of resource do I have here? There are many. Okay. For example, in Facebook, for those of you who use Facebook, there's WP Montreal.org Facebook. It's for beginners or, but when you go there before asking a question, please search first. Okay. And then if you don't find your question, then you post because people, they receive like zillions of questions every day. There's a meetup in Montreal for WordPress as well. So you guys can, you know, join other people, talk about WordPress. And there's a great website they're recommending to everybody. It's called WP beginner. It's, they have many, many articles like for beginners in WordPress. How do I do this? How do I do that? It is in WordPress. So this is one I recommend you to go. So and plus there's like zillions of other websites, but those are more like the first two are Montreal oriented. So, and it's bilingual as well. So you can ask questions in English and French. It doesn't matter. Okay. So another thing like at Dawson College, we have many, many courses in computer science. We have HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, SQL. We have three levels of WordPress. We have introduction to WordPress, intermediate WordPress and advanced WordPress. Those courses are subsidized by Imploc back. You pay two dollars an hour. Okay. It's nothing. Okay. So in order to check those course, you can just go Dawson college.qc.ca slash CTD center for training development dot EQ. EQ is Imploc back. Okay. So the only, there's some prereqs you need to have. It must be working. Okay. And you need to apply this to your job. Okay. If you're not working, Imploc back does not allow you to take the course. Okay. I'm going to start two courses now in September, the second week of September. Introduction to WordPress and online store using WooCommerce. Okay. So for those of you like to start or know a friend, please give this a link and people can go and have those course. And this presentation, for those of you who want to have this in the slideshare.net slash RSCAPIN. So you can have the entire presentation there. You can download. And for those of you who are open for the question a few minutes, if you want to contact me, Rafael at scapin.org, any questions, anything related to WordPress. Okay. I'm also on Twitter, RSCAPIN, Facebook, RSCAPIN, RSCAPIN is my, my nickname over there. Okay. And thank you very much. Thank you. So we can open for questions. Yes. This one? Sure. Yep. Oh, this slideshare. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. His slideshare is my repost store for my presentations. Everything I produce, I keep it there. It's, this is a CC, a Creative Commons presentation. So you guys can reuse it as long as you keep my name. Don't sell it and don't change anything. Okay. That's the only things I ask people. Yes. Okay. So the question is for which case WordPress is not suitable for websites. Okay. So WordPress initially was born for blogs. Okay. And that's the, the, the default option when you go to the dashboard, it's blogs over there. Of course, you can change to not be a blog. And then people start to work for, for websites as well. It's a CMS, like WordPress is a CMS, a content management system. There are many other CMSs like Joomla, Joompaul, open source as well. So you don't pay any license. But I mean, I difficult to say, like people do a lot of stuff with WordPress because WordPress, it's, it's based on plugins and themes and content. Okay. So your content is totally separate from your layout. Okay. And like from all those CMS, I mentioned before, is the one with the biggest number of plugins available. Okay. One of the, I think it's the biggest CMS we have in the world right now. So many big companies are using WordPress. I mean, it depends if you have a very specific thing, I don't know, I have a specific project we, we can analyze and say, okay, maybe for you. But from what I've seen like in those years, like WordPress works for like zillions of different things. It depends on your imagination, the plugins you have. And because it's open source, you can always create or develop specific plugins or modules to your installation. Okay. Answer your question. Good. Thank you. More questions. Yes. Plugins. Yeah. Imagine plugins as apps. Okay. If you have a smartphone, okay, you install apps, but I do know how many apps you guys have in your smartphones, more than 50, more than 100, more than 1000. I don't know. Some people have. Just kidding. WordPress, you have this. Okay. It's a plugin architecture thing. Let's say you need a very specific thing. Let's say you need your, there's one, I'll give an example. There's one plugin you install in WordPress that checks if there's a broken link in your website. Let's say you have many links to websites. So this one works in the background. Checking. If it detects a broken link, it warns you, look, this link is not working anymore. Okay. So imagine a plugin like an app. It performs a very specific thing in your website and could work on the front end on the back end of your website. Okay. That's basically what a plugin is. Yes. Questions? Yes. How to publish from? From Ward? Okay. Yeah. If you have a text in Microsoft Ward, for example, you can copy there. I mean, there's not an issue, but what I recommend you guys to do is first to clean up the text, okay. And then paste over here. When you go to the page in WordPress, you have two tabs at the top, the upper right, visual and text. Okay. The visual one is a whizzy week. What you see is what you get. Everything you type is the way you're going to see. You can just paste a Word document over here, but sometimes they're a little glitch. So before this, you can take the text, clean up, put like just a simple text, save as a TXT, and then you're going to make the change over there. Okay. With the new editor, now the Gutenberg, you're going to, this is going to be a little bit more powerful. You can have many options to, to add it. Okay. But it's a very simple editor. Some people, what they do, because this is, if you see over here, let's say, if I put like bold over here, look at this and put bold, you see bold. If I go under text, this is what I see for the bold. You see for the bold, there's a strong, this is a HTML tag. Okay. Look at that. So your text, in fact, in WordPress, it's HTML, but you don't see that unless you click text. For the visual, you only see, you know, the text itself, like a whizzy week editor. So I recommend you to, can use another editor, like a HTML, if you know HTML, that helps a lot as well. We don't need to, but if you know it's an asset, before you paste in your text there. Good? Yes. It has, but it's not perfect. Okay. Is everything Microsoft? Don't rely on that stuff. Okay. Yes. Other questions? Yes. Yes. Is it, the question, is it possible to create user profiles in WordPress? It is. When you see on the dashboard over here, on the back, on the left sidebar, you have users. Okay. They're different. There's a hierarchy of users in WordPress. There's the admin. There is the author. There is the, there are many. So let's say I'm going to create a new user. I just click here, add new user. Okay. I create a username, email, first name, and everything. And then look at here. There's a role. The role can be the first one is shop manager because I used to have WooCommerce installed over here. So that could be a shop manager, but customer, subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and admin. Admin is the highest level. I don't recommend you have many admins because people can screw up your website easily if they don't know what they're doing. So keep you as an admin or maybe another one person. Okay. This is the level of users, of roles you have in WordPress. Good. Yeah. The question is, uh, what, what happens if I forget my, uh, admin password? When I, when I log into WordPress, it's also remember me, uh, lost your password. You're going to click over there, lost your password. This is tied to your email. They may your register for that unless you don't have access to that email anymore. That could be an issue. But there's always ways you can hack the website to look for this information at database, but there's this lost your password. So if you forgot a password, click there, lost your password, going to send you an email to, they may your register when you create this account so you can reset your password. Okay. Yes. Yeah. How Gutenberg is going to be different than the current editor. Um, there, the thing is, um, let me show you again. We're just going to bit. Yeah. The idea here, uh, the new editor, like we have blocks now. Okay. So look, this is a block. This is another block. This is a block called paragraph. Look at that. If I click on the right side here, I can edit this as a HTML. I can duplicate, I can convert to a shared block. I can remove that. So the idea, like they're creating different kinds of blocks. Okay. Look, this block here's a coat. Okay. This is a paragraph. This is a cult again. And on the right side, you can put also. So the idea, um, it's changing some, they're trying not to be so radical in the change because no people don't, want to go like, but in the regular WordPress, you have a very simple editor that doesn't, it's been there for 15 years. Okay. So that's the reason they decided to move a little bit, like, like subheading, adding, like they divided the, the, your page in different blocks and those blocks, you can change everything inside. Okay. That's one of the biggest change I can tell you right now, but it's an evolving project. It's not finished yet. Okay. So they have a lot of feedback. People are sending a lot of feedback and they are taking those into account. So the idea is like, this is going to change more in the near future than it is right now, but it's coming. So they, after 15 years, they decided, you know, it's time to update our editor. And that's what they're doing right now. Yes. Question. Yeah. The themes are, are getting used to, uh, yeah, they're going to be adopted. There's going to be no issue plugins as well. So, because they knew about this a long time ago, so they are prepared for the change. Yeah. Not an issue. Yes. Sure. The question is, how do I can edit my menus in WordPress? I can show you, it's very simple. I'll show you right now. So you go to menus. I have one minute. Okay. So this is a very simple menu. Okay. You're going to see here how to create a bilingual website. You have two menus. Let's say English and French, but basically, you can change the label over here. Okay. You just check over here. You can change a label and this is for a page. Okay. Let's say home English, whatever. I can create links, a menu for posts for, when I have a post, I can put this. I can create a menu using a custom link or I can create a menu for my categories when I have a blog. Okay. Imagine you have 1000 posts. 500 are about Montreal. The hashtag is Montreal. The category is Montreal. I can put Montreal as on my menu. And when I click in Montreal, I'm going to see the 500 posts related to Montreal. This is powerful. The indexation in WordPress is amazing. Okay. So you guys can have a great thing. So this is basically how you do this. You come here and just change and you save the menu. Don't forget to save your menu. Okay. So look, if I'm going to see my website right now, I'm going to see home English that I just changed it over there. Well, what do you mean menu on the page? Oh, this is, well, you need to create this in advance. And there are many plugins for this kind of thing. They're booking plugins you can install. Then you're going to work inside the plugin itself, not the page. That's what I recommend you to do. If you want to do a booking thing, install a plugin or you can create one, but there are plugins for this. You can do a better job. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. I wish you a great day. Thank you.