Ways To Extend Your WordPress Site

Whether you are a developer or a content writer, WordPress offers a multitude of ways in which to update your site. The question is are you utilising them all?

Content

The first way your site can be extended is through content. WordPress allows you to create multiple pages of content with text and images. Of course if you want to have a blog, you can also add content as posts. The difference between a page and a post, is pages are single individual pieces of content, and usually have their own navigation button on the site navigation. Whereas a single page can then have multiple posts nested inside itself, as you would see on a blog. Posts can also be dropped into categories, so that you can have certain categories of posts displayed on certain pages. This allows posts to be separated.

Widgets

Another great way the site can be exteneded is through widgets. These appear in your ‘sidebar’, which is basically a column that can be positioned on the left or right of the site. WordPress allows you to include different sidebars on different pages, which is pretty useful. For example on our site, on the hire us page we have the address in the sidebar, but on the blog we have a ‘tag cloud’ and ‘recent posts’. These are 2 different sidebars.

Within the sidebar we have little blocks which do stuff (Widgets). In the WordPress backend you can edit, add and remove these Widgets under ‘Appearance’.

There are many different Widgets to choose from, so it is worth getting in there and adding and removing them, to see which ones are useful for your site!

Plugins

WordPress is created in such a way that allows other developers to create useful ‘tools’ that can be literally plugged into your WordPress installation. There are so many plugins available now that almost everything you could imagine has been done in one form or another.

You can actually browse and install plugins directly from your WordPress installation, just login find the ‘Plugins’ tab on the left hand navigation, click ‘Add New’ and do a search from there.

Themes

If you have some knowledge of HTML, CSS or even PHP, you can also start to change the appearance of your WordPress site, by using the ‘Editor’ function under the ‘Appearance’ tab.

The power of having your website running on WordPress, is that you can do SO much in extending your website yourself. Whether it is adding new pages or extending it through plugins, there are unlimited ways available to work on your site!

Not able to update your site? Hire us to convert your site to WordPress today!