Your First WordPress Site: Installing Themes, Creating Pages and Menus

In an earlier article, Kakuru Benard shared with us how to install WordPress in cPanel. But what happens after installing WordPress? You need a theme (Or loosely, a template) to work with.

Word press works with themes. On opening your WordPress dashboard, you will find some pre-installed themes. However, there are very many themes you can choose from. Both Free and paid. In this lesson, we are using the OceanWP theme.

Step 1:         Login into WordPress

• In your browser type, www.yoursite.tk/wp-admin and press enter.
• Enter the login details you created in cPanel and click login.

Step 2:         Choose a theme for your site

• Go to Appearance and choose Themes. The installed themes will be displayed. Click Add New and search for a theme.

• Choose OceanWP and click Install then Activate. (Install is displayed when you hover above the them)

Step 3: Adding  pages to your site

We shall create the following pages. Home : Services : Blog : About Us You can more of your choice.

▪ In your WordPress dashboard go to Pages and click Add New. In the Add Title box, type ‘Home’ and click Publish and then again click Publish. 

Do the same for all your pages i.e. Services, Blog and About Us.

When you click on All Pages, you must be able to see all the pages that you created.

However, these pages will not be displayed in our website yet. We shall need to create a Menu.

Step 4:         Add a menu

A menu appears mainly on top of your webpage. To create one,

• Go to appearance and choose Menus. At Menu Structure type Main and click Create Menu.

• Its now time to add our pages to the menu.
• In the Menu settings click Select All 
• Tick the 2 boxes as shown
• Click Add to Menu
• Click Create Menu

You can now open your website in a fresh tab and you will see that your menu is now active.

Re-arrange (Organise) your menu.

Notice however that your menu is not in good order. Drag the Home tab upwards and put it in the desired order. Drag the others to make the order Home : Services : Blog : About Us

Click Save Menu.

You can now type www.yoursite.tk in your browser to view a sketch of your first website.

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Stephen Dumba
E-zone School of Computing
0752 111 223 / 0772 111 223