WordPress Overview for Showit Users

New to WordPress? This WordPress overview was created for Showit users who want to get acquainted with their new WordPress blog.

Checkout the video below for a quick overview of your new WordPress blog.  We also add notes under the video in case of any small updates that don’t warrant an entirely new video. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions, or if we need to make an updated video.
You can also find a video transcript underneath the video.

Video Transcript:
What’s up guys, Davey here with Davey & Krista, where we help creative businesses build brands that book. Today I’m going to walk you through—I’m going to give you an overview of your WordPress blog and how it works with Showit. Now if you want to adjust the design of any of your pages—including your Showit pages, including your blog or your single-post page, so how an individual blog post page looks, how your category pages look, your tag pages look and so on—you’re going to do all of that inside of the Showit app and you access the Showit App, at app.showit.co. But if you want to actually write a blog post or upload a plugin, what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to your WordPress site. So here I am on our photography website, and the way that I’m going to get to my WordPress blog is just /wp-admin. Alright? And when I hit that, I’m going to get to my WordPress login screen. Now when Showit sets up your blog for the first time, they should give you login credentials for your blog, and what you’re going to want to do is make sure you change those just every once in a while you should always change your passwords. So I’m gonna log in here.
And when I log in I’m going to see my dashboard. Now my dashboard doesn’t really have anything on it, but you could customize this to have all sorts of at-a-glance views here, and what you’re going to see in the navigation on the left hand side are all the things that you have access to. Now, a couple, a couple areas that you’re going to probably frequently go: Posts. This is where you can write and edit all of your blog posts. Your Media: so just as you would upload media to your Showit library, you can upload media to the WordPress portion of your website as well. Pages is something that you probably won’t spend much time in or maybe anytime in. It depends on how your website is set up. If your template comes with a Showit—or I’m sorry—WordPress page templates within Showit, you might go in here a little bit. But we’re going to stay away from that for now. And comments and Plugins. So we’re going to start here with posts. If I go to posts, I’m going to see all of my blog posts here and what I can do is I can easily add a new post just by clicking this button and it will create a new post. And if I do that,
I can just get started by entering the title, the subtitle, and then here’s where I would write my blog post, upload images, that sort of thing. So next we’re going to come down to Plugins because that’s something that we’re asked about a lot when people are just getting started with WordPress. Plugins are awesome because they add additional functionality to your website. Now, if you are on the higher Showit tier—so if you’re on the “Advanced Blog” tier, you’re going to have access to a lot more Plugins or your going to be able to download Plugins. If you’re only on the Middle Tier—I think it’s like a basic blog setup—whatever Plugins your blog comes with, that’s kind of what you’re, you’re stuck with. So if you need greater functionality and you want access to more Plugins, you should go to the Advanced Blog setup. And to add a plugin— whenever you get a plugin—it should come in a zip file and to add a new one, all you hit is the add new button here.
And you can upload a plugin. All you have to do is drag in that zip file or you can search for a plugin here. And like I said, plugins just add greater functionality to your website. So for instance, we have, we use an editorial calendar called Coschedule on daveyandkrista.com and it helps us manage all of our content. And so Coschedule has a plugin and what I would do is come here and I could search Coschedule, and here’s the Coschedule plugin and I get—all I’d have to do is hit install. And then I would go back to my Plugins and I would activate it. So here’s a word of warning about Plugins: Don’t go crazy with Plugins because it could really slow down the speed of your website, and you’re going to want to do some testing and make sure that whatever plugin you’re installing plays nicely with Showit because not all of them will work with your Showit website—but many of them do.
So the next thing that I want to point out is when you download a plugin, occasionally you’ll see, the settings here. You’ll be able to access the settings here in the left hand navigation. So for instance, we have the Yoast SEO Plugin and this is a plugin that Showit has pre-installed on all of their blog setups—not the premium version, so we use the premium version. I highly recommend it, but the free version comes with all of the blog setups. And so I can come in here and I can access all of my Yoast SEO settings right here. Now, some of my other plugin settings, I can, I can access through the Plugins page. You’ll see the settings buttons here, um, or they’ll show up maybe in tools here, but this is where I’m going to access a lot of my other plugin or tool settings.
Some of this other stuff like Appearance, you’ll never have to, you know, go in there and mess around with. If you have more than one user for blogging, you know, if you have multiple people who blog for you, you can come in here and create additional users. This is just helpful—you know, Krista and I have our own username to log into the WordPress portion of our websites. The last thing I’ll mention here is under Post: That’s where you can add categories and tags. Categories are kind of for broad topics. A category, if you’re a photographer, might be “weddings” and another one might be “engagements” and another one might be “anniversary.” And then tags are generally for more specific organization. So think of categories as sort of a “table of contents” and think of tags as sort of the “index.”
So we use tags for—at least for our photography website—for venues, for instance. Whereas our categories are like “Annapolis Weddings” or “Washington DC weddings.” So that’s pretty much it. If there’s something in here that I didn’t cover that you would like us to cover, all you have to do is go to daveyandkrista.com/showit where you can request a tutorial. And if you have any questions, make sure that you drop that question in the comment section of this video. You’ll also want to check out the transcript of the video. You can find that on our website. Or you can find that on YouTube in the video description. We’ll update that information with any updates that we receive from Showit. One other note about Plugins: Showit’s going to pre-install some Plugins on your blog. You’re going to want to keep those activated for the most part and on your blog. You don’t want to delete those, and if you do, you just want to touch base with Showit and make sure that it’s not going to break or mess anything up on your website. So that’s it. If you enjoyed this video and you want to stay up to date with the latest tutorials, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks!