Step-By-Step WordPress for Beginners: How to Build a Beautiful Website on Your Own Domain from Scratch (Video Course Included) Paperback – December 21, 2016

I am a computer science student that taught myself how to program in high school, but learning WP has always been a daunting task because of how disorganized and un-intuitive WordPress and web-hosting are. This book really makes it easy to learn quickly without leaving out important details. You can literally go from zero knowledge about hosting to a full fledged website, and it doesn't skip steps.The author also isn't too worried about making things sound professional, so his explanations are not over-technical. He also has a solid path of advice for getting a fully-working website up and running. This means he takes away some of the decision about what plugins to use from the reader, but the reader is NEW so this is helpful and necessary, and readers can easily see where they might want to change in what they are using.This book receives the ADHD/anxiety seal of approval.

Full disclosure - I received an advance copy of this book and the supplementary content in exchange for participating in a survey to help the author select a cover for his book. I don't know him personally, so I really didn't know what to expect when I was notified the book was available. After reading through the full book and watching all the videos that go along with it, I can honestly say this is a very good resource for anyone starting out with using WordPress as a platform for blogging. I'm only a year into using a self-hosted WordPress site for my own blog, and this book covers most of the pain points I encountered during the course of that year. In many cases, the solutions provided are better than what I uncovered on my own and I'll be updating my site accordingly.ProsThe video content is the real gem, covering nearly every aspect of working with WordPress from installation through configuration as well as important topics like search engine optimization. I've not seen all this information in one place prior to this book and the related video content. The author is very articulate and thorough, and does an excellent job of walking the viewer through each step covered.ConsThere are some topics that would be beneficial for a beginner to know about that aren't mentioned at all, such as creating child themes that allow customizations to persist even after your main theme gets an update, and WordPress managed hosting plans that take care of WordPress-related maintenance like updates, caching, and backups for you. I wish I had known about child themes when I first started, it would have saved me a lot of trouble in terms of theme updates wiping out my customizations. A managed hosting plan will cost a little more but I consider the time it saves me to focus on content creation to be worthwhile.**Edit** I was wrong about child themes. Although not covered in the book, manual creation of a child theme *is* covered in the supplementary video content. However, I would suggest beginners take a look at one of the many automatic child theme creation plug-ins available rather than creating one manually. For example, I've used Child Theme Configurator and it worked extremely well for this purpose.Bottom lineThis is a very good resource for anyone looking to get started with WordPress, just be aware that it is not a completely comprehensive solution - you'll still want to do a bit of research on your own to make sure you have all your bases covered.

I needed something / someone to explain the process of building a website in Wordpress so I could speak to our website builder who is working on our new company site, without sounding like a complete beginner. This book was perfect and more helpful than I imagined - a quick and easy read and to the point - glad I purchased this book amongst all of the books I looked at, it is a great buy.

This is the second Wordpress book I have purchased and have yet to find one that is truly helpful. Most of this book is dedicated to downloading & installing Wordpress to a vacant site there is very little useful info on creating a custom site. The biggest disappointment is the "screenshots" which are in black & white and are nearly impossible to read (even with a magnifying glass). I included a screenshot of the book to illustrate this problem. I bought web hosting with Wordpress preinstalled so the first 2/3 of the book was useless to me. I plan to visit the online training videos to see if I can glean any further info that way and perhaps not feel as if I just wasted $12. Unless you are really challenged by even attempting to build a website then you should avoid this publication. I have discovered that Wordpress can be very intuitive and installation is not difficult, customizing the site is where it becomes tricky and this book is of little help. I am being generous with three stars!

Great book for anyone looking to build their first Wordpress website. A few other reviews critique that there could have been additional info on certain aspects, but I think that might be have been overkill. It's possible to write a 1000 page in depth guide on WP, but this guide covers most of the issues I had when I was setting up my website. Wordpress is great but it's got a bit of a learning curve, and isn't super intuitive. In the beginning, I had difficulty finding certain pages within the WP dashboard, and I spent a lot of time simply going from page to page trying to find the one setting I was trying to change. This book breaks this steps down and shows you exactly where everything is located. Really helps with the maze-like layout of wordpress. Definitely recommended. Would have saved me a lot of time a couple of years ago.

My daughters will confirm that I am the last person to ever grasp how to set up a blog. Numerous on line you-tube videos later I was none the wiser. Bought this book – at last something written in plain English with easy steps and online help as well. Still not the fastest web builder but I’m getting there. It is what it says - a book for beginners Thanks Mike …

Thanks Mike for taking the time to compile these easy to read and watch reference book and videos.Regards Robert.

Having seen wordpress, but never really dabbled in it, very good to read, easy to understand.

This book is more for anyone who wants to use WordPress.org and self host their website or blog and not for users of WordPress.com. If you intend to use a unique domain name and more professional website hosting then this book is for you, but not for me, as I needed to use the WordPress.com route as I had no experience of website building and didn't want any extra expense in using website hosts that may charge more until I was sure I knew what I was doing. If you are as inexperienced as I was then go for WordPress.com and read all the help files and save your money until you are more familiar with it all.

I found this to be a helpful book