Getting Started
Once you’ve signed up for Brand-Forge.com and the payment process has been completed successfully, you will receive a welcome email within 24 hours with your account access details and a pre-configured WordPress account with your chosen Revolution theme.
Information included in the welcome email:
- Username & Password
- Web address for the site
- Web address for the WordPress publishing administration interface
- Address details for FTP, Webmail, Statistics and RSS feed
The standard list of Brand-Forge.com plugins will be installed, activated and configured ready for use, all you need to do is to start customization and upload/enter your site content/pages/posts etc.
WordPress
Starting to set up your site functions and structure is the best place to start. In the beginning it is best to worry less about the look and feel or design of the site but instead to focus on how the information will be organized. The primary WordPress organizational elements are:
- Pages - These are either the top level of your navigation structure (home, about, contact, blog etc) which usually run along the top of the design theme, or alternatively they are ‘child-pages’ whose ‘parents’ are the top level pages.
- Categories - Categories are normally the sub-navigation structure which are shown below the primary pages navigation. Any Post which you create should be assigned a category and when you click a category heading in the sub-navigation, you will see a list of all posts in this category.
- Posts - Posts, like pages are created through the WordPress ‘Write’ interface. Unlike Pages which represent fixed presentation pages of the site, Posts are part of the ‘blogging’ features of WordPress which allow you to create short posts in a Blog section on which other registered users of your site can comment and share with their friends.
Resources:
How to Use WordPress
WordPress user Forums
WordPress Video Tutorials
Note: third-party sites may have their own offering of WordPress themes and Hosting packages which are already included with your Brand-Forge.com pack and are provided only for tutorial advise on using WordPress. Where there are references to installing WordPress and themes, you might find this interesting but since we have already installed both for you, don’t need to worry too much about this.
Revolution Themes
Once you planned out your site structure, created the necessary pages, categories and posts to cover the initial population of your site, the next step is to customize the look and feel or design elements.
Brand-Forge.com offers a range of Revolution themes, any of which can be applied to any site without adversely affecting content that has already been created. In fact, this is one of the really cool things about WordPress that almost any theme from any source will fit with any WordPress site at the click of a button. When you get more proficient with the use of WordPress, you may decide to choose another theme from the 1000s of themes out there and apply it to your site. The only part of your site that you’ll need to re-customize is the design of the pages and your logo/banner/identity as these are often specific to a theme.
Resources:
Customizing Revolution themes Tutorials
Note: not all revolution themes have the same feature set and ability to customize however the above tutorials are very detailed and will provide you with a good overview on what is involved in customization of themes. If you get stuck, please feel free to call on our assistance at any time. Our support and customization agents are available to you from as little as $10 (£5) per hour simply by emailing support@brand-forge.com
