Wordpress for Beginners: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide to Creating your Own Wordpress Site in Record Time, Starting from Zero! Paperback – June 25, 2013

Okay, so I'm 71 years old, but I love photography, and art and involved in both. What better way to show my friends and others the portfolios of my work than my very own website....and also, look how much I can learn about the new technology by doing it. SO, while.......I did not want the learning curve of setting up a website, and heard Wordpress was the way to go these days. But needed some definite direction on how to detangle the maze of getting it all up and running without a glitch. AND Andy's book did the trick....from the first page, you feel confident in getting this done in a no nonsense way. Andy illustrates each step along the way, after totally describing what you are to do and WHY! so that you have an understanding of what you are doing. Periodically, after going through a few steps, he stops to give you some assignments to complete what you have just covered on your own machine, if you have not already been doing so. A few times things on my machine did not look like what he had explained, and after going back and trying repeatedly and still not getting the results he had in the book, I emailed his website for more information, and received a prompt response within 24 hours of how to move forward from where I was. SO HELPFUL!! What author of a book takes the time to insure your own personal success!!I cannot say enough good things about this book and know you will get your site to your liking by using his direction and his book. The download process to my device was seamless. Why do I want a material copy of this book to store? When I can get all the information on my digital device; after all, that is why we have invested in them, right?So do yourself a favor! Get this book by ANDY (you will not need another one) and get the end results you had wanted without all the hassles and confusion of getting up and running on the website. You will certainly, without a doubt, be glad you did.PK South, Carolina 29940)

This guide fulfills the "as advertised" goal of providing a Visual Step-by-Step Guide of creating a (self-hosted) Wordpress (WP) site. It is concise, moves quickly and provides almost all the basic steps for a WP novice to load and launch a WP site. It assumes that you are not a computer novice but only a WP novice. It does not cover any advanced topics nor management of the site after you actually launch -but that's not what it's advertised to do. The pricing of the guide is very reasonable, especially compared to the usual high priced 3rd party computer manuals, and that is in line with it's very limited scope and target audience. If you've already launched a WP site, this guide will be too basic for you.One star was deducted because it is already outdated -WP having moved to version 3.5 which overhauled the look and organization of the Admin pages. So several of the screen shots are out of date (i.e. the "HTML" tab is now called "Text". But most significantly in v3.5, the Links Menu is no longer there (now disabled by default and requires a plug-in) and Adding Media is now different (The Media Uploads Folder can no longer be set from within Settings->Media. You will now have to define it in your wp-config.php file if you want to change this location.)Besides updating, it would be great in the Kindle version, to include hot links to appropriate sections of codex.wordpress.org. Being concise is great to get up and going but it would be nice to have hyperlinks to where a bigger/broader explanation is available (and beyond the scope of this beginner guide).Overall, this is a nice and reasonably priced "short-cut" for a first time WP publisher that just wants to get a site launched. The writing and style is quite clear. You'll probably only need this guide once or twice and you will quickly advance beyond it's scope but its low price makes that a reasonable practice.

Looking at this book, it has the features other readers like--organized Table of Contents. In this table you'll see WordPress.com or WordPress .org? This is in the beginning. Dr. Williams emphatically recommends WordPress.org.At one point I tried to have WordPress.org and I even got an excellent Hosting site. But with Word Press.og, you have to decide what kind of security to have. I have no experience with this at all. You are also responsible for your own backups. And you have to make many decisions about what plugins to use. You have to make other decisions,which--to me, as one with no experience in these things, is really daunting.In my hands, the Site could crash.This is why I like like WordPress.com. They make all these decisions for you. Yes, there are limits in the way you can edit, but I don't mind. I'm creative on that score.I don't know how Dr. Williams can call his book" For Beginners" Does he mean a beginner knows enough to choose his own security Pluggin?So, to sum up--his book is for users of WordPress.org. Not WordPress.com