Custom menus allow you to extend your site’s capabilities with easy to use components such as category and recent post listings or even a calendar.

You customize menus as follows:

1.  Click on Menus in the Appearance module

2.  Enter Menu Name then click Save Menu

3.  Select your new Menu Name from the drop-list in the Theme Locations section

4.  Add links to the menu using the Custom Links, Pages or Categories modules

5.  Re-order the menu items as you like, then press Save Menu

Enjoy!

WordPress Widgets add modular functionality to a WordPress site. What do I mean by that? Well, you can arrange anything in a widget with drag-and-drop simplicity. The options you have for what content appears in widgets is usually controlled by plugins. We’ll get to plugins later…

If you’re watching basic tutorials, chances are you’ll never use this feature. It’s for coding changes made to the source files of templates, plugins, etc. If you do end up becoming a proficient coder, chances are you’ll use a free-standing editor, such as Coda, and not the one built into WordPress. However, in an emergency, it’s a good idea to know that this tool exists.

This video tutorial walks you through the process of installing and activating a theme in WordPress.

Themes, templates, skins… whatever you want to call them, they are what control how your site looks online. Themes contain the structure and the styles that determine how your site appears in a web browser. The structure determines which elements are included and in what order, and the style determines how those elements look (colors, fonts, position, shapes & images). There are literally hundreds of thousands of themes out there: many are free and some, which you pay for, are premium themes. When I first started out with WordPress, I went the route of the free theme, then I’d modify the heck out of it. Now, I use a variety of methods from quick themes made using Artisteer, premium themes from StudioPress, and ElegantThemes, and I build my own using iThemes Builder.

The built-in commenting system in WordPress enables visitors to your site to interact with you and others about the content of your posts and pages. Here’s some of the settings you should know about the comment system (again, video is of WP 2.9, most of it hasn’t changed)

Pages in WordPress are what make it such a dynamic content management system (CMS). Pages, combined with the new menu system introduced in version 3, mean you can customize a multi-tiered navigational system almost instantly. This video shows how to add pages (similar to posts) in WordPress 2.9. The methods are similar in WordPress 3+.

This is an often unused feature in WordPress. It offers you the ability to add cataloged links to your site.

This is an often-misunderstood pair of features in WordPress. Using Tags & Categories properly will help your page be indexed better by the search engines, and it will make it easier for your readers to find content on your site.

Now that you’ve learned how to create a post, this is the next logical step: how to edit a post in WordPress.