WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide [Paperback]

Jessica Neuman Beck (Author), Matt Beck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0321679210 | ISBN-13: 978-0321679215 | Edition: 1

This book gives readers the tools they need to create beautiful, functional WordPress-powered sites with minimal hassle. Using the WordPress user interface as a baseline, authors Jessica Neuman Beck and Matt Beck walk new users through the installation and setup process while providing valuable tips and tricks for more experienced users. With no other resource but this guide, readers can set up a fully-functional and well-designed WordPress site that takes advantage of all the features WordPress has to offer.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jessica Neuman Beck is a writer, editor, and Web designer. She is the managing partner at CouldBe Studios, a small-business-focused Web design agency located in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in Shopify and WordPress sites.

Matt Beck is Jessica's business partner at CouldBe Studios, a designer, and a PHP/MySQL developer. He has a solid background in IT and MIS management, including lots of experience with WordPress design and customization.

Find out more about Matt and Jessica at: www.couldbestudios.com --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1 edition (November 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321679210
• ISBN-13: 978-0321679215
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #791,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to WordPress 2, January 27, 2010

By 

Damodar Chetty (Minnesota, US [www.swengsol.com]) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

I was looking for a very quick introduction to WordPress, and I was fortunate to chance upon this book.

The authors have done a stellar job in creating an extremely approachable guide to WordPress. This is one of those books with a very high Return On Investment for your time spent reading it. Plan on spending about a weekend, and make sure that you have a hosting service handy (ideally with cPanel and Fantastico) to try out the examples.

The book is targeted at WordPress 2.7 - and does a very decent job of describing all that you need to know about installing, configuring, and using WordPress. If you want to know how to manage your posts, pages, tags, categories, links, media, widgets, plugins, RSS feeds, and themes - this book covers it all.

The only downside that I might point out is that the book devotes a lot of space to the creation of custom themes - which could be considered a topic that is simply too complex for a visual style workbook. There's a lot of ground to cover here in addition to just WordPress ... PHP, HTML, CSS ... and this is where the book tends to lose some of its simplicity and purity of focus. (Note that if you're somewhat familiar with these technologies, you should have no problem following along.)

Notwithstanding that caveat, if you want to get a quick grasp of the lay of the land, this book works out just great. It was a highly enjoyable read for me - hence my 5-star rating.

Happy Blogging!
~Damodar

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Functional rather than conceptual, June 22, 2010

By 

E. Angell (Nashua, NH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

WordPress Visual Quickstart is a thorough, step-by-step guide to installing, configuring and managing your own WordPress site. It will walk you through everything you can do with the basic WordPress configuration, as well as talk about some of the extensibility of the application. As a reference book for the beginner, you can hardly go wrong with it.

One thing to be aware of is that the book really is more functional than conceptual. The book does not attempt to guide you through the decision-making process when setting up your site, and only rarely makes recommendations for configuration choices...nor does it have a lot of sidebars explaining concepts like linkbacks and their importance, or talk in depth about best practices and the most effective ways to structure/organize your site (using pages vs. categories vs. tags etc.) I would have liked to see a little more discussion on some of these concepts -- but then, it does follow the most common pattern of VQSG's by Peachpit.

If you're new to Wordpress and to blogs, I'd suggest purchasing this book in combination with a more conceptual overview of the available Wordpress functionality.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy, simple instructions, January 22, 2010

By 

Kirk P. Fryrear (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

Having previous experience with WordPress but still struggling with some basic concepts, I found the book to be a good way to look over the parts of WordPress I had missed or needed work on. Contains simple step-by-step instructions, good for those less inclined towards complex instruction such as myself. I was rarely in the dark when going through the steps.

Worth your time.