WordPress To Go: How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner Paperback – May 7, 2013

I am a pretty effective SEO specialist but not an expert to actually build a website from scratch - something that some of my clients would be interested in. So I looked into different programs (Dreamweaver being one of them) and found that Wordpress is the ideal platform. However, there are almost no good courses on WP out there, and just a few decent books, most of them either convoluted, unnecessarily technical, and / or very expensive. But then I was lucky to find "Wordpress to Go" - and was hooked.It's no exaggeration but I can say with total conviction (and no, I'm not getting any rewards for this) that Sarah's book is the best tutorial I have ever read - probably on any subject, and certainly on a technical one, bar none. The main upside of this book is the totally practical approach the author takes (I guess only women can be that practical!): clear, very easy to understand, and virtually holding the reader's hand as she goes through all the important WP modules and menus step by step, and extremely clearly. Sarah is a programmer and as such a professional but she has a very readable and personal style, almost as she was sitting across the table. Oh, and BTW, all the info is up-to-date, not some rehashed, obsolete stuff.Hosting (Sarah maybe receives a commission from Hostgator but so what? Hostgator is really the best), Setup, Installation, all are explained very well. The entire WP structure, and all its critical functions, are totally easy to read and understand - and to apply, too, because practical examples and useful screenshots are there to help. WP has a lot of widgets and plugins, and the author gives all pros and cons, and gives plenty of good advice. It's fair to say that unless a user is severely untalented, he / she will be able to apply Sarah's book to build decent WP websites within a few days, often even faster.This is a relatively short e-book (only 80 pages or so), and Kindle pages are not big, so something had to give, such as extensive MySQL and php guidance which is lacking, along with a few other, though non-critical pieces. But the author is practical (a woman, remember?), and has managed to superbly balance vital knowledge with bottom line applicability, and pack into this great book almost as much information as books 10 times the length, one tenth of clarity, and 20 times the price.Bottom line: this book is worth a lot; and at under $ 5 this is the steal of the year.

With this book in hand, I finally tackled a job I'd been putting off for months - converting my old hand-built website to a WordPress.org site. It involved changing hosts, since my previous provider didn't offer a WordPress installation, and frankly that intimidated me more than a little. Following Ms McHarry's advice (and some other on-line checking), I signed up with Hostgator. After an initial hiccup or two, easily resolved via their customer service, they completely transferred my site from my old provider to Hostgator. The WP installation was very easy and straightforward to do myself.This book provides an excellent basic overview of how WP works and how to set up your site with pages and posts, categories, widgets, plug-ins, comment moderation, etc. I appreciated her suggestions for plug-ins to add and how to set them up. Overall, I found the book well-written, and appropriately targeted for her stated audience - beginners with basic familiarity with web site structure and usage. It by no means answered every question I had (particularly about making WP pages top level in your domain, or how to convert existing .htm pages to WP). But it gave me a very good foundation to start with, which made it much easier to understand the more detailed on-line WP help or other internet sources.The one slight nit-pick is that she advises you to disable Jetpack early on (I assume to make the tutorial easier to follow), and then never says anything more about this plugin. In fact, I found Jetpack to be immensely useful once I did activate it. Among its many features is an easy-to-add set of social media link buttons. Given the importance of social media these days, I'm a little surprised this was missing from the book, but perhaps it's been added to later editions than the one I purchased.All in all, if you are just getting started on WP, your $5 (Kindle version) will be well-spent on this nice, easy tutorial guide!

This book was an excellent resource for me. I wanted to pull my old website for my consulting business from Yahoo/Aabaco's terrible hosting service and move to a new provider -- and modernize my website in the process. Wordpress seemed the way to go, and this book gave me the roadmap to getting the new site up and going quickly.Why only four stars? This book lacks something very, very basic: an index! It's extremely difficult to find topics in it other than by reading the book A to Z. For example, in my new site I wanted to disable commenting on all pages. I knew there were steps on how to do that in the book... somewhere. I should have been able to go to the index and look up "commenting." Alternatively, if a PDF of the book came with purchase, I could just CTRL+F my way through finding what I need.I'd seriously spend another ~$10 on the next edition of this book if it came with an index or PDF -- the info is THAT good, it's just hard to find...