Review: Extremely useful for Wordpress beginners; helpful to intermediate users too
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 18, 2012
Eric Allyn's little "Simply Wordpress" book does just what it suggests -- it gives you a basic, step-by-step tutorial for building a Wordpress website. Besides being very practical for WP beginners, Eric's concise suggestions make a nice "checklist" for those who have intermediate or even more advanced experience with Wordpress. It's just very, very useful.As someone who's built dozens of Wordpress sites over the years, I might niggle over a few of Eric's choices, but I support the way he's done those choices: He sets out a solid "here's how I do it, and here are a few options you might want to try later" methodology. He goes so far as to make specific recommendations on finding and registering a domain name, as well as finding and signing up for a good webhosting service. No arguments with that, because someone buying this book for the sake of its title wants and probably needs that guidance.And, by the way, the content not only walks you step-by-step through setting up a Wordpress site, it offers some short and very practical discussion about the difference between Wordpress "pages" and "posts." Many Wordpress tutorials I've seen fail to explain that fundamental distinction and leave beginners puzzled about why the two terms and which they should use. (The author comes down on the side -- soundly so, I believe -- of using mostly "posts" with very few "pages.")There are all sorts of more advanced books and online video tutorials out there for Wordpress. But there's nothing I've seen as over-all useful and practical as this little ebook for those wanting to get a Wordpress site up and running today.The book is marred slightly by the occasional typo, punctuation inconsistency, etc., but over-all is so useful that I'm giving it a 5-star anyway. The content of the ebook itself is that well done.