45 brilliant WordPress tutorials for designers

WordPress is the world's most popular publishing platforms, and it's currently estimated to power 17.6% of all websites. It's highly customisable, very easy to use and, probably the best part, it's completely free. 

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Because of its enormous popularity, there's a wealth of WordPress tutorials online to help you get to grips with the content management system. But with so much choice, things can often get confusing.

So, to save you time we've done the hard work for you and picked 40 brilliant WordPress tutorials from around the web that will boost your skills and introduce you to exciting new techniques.

• Why not read our other WP articles: The best WordPress plugins; Amazing FREE WordPress themes; Top-quality portfolio WordPress themes; Great examples of WordPress websites

For beginners

01. WordPress  - getting started

This video-based WordPress tutorial will show you everything you need to get started with the content management system, including installation, setting up pages, managing themes, and adding plugins.

02. Beginner's guide to WordPress menus

Follow along as Paul Kaiser explains the menu system basics and how to start using them on your new site in this excellent WordPress tutorial for beginners.

03. How to learn WordPress in one week

This step-by-step guide to WordPress is aimed at beginners who are trying to become competent with the platform in their spare time. 

04. Mastering the WordPress visual editor

Author Tom Ewer takes an in-depth look at the Visual Editor in this comprehensive WordPress tutorial for beginners.

05. The WordPress community offers advice to beginners

Siobhan McKeown reached out to people from across the WordPress community to ask what advice they would give to people just starting their WordPress journey.

Improve your site's design

06. WordPress for designers

Using a series of easy to understand screencasts, Drew Douglass explains exactly how to design beautiful sites for WordPress.

07. How to make a featured post carousel

It’s becoming more and more common for blogs to feature certain posts at the top of the page. In this intermediate WordPress tutorial, Nettuts+ author James Lao explains how to implement this in WordPress.

08. How to choose a great colour scheme

This helpful WordPress tutorial explains the three main considerations when choosing colours for your website.

09. WordPress Post Formats made easy

Ryan Taylor walks you through the Post Formats feature, which allows you to add meta information that can be assigned to individual posts and used by a theme to customise the presentation of these posts.

10. The complete guide to custom post types

WordPress has been gaining a foothold in the general CMS game for a few years now but the real breakthrough was the custom post type mechanism which allows for the creation of a wide variety of content. Daniel Pataki takes a look at how this came to be and all the options that this great functionality offers.

Add images to your site

11. How to add author's images to your blog

Pro designer Joseph Foley explains how adding a few simple lines of code to your site can display author's images on your site. A very useful intermediate-level WordPress tutorial.

12. How to create additional image sizes in WordPress

If you want a bit of variety with your images, check out this WordPress tutorial which will show you how to add additional image sizes.

13. How to create a photo album gallery in WordPress

In this WordPress tutorial, the guys at wpbeginner.com explain how to create a monthly photo album gallery without a plugin.

14. Better image management with WordPress

Here are a few ways to enrich your blog using some common sense, best practices and the power of WordPress.

15. How to get perfect blog images

Craig Grella talks through the best way to get perfect blog images every time with Auto Scale and Crop in this WordPress tutorial.

Create a WordPress theme

16. How to code a WordPress theme from scratch

In this superb WordPress tutorial, the guys at oneextrapixel.com show you exactly how to code a theme from the ground up.

17. How to build a basic portfolio WordPress theme

In this in-depth WordPress tutorial Chris Spooner explains how to take a portfolio site design and convert it into a basic theme.

18. How to create a WordPress theme

In 11 individual lessons, this WordPress tutorial will show you how to create a powerful, up-to-date theme. 

19. Designing for WordPress: complete series

Web craftsman Chris Coyier's three-part Designing for WordPress series covers downloading and installing WordPress on a server all the way to a completed theme.

20. Create a typography based WordPress blog theme

Having gone through the Photoshop, HTML5 and CSS3 coding stage, in this WordPress tutorial Chris Spooner explains the templating stage to finish off a typo design as a fully working theme.

21. Improve And Refine Your Theme Development Process

Some of the top theme designers and developers share some tips and techniques to help you improve and refine your theme development and design process.

Integrate social media

22. Integrate Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in WordPress

In this WordPress tutorial, Scottish webmaster and blogger Kevin Muldoon explains how to manually integrate the three most popular social media services on your website: Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

23. How to add Pinterest 'Pin it' button in your blog

If you want to enable your readers to pin images from your website but don't know how, check out this WordPress tutorial, which will show you exactly what you need to do.

24. Beginners guide to adding Twitter cards in WordPress

Twitter is slowly rolling out this experimental technology called Twitter Cards which makes it possible for you to attach media experiences to your tweets that link to your content. This WordPress tutorial shows you how to use them.

25. How to create email newsletters in WordPress

In this WordPress tutorial, learn how to create a daily and weekly email newsletter using Aweber or MailChimp.

Customise your website

26. Customise the WordPress admin area

In this two-hour WordPress tutorial, web developer Thomas Hardy guides you through how to tailor the Administration screens to match your client's branding. 

27. Create a WordPress custom post type

This quick 20-minute WordPress tutorial will show you exactly what custom post types are, and how to use them in your plugins and themes straight away. 

28. Implement Google Custom Search into WordPress

WordPress has a search function which has developers opinions split. In this WordPress tutorial freelance developer Paul Maloney explains how to replace the search function with a super powered Google Custom Search engine.

29. Add icons to WordPress custom menus without plugins

Adding icons to custom menus is a relatively simple two-step process that doesn't involve any PHP coding whatsoever. And this WordPress tutorial will show you just how to do it.

30. Build a multilingual site with WordPress

Take your WordPress site to the world. Shannon Smith, founder of Café Noir Design, explains what components are needed for a successful multilingual WordPress site

31. The WordPress Theme Customizer

WordPress 3.4 includes an exciting new development - the theme customizer. It allows you to tweak theme settings using a WYSIWYG interface and customise a theme so it includes the colours, fonts, text and pretty much anything else they want, as this tutorial explains.

Use plugins

32. 5 free essential plugins for your first WordPress blog

There are many useful plugins available for the platform. In this WordPress tutorial the guys at WPMU.org pick five must-have plugins for your first blog.

33. How to display your latest Spotify activity in WordPress

The latest Spotify activity plugin lets you display a stream of the latest songs you’ve listened to right on your website. Check out this WordPress tutorial to find out how to get it working.

34. How to create your very first WordPress plugin

For more control and flexibility over your site, one of the first things you'll want to know is how to create a plugin. Find out how in this simple walkthrough WordPress tutorial. 

35. Require or recommend plug-ins with a WordPress theme

This tutorial explains how you can easily include pre-packaged or repository plug-ins with a WordPress theme and prompt users to install and activate them in one single step, using native WordPress classes and interfaces.

36. How to create an embeddable content plugin

You may have a need to share advertisements, product information or your photo gallery if you are a designer. Whatever the reason, this article will show you how to create an embeddable content plugin to share your WordPress content with other websites.

Secure your WordPress site

37. Protect your WordPress site with .htaccess

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS with over 70 million users, but how safe is your install? Paul Maloney shows you how to secure your WordPress site with .htaccess.

38. Common WordPress malware infections

What hacks are WordPress users particularly vulnerable to? What do they do to a WordPress website? This tutorial covers backdoors, drive-by downloads, pharma hack and malicious redirects.

Advanced skills

39. Master the WordPress loop

The Loop is the basis of dynamic content in WordPress. Here, web developer, teacher and author Joe Casabona explains what it does, how to use it and resolves the most common Loop-related queries. 

40. Get to grips with shortcodes in WordPress

WordPress has a fantastic feature called shortcodes. Here, Paul Maloney explains how they work and offers up a few examples of shortcodes you can use in your WordPress install.

41. User-friendly custom fields with Meta Boxes

Ryan Taylor explains how to add metadata to a post by creating and adding Meta Boxes and improving the usability of custom fields.

42. Getting WordPress to play nice with responsive images

Frontend designer David Smith explains how to make images on your WordPress site adapt to different devices and screen sizes.

43. What You Need To Know About WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 was officially released on December 11th 2012. This version of WordPress is focused on improvements of existing features, rather than adding new ones, such as media library, plugins installation and theme previewer.

44. Inserting widgets with shortcodes

The shortcode ability of WordPress enables the end user to create intricate elements with a few keystrokes while also modularizing editing tasks. Daniel Pataki explains how adding widgets anywhere with shortcodes isn’t that difficult.

45. Using WP_Query In WordPress

If you've been around WordPress for a while you know how difficult it used to be to create post lists based on complex criteria while also conforming to WordPress standards. Over the course of a few years the platform has come a long way. By utilising the power of the WP_Query class, we can lists posts in any way we want.

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Have you found a great WordPress tutorial online? Let us know about it in the comments!