0095 - Creating WordPress Websites

Course Description

Course Details 
 
Learn how to create attractive, sophisticated blogs and websites—without any coding! WordPress is the world's most popular website publisher, powering more than 25% of all sites on the Internet. WordPress is an easy-to-use solution that will help you put your site on the Web in far less time than by coding, and at a much lower cost than hiring a professional. In these lessons, you'll get hands-on experience with this powerful tool as you create your own WordPress.org site and blog. You'll find out how to use WordPress to create pages and posts, add images and videos, change a site's look and feel, and include user-friendly features. You'll discover the ease of using WordPress design themes to express your creativity, and you'll see how much fun it is to be part of the vibrant WordPress online community.  In addition to mastering the technical elements of WordPress, you'll learn how to organize a blog or website, create appealing content, keep your site secure, and achieve better positions on search engine results pages. By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently use WordPress to create a blog or a personal, business, or organizational website. The WordPress.org version covered in this class is the platform the pros use. While it normally requires a paid hosting account, this course includes a totally free, no obligation SiteGround hosting account for three months, along with a private place on the Web for practice.  
 
How It Works 
 
This course is fully online, you require internet access and an email account. The course duration is 6 weeks, followed by a 2-week period to complete the final exam (online, open book). Lessons are released on Wednesdays and Fridays of each week, for a total of 12.   You are not required to be online at any specific time. In addition to the specific lesson content, there is a discussion board with each lesson and often there is an optional assignment to apply the learning. Following each lesson,   there is a short multiple choice quiz. Your score on these quizzes does not count towards the final mark but completing these helps solidify your learning as well as prepare you for the final exam. The final exam is an open-book, multiple choice exam   and you need to achieve a minimum of 65% on the final exam to pass the course. There is only one opportunity to pass the exam. A certificate of completion from WatSPEED is available within four weeks of successful completion of each course and can be accessed in your student portal. Many of the Ed2Go courses are eligible towards the various online certificates offered by WatSPEED. 
 
Requirements 
 
No software purchase or installation is necessary. WordPress.org requires a paid hosting account, which normally costs around $8/month. Included in the course is a free 90-day hosting account (US only) and temporary domain with SiteGround, one of the world's most respected hosts. You'll receive instructions for registering for and accessing your free account. WordPress runs on any Windows operating system from Windows Vista to Windows 10 and on all versions of Mac OS X. No specific knowledge or skills are required, just a general familiarity with the Internet. 

Syllabus

Lesson 1 - Getting Started With WordPress. In this first lesson, we'll explore the magic of WordPress! You'll discover how to use this WordPress to create an attractive, dynamic blog or website, without learning any special code. You'll find out what the two "flavors" of WordPress are and why we'll use the self-hosted WordPress.org version. Then you'll go online, sign up for a free hosting account, and tour the WordPress Dashboard.

Lesson 2 - Creating a Blog. What can a blog do that a website can't? Blogging's become a popular way to establish an online presence. We'll discuss how adding a blog can make a traditional website more effective. Then you'll build a blog with WordPress, by creating, refining, and categorizing posts. You'll also find out how to encourage and control visitor feedback.

Lesson 3 - Making a WordPress Website. Get the best of both worlds by combining a blog with a traditional website. In this lesson, you'll use WordPress to create and organize Web pages. And I'll show you how to convert your blog to a traditional website, or vice versa, with the click of a button.

Lesson 4 - Making Your Pages Look Great. This lesson's all about WordPress themes, the templates that give your website its look and feel. You'll discover how to choose a theme, install it, and tweak it.

Lesson 5 - Working With Images and Multimedia. Photos, drawings, charts, videos, and audio clips can make your website more appealing and understandable. In this lesson, I'll show you how to use WordPress to upload and insert images and multimedia files.

Lesson 6 - Plugins: The Modular Solution for Functional Websites. Plugins are little programs that add features to your WordPress website. In this lesson, you'll learn how to find and use them.

Lesson 7 - Making a User-Friendly Website. If your online visitors have trouble understanding or navigating your website, they'll go somewhere else. This lesson helps you pinpoint and eliminate usability problems.

Lesson 8 - Polishing Our WordPress Website. In this lesson, we'll take a long, hard look at our class project and decide how to make it better. You'll create a front page featuring both static and dynamic content add links to pages, documents, email, and other sites and repair typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes.

Lesson 9 - Getting Search Engines to Love Your Website. What if you launched a website and nobody came? This lesson will show you how to keep that from happening. You'll find out what makes search engines tick and how to get them to visit your pages.

Lesson 10 - Making the Most of Statistics and Social Networking. Statistics are just a bunch of numbers if you don't know how to use them. We'll focus on how to analyze stats so you can improve your site. You'll also find out how to tie your WordPress pages into social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Lesson 11 - WordPress Security and Monetization. In this lesson, we'll discuss how you can protect a WordPress site against hackers, and we'll review money-making strategies for blogs and websites.

Lesson 12 - Mastering Your Domains. In our final lesson, we'll tour the hosting control panel, discuss domain naming strategies, and review where to get help after the course ends.