Wordpress

Today you will be learning the basics of how to create a website using Wordpress, one of the most popular platforms for building websites.

Personal Website Warm-Up

In your group, divide up the following personal websites. Each person take a few minutes to go through a professional website from different people who will either be speaking to our class or who are involved with the Digital Studies Certificate:

  1. https://carolineklibanoff.com/
  2. http://abbymullen.org/
  3. http://johntinnell.com/

Go through the website and think about what kind of information it includes, how it is organized, what message it is sending about the person.

Once you’ve had a chance to explore your individual website, compare notes across the different websites (pull each of them up on your own machine):

  • What are the similarities and differences in terms of content?
  • What are similarities and differences in terms of design and layout?
  • What one is more appealing or informative to you as a viewer - let’s say you’re thinking about taking a class with one of them or want to do some kind of project with them - what is helpful and what isn’t? It’s okay to be honest. :)

Wordpress Tutorials

I’m going to have you go through three mini-tutorials:

Experimenting in Wordpress

Once you’ve gone through the above tutorials, you are going to try and do as much of the following as you can in order to start to familiarize yourself with the interface. The best way to learn is to try different things and see what happens! Remember, this is the point of having this installed in a sandbox!

  1. Change the Theme of your Wordpress site to the Library Books theme.
  2. Change the title of your site to the name of your favorite restaurant in Denver
  3. Add a Background Image of the Denver Skyline (here’s one you can use)
  4. Create a new page titled “Privacy Reading” and copy and paste some text from the reading you had for today and include a hyperlink to the original article in your page. Preview how the page looks and when you are ready to do so, Publish it.
  5. See how the new page looks on your site, then change the font to make it a little more readable