Wordpress Introduction

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 are somehow related to the class (author of a reading, speaking to our class, or involved with the Digital Studies Certificate):

  1. http://bogost.com/
  2. http://abbymullen.org/
  3. https://amyhasinoff.wordpress.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?
  • Which 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. :)

Familiarizing Yourself with Wordpress

I’m going to have you go through a few tutorials and then apply what you learned to your own site. 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!

The Wordpress Dashboard

  • Look through the instructions for: Navigating in Wordpress Dashboard
  • Change the Title and tagline of your site under Settings -> General Settings to something more appropriate (ex. “Cameron Blevins” and “A Personal Website”)
  • Change the Timezone under General Settings to Denver time zone

Creating Your First Page

  • Look through instructions: Publishing Content
  • Create a new Page titled “Test Page”.
  • Write 1-2 sentences in your page describing the topic of your Zoom presentation.
  • Make some of the words in your block bold and italic.
  • Use the “Preview page” option to see how it looks by navigating to the published page.
  • Go back to the page and add a new block then insert the image of Professor Blevins’s ferocious cat from your computer.
  • Change the Image Dimensions to make the image smaller (use Preview page to adjust it to your liking)
  • When you’re done, click Publish button and then click View Page to see the new page.
  • Copy the URL of the page (it should look something like: https://yourdomainname/sandbox/website/test-page) and send it over #in-class Slack channel

Installing a New Theme

  • Instructions: Installing Wordpress Themes
  • Change the Theme of your Wordpress site to the OceanWP theme (install then activate the theme).

Bonus

If you finish earlier than your classmates, see if you can figure out how to add a header image of your website that is this image of the Denver skyline. Try googling to find instructions or tips!