WordPress: An Introduction

Course review:

WordPress offers a powerful & flexible solution for designing a website or blog. This two day WordPress training course will provide you with the skills and best practice approach needed to successfully create and run your own website or blog.

Why have we created this WordPress course?
WordPress, albeit largely an intuitive software to use, can be a bit tricky and people get very lost in the process. In addition, with the regularity of WordPress updates we found 99% of the tutorials online tend to become out of date pretty quickly. Nothing compares to instructor-led live help and guidance!

In this course you will find a middle ground between Beginner and Intermediate levels; we take you all the way from introduction, installation and configuration to building themes, extending wordpress with plugins and much more; Hence it is a 2 day course unlike the many of the 1 day WordPress courses that dominate the market place...best still it's provided to you at just half the normal price!

Course Outline:

Day 1:

Morning – Introduction:
• WordPress overview
• Why WordPress?
• Content management system or blog or both?
• How can WordPress benefit my business?
• The five minute install
• Configuration
• Connecting to the database
• Explore the WordPress Dashboard
• Find your way around
• What’s a page?
• What’s a post?

Afternoon – Build your WordPress Site:
• Brainstorm as a group how site will be structured
• Produce site map of site
• Layout post categories
• Layout parent and child pages
• Define home page content and other site content
• Explore page layouts and post content:
• Sticky posts
• Galleries
• Images
• Explore widgets – install them and remove them
• Explore plugins – install them and remove them
• Install shop plugin and commission it for the site
• Explore SEO: tags, categories etc
• Use Google custom search API to generate a more advanced search facility
• Build a contact form
• Build member area of the web site

Day 2:

Morning - Theming WordPress:
• Exploration of CSS and styling of WP themes.
• Build sidebars
• Explore page layouts
• Customise the loop in WP
• Include social networking attributes such as Twitter widgets and AddThis functionality
• Write a simple function
• Action hooks and filters
• Explore other theme frameworks such as thematic

Afternoon - Maintenance, Security & Resources:
• Evaluate what has been achieved from the session on theme frameworks and discuss how what we have created could be built in another framework
• How to maintain your WP site. What security precautions need to be considered
• Resources for further learning
• Recap on aims and objectives