WordPress: Masterclass

Course review:

-WordPress offers a powerful & flexible solution for designing a website or blog. This WordPress masterclass training course will provide you with the skills and best practice approach needed to successfully create bespoke Wordpress sites and advanced theme customisation techniques.

Why have we created this WordPress course?
WordPress, albeit largely an intuitive software to use, can be a bit tricky to customise and people get very lost in the process. We have taught so many people the basics of WordPress in the past only for them to come back later wanting to create their own bespoke theme or need to learn how to configure it on their server, secure the site, change domain names, set debug options, configure plugins etc.

In this course you we will be exploring PHP variables, arrays and functions, MySQL, Ajax form validation, building themes, extending wordpress with plugins and much more.

A brief look at our WordPress course outline:

What is WordPress made of?
• PHP – the building blocks of WordPress
• Why use PHP? Who’s using it?
• PHP variables, arrays and functions
• Build some simple scripts
• Anatomy of a WordPress template

How is data stored?
• What is MySQL? Why use it?
• How the WordPress database is built
• Administering your WordPress database with phpMyAdmin
• How WordPress communicates with the database

Interaction:
• Dynamic forms in WordPress
• Create a feedback form
• Validate data
• AJAX form validation
• Send confirmation emails

Managing users on WordPress:
• Display a member’s area of a site
• Restricted access and user levels
• Content management
• Add, edit and remove content
• Learn creative ways to display content on your site relevant to categories etc

WordPress and the Mobile Web:
• Creating responsive sites for Smart devices
• How does WordPress assist in that process?
• Explore examples and case studies

Theming WordPress:
• Available themes
• WordPress Theme Frameworks – how to get the best out of them
• Building our own theme from an HTML template
• Enable powerful features with WP theming functions
• Template files
• Code separation – keep headers, footers, sidebars (i.e presentation) separate from PHP functions (i.e programming logic).

Making your site pay; Search Engine Optimisation:
• Create a powerful search page template for your WordPress site
• Manipulate results with links and search term highlighting
• Blogging for business
• Integrating social media
• Dynamic content: Evolve our theme around the content – display latest posts, news items and RSS feeds on selected pages and hide content from others

Extend WordPress:
• Additional functionality with plugins
• Which plugin will work for you?
• eCommerce – best practices to add an online store to your site

Protecting your WordPress site:
• Website security:
• SSL certification
• Methods to minimise risk to your website