Learn how to create attractive, sophisticated blogs and websites—without any coding! WordPress is the world's most popular content management system, powering more than 40 percent 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.
Richard Mansfield is a best-selling author and widely recognized expert on computer programming. He holds a master's degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written numerous articles and columns on computer topics, and was the editor of Compute! Magazine. In addition, he has authored or co-authored 44 books, including the best sellers Machine Language for Beginners (Compute!) and The Visual Guide to Visual Basic (Ventana). His more recent titles include Creating Web Pages for Dummies (co-authored, Wiley), XML for Dummies: All-in-One Desktop Reference (co-authored, Wiley), Mastering VBA for Office 2019 (Sybex), and Programming: A Beginner's Guide (McGraw-Hill). Richard's books have sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into 12 languages.
The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.
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Lesson 1
In this first lesson, we’ll explore the magic of WordPress! You’ll discover how to use this free software to create an attractive, dynamic blog or Web site—without learning any special code. You’ll find out what the two “flavors” of WordPress are and why we’ll use the hosted WordPress.com version. Then you’ll go online, sign up, and tour the WordPress Dashboard. You’ll also plan your project and set goals for yourself.
Lesson 2
What can a blog do that a Web site can’t? Blogging’s become a popular way to establish an online presence. We’ll discuss how adding a blog can make a traditional Web site 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
Get the best of both worlds by combining a blog with a traditional Web site. 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 Web site—or vice versa—with the click of a button.
Lesson 4
This lesson’s all about WordPress themes—the templates that give your Web site its look and feel. You’ll discover how to choose a theme, install it, and tweak it.
Lesson 5
Photos, drawings, charts, videos, and audio clips can make your Web site 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
Make your Web site or blog more informative and easier to navigate with some special WordPress tools. You’ll learn how to use sidebar widgets, forms, maps, and syndicated newsfeeds to make your site more useful and usable.
Lesson 7
If your online visitors have trouble understanding or navigating your Web site, they’ll go somewhere else. This lesson helps you pinpoint and eliminate usability problems.
Lesson 8
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, e-mail, and other sites; and repair typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes.
Lesson 9
What if you launched a Web site 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
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
It’s time to put the finishing touches on your site. This lesson includes a prelaunch checklist, so your online guests won’t find any mistakes. I’ll also show you how to promote the site and manage contributors.
Lesson 12
In our final lesson, you’ll learn how to build a sophisticated form, and I’ll review all the optional upgrades WordPress offers. You’ll discover how to personalize your domain name, use your mobile phone to update Web pages, and access the files that control your site’s appearance. I’ll also examine the pros and cons of moving to the self-hosted version of WordPress.
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