Blogging with WordPress

Hours: 16 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

WordPress websites are some of the most common sites built on the internet. This course will give you all the tools you need to create, maintain, and grow your online presence using one of the most well known and powerful site creation tools: WordPress. You’ll get started with the basics of signing up and hosting your site. After your site is started, you learn how to optimize your site for search engines to direct readers to your site increase reader engagement. You learn the administrative functions of WordPress, how to manage users and their permissions. Then you learn how to further customize your WordPress site and add advanced features such as ecommerce elements and social media integration. At the end of this course you will have all the knowledge and tools you need to create your very own WordPress blog site.

Students will:

• plan your WordPress site.
• identify and utilize the site hosting options available.
• create various posts for your WordPress site.
• use themes to customize your WordPress site.
• add pages and menus to your WordPress site.
• manage comments for your posts and pages.
• use plug-ins to enhance your site functionality.
• add media such as photos, music, and video to your site.
• optimize your site for search engines to attract new visitors.
• increase site engagement with reader comments and social media integration.
• add ecommerce elements such as shopping carts and payment acceptance.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: The WordPress Landscape

This lesson introduces you to WordPress and the sites available for creation. You’ll learn basic functionality of WordPress sites along with the hosting options available for your site.

Lesson 2: Signing Up with WordPress.com

This lesson guides you through the process of choosing a web address for your site. You’ll create your own WordPress.com account and learn about the WordPress.com online community.

Lesson 3: Installing WordPress on Your Web Host

This lesson guides you through the process of preparing your WordPress site for hosting and the hosting options available. You’ll work with Autoinstallers to automate processes in addition to techniques and tools for site maintenance.

Lesson 4: Creating Posts

Now that your site is created and hosted you will begin creating, adding, and organizing posts for your WordPress site. You learn how to use the Dashboard feature to save time and effort when creating posts.

Lesson 5: Choosing and Polishing Your WordPress Theme

This lesson introduces WordPress theme. You learn how to add themes to your site, customize them to your preferences, add widgets, and chose new themes when you’re ready to redesign your site.

Lesson 6: Jazzing up Your Posts

This lesson teaches you how to enhance your posts with things like photos and other media. The Media Library function is covered in addition to options for customizing the way your posts are displayed to your site visitors.

Lesson 7: Adding Pages and Menus

In addition to creating posts for your WordPress site, you can add pages to enhance organization and navigation for your content. Creating menus for your site is covered in addition to customizing your Home page.

Lesson 8: Comments: Letting Your Readers Talk Back

This lesson covers managing comments which includes the option to allow comments or not, how to keep the conversation going among your site visitors, and how to prevent spam comments.

Lesson 9: Getting New Features with Plug-Ins

This lesson covers how to use plug-ins with your WordPress site to enhance the experience of site visitors on mobile devices, automate site backups, and enhance site performance with caching.

Lesson 10: Adding Picture Galleries, Video, and Music

This lesson will teach you how to embed code into your WordPress site to add photos, video and music to your site.

Lesson 11: Collaborating with Multiple Authors

This lesson teaches you how to add multiple collaborators and manage their editing permissions. You learn how to create a private community and manage a network of sites.

Lesson 12: Attracting a Crowd

This lesson teaches you techniques for increasing engagement from your site visitors by encouraging your readers to share your site on social media, search engine optimization, and utilizing site statistics.

Lesson 13: Editing Themes: The Key to Customizing Your Site

This lesson covers WordPress themes which allow you to customize your site. You’ll learn how to edit the style of your theme and how to use code to optimize and protect your theme.

Lesson 14: Building an Advanced WordPress Site

The final lesson will guide you through advanced ways to build customization into your WordPress site including adding categories, products and ecommerce capabilities.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.