Online WordPress Course

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.

The WordPress.org version covered in this class is the platform the pros use. To set up a practice site for this class, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Several options are described in the lessons. WordPress itself is free, but you'll need to host it somewhere.

What you will learn

• Learn to use WordPress to create pages and posts, add images and videos, change a site's look and feel, and include user-friendly features
• Learn how to organize a blog or website and create appealing content
• Discover how to keep your site secure and achieve better positions on search engine results pages

How you will benefit

• Confidently use WordPress to create a blog or a personal, business, or organizational website
• Open the door to more career opportunities as a WordPress designer for small businesses
• Create your own personal website to brand yourself and your business services online

Outline

Getting Started With WordPress

This first lesson explores the magic of WordPress! You'll discover how to use this WordPress to create an attractive, dynamic blog or website—without needing to learn any special code. You'll find out what the two "flavors" of WordPress are and why most experts recommend the WordPress.org version we will use in this course. Then you'll go online, sign up for a hosting account, and tour the WordPress Dashboard.

Creating a Blog

What can a blog do that a website can't? Blogging's become a popular way to establish an online presence. This lesson focuses on how adding a blog can make a traditional website 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.

Making a WordPress Website

Get the best of both worlds by combining a blog with a traditional website. In this lesson, you'll use WordPress to create and organize web pages. You will also learn how to convert your blog to a traditional website—or vice versa—with the click of a button.

Making Your Pages Look Great

This lesson is all about WordPress themes—the templates that give your website its look and feel. You'll discover how to choose a theme, install it, and tweak it.

Working With Images and Multimedia

Photos, drawings, charts, videos, and audio clips can make your website more appealing and understandable. This lesson teaches you how to use WordPress to upload and insert images and multimedia files.

Plugins: The Modular Solution for Functional Websites

Plugins are little programs that add features to your WordPress website. In this lesson, you'll learn how to find and use them.

Making a User-Friendly Website

If your online visitors have trouble understanding or navigating your website, they'll go somewhere else. This lesson helps you pinpoint and eliminate usability problems.

Polishing Your WordPress Website

In this lesson, you'll take a long, hard look at your class project and how to make it better. You'll create a front page featuring both static and dynamic content; add links to pages, documents, email, and other sites; and repair typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes.

Getting Search Engines to Love Your Website

What if you launched a website 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.

Making the Most of Statistics and Social Networking

Statistics are just a bunch of numbers if you don't know how to use them. This lesson focuses 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.

WordPress Security and Monetization

This lesson will teach you how to protect a WordPress site against hackers and reviews money-making strategies for blogs and websites.

Mastering Your Domains

In the final lesson, you will take a tour of the hosting control panel, discuss domain naming strategies, and review where to get help after the course ends.

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.