Creating WordPress Websites

Learn how to create websites with WordPress, the world's most popular website building platform.

6 Weeks / 24 Course Hrs

Currently Enrolling

Offered in partnership with your preferred school

Troy University

Change School

Learning method

Self-Guided

$129

No instructor. Study on your own schedule

Enroll Now

Instructor-Moderated

$129

Confirm your start date in cart

Starting April 16 | May 14

Details + Objectives

Course code: cww

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

How the course is taught

Instructor-Moderated or Self-Guided online course
6 Weeks or 3 Months access
24 course hours

Outline

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Instructors & Support

Richard Mansfield

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.

Instructor Interaction: The instructor looks forward to interacting with learners in the online moderated discussion area to share their expertise and answer any questions you may have on the course content.

Requirements

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

PC: Windows 8 or later.
Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are preferred. Mozilla Firefox and Safari are also compatible.
WordPress.org requires a paid hosting account. You'll receive instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Other:

Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

FAQ

Instructor-Moderated: A new session of each course begins each month. Please refer to the session start dates for scheduling.

Self-Guided: Your course begins immediately after you enroll.

Instructor-Moderated: Once a course session starts, two lessons will be released each week for the 6 week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends. You will interact with the instructor through the online discussion area. There are no live sessions or online meetings with the instructor.

Self-Guided: You have 3 months of access to the course. After enrolling, you can learn and complete the course at your own pace, within the allotted access period. You will have the opportunity to interact with other students in the online discussion area.

Instructor-Moderated: The interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes two weeks after each lesson is released, so you're encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release. However, you will have access to all lessons from the time they are released until the course ends.

Self-Guided: There is no time limit to complete each lesson, other than completing all lessons within the allotted access period. Discussion areas for each lesson are open for the entire duration of the course.

Instructor-Moderated: Students enrolled in a six-week online class benefit from a one-time, 10-day extension for each course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.

Self-Guided: Because this course is self-guided, no extensions will be granted after the start of your enrollment.

Reviews

I am so impressed and grateful for this class. It is like an answered prayer and has cracked the door open for me to learn how to learn Wordpress. Thank you for your clarity, patience, candor, and amazing level of needed detail when conveying so much material. I am also grateful for how you answer questions in the discussion area - fast response, clear answers.

This was a great class!

This was an excellent course, as it helped me to become familiar with WP -- something that would not be possible from just reading a book.

Thank you for creating a course that has given me valuable information and helped bring me back to educating myself. This has been an excellent experience and I will tell anyone interested in creating a blog pr website about the course.

I really want to let you know how great I think you've been as an instructor. The depth and length of your responses have been phenomenal. Your knowledge of the subject and your ability to put your students at ease with a subject that overwhelms most of us is exemplary. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am not now an expert - but I do have the confidence that I can get in there and tackle the world of web design.

This is really the best class Education To Go has to offer. You are the best instructor and you make it fun!

I definitely got what I needed out of this class. My primary objective was to learn how to work with a self-hosted WordPress website/blog that I took over for a client. Previously, I was intimidated by WordPress because I had never worked in it. This class gave me enough knowledge and confidence to dive into the existing WordPress site and start making changes to it, as well as set up my own self-hosted WordPress site which I am integrating with an existing, traditional website. Even though my objective was outside the scope of the class, the material you covered and the conversations in the Discussion area gave me what I was looking for.

This was a great class!

This was an excellent course, as it helped me to become familiar with WP -- something that would not be possible from just reading a book.

This is really the best class Education To Go has to offer. You are the best instructor and you make it fun!

Creating WordPress Websites

Troy University