Creating WordPress Websites

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

6 Weeks Access / 24 Course Hrs

Details
Syllabus
Requirements
Instructor
Reviews

Enrollment Options

Details

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 34 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. While it normally requires a paid hosting account, this course includes a free SiteGround hosting account for three months, along with a private place on the web for practice.

Enrollment Options:

Instructor-Led

6 Weeks Access Course Code: cww

Start Dates*Jul 15 | Aug 12 | Sep 16 | Oct 14

*Choose start date in cart

$139.00 USD

Add to Cart

Self-Paced

3 Months Access Course Code: T9215

No Instructor, Start Anytime

$139.00 USD

Add to Cart

Syllabus

Lesson 1 - 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 learning any special code. You'll find out what the two "flavors" of WordPress are and why users use the self-hosted WordPress.org version. Then you'll go online, sign up for a free hosting account, and tour the WordPress Dashboard.

Lesson 2 - 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.

Lesson 3 - 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. And you will learn how to convert your blog to a traditional website—or vice versa—with the click of a button.

Lesson 4 - Making Your Pages Look Great

This lesson's 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.

Lesson 5 - 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.

Lesson 6 - 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.

Lesson 7 - 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.

Lesson 8 - Polishing Your WordPress Website

This lesson takes 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.

Lesson 9 - 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.

Lesson 10 - 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.

Lesson 11 - 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.

Lesson 12 - 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.

Requirements

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

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

Software Requirements:

PC: Windows 8 or later.
Mac: OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 or later.
Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
WordPress.org requires a paid hosting account, which normally costs around $8/month. Included in the course is a free 90-day hosting account (US only) and temporary domain with SiteGround, one of the world's most respected hosts. In Lesson 1 you'll receive instructions on how to sign up for your free account.

Other:

Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.

Instructional Material Requirements:

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

Instructor

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.

Reviews

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.