Notes from Wordpress Website Workshop

Definitions

  1. Domain: The address assigned to a website. Must purchase from a domain registrar, usually about $12. Often comes with a free email address.
  1. Web hosting: Space on a server owned or leased for use by clients (like you)
  1. Wordpress: A content management system used to build websites, originally only intended for blogs
  1. Wordpress.com: site where you can host a blog for free (not intended for businesses)
  1. Blog:
  1. SEO:

Setting up Wordpress (Settings Tab)

  • General settings:change title, tagline, email, time zone, date and time format
  • Reading: Select “Front page displays a static page”, and make sure “site is visible to search engines” is selected
  • Discussion: Select “Email when comments are posted” an select “administrator must approve comments”
  • Permalinks: (self-hosted wordpress only)—change to “post name”
  • Sharing settings—Add facebook, add sharing buttons, open links in new window, show buttons on all pages

Notes:

Themes

  1. Select new theme by clicking on “appearance” tab, clicking on “Themes”, and selecting new theme
  2. Change header image by selecting “Header” under the Appearance tab

Notes:

Adding Pages

  1. Use our template to write content for your pages if you need assistance
  2. Remember to create a page called “Blog” and make that the default page for new posts (change this under Settings—Reading)

Notes:

Creating Menus

  1. Remember that you can create a different name for a page on a menu than the title of the page

Notes:

Adding Pictures and Videos

  1. Remember: ALWAYS include an ALT tag with your images!!!
  2. Formula for adding a YouTube video:

[youtube=url of video&rel=0&w=width of video&h=height of video]

Example: [youtube=

Add “&autoplay=1” if you want the video to play automatically.

Notes:

Adding Contact Forms

  1. Put cursor where you want the form on the page or in the post.
  2. Click tiny button on page or post editing screen above WYSIWIG editor.
  3. Customize form; add or remove fields.
  4. TEST THE FORM

Notes:

Widgets

  1. Different themes have different widget areas—i.e, along the side of a page or at the bottom of a page
  2. Many themes have the option of creating some pages without widgets and others with widgets

Notes:

Plugins (self-hosted Wordpress only)

  1. Click on plugins tab, “add new”, and search for a plugin to add.
  2. Click “install plugin” to add the plugin to the site.
  3. Activate the plugin once installed.

See our resource page for a list of recommended plugins.

Notes:

HTML

Visit learn and practice HTML.

Create a link using HTML: <a href="url">Link text</a>

Create a link that opens in a new window: <a href="url" target="_blank">link text</a>

Insert an image using HTML:

imgsrc="image url " alt="alt tag of image" width="width of image" height="height of image">

Combine the two elements, and you can use HTML to make any image a clickable link. For example, this HTML code:

<a href=" target="_blank"<img alt="Facebook"src=" style="width: 150px; height: 50px;"</a>

Produces this image:

Which is a clickable link to the RMC Facebook page.

Your Homework

  1. Practice doing everything we talked about tonight on an actual Wordpress site within 1 week (you can set up a test site for free at wordpress.com).
  2. Visit and watch some of the video tutorials that we link to, and/or review the recording of this class.
  3. If you are setting up a self-hosted Wordpress site, install some of the recommended plugins and learn how to use them.
  4. Sign up for a free Mail Chimp account or a free 60-day trial of Constant Contact and start building your email list (yeah, it’s that important).
  5. Leave us some nice feedback on our Facebook page.
  6. Go to the address listed below to try one module of our Total Online Presence course for free:

Visit for links to more resources.