Exploring the WordPress Potentials, Part II!
Welcome Back!
Class recordings will post after class below – > (as usual!)
Thursday’s Section – 5/4 Class Recording:
Passcode: *Y.vT6NL
Tuesday’s Section – 5/2 Class Recording:
Passcode: 0C!924%h
Let’s get a bit more specific with WordPress and begin to apply intentional context to our website design. Last week we started setting up our new websites by simply discussing the potentials of the visual design creation and experimentation process. We dug in a lil’ – but let’s move forward and focus on this here this week.
Let us now talk about how to set up new pages, and how to add those pages to the main navigation menu. We will discuss the navigation menus locations and what their functions were. We will look at the footer space and adding widgets in the footer areas. We also took a peek into “plug-ins” and installing plug-ins (especially the Classic Editor for the similar blogging experience we see on the ct101 site for writing our posts) and the differences between pages, posts & categories.
This is quite a bit of information and I highly suggest that you re-watch the class video tutorial from last week for the practice of retaining the new skills that were shared and displayed. I do this very often myself as I find it super helpful for being able to replicate a new skill or technique.
This all takes regular practice and a bit of openness to experimentation in general. How did you do with your experimenting last week? What did you work on? You can leave a comment below on this post and share the link to your new site :))) – WordPress is a very intuitive piece of software, and it wants your creativity!
Let’s continue forward. I will be sharing a new series of demonstrations with WordPress this week.
**This Week’s Blogging Assignment Prompt is Optional**
Let’s begin populating our new websites by publishing a new blog post there. Thats right, You can publishing a new post on YOUR website and also “cross-post” that information here on CT101 as well. There is an efficient way to cross-post content across WordPress websites.
I will show you how.
Lets say you just published a great new blog post on your new website and you also want to share it with your classmates / community here on the CT101 website. (You can! Its easy)
Step 1 – is to publish the new blog post on your website. Remember, every blog post has its own unique URL that can be later shared on other places and space on the Internet.
An example of cross sharing your post on may be done in a new post on CT101 that reads:
————
Your Blog Post Title (all blog posts need a great title!)
(insert an image – GIF – Meme – Quote – or some kind of related media)
“Dear Fellow Readers – I just published a new blog post here on my website: http://yourwebsitename.com, (make sure to hyperlink the post url) please come and check it out and feel free to engage in some fun dialog. Thanks so much”
————
This is a very minimal example above but perhaps just a title and a link is not that interesting? We need a bit of compelling energy to draw the reader from CT101 over to your site. So make this interesting and creative!
**This Week’s Blogging Assignment Prompt is Optional**
Publish a NEW blog Post on YOUR new website, the post can be about anything that you wish that has direct context to your new website’s stated intentions (what your site is being used to promote and share.) After publishing the post, create a new blog post here on CT101 that shares a synopsis of your new post from your website that will entice and grab our attention, be sure to include the direct URL as a hyperlink to the new blog post.
PS – WordPress is really vast and there are many many tutorials out there for “WordPress beginners” – Perhaps YouTube is a helpful source for finding some new resources outside of class? Of Course! Here is one, but feel free to share links to others that you have explored (add the link to the comments section below.)
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
