OER-CRAFT

How to set up your website using WordPress

ICT_2_EN  

 Title:
How to set up your website using WordPress
 Keywords
WordPress, communication, ict, website, WordPress, Websites, Use of internet
 Author:
IWS
 Languages:
English
 Objectives/goals:
At the end of this training fiche you will have enough knowledge on how to create a website by using WordPress.

 Description:

This training fiche is about how to build your own website with WordPress. First, we need to explain what is a WordPress. WordPress is a content managing system (CMS) designed mainly for blogging. Due to its great functionality, a large number of plugins or extensions are available perfectly suitable also as websites, business cards or even portals. WordPress action based on PHP / MySQL and is extremely easy to install and configure. This makes it one of the most popular CMS systems in the world. WordPress was used by more than 26.4% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2016. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, used in more than 60 million websites.
At the moment 80% of the websites in the USA that are launched with CMS use WordPress.  Every website is built with a HTML- code, a CMS offers user to maintain and adjust their website without the knowledge of programming, the system writes the code for you, and so you can focus on the content. 



 Contents

The use WordPress requires a web server with PHP and MySQL!

How to set up your website using WordPress in few steps.

• Domain Name: The first step that you have to take, before you start creating a website, is choosing a domain name that is relevant to your business.

• Hosting: Choose a hosting package, including at least 1 database and enough space to host a WordPress. With wrong hosting packages your website will suffer. A host should empower you, never limit you.

• Download WordPress: Once you have activated the hosting, you can download the application on your computer, so that you can have an easy access. Follow installations instruction or use this video as a guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3UB54eA2S4.

• After installing the software there are a few steps that you need to do before you can start.

1. You need to set the title, tagline and time zone.

The title and tagline will be automatically shown on your page.

2. Personalization: Delete the standard messages and pages from the website.

3. Appearance: Delete the standard themes that are installed.

After installing WordPress there are three standard themes installed. You can use one theme at the time, so by deleting the other two you create more space on the hosting package. You can pick new themes here: https://es.wordpress.org/themes/. One important tip is to choose a responsive template, with colors and layout that can be easily adapted to your corporative image, and with all the widgets and functionalities that you need to have in order to carry out your business activity. It is better to spend some time picking the perfect template, than have to start from 0 a billion time because you have not thought that you needed a calendar, a gallery or any other section.

4. Plugins: Delete the Plugins, and install new ones according to needs. Careful, some plugins work better than other and sometimes they are non-compatible with your WordPress version. You will probably have to install a number of them before getting to your favorite one. There are plugins for almost everything: weather, set optimization, newsletters subscriptions, forms, etc.

5. Security: Install a safety plugin, the safety of your website is very important. A plugin that is good to have is Limit Login Attempts, it makes sure that with too many login attempts it (temporally) blocks your account.

6. Positioning and internationalization: Install SEO- plugin, SEO- plugin helps you to position your website on the internet, whereas in terms of internationalization there are a lot of plugins to translate your website automatically or manually.

7. Backup: Installing automatically backups, make sure that you do a regular backup of your WordPress website. This is important because when your website is broken for some reason, it is easier for you to restore it by pushing a button. The weakest point of WordPress is definitively security that is why we strongly recommend keeping a backup copy.

• Website layout: After downloading the software and going through the steps mentioned above, it is important to start thinking about the layout of your website. Your layout is the first thing that the visitor of your website sees, therefore it is important that there is a good and easy to use structure.

• Contents: After you have decided how your layout is going to look, it is important that you think about the content. The content is also an important part of what the customer thinks when the content is not focused on the right target audience; they can decide to go somewhere else. Actually, the easiest way to implement a WordPress is to have all the structures planned before creating menus and categories so it gets easier to insert contents and you do not have to struggle against the application.

• Data: Some publishing platforms lock you in with proprietary data formats. Not here. WordPress relies on open standards to allow you to take your data with you, and even comes with tools to import from many popular sources. It’s your data, and you should be able to do what you want with it. We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine is under way.

• Software: WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, in the cloud, or in a shared hosting account. You have complete control. Unlike commercial software or third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your site. You can even install WordPress on your personal computer, or on a corporate intranet.

• Dynamic page generation: No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your site, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your site is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your site, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.

• Allowed html tags: Not everyone is evil, but keep those who are in check by limiting which html tags are kosher on your site. The default html tags allowed by WordPress are a sane choice to let people use html in their comments, without compromising the safety of your data or server.


 Results

After these recommendations, you will know how to install and properly configure the program WordPress. 



 Indicators

Stats:  With WordPress you can monitor your stats, the page includes a lot of useful graphs, charts and lists that show you how many visits your site gets. It also shows you which posts and pages are the most popular, and a lot more.

There are three ways to access your stats, you can access the stats via the ‘My sites’ tab on the WordPress.com home page, you can also access it via your Admin dashboard, or via the tiny stats chart in your toolbar that is called a Sparkline.  The chart consists of a bar that stands for 48 hours of page views, with the darker lines indicating nighttime page views.

Newsletter:  For WordPress there are plugins with various sign- up methods to your WordPress website, like sign- up checkboxes in your comment form and a sign- up form that shows in your posts, pages or widget areas.  These plugins work with almost every third party that has an email marketing service. With the right configuration settings, you can use the plugins for any newsletter service around. 

 

Popularity in the world: The most notable big name brands that are using WordPress are TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, The Official Star Wars Blog, Variety, Sony Music, Quartz, Glamour Italy.

 

Features of WordPress.com:

- Premium hosting, security, and backups are included.

- This service is free and much easier to configure.

- Automatically performs a copy of the entries.

- Login to the site is encrypted (SSL), so no one can access your account when you use the wireless network.

 

Features of WordPress.org:

- The ability to use your own motives.

- The ability to use your own plug-ins.

- Total control over the code that you can modify if you have the necessary knowledge.



 Learning Outputs
Online learning


 Bibliography

Training

fiche reference link: 


Description:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress, 





 

                   

 https://wordpress.org/





Content:      

 http://www.wplounge.nl/10-dingen-die-je-moet-doen-na-het-installeren-van-wordpress/





Indicators:     https://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/


                      https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/





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