Creating a Web Site with WordPress

Introduction

This lab will walk you through the basics of learning WordPress.

Learning Outcomes

• Use WordPress.com to create a web site with menus and HTML content
• Add images of maps to your web site

Getting Started

1. Navigate to WordPress.com in a browser
2. Select a topic for your web site
3. Select "Start with a website"
4. Enter a unique name and select the "Free" option
5. Select "Start with Free" (you can always come back and pay them for more services)
6. WordPress will create a new "subdomain" for you. This is the URL that you can use to access your website. For now, don't worry about making a great URL as you can change it later, just click on "View My Site"
7. WordPress will take you into a view of your web site similar to what the user will see. "My Sites" and then select your new site. This should take you to a page with a left navigation bar showing "Switch Site", "View Site", "Stats", and other "Options".

 

Updating Pages

1. Click on "Site Packages" to see a list of the web pages in your website.
2. Click on "Home"
3. Click below the editing bar and write some text. Click "Update" and you should see the changes on your page in this "preview" mode.
4. Click "Edit" to return to editing the page.
5. Select some text and then change the style of the text from the "Paragraph" drop down menu.
6. To the left of the style menu are icons to make text bold, italic, a bulleted list, a numbered list, and a hyper link. Try each of these now.
7. Continue switching back and forth between the preview and edit modes adding text and images to your web page.
8. You can also change the title of the web page by clicking on "Home".

Adding Images

1. Click on "Add" and then select "Media"
2. This is a web page that manages your images, PDFs, and other files for the web site.
3. Select "Add New" and then upload an image from your computer. This allows you do add your images, including static maps to a web site.
4. Remember to scale your images to an appropriate size to keep them from taking a long time to download!
5. When ready to edit another page, click "My Sites" in the upper left.

Selecting and Customizing the Theme

1. In editing mode, click on "Theme" at the left.
2. You'll see a huge number of themes.
3. Click on the "Radcliffe" theme.
4. Scroll down and you'll see there are video tutorials for using this theme. Remember these in case you want to go through additional material later.
5. Select this theme or another one.
6. If your web site looks good you can keep this theme and customize it.
7. If you select a new theme, WordPress will take you to the "Customizer", otherwise, return to edit mode and click on "customize"
8. Click on the options on the left to see how to change all of the content that is part of the theme.
9. Click on "Menus".
10. Click on "Menu 1" to edit the menus in your website.