You won’t find any talk of HTML, PHP or creating WP Themes here. What you will find is a simple, easy to read WordPress manual that will guide you through the process of editing your site content.
You can read the Easy WP Guide WordPress manual online, download the free PDF, or purchase the eBook or brandable Word document. If you’re a WordPress consultant, use it to help your clients get the most out of their brand new site.
There are many tutorials out there – and this post will merely introduce you to a few to start with. It would be brilliant if you could share your findings with me so I can add them here for everyone to enjoy and learn from :)
Please note this is a post in flux, i.e. it will be updated, changed and added to as fitting.
Links to websites you may find useful
Learning WordPress & WordPress TV
The organisation behind WordPress have a lot of materials for people publishing on WordPress websites and also those working with WordPress as web designers and web developers.
Learning WordPress is a website including training courses and videos for people that would like to learn more about WordPress. A lot of this information is aimed at experienced users and developer.
WordPress TV contains presentations from WordCamps, which are conferences for people using WordPress.
How to Create a Post or Page with the WordPress Block Editor
This is a video demonstrating how to create post and pages on WordPress.
It’s important to know/understand where the details for our cookies ‘live’ within our browser, on our computers. Here are a few notes and screenshots to explain.
Inspect element
In order to get to the information of the cookies being set on a certain page, we can use the developer tools, built into most modern browsers.
Right-clicking on the page, or a specific element on the page, will call up the ‘Inspect’ function which will allow us to view the underlying code and various addtional specifics.
Depending on the browser or prior use, the inspector will call up an extra window pane (or window) to present the details.
Of course, this is a tool for developers primarily, but useful for us to find the cookie info ~ via the ‘Storage’ tab:
This now lists stored information and can give us insights into the specifics of the cookies set by the page we are viewing. For your projects, you will likely use a plugin which will retrieve the related details automatically, phew ;)
Luckily, the CookiesYes plugin will make your life easier by offering a cookie scanning option. This is the final step and should be done once you are finished with the site. Once your content is all published, you’ve configured your theme as required and you’ve activated the plugins you’re using (deleting the ones you don’t) — run the cookie scanner and complete the settings for this. You should check on the categories, only keep those you need and remove the ones you don’t.
As an example ~ check out the cookie settings (link in popup) on this new website promoting the book ‘understanding well-being data’ by UoS’s own Susan Oman: well-beingdata.com
The latest updates to WP [1] have brought new themes and more changes to the interface. The views in the editor are aiming to make writing a more focused and calm experience. The usual left-side panel offering an overview of admin function is hidden by default now.
If you are very new to working with WordPress, you might like this as a distraction-free way to write your text. However, if you have worked with WP before, then this might catch you out and be quite confusing.
This is when plugins are useful ~ restoring a previous default. To stop the automatic full screen mode, install and active the following plugin:
WordPress is wonderful and offers so much flexibility. It uses themes and plugins to offer site owners easy access to unlimited design choices and useful features.
Every WordPress site uses a theme to control the design of the website. It manages the style including the colours, fonts and layout. Some WordPress themes are free, but it is also possible to pay 3rd parties for WordPress themes. Paid themes may offer styles that you prefer or include options which make it easier for you to customise the design to create a layout or overall style that you prefer.
For most of you this course was the first time that you have used WordPress to build a website, but I hope that it won’t be the last.
Although for this unit we have used WordPress to create a very specific type of site, the skills that you have learnt to do that can be used to create and manage websites for any purpose, without having to write any code. Over a third of all websites currently on the internet were built using WordPress, including many belonging to businesses, charities and other organisations.
Websites should always present good original content which respects copyright of authors and creators as well as site visitors and their privacy. By law, every website is required to be transparent about data handling (via a privacy policy) and state clearly which settings are in place as well as asking for explicit consent to set cookies.
When writing your content, always keep your readers in mind ~ these are the people you write for, your target group and it is up to you to make your text clear and easy to understand. Your subject might involve a certain terminology, or subject-specific jargon [1] or abbreviations, for example. Consider whether certain phrases would benefit from explanations, and offer additional information as fitting context.
Images of any kind, be that illustrations, graphics or photographs, are effective additions to your content. To follow good practices for both accessibility and SEO – each image has to include the alt/alternative text.
