Manuela, Unathi, Engela, Zandile, Chris and Daniel (L to R)-Create FREE Website

Create and Publish a WordPress Website

Create and Publish a WordPress Website

At the end of this Workshop you will walk away with a good understanding of your WordPress Dashboard (Admin Area)! This training is for anyone who already has access to his/ her WordPress Admin Area and wants to learn how to customize and manage the website’s Admin Area, add/ edit pages and posts, photo galleries, widgets, menus, download and configure essential plugins and more. 

Please note that during this training we will be downloading important plugins to your WordPress website – this training is therefore for all those who already have a (non-free) WordPress website (self-hosted WordPress website) hosted by a hosting company such as BlueHost, AfriHost, Hetzner, or any other hosting company or individual. There are over 500 000 plugins in the WordPress repository – in this training we cover the important ones.

Should you not yet have a WordPress website and should your objective be to learn how to create a free website on WordPress I recommend you attend the Training Course ‘Create Free Website‘ >

Create and Publish a WordPress Website
Create and Publish a WordPress Website

Update your Website to the Latest WordPress Version

Update Plugins

Configure Settings in the Admin Area

  • General
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Discussion
  • Media
  • Permalinks
  • Rating

Download, Activate and Configure Jetpack

Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Configure the following plugins within Jetpack:

Carousel – With Carousel active, any standard WordPress galleries you have embedded in posts or pages will launch a gorgeous full-screen photo browsing experience with comments

Contact Form – A contact form is a great way to offer your readers the ability to get in touch, without giving out your personal email address.

Gravatar Hovercards – Hovercards enhance plain Gravatar images with information about a person: name, bio, pictures, their contact info, and other services.

Likes – Likes allow your readers to show their appreciation for your posts and other published content using their WordPress.com accounts. Your readers will then be able to review their liked posts from WordPress.com.

Mobile theme – There’s a good chance that visitors to your site will be using a smartphone, and it’s important to provide them with a great reading experience while on the small screen.

Omnisearch – Search once, get results from everything! Currently supports searching posts, pages, comments, media, and plugins.

Related posts – “Related Posts” shows additional relevant links from your site under your posts.

Sharing – Let visitors to your site share your pages and posts with their friends.

Subscriptions – Easily allow any visitor to subscribe to all of your posts via email through a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Every time you publish a post, WordPress.com will send a notification to all your subscribers.

Tiled Galleries – Create elegant magazine-style mosaic layouts for your photos without having to use an external graphic editor. When adding a gallery to your post, you now have the option to select a layout style for your images. WordPress added support for Rectangular, Square, and Circular galleries.

WordPress.com Stats – There are many plugins and services that provide statistics, but data can be overwhelming. WordPress.com Stats makes the most popular metrics easy to understand through a clear and attractive interface.

Download, Activate and Configure very important Plugins

Resize Image – Simple plugin to automatically resize uploaded images to within specified maximum width and height

Photo Album – Easily create and manage photo albums

Login Redirect – Redirect users to different locations after logging in – this is important as you don’t want to confuse users by getting them to the admin area after logging in. You want users to land on the homepage after they login.

Embed Document – this plugin lets you upload and embed your documents easily in your WordPress website without any additional browser plugins like Flash or Acrobat reader.

User Role – Change/add/delete WordPress user roles and capabilities

Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam.

Colours – Customize the colours of the Twenty Fourteen Theme

Google Calendar

The best calendar for your WordPress site. Lots of incredible useful features. It works and does not conflict with other plugins:

  • Create New Calendar
  • Settings
  • Create Events
  • Embed Calendar in a Page or Blog
  • Embed Calendar in a Widget on the sidebar

Users

  • All Users
  • Add/ Invite New
  • Your Profile/ Personal Settings

Appearance – Themes

Choose a theme – you can change the look of your blog with over 380 attractive WordPress themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar.

Pages

Add/ edit/ pages: Home, Gallery, Contact us

  • Screen Options
  • Save Draft/ Publish
  • Title
  • Content
  • Page Attributes
  • Featured Image

Posts/ Blogs

  • The difference between ‘pages’ and ‘posts’
  • Screen Options
  • Save Draft/ Publish
  • Title
  • Content
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Featured Image
  • Author

Photos, Galleries and Photo Albums

Managing Photos in WordPress-Photos, Galleries and Photo Albums-2

Media Search

How to quickly search for a photo in the media library: it enables you to search by ‘item’, ‘date’, ‘keyword’.

Image Attachment Details
  • URL
  • Title
  • Caption
  • Alt text – let images help your Search Engine rankings
  • Description
Image Attachment Display Setting
  • Media File
  • Attachment Page
  • Custom URL
Gallery Type
  • Thumbnail Grid
  • Tiled Mosaic
  • Square Tiles
  • Circles
  • Tiled Columns
  • Slideshow
Wrap Text

Wrap text around Image

Embed Videos

Embed a YouTube Video to a Page or Post; Embed a Video as a Widget

Google Maps

Easily add, customize and embed Google maps on pages and posts and… in widgets

Download a PDF file

Easily download any document s.a Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, a Power Presentation and more.

Menus

Add a Nav Bar, Menus and drop-down Menus

Widgets

  • Gallery – display a photo gallery or slideshow as a widget
  • Top Posts & Pages – shows your most viewed posts and pages.
  • Top Rated – a list of your top rated posts, pages or comments.
  • and more…

Time: 09h00 – 14H00

Refreshments: There will be a tea break.

What to bring: a lap-top and a mouse (a tablet is useless for this type of training). There is high speed WiFi at the venue (but bring your 3G as backup).

Hands-on: This is a hands-on Event. During this workshop you are going to create your own website.

Meet new friends and learn how to create and publish a website.


70 thoughts on “Create and Publish a WordPress Website”

  1. Tony is a fantastic trainer. As someone who does have website building experience but not on WordPress, it was a refreshing look at something I am not used to. His training methods are extremely hands-on and very easy to understand. At no time did I feel overwhelmed. Thanks Tony and I will most certainly recommend you to everyone!

    Reply

    1. Thank you very much Muller. It was great having you here and best wishes with your new website. I look forward to seeing you at the next Training Course. TT

      Reply

  3. Tony, thank you so much! Your WordPress training is literally going to change my life. You have made what seemed and impossible task, i.e. developing my own website, so achievable. I look forward to further training very soon

    Reply

  4. I loved the training Tony … so much tips and tricks …I will come and attend your Google Analytics training too…

    When is your SEO training please ??

    Thank you for your time and training !!!

    Reply

    1. Thank you Roelf, it was great having you and Mary-Anne attend the training. Look forward to visiting your new website soon. TT

      Reply

  9. Dear Tony

    Thanks so much for the WordPress course on 4th January. Your approach helped me to gain confidence and understanding of the amazing possibilities with WordPress and I am pretty sure I can now use our website to gain commercial advantage.

    Reply

  12. Wow Tony! Thanks very much for enlightening me on how to use WordPress, you made it very informative, I learnt so much doing this course and it was absolutely worth my while.

    Reply

  18. Thank you so much for this brilliant training Tony.
    This was such an awesome session. We will be back for sure.

    Regards,

    Michael & Russell

    Reply

  19. Really looked forward to this training and have thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I didnt have any prior knowledge of web design or wordpress and am walking away feeling quite pleased with myself. Cant wait to play around and practice now… thank you Tony, you’re a great and patient teacher!

    Reply

  28. Hi Tony – Thanks for the WordPress training, i have been putting off the learning WordPress for years, and this morning i learned enough to start using it 🙂 Thanks for your help Tony!

    Reply

  29. I arrived as a complete novice and I am now able to build a very sophisticated web site. Very interesting course and well worth attending

    Reply

  32. Definitely worth it for learning the fundamentals you need to create a website. I’m usually self-taught when it comes to website related work (ASP, PHP, MySQL) using a lot of Google, but would have missed a lot of important fundamentals and information about good plugins to use, so the course was definitely invaluable.

    Reply

  34. How refreshing! Tony is very dedicated, by making sure that you have grasped all important concepts. Thanks Mr T!

    Reply

Please comment, your thoughts are welcome

Consulting & Training: AdWords, Blogging, E-commerce, Email Marketing with MailChimp, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, WordPress

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