Case Study- Wedding and Family Website- Part 1

Starting With A free Website

I've decided to start building the site with using a free WordPress hosted blog as it will give you a chance to follow along by building your own site at the same time.

I will not be able to develop the complete site using the hosted blog and so we will abandon it after part 1 and move to a self hosted blog.

 However by that time you will hopefully be feeling comfortable using WordPress and will then be able to decide if you want to invest in a host and domain name.

What we Will be Doing

Part 1

1. Wordpress Overview
2. Registering for a blog
3. Adding a Blog
4. Choosing the blog theme
5. Initial setup
6. Site Layout
7. Making a few blog posts to see how they work.
8. Putting content on Home page and linking in the blog posts
9. Adding A few more Content Pages.
10. Wrapping up.

Part 1 is online here. Please come back here to comment and make suggestions.

WordPress Overview

WordPress was originally conceived as a blogging platform and not for building websites.

But isn't a blog is a website? Well yes, but it is a special type of website. It is a website arranged like a diary or journal and so it is ordered by date whereas a standard website is ordered by subject.

Recent changes in WordPress have made it easier to arrange WordPress to function like a standard website making it an ideal platform for non technical website builders to build a website.

Most websites today incorporate a blog which contains news like items/announcements. So if you use WordPress you have both on the same platform, - a website and a blog.

WordPress Pages and Posts

You have  two options when creating content. You can either create a post or a page.

Pages were introduced in WordPress 1.5 for creating non time sensitive content. So any content that you want to have permanently available should be created as a page.

The general rule is when using WordPress as a blog you use posts and when using WordPress as a standard website you use pages.

Registering for a Blog

if you want to follow this case study by building your own site at the same time then you will need to register for a blog. Go over to wordpress.com and sign up.

When you sign up just create a user account initially by selecting the just username option (see below)

Once you have signed up you can create as many blogs as you want. Each blog will be given a domain name of:

Your-unique-name.Wordpress.com

Adding a Blog

Go to the wordpress.com site and login using the username and password that you created in the sign up. Once signed in go to the Global dashboad under My account in top left corner.

Select the blog stats tab and you will see a link to start one

You will need to enter the name of the blog and language if not English. In this case study we are doing a wedding site and then changing it later into a family site so the name should reflect that.

I am going to choose HarryandSally but you may also want to consider adding the surname e.g. HarryandSallySmith.

Domain names aren't case sensitive so in any documents you can capitalize the names to show them clearly. It doesn't matter what case the visitor uses when they type in the name.

Choosing the Blog Theme

WordPress comes with a wide choice of themes, and if you get tired of one you can quickly and easily change it. For this site I am going 2 use a simple 2 column theme that supports widgets.

Widgets let you easily add functionality to the side navigation.

First you need to login to your blog by going to the WordPress.com site and logging in. The go to My Dashboard.

Which takes you to the main admin page. You should see the url in the browser change to (in my case):

http://harryandsally.wordpress.com/wp-admin/

Click the presentation tab

and it should open with the current theme being displayed. The default theme is Kubrick and we will stay with it for the time being. We will change the header image or something a little more appropriate.

Here I've used a picture from http://www.sxc.hu/. The Wordpress upload lets you resize/crop the image to suit the header size.

Initial Site Setup

We are going configure WordPress to look like a traditional web site with a static front page. The traditional blog posting will be put on another page I will use the page name blog but names like news etc can be used.

So the first step is to create two new pages one called home which will become the home page and one called blog which will contain the latest blog posts.

Go to manage and select pages and then click create a new page.

Here is the home page I've given it a title of home, the page name defaults to the same as the title but lower case. I've also added a little introductory text. This will be edited later.

When finished publish the page. Publishing makes it accessible to visitors. You only need to publish once after which you will use then save or save and continue options.

You need to do the same with the blog page. But this time you only need to enter a page title as the content is automatically added by WordPress.

Now we have the pages we need to configure WordPress to use them. To do that go to Options>reading and click the static front page radio button and select the pages using the drop down menu as shown below.

Now we need to test it. Go to

http://harryandsally.wordpress.com/

and you should see the static home page. the go to http://harryandsally.wordpress.com/blog/ and you should see the default Hello World post that WordPress automatically creates for each new blog. We will delete it later.

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