WordPress 3.1 for Designers Course

Hi there, and welcome to VTC's WordPress 3.1 for Web Designers. My name is George Plumley, and I've been developing small business websites for over fifteen years. Since 2007, I've used WordPress exclusively. I'm also the author of an introductory book for WordPress users. Now over the last couple of years, WordPress has really matured from originally a blogging software, to now a Content Management System, that really handles any kind of website. Being able to offer WordPress to your clients, is going to be a very important skill for web designers, and this course is going to enable you to create sites with this open source software, either from scratch, or by converting an existing site, or site design. And that means showing you not only how to implement your designs in WordPress, but how to install the software, customize it's functionality, and get your client up and running with a working website. I'm going to start with an overview with WordPress itself, so you understand what it can do for your clients. Now even if you've used WordPress before, I encourage you to watch the videos in this short primer, because I'll be talking in part, about how to train your clients. That's an important service to be able to offer them. WordPress is easy to use, but of course, clients are going to need varying levels of help, in order to get them started. Next, I look at how WordPress works, especially the Templating Structure, known as Themes. Now we'll go into this in a far bit of depth because the Theme is really the heart of the web designers role, in creating a site using WordPress. Plus knowing this will equip you to create new themes for existing WordPress sites. This is an area of business that will remain in demand for quite some time, given the number of sites now being made with software, literally millions upon millions of them. The second important part of the course focuses on how to solve client needs through the use of WordPress plug-ins. Now these are add-ons which give WordPress greater functionality, and they're are literally thousands of these. So for example, if your client needs a Photo Gallery, or an Event Calendar, or they want to integrate their site with Social Media, or for example, they even need E Commerce, you can do that using plug-ins. But knowing what to look for in the more than 13000 plug-ins out there, that's very important. So I'll lead you through all of that, but also show you how to set up these plug-ins, because quite often, you're going to need to do that for your client, customize it in just the way, they need. And then of course, I'll show you how to implement key housekeeping tasks in WordPress, like security, statistics, backups, and more. And when it comes to creating custom functionality for your client, I walk you through some of the basics of working with PHP, and WordPress's own Tagging System. Now don't worry, it's not as complicated as it might sound. That's one of the great things about WordPress, it's much easier for you as a designer to offer clients complete websites without having to become a programmer. So let's get started.  

Download WorkFiles