Blogging with WordPress

Hours: 16 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced
Retail Price: $255.00

Course Overview:

Blogging is a great way to get the word out about your product, expertise or anything that's on your mind. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging applications, readily available on a lot of web hosts. In this course you will configure WordPress options and customize its appearance. We explore options for blog topics and getting the word out about your blog. You will write blog entries, publish them and then set up accounts for allowing access to your blog.

Students will:

• install and configure WordPress.
• write and publish a post in their WordPress blog.
• configure page settings and links.
• manage comments on their WordPress blogs.
• create themes and install plug-ins for their WordPress blog.
• look back at what they have learned and build a plan for working with WordPress.

About This Course:

We are committed to offering world class interactive online courses that provide training and learning support for the student in a number of ways during their experience. This course structure has been developed to provide activities to guide students throughout the entire process of learning. Learning activities include hands-on assignments that allow students to use what they are learning to allow better transferable skills within their work environments.

When a student learns, they are not alone.   Each student will be supported by our student services department – which ranges from course mentors, registrar, and technical support assistance.   Every month students have a progress report run on them every month by our student services department to ensure they are making satisfactory progress.   If a student falls behind, we reach out to them personally by phone call every month to see if there is anything we can do to continue to assist them with moving forward in their course.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Getting Started

In this lesson we are going to start the dirty work of starting a blog on WordPress. We are going to discuss options for hosting your blog, whether on WordPress or on your own domain. If you will be hosting on your own domain, then we will go through the process of installing the site. Then we will look creating user accounts and the screens we can use for configuring the blog and the way it works.

Lesson 2: Creating a Post

Now that our blogs are up and running and configured, in this lesson we are going to take a look at creating our first real post. We'll look at the tools we'll use for creating a post -- the Visual and HTML editors. We'll also look at adding pictures, movies, audio and other media to our posts. We'll discuss tags and categories and why you want to add them to a post. We'll end the lesson by clicking the Publish button and making the post available to world. We will also look at how to make posts private and managing posts, media, tags and categories.

Lesson 3: Pages and Links

In the last lesson we looked at the most commonly created content on WordPress - posts. In this lesson we will explore the other two kinds of content - Pages and Links. Pages are good for content that you want to always be around. An "About Me" page is a good example of a page you can create. Links allow you to create links to your own content or to pages that you want send others to. 

Lesson 4: Managing Comments

One of the cool things about blogs is the possibility of having a two-way conversation with your audience. That can be accomplished by allowing users to post comments to your blogs. But allowing comments can open yourself up to spam attacks. In this lesson we will explore how to moderate and manage comments and deal with the possibility of content spam.

Lesson 5: Themes and Plug-ins

Now that we have our blogs up and going, we are going to go behind the scenes and look at ways we can customize our blogs, from the way they look to the kinds of things the blog displays or can do. We will also look at ways of keeping the blog up to date.

Lesson 6: Putting it All Together

This lesson will give you a chance to show off what you have learned in this course. There is no new content, just a review of what has been covered.

All necessary materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.