Creating Websites in WordPress: Home
This guide is intended to aid students in creating WordPress sites for a class project.
Quick tips for Good Website Design
From Smashing Magazine, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/
- Don’t make users think
- Don’t squander users’ patience
- Manage to focus users’ attention
- Strive for feature exposure
- Make use of effective writing
- Strive for simplicity
- Don’t be afraid of whitespace
- Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
- Conventions are our friends
- Test early and test often
Using WordPress as a Content Management System
Some things to remember about WordPress:
- Started as blogging software in 2003
- Post-centric
- If you want to use it as a website you'll need to identify your home page
- Open source with a robust user community, https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/
- Has been used successfully as a Content Management System
Tips for successfully using WordPres
- Choose a responsive theme (lets your pages change size to fit the screen)
- Plan out the information you want to display (a storyboard or outline will work well)
- Always think of your users
- File sizes and types may be hard for some users to access
- Don't ignore accessibility, http://www.w3schools.com/website/web_wai.asp
- Remember “Alt”
- Don’t use small fonts (Don’t force visitors to enlarge your text every time they visit your site)
- Choose the best letter and line spacing
- Avoid fancy fonts (no italics, sans serif is easier to read)
- Avoid poor color contrasts
Working with HTML (and more)
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W3Schools HTML HelpThis is a tutorial for people who want to learn HTML. W3Schools also has tutorials on JavaScript, XML, CSS and more.
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Aptana Studio DownloadThis is an easy to use HTML editor that allows you to preview your HTML in different browsers.
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Notepad++This is a source code editor that supports lots of different kinds of code.