WordPress School: Week 1

Welcome to the first of Lorelle’s WordPress School, a year-long project to teach you WordPress from the inside out.

This is the first week, and there is much to cover to help kick start this program and your learning in WordPress.

Remember, for those who are new to WordPress, this will all be fresh and possibly overwhelming. For those who are familiar with WordPress, this may be old news, but think of it as a chance to relearn what you should have learned the first time around. More importantly, use this to learn how to teach friends, family, and clients how to use WordPress better.

You will not need to have your WordPress test or experimental site set up right away, but you will by the end of the week. It’s more important that you start thinking about the plans for your site than making your WordPress site at the very beginning.

Lorelle’s WordPress School Week 1

Here is a summary of this week’s WordPress School.

Monday:
- Go to the WordPress School Google+ Community, join, and introduce yourself
- For your test site, you will need content. Consider blogging about something you are good at, maybe even an expert. As you fill out the following forms below, I want you to give serious thought to what you will do with your test site as explained in the WordPress School introduction and video. This is your chance to experiment with creating something fun and special. Doesn’t work out, you can delete it when you are done with the course.
- Read the Site Master Plan post and download and print Site Master Plan Worksheet (PDF) and start filling it out
- Download and print the rest of the worksheets on the WordPress School Tutorials List in preparation, and you may start using them if you are ready.
Tuesday: Explore the concepts behind WordPress posts and Pages.
Wednesday: Learn about categories and tags in WordPress. To help you get started, there are worksheets, the Site Brainstorm for Content Structure and Organization Worksheet (PDF) and Site Structure and Organization Chart (PDF), for you to download and print to help you begin to build your site’s content structure, organization, and design.
Thursday: Thursdays will feature posts teaching you WordPress naming conventions, jargon, and lingo, introducing you to the names WordPress calls its bits and pieces. Learning the names is critical to asking and searching for help.
Friday: This is the day for action. We will be creating your WordPress test or experimental site if you don’t have one already. It is highly recommended that the site be a free one on WordPress.com to start. Don’t worry, there will be a guide to help you set up your WordPress.com or other site in a testing environment with things you can start on immediately to flesh out your new test site.
Next Monday: Next week we begin to explore web publishing with WordPress and basic functionality, helping you to navigate in the ever-changing world of WordPress interfaces and get you starting to fill in your test site.