Wordpress & Branding Workshop

Barbra and I are going to be giving a workshop on Wordpress websites, branding/SEO, growth, and more. A great way to gain traction of potential customers is to have a great website that publishes fresh and useful content! In order to prepare you for this, I have written a 30 minute guide to help you get started.

Wordpress is a free open-source content management system. It is the most popular CMS on the internet. Many major companies including; BestBuy, Xerox, TechCrunch, Google Ventures, and so on use Wordpress to ease development. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out here: wordpress.com.

I will be talking on how to best Search Engine Optimize your website to reach your customers. In order to make use of time, were all going to use the same Wordpress theme here: http://themeforest.net/item/neighborhood-responsive-multipurpose-shop-theme/5086341?s_rank=2. I purchased a single license for this theme, so it will only be used for educational purposes during the class, if you like it- the theme is $70. If you’re looking for other themes you can check them out here: http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress. I will also be using Mac OS X for the demo, but the steps should be the same on any system (Mac or PC).

Some things to do before we get started

1. Think of some ‘words’ that describe your product, business, company, and customers. Uber => Commuter, Share, Ride, Taxi, Drive, Work, etc. We discussed these this past week. Continue to elaborate!
2. Create some content! A blogpost, slogan, interesting thought, anything you want to post to your website.
3. Download Wordpress on your computers: https://wordpress.com
4. Download Wordpress Theme: http://themeforest.net/item/neighborhood-responsive-multipurpose-shop-theme/5086341?s_rank=2
5. Download and install MAMP: https://www.mamp.info/en/downloads/
6. Draw some wireframes on notecards. Learn how to here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_wireframe

Steps to get working with Wordpress:

1. Install MAMP
2. Create New Folder inside Applications->MAMP/htdocs called wordpress
3. Update folder in MAMP settings (point to it) by clicking on the folder icon and then selecting the newly created folder.
4. Go to PHPMyAdmin and create a new database, title it something like ‘wordpress’.
5. Go to localhost:8888/ in your browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari)
6. Use this info in the required sections

Database Name: wordpress (the one you created in step 4 above) User Name (database): root Password (database): root Database Host/server: localhost Table Prefix: wp_

1. Click on Install
2. Enter Startup Name, Username, Password, Email, etc.
3. DONE! :D Go to localhost:8888/wp-admin/ and enter the username and password entered above ^

Installing the theme

1. In Wordpress click on Appearance -> Themes -> ‘Upload Theme’ and upload the theme downloaded earlier.
2. Once uploaded, select ‘Activate’
3. Open a new tab and open http://localhost:8888 to see how the base theme looks! Notice its pre-populated.

You are now ready to get started developing with Wordpress on your computer! Yay :)

I will NOT be showing you how to upload your local site to a hosting service, nor how to point your DNS/Domain Name to this host. If there is enough interest I can put a tutorial up on that at a later date, otherwise you can contact me and I’ll show you how to set it up.

Here are some resources to help you with content creation:

• Free Images: unsplash.com
• Background Patterns: subtlepatterns.com
• Wordpress Themes & Plugins: themeforest.net
• Cool Free Wordpress Themes: alxmedia.se/themes/