Your Learner Verification

This free online course guides you through building your own WordPress website to boost your online business and brand.

Do you want to market your business all over the world? A website or a blog might be the best way to do so and you can use WordPress to create one in only a few hours. As a very versatile platform, WordPress allows you to complete manageable websites or blogs with your smartphone. Designed to lend anyone a voice as an effective presence online, WordPress is an open-source platform that falls under the general public licence and is free to use. The good news is that you do not need any programming or web design experience before using WordPress.

This video-based course begins by teaching you how to install ‘XAMPP’ server on your localhost (local computer), a prerequisite to installing WordPress. Following an overview of WordPress navigation, we discuss posts and how to create them. Posts typically include titles, images, texts, videos and audio, allowing you to communicate effectively with your target audience online. We then explore ‘categories’ to enable you to filter and sort the content of your website. Not only do they allow visitors to quickly find the information they need, categories also offer a much more user-friendly approach. We also refer to the filtering or grouping of information as ‘tagging’. ‘Tags’ are subcategories and we use them to provide further details about specific posts. Categories and tags are essential elements you need to understand when you start using WordPress. We then go into more detail and examine text formatting, working with images and videos and inserting lists, links and tables.

The course then lays out other characteristics of WordPress. It is crucial to understand how users browse your website to find information about your business or organization. How will your website look, particularly its layout, colour scheme and stylistic elements? In a nutshell, what is the ‘theme’ of your website? We answer these questions as you advance and demonstrate how to install a WordPress ‘theme’ that you can customize to suit your needs. We cover theme settings, widgets and menus to give you a good grounding in plugin functions. Finally, we delve into features like the contact form, photo gallery and the security and maintenance of WordPress sites. This course is helpful to business people who would like to market their services or anyone who wants to be their own web publisher. Anyone interested in programming and web design should also sign up.