Here are some great WordPress resources, courtesy of Clark College Instructor Lorelle VanFossen, whom I mentioned in Monday’s class. She has provided us with the following sites to explore and advance our WordPress knowledge.
- What is WordPress?
- WordPress Social Integration
- The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog
- How to Sign Up for WordPress.com Blog
- How to Log Into WordPress
- The Basic Structure of a Blog Post
- The Basics You Must Know About a WordPress Theme
- How to Add Images in Your Post Content
- How to Link to Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, Authors, and Feeds in WordPress
We will cover some advanced topics, as well as the detailed weekly class calendar on Wednesday.
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This week is a short one – just two classes with the day off on Friday, Oct. 11. So, we will be packing a lot into it.
On Monday we work on getting our blogs fully set up, going over WordPress as a platform and some of its most basic (but important) features. At the end of class, you should have updated your shell blog account with the following:
- A blog name (site title);
- A blog subtitle (tagline);
- A theme of your choosing;
- A custom header image;
- A default image for your blog profile; and
- A basic first post, along the lines of “Hello, world.”
There are a tremendous amount of resources on the Web to learn about WordPress, but there is no substitute for spending quality time with your blog (especially the dashboard and admin side of it). Spend some time exploring it.
As we covered on Monday, WordPress is the creation of Matt Mullenweg and a bunch of open-source creators who have given people like multimedia journalists a powerful platform to communicate. We can carve out our own space on the Web and build out a website, hosted on wordpress.com or self-hosted on a custom URL powered by WordPress.
On Wednesday, we will go more in-depth into key WordPress settings. We touched on search engine optimization (SEO) and web coding of WordPress pages on Monday, but we will dive deeper into tagging, SEO basics, and blog settings. By the end of the class we will create a sample multimedia post that will include text, links, photos, and embedded video.
>>The final weekly schedule of classes is now published on our site under the “Calendar” section
Clark College JOUR 111 Class Blog 
Lorelle waves back!
Hey, you all! Checking in from the WordPress I course at Clark College – and I expect to see all of you in my class soon because you are going to LOVE THIS STUFF!
If you have any questions about web publishing, writing for the web, and WordPress, beyond what your skilled and talented instructors have to offer, let me know how I can help.
The WordPress class has its own magazine site about WordPress and blogging we just started this quarter at ClarkWP and we’d love to invite you to check it out.
I’ve talked to Jeff about inviting you to contribute to the site as guest contributors. We will be publishing articles on blogging, web publishing, citizen journalism, and WordPress. Nag him for me and hopefully we can get some cross-class projects going! Would be exciting to see your names in bright lights on our site.
Thanks and hope to see you in my classes soon! WordPress I is next quarter, I believe the same day as the Writing for the Web course, and WordPress II, the sequel, should be this Spring, for those who take their web publishing seriously, inside and out.
Thanks!