A-Pop - WordPress

Week 1 Workshop

Access your site

Your sites have been pre-created based on a site template. To access your site:

1. Login to blogs.evergreen.edu
2. navigate to My Sites in the upper left for a listing of all sites connected to your login

Note: we will be changing URLs to match the preferred first name provided.

Site Visibility

Your sites are currently set to be publicly viewable.

• In order for your posts to aggregate to the main program blog, your site needs to be publicly viewable.
• To protect specific posts, Edit the post's visibilty and set to Private. Private posts can only be seen by you and will not agreggate to the class blog.

Display Name

How your Author display name can be changed sitewide.

1. Go to Edit Profile from the "Howdy, your name" drop down in the upper left admin bar
2. Change the "Display name publicly as" field to your choice. First name last initial is a good option.

Site Title

Your site's were created using the pattern First Name's A-Pop Blog. You can change this in your Dashboard.

1. Go to Settings > General
2. Change the Site Title field and click Save Changes

Writing and Managing your content

• Get Published - Pages and Posts
• Categories and Tags - Every post you write should be added to one of the three categories provided: Rock, Scissors, Paper
• Custom Menus - let you modify your site's navigation and add links to new pages or post categories or create sub-navigation.

Images, video and linked files

• Insert an image
• Set a featured image for each post.
• WordPress built-in image galleries
• You can display Instagram Image Galleries as well. See: Setting up the Feed Instagram Pro plugin.
• Embed video from Vimeo or YouTube by pasting the URL link into the content area of your page/post
• Link to a file
• Audio

Week 2 Workshop

Blog Syndication

Each of your blogs is now set to syndicate to the A-Pop program site at https://sites.evergreen.edu/a-pop2017/.

What you need to know about syndication

• Each of your posts will be copied to the program site
• Viewers will be redirected to the original post when they click the title

Customize Your Site

Examples from previous students of A-Pop

• Emily H.
• Randy D.
• Dakota N.

Recommend Themes

TwentyFifteen

This is default theme your site is already set to use. This theme has a flexible Theme Customization panel located in Dashboard > Appearance > Customize, that lets you customize a few components.

Additional themes

If you feel compelled to use a different theme, the following themes will work well on mobile devices (they are responsive) and make good usage of navigation (Menus) and widgets so you can design a site where viewers can easily find and interact with your content.

• Baskerville (custom header image)
• Editor
• Hemingway (custom header image)
• Ignite
• Padhang
• Tracks (works best with featured images saved to posts)
• Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Sixteen

Additional themes may not have Theme Options but can be modified by Appearance > Customize

Sidebars (Widgets)

Sidebar content in WordPress is controlled via "Widgets". Often times if you don't anything to your sidebar a default set of "widgets" will appear. You can change this by adding your own widgets.

• Widgets - add additional features to your sidebar

Week 6 Workshop

For this session we'll first meet in small groups of 3-4 people.

Each person is to identify one element of a peer's site that you really like and/or find successful and one element of your own site you feel could benefit from improvement - this could be both content and/or design elements.

We will then share out highlights from our small group discussions to the larger group.

Additional WordPress Resources

• Built-in Help
  • when you're logged into the Dashboard look in the upper right under "Howdy"
  • Help is context-aware so will provide directions based on where you are in the WordPress Dashboard
  • Built-in help videos (part of built-in help)
• Wordpress Tutorial: Blogs
• Wordpress Tutorial: Sites
• Lynda.com Video Tutorials