Difference between revisions of "Audio Recording - WordPress"

Revision as of 16:37, 8 March 2017

Why a build a personal website?

• stake out your personal space/name on the web
• a stable location you control to point your social media accounts to

What to use to build a site?

• What is WordPress? How is blogs.evergreen.edu different from wordpress.com different from wordpress.org?
• Alternatives include Squarespace, Tumblr and Wix

Audio portfolio examples:

• http://www.gameaudiogirl.com/
• http://zacharyquarles.com/blog/

Create a New WordPress Site at Evergreen

As an Evergreen student, you have access to create a site at blogs.evergreen.edu and get support. This is a great opportunity to explore the waters of creating your own website in preparation for managing your own after graduation. blogs.evergreen.edu is Evergreen's WordPress server. You can create your own site, all you need is an evergreen email address and login.

• Create your first site if you are new to blogs.evergreen.edu.
• Learn how to create additional sites if you already have a site at blogs.evergreen.edu.

Writing and Managing your content

• Dashboard Overview
• Get Published - Pages and Posts
• Categories and Tags

Images and linked files

• Insert an image
• Link to a file

Designing Your Site

Working with themes

Themes allow you to change the design of your blog at any time. Changing your theme will not affect the primary content of your site.

• Choose a theme
• Customize your header image - some themes allow for you to add your own header image Appearance > Header Image (may only appear if your chosen theme supports custom header images)
• Make additional changes to your theme (advanced)

Suggested themes for portfolio sites:

• Baskerville
• Hatch
• Hemingway
• Twenty Fifteen
• Fullscreen
• Onesie
• Snaps
• Wilson

Sidebars

Many themes support sidebar content. Often times if you don't anything to your side bar a default set of "widgets" will appear. You can change this by adding your own widgets.

• Widgets - add additional features to your sidebar
• Add external links to your sidebar

Front Page and Navigation

• Change what your front page displays if you'd prefer a static pages instead of your latest posts (optional).
• Custom Menus - allow you to modify the navigation for your site
  • not all themes support custom menus

Adding functionality to your site

• Plugin Overview - use plugins to connect your site with a variety of web content including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Want to connect to a popular service that you don't see listed in the available plugins? Let Academic Computing know and we can look into adding it.

Embedding media

• Image Galleries
• Video
• Audio
• Adding sound files using soundcloud

What about after graduation?

• What happens to my blog when I graduate?

Getting your own website

Securing your own custom domain name

Every website has a unique web address. Best practices for choosing a custom domain name:

• short, descriptive, easily communicated, not easily confused with other websites
• first and last name .com
• domain registration happens via a domain registrar. Often times web hosts will also offer domain registration. Coupling domain registration and web hosting is the easiest way to manage as each will have to be renewed annually.

Web Hosting and Editing Platforms

Web hosts are the folks who host your website on their internet connected web servers. They can host simple html files but now, more often they additionally host web editing platforms such as WordPress, Wix or Squarespace. Before you commit to a web host:

• Create a trial account before you commit to a platform. Make sure it feels easy to use and meets all of your site's requirements.
• Add up all of the recurring costs (domain + web hosting)
• some platforms are Open Source such as WordPress which means if you don't like your web host you can always move your code to another server
• some platforms are proprietary such as Squarespace - web sites built here will have limited export functionality