Launch Your Website with WordPress
4 weeks/10 hours
Wednesdays 8-9:30 p.m. ET, Oct. 15-Nov. 5

Want to establish a presence on the Internet but don’t know anything about web design? Are you technologically challenged? Then this course — the first from TreeHouse Media Project — is for you.

When I left The Philadelphia Inquirer for the wild, wild web in 1999, it cost us tens of thousands of dollars and weeks and weeks of programming to create a very rudimentary news website.  Now, thanks to free, open-source software, you can launch a more sophisticated site for next to nothing in much less time.

WordPress is a popular, free software application used by bloggers and other websites (including this one). It’s easy enough to learn that you can launch a website in minutes.  But it’s also flexible enough to allow great creativity and customization. And it’s sophisticated enough to serve as a content management system (CMS). It can incorporate video and podcasts. And it has built-in SEO (search engine optimization) tools that will help you get your site noticed.

Even big media, such as CNN’s Political Ticker and Dow Jones’ All Things Digital, use WordPress. Here are just a few examples of sites built on WordPress platform. And here’s an article that makes the case for using WordPress for non-blog sites. And another.

But it takes some help to do this fancy stuff. And even if your plans are simple, it helps to have someone to hold your hand on your way up the learning curve.  You couldn’t have a better guide than the instructor for this course, Brandon Maddox.

Brandon is the Web Administrator for the National Association of Social Workers and an experienced and dynamic teacher. I’ve taken two of Brandon’s web design courses at the USDA Graduate School in Washington, D.C. and I can tell you he’s terrific.

This web-based, 4-week course includes 4.25 hours of self-study video tutorials from Lynda.com plus six hours of classroom review and instruction by Brandon via a WebEx video conference link to your computer. Every Wednesday night for 90 minutes, Brandon will review the topics covered in the videos, answer questions and provide troubleshooting for problems you may encounter along the way.

If you’ve got an idea for a website, you won’t find an easier or more economical way to get started than with the instruction and consulting you’ll receive from Brandon. He will walk you through the entire process of building and maintaining a blog, from setting up an account to using advanced customization techniques. He’ll explain how to create and organize posts, pages, and links.  He also will introduce you to the use of WordPress as a content management system (CMS). (Later courses will cover more advanced CMS programs such as Drupal and Joomla.)

The course syllabus is below. To preview the tutorial videos click here.

Launching Your Blog or Website Using WordPress
4 weeks/10 hours
Wednesdays 8-9:30 p.m. ET, Oct. 15-Nov. 5

Week One - Installing WordPress and Setting Up a Blog
•    Defining a Blog
•    Buying a Web Address
•    Find a Host to Run WordPress.
•    Setting Up the database
•    Download WordPress
•    Install WordPress
•    Editing your Profile
•    Writing Posts (intro)

Week 2 - Writing and Managing Posts
•    Writing Posts (contd.)
•    Setting general options
•    Basics of posting
•    Using the Write Post
•    Setting writing options
•    Adding links
•    Setting categories and tags
•    Previewing and publishing
•    Introduction to categories and tags
•    Managing categories
•    Managing tags

Week 3 - Advanced Posting Options
•    Advanced post options
•    Using the more tag and excerpts
•    Password-protecting a post
•    Creating pages
•    Setting page options
•    Previewing a page
•    XML/RSS Feeds

Week 4 - Customization
•    Using themes
•    Downloading and installing a theme
•    Adding users
•    Inviting a friend to be a user
•    Adding another WordPress.com user
•    Customizing your blog’s appearance
•    Adding widgets
•    Customizing widgets
•    Installing plug-ins

Fee: $95 (discounted) until Oct. 8, 2008; $125 after Oct. 8.

I know money is tight, so we’ve made this course as inexpensive as possible: If you sign up by Oct. 8, your cost will be only $95. In fact, if you and a friend sign up together, your cost will be only $65 each. Or, you can attend classes for free by becoming a contributor on the TreeHouse Media Project website. Email Rich Heidorn to find out more.

Sign me up! I’m ready to become a publisher. $95

I’m signing up with a friend. Give me that extra discount! $65

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