WordPress Web Design For Dummies

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119088608
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Web Design

Your full-color guide to creating dynamic websites with WordPress

Are you familiar with the fundamentals of WordPress, but want to take your skills to the next level? From bestselling author and WordPress expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson, this new edition of WordPress Web Design For Dummies quickly gets you up to speed on the latest release of the software and shows you how to use it as a tool to create a customized, compelling, and cost-effective website—without losing your cool.

WordPress can be used to create a custom design for your website using complimentary technologies such as graphic design, CSS, HTML coding, PHP programming, and MySQL administration. With the help of this hands-on, friendly guide, you'll discover how to create an effective navigation system, choose the right color palette and fonts, and select different layouts. Plus, you'll find out how to tweak existing website designs with available themes, both free and premium, and gain the confidence to translate your design skills into paid work.

• Create dynamic, custom websites with the self-hosted version of WordPress
• Use free themes and enhance them with CSS and HTML
• Create a responsive design for mobile devices and tablet users
• Get to grips with the newest release of WordPress

Whether you want to use WordPress to spruce up your existing website or create a brand-new one from scratch, this do-it-yourself guide has you covered.

Part I

Establishing a WordPress Foundation

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In this part …

Get an overview of the concepts of WordPress web design, including the basic requirements needed to design with WordPress.

Discover how to install WordPress on your web server.

Explore the different types of content that can be published with WordPress.

Build a solid starting point for designing your website with WordPress.

Chapter 1

Exploring Web Design with WordPress

In This Chapter

Comparing blogs and websites

Introducing WordPress as a content management system (CMS)

Understanding ways to publish content with WordPress

Discovering WordPress free and premium theme options

When you discover that you can build and design more than just a blog with WordPress, you begin to realize the potential of the software and how you can apply it to your website-building efforts. For me, the lightbulb went off in 2005 when my clients came to me wanting more than a blog on their sites. Many of them ran small businesses and needed to add other features to their websites, aside from the chronological display of the blog posts they’d been publishing.

This chapter introduces you to the concept of using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). You find out what CMS really means and see how you can apply it to your own website-designing efforts. You also discover what types of content you can publish with WordPress software and how you can leverage that content to build dynamic websites.

Additionally, this chapter introduces you to the world of WordPress themes — what’s currently available for you to use right away, what you can tweak to your own liking, and what you can research and dig through to discover more about WordPress design and theme building. You find out which themes are free for the taking and which themes cost you money to use. (Hint: The free ones are the best ones to practice with because there’s no cost to you!)

This book deals only with the self-hosted version of WordPress that you download from the official WordPress website (https://wordpress.org). You can’t fully customize and use WordPress as a CMS, as described throughout this book, if you use the hosted service at WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com). The names (and domains) are so close that it’s easy to confuse them, so the basic rule of thumb is this: If you did not install the software on a web-hosting account for your own domain, you’re using the incorrect version of WordPress.

Delving Into the Differences Between Blogs and Websites

If you read the introduction to this book, you know that I assume you already know how to use WordPress to publish content on the web. Therefore, you’re likely already aware of what a blog is and can recognize one when you encounter it on the Internet.

But just in case, a blog is typically a chronological listing of blog posts (or articles) that you (as a blogger) have published on the web. Often, having only a blog on a domain suits many people just fine — these people are referred to as bloggers, because they blog; that is pretty much all they do on their domain.

Figure 1-1 shows you what a typical blog looks like with the chronological display of blog posts with categories, publish dates, and comments.

Figure 1-1: My business blog at http://webdevstudios.com/blog.

Blogs have predictable features that you can assume exist, including

• A chronological listing of blog posts
• Blog posts archived by date, category, author, and tags (microcategories)
• A commenting feature that invites readers to leave comments on blog posts
• RSS (really simple syndication) feeds for posts and comments that get syndicated in RSS feed readers like Feedly (http://feedly.com)

You can build a website with WordPress as well; however, it encompasses so much more than just having a blog on your domain. Many websites built with WordPress, such as business or corporate sites, don’t even have a blog. Other websites have blogs, but they’re not the main focus of the site. Several types of sites, such as business sites, have more content and features than just blog posts to offer visitors, and WordPress allows you to have both a blog and a full-blown website.

When designing a website, you need to sit down and map out which of the many WordPress features you’re going to use, as well as decide how and where you’re going to use them on the site. Chapter 8 takes you through planning your design strategy — don’t miss it!

My business website, WebDevStudios (http://webdevstudios.com), is a good example of using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) to design and create a small business website. For instance, in Figure 1-2, you see that the front page of my business website doesn’t look anything like a traditional blog; however, if you look near the top, you see a link to the blog.

Figure 1-2: My business website is powered by WordPress.

You can manage and maintain several sections of your website through the use of one installation of the WordPress software on your web-hosting account, and create the visual look and design/layout of the site through manipulation of the WordPress theme templates. (I introduce themes later in this chapter.)

I have a blog on my business website, but it’s secondary to the other content I display there, including

• A front-pag...