Wordpress Concepts

Here are a few concepts and site definitions to keep in mind.

Wordpress was originally developed to be a blogging platform, and it can be easily manipulated to serve many purposes.

SiteThe key aspects you'll be working with are under the "Site" portion of the dashboard (the dashboard is what Wordpress calls the control center for your website).

Pages generally don't change very often.  These are used primarily as "top level" pages like homepages, about, resumes, contact forms, etc.

Posts are the main way to stay organized with specific topics; or in our case: productions.  Posts can be easily categorized.

The Media Library can store many types of images and documents.  It can also serve videos and audio files, but I recommend using other services like YouTube and Vimeo for that purpose - unless you're willing to pay for improved services from Wordpress.

Comments -  this is the Internet.  I strongly recommend disabling comments on all of your pages.  Unless you're willing to deal with a lot of spam and advertising ("work from home to become rich!") and mean/hateful comments ("I don't know you, but you suck!") I suggest not feeding the trolls.

Jetpack is where many additional widgets and analytics can be integrated - but Jetpack is very limited on free Wordpress sites.

Under Design is where you can choose your

Themes, which can easily change the look at feel of your website often without much work.  There are a lot of themes available for free, and you can pay for others which often have great add-ons.

Customize is where you can customize the theme you're using...changing the font, color, titles and menus throughout the site.

With these terms in mind, I've created a 10-minute introduction to my portfolio website which runs on Wordpress to give you an idea of what's possible - and how I've organized it.  I've made the video dowloadable, so you can save it for reference, and pause/replay as you wish.

 

Direct link to the video on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/503754478(from which you may also download the file).

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/S2C5yX_gmUA