A beginner's guide to WordPress.

The main goal of this course is to teach anyone, even a complete beginner, how to set up a complete WordPress website quickly and easily.

While other courses teach you all of the in-depth, complicated things about building websites in WordPress, this course focuses on only those things needed to get your website up and running as efficiently as possible.

You do not need to wade through hours and hours of lectures to create a stunning website. WordPress is wonderful because once you have your site up, you can refine it over time as you are able. If you're like most designers or freelancers or entrepreneurs, chances are good you don't want to spend weeks perfecting your website, you want something up as soon as possible. To help you reach that goal as quickly as possible, I move quickly through the content to help get you up and running fast, so come ready to rapidly dive into the meat of this course.

What will you learn in this course?

With an emphasis on design elements, I will walk you through everything you need to start building a WordPress website, including how to:

• Spin up new WordPress sites in under one minute
• Install WordPress on your local computer (Windows or Mac) so you can learn without paying for a domain and web hosting.
• Download, install and configure WordPress plugins
• Optimize your website for search engines
• Backup, export and move your website to a different domain and/or hosting
• Create pages and posts, and how to understand the difference between the two
• Create custom menus and navigation systems that both visitors and search engines will find useful
• Protect your WordPress website from hackers and spammers
• Back up your WordPress website in case of an emergency
• Set up server and hosting environments in the most economical and secure way
• Build and edit websites within staging and development environments
• Migrate and transfer WordPress websites from staging to live and vice-versa
• Use some of the most popular and versatile WordPress themes available
• Discover multiple ways to work with various themes and frameworks
• Use Flywheel for hosting

As with all my courses, software and online tools are always changing and evolving, so if you think of something that could be added to the course to add value, let me know.

The end goal is for you to learn how to build a functional, beautiful, responsive website with WordPress. It's that simple. By combining both backend setup lectures with design-specific lectures, you will get a broad, well-rounded look at how to create a website you can be proud of, without taking months to complete it.

The processes shown in this course are the exact same ones I have used in my design agency for years. This is exactly how I build websites for my clients.

What makes this course different from other courses is that I am approaching it from two perspectives:

1. My real-world understanding of how to build websites for actual clients
2. My understanding of the graphic design and how that directly relates to website design best practices

I have over a decade of experience owning my own graphic design and website development agency, and I am so excited for the chance to pass the knowledge and tricks I have learned on to you.

With WordPress, you have options.

I will walk you through both free and paid themes so that you can dive in at whatever investment level woks for you.

Most themes use a similar backend layout, so once you learn the basics in this course, you can apply that knowledge to other themes down the road. This gives you the ultimate creative freedom and ownership over how your website looks and functions both now and on into the future.

Who should take this course?

This course is great for designers that want to learn how to build beautiful websites without the hassle of having to learn how to code. It is also great for entrepreneurs and freelancers that need a professional online presence but that also does not want to pay a lot of money to have someone else create it for them. It is also a great course for anyone that is curious about websites and graphic design, as the course serves as a great launchpad for wherever your creativity and passions can take you.

By the end of this course, you will have a beautifully designed website that you are proud of, and if your goal is to start creating websites for others as a side gig or as a business you will have learned some of the tricks and tools that I used to successfully build websites that clients pay very well for.