Thanks for stopping by the home of the One Hour Website. What started as a demo and talk for the 501 Tech NYC is now a web resource for those of you who want to make a good websites with WordPress for a dime. Come here to check out my three rules for rocking WordPress, or watch the video.
Who Am I?
My name is Amanda McCormick, and as you’ll see from the video above, a few years ago, I had very little coding knowledge or much idea at all about how websites get made. While working at a nonprofit, I sensed a gap between what we were offering our fans and followers via networks like Twitter and Facebook and what we had on our website.
I needed a flexible, easy, and most of all super cheap solution. I found it in WordPress, and through the talk I gave for 501 Tech NYC, and this web resource, I’d like to help other enterprising people to do what I did…
Build user-friendly, socially integrated websites that get powerful results on a super-low budget.
You might be an educator, an artist, a writer or just someone who wants to learn more about the web. If you enjoy these resources, and want to get more as they are available, I hope you’ll subscribe below:
Getting started
You’re going to need a hosting account to set up your self-hosted WordPress installation. I use Bluehost, because I like the ease of use with WordPress, but a number of other hosts provide “one-click” installations of WordPress. Once you have a hosting account set up, and have installed WordPress, you’re ready to begin building your non-blog WordPress site with plenty of social functionality.Below you’ll find my three rules for rocking WordPres:
Make it Not a Blog
Make it Social
Make it Your Own
1. Make it Not a Blog
A few quick things will turn your WordPress install from a blog into a website.
First navigate to the Dashboard, look for Pages and click on Add New. Name this page “Home,” and publish it. Create a second page called “Blog” and publish that.
Second, navigate to Dashboard, and look down the left hand menu for Settings (it’s near the bottom). Click on Reading. Next to “Front Page Displays” select Home. For “Posts” page, select Blog. Now you have a Home page that is static and a page for running blog posts.
Next you’re going to want to remove the comments template from Pages. To do this, go to Appearance, click on Editor, and locate a file caled Page.php on the right-hand file list.
You’ll locate the comments template and then comment it out by typing <!– –> around the code you want to take out of commission.
Before:
After:
Make it Not a Blog
Make it Social
Make it Your Own
2. Make it Social
You can add all sorts of social functionality by using various plugins. Here are some of my favorites:
Facebook comments: These are not for everyone, but if you’re aiming to make a super-social site, I think Facebook comments are an excellent choice. Basically, they remove a lot of barriers to participation, seeing as so many users have Facebook accounts and surf the web while logged in. To install Facebook comments, you’ll have to create a Facebook application first. This plugin walks you through the steps. As an added bonus, you can use it to add the “like” button to your pages and posts.
Tweet Blender: I love Tweet Blender because it allows you to curate a group of Twitter users to show in a sidebar widget. Let’s say you have a campaign going and you ask everyone to use the hashtag #puppies. Tweet Blender can display that too.
The Tweet Button: Use this plugin to get the official “tweet button” on all your posts.
SocialFlow: Full-disclosure: I work there, so I’m a bit biased. But I think SocialFlow is a terrific solution for publishers, both because it makes sure your content gets broadcast to your Facebook and Twitter followers at the times its most likely to get the highest level of engagement, but also because it makes your workflow much, much easier. Which is something we all know is essential in nonprofits.
3. Make it Your Own
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are what’s behind making your website look awesome.
Let’s say you want to make all headlines green, or always display a fair amount of space around your pictures. In your stylesheet, you can create “rules” that will always tells web browsers to display pages in the way you specify.
While it’s true that you can’t learn, overnight, to design mind-bendingly beautiful website, getting a little knowledge of how CSS works will set you on the path to making WordPress your own.
Here are some of the resources that I recommend most:
Firebug: Firebug is a browser plugin for Firefox that’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass. Find a style on the web that you think is great, and activate Firebug to inspect how its CSS was written. You can even make changes in the Firebug panel and see how that changes the display of the webpage — any webpage. An essential tool for learning CSS.
The Weaver Theme: Weaver is a WordPress theme that puts many of the style rules you might declare in a stylesheet into a simple, selectable dashboard. Here, you can make changes to some design elements, fonts and font colors, and the header. When you are ready to get more advanced, you can insert your own code into the Snippets section, and Weaver will add those instructions to the stylesheet.
Custom typography:
Another relatively easy way to rock the look of your WordPress site is to use specialized typography. Among the easiest libraries to implement is the Google Font Library.
Custom Page Templates:
A huge boon in the WordPress customizers bag of tricks, Custom Page Templates are what you need to display content in innovative ways. Learn more here.
