WordPress
What is it?
WordPress is free, open source blogging and website management software. Again, in keeping with my philosophy, I believe in sharing information. And, if you’re reading this, then you know that the web is one of the best ways of doing that these days. This website, for example, runs on WordPress. It can be challenging (at the University of Washington at least) to get WordPress set up initially, but once it is installed, it is a breeze to share your ideas on a blog or website!
Why should I use it?
- It’s free!
- It’s easy to use!
- It’s flexible – you can set up either a blog or a static webpage or a site that uses both static pages AND a blog.
- It is under constant development and improvement
- There are thousands of free themes to choose from so you don’t have to be a designer to make a beautiful and relatively unique looking website
- There are thousands of plugins and widgets to add easy functionality to your webpage. For example, I use a plugin to redirect other websites with my out-dated web address to this site. The other webpage I manage uses a dozen plugins to do a number of things from creating beautiful web galleries to advertising events and collecting conference registrations.
How do I install it?
If you are a student/staff/faculty at the University of Washington, there are specific instructions here which describe how to install WordPress to you individual web space. Note: you must first have your web space activated here (under computing services) and you need to follow these instructions to set up MySQL before you attempt to install WordPress. You will probably also want to make your WordPress site appear in the root directory of your web space (so that “WordPress” doesn’t appear in the address to your website). There are instructions about how to do that here.
Check with your university IT department to see if they have instructions specific to your university servers. The instructions from the WordPress codex are here, for those of you installing on your own server.
How do I use it?
Apart from the extensive WordPress Codex, there are probably hundreds of tutorials available on the web about how to use WordPress. And most of them are probably better than anything I can produce here. So, I recommend you use Google to find them, as they are constantly changing and updating. You might wish to search either “how to use WordPress to make a static website” or “how to use WordPress to make a blog” depending on your own plans for your site.
As with most things, creating a website is all about imagination. You must imagine what you want to do, and then imagine what solutions there might be to help you achieve that. Once you have that vision, you can use Google to find out how to do almost anything you might want to do with your website.
Tips and Tricks
If you are the UW, the following might be helpful to you.
There is an error (or confusion) in the IT Connect instructions for WordPress at step seven of the installation section here, when you get there you might want to come back and read below.
You do not need to put the words “webdev” in the “database host” field. You only need the address of the host, [dante or homer].u.washington.edu, and the port number, which you would have written down in step 5 of the MySQL setup. In addition the login on the installation page should be “root” rather than your UWNetID.
I hope that helps!
Happy Web-Designing!
