The recent WordPress Websites Webinar held on 21st May 2023 was recorded, and is now available for purchase from our PD On-Demand page.
Many thanks to WAMTA Past President Jocelyn Kotchie, who attended the webinar, for her report on the workshop:
On Sunday 21st May I attended the WordPress Websites Webinar given by Simone Collins, our illustrious WAMTA Secretary, who has a long and strong background in Web Design and technology.
WordPress is the most used web building platform globally and is available in two different versions or installations. Simone gave a thorough overview of each of these installations -wordpress.com which provides perhaps a more user friendly and simpler option for beginners as it provides hosting and all the instruction needed to get online ... and wordpress.org which requires that the user has a domain and hosting already set up but which then provides considerably more options than WordPress.com.
Simone looked at each of these, their pros and cons and the features of each. She talked about the themes which are available on each of the installations and the various plugins which assist in building a website, which are considerable. She went through the menu items on the dashboard of each installation and how to use them. She shared her own experiences, her preferences and why.
She talked about the limits of each theme and how important it was to choose a theme which offered sufficient options and capabilities inbuilt to avoid extra time, work and money later. After that, the theme can be customised (within its limitations) to create a site that we are happy with. These may include the colours, fonts, layout, images etc.
She discussed the different ways of editing the site, such as block and classic editing and the options available within the WordPress editing menu. I found these options almost limitless and very exciting.
As part of her discussion, Simone looked at the options for Search Engine Optimisation, which is so important for a website to be easily found in google searches. WordPress generally has good SEO but with the tweaking of various settings and the help of plugins, the site can be optimised to offer the best possible opportunity for visibility.
As I am needing to update my websites and keen to shift to the WordPress platform, I found this webinar highly informative and extremely motivating. I’m very grateful to Simone for providing such detailed information and am glad to have the video to watch back for help as I begin the exciting task of rebuilding. For those who want to try WordPress to either start a new website or rebuild their existing one, I highly recommend this webinar.