Web Development and Design using Wordpress

In today’s digitally connected world, an engaging, distinctive website is a necessity for artists, musicians, designers, and creators. This course provides an introduction to website design and development for artists, providing the tools to create and maintain a unique online identity. In this course, you will learn how to build a custom website for your online artistic presence and portfolio, and how to leverage content management systems to develop and manage your site. You will also learn how to customize your site further with HTML, CSS, and PHP, three building blocks of the modern Web. This class will teach essential skills for designing and organizing your website, so you can create a site that is both visually distinctive and engaging. Over weekly assignments, you will develop an actual, live website from simple HTML to a full-featured site with galleries, analytics, social media integration, and other advanced features.

• Content, Themes, and Customization
• Themes define the overall structure, organization, and visual identity of your site. In this session we discuss how to choose the right theme for your site, and using HTML, CSS, and PHP to customize your theme.
• Managing Content with Wordpress
• In this session, we'll discuss installing a content management system on your site to quickly build your site and focus on the essentials of a site’s content and design.
• HTML5, CSS, PHP
• In this session, we will look at how HTML5 and CSS work in tandem to define the structure and style of a Web page. We'll also see how PHP is used to generate dynamic content.
• Intro to Web Design
• This session reflects on how design affects the interpretation of your website including Gestalt psychology and theories of visual perception. We'll also look into utilizing the Web design toolbox.
• More on Design: Color and Typography
• In this sessions, we'll look at the characteristics of text and fonts and their effects on Web design.
• Wordpress Plugins, Analytics, and Security
• This session goes over essential Wordpress plugins for further customizing and improving your site and how to integrate social media into your site, along with applying analytics to understand how visitors use your site.
• Advanced HTML, CSS, and PHP Features
• The final session will go over using advanced features of HTML, CSS, and PHP to give your site polish, style, and responsiveness.
• Introduction to the Web; Domains and Web hosting
• This session will go over how the Web works from choosing and purchasing domain names to servers and hosting.