Making Your WordPress Site Awesome: The Intermediate Guide

This book is for: Individuals with limited or no coding experience who want to add the bells and whistles to their WordPress Web site and Instructors who are tasked with teaching intermediate WordPress.

Conventions used to walk you through building an Awesome Site using WordPress: (1) Step-by-step methodology (2) Learning by enhancing a site (3) Using open-source resources (4) Tips around known pitfalls that may hinder progress.

If your goal is to improve the look, layout, and access to the information in your site, learning the lessons of efficiency and affective placement is the best place to start. Because Content Matters, the first chapter will fly with you 'above the basics' of category, post, page and user management.

In the engagement strategies section, you will learn best practices of designing content using purposeful site engagement techniques like understanding your audience, defining, setting and implementing your site's engagement goals.

Creating and maintaining engaging content with the WordPress platform is easier than ever with the use of shortcodes that give you the ability to create an item and reuse it throughout the site. Shortcodes also gives you the ability to make a change to content while the changes flow to every other instance of that content in your site.

Making Your WordPress Site Awesome - The Intermediate Guide stresses the importance of using elements like clean code, keyboard support, text alternatives and style-free options to name a few. All of these elements and more prescribed by leading web groups and consortiums such as The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 are found in this guide.

Having social platform-friendly sites has been spear-headed by the social revolution and has served to integrate WordPress web sites with sharing sites. Using third-party elements to author data, utilizing ads and sharing to integrated web site content is as important as the formulation of current content and sensible navigation.

Using the tenants of User Experience (UX) to display your posts and pages in ways that are easy for your visitors to find and follow are explored in Making Your WordPress Site Awesome - The Intermediate Guide. You will also investigate the importance of visitor interaction as well as learn ways to manage your site's users, registration and logins to enhance control as a site's owner

Finally, you will learn specific ways to improve you WordPress web site's performance. You can easily build in performance by keeping a few elements in mind when designing your site security and others during maintenance.

Shere L.H. McClamb, Ph.D., PMP, PMI-ACP has more than 22 years working in the Information Technology field in the roles of Technical Suppot, Webmaster, Instructor, Instructional Technologies Developer, Business Systems Analyst, and Project Manager. She has taught at community and 4-year colleges as well as working for various governmental agencies within the State of North Carolina. Shere holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Capella University, a Project Management Professional (PMP) and a Project Management Institute- Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) Certifications from the Project Management Institute (PMI). She develops web sites and print media for her wonderful clients, teaches Web technologies and Project Management courses.