WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 2Planning Your Site for WordPress

It's beyond the scope of this lesson to go into the entire planning process for a website. Rather, the goal is to map out a website and plan generally how to implement it in WordPress.

If you're setting up a personal blog, WordPress has done much of the structuring for you, and you could skip to the next lesson, but there's still plenty here that can be of use. For everyone else, this is an important step because with the right kind of planning upfront, not only can you save a lot of time and energy in the future, but it also can help you think about ways to make your website even more useful and easier to navigate.

To build a site in WordPress, you have three key things to consider during the planning process:

• What content will you have? (Including areas such as the header and footer)
• What special functionality will your site need? (E-commerce, events calendar, and so on)
• What do you want the site to look like? (Layout, colors, and so on)

The main focus in this lesson is on the first item—the content—because people have the hardest time with it.

The site used as an example throughout the book is for a company called Island Travel, a small travel agency with two locations, specializing in vacations to the Caribbean. Its primary goal is to have a website that provides a personal touch, with information largely written by its staff, and of course, the company wants it to be as easy as possible to update and expand.

Mapping Out Your ...