A flexible, go-at-your-own-pace 8-week online course that teaches you how to use WordPress to build custom websites with CMSs, reviews and payment features. It's designed to have you building completely custom CMS driven sites within the first few weeks.
WordPress is great for blogs, e-commerce and building sites to hand off to clients. Learn how to build your own themes from scratch, customize them around your features, and implement e-commerce with payments.
What you’ll learn
Learn how to install WordPress and how to configure it for your own needs
Building themes from scratch + customizing them with advanced data and features
Converting designs into dynamic HTML, CSS + Javascript themes
How to find and use the best plug-ins + how to integrate them smoothly
Integrating e-commerce and payments with WooCommerce and Stripe
Getting our WordPress sites hosted online securely and handed over to clients
Requirements
A computer with Mac OS X 10.9 or above, Windows 7 or above installed and a broadband internet connection. That’s everything!
Target Audience
This course is accessible to beginners. All you need is a tiny bit of front-end HTML + CSS experience – if you don’t have this already, we recommend you take our Foundation HTML, CSS + Javascript course first.
Most of our students work in the creative industries – designers, strategists and copywriters are the most common jobs – but anyone is welcome to join the course.
For our first week we’ll start by looking at cool mat’s brief, translating it into a list of features that we can turn into code. We’ll then learn a bit about the web and how WordPress works before getting ourselves up and running with it.
In our second week we’ll introduce loops and how we can shape our post content to fit our design. Using our design and shopping list as a reference we’ll then work through our page’s front-end and get to grips with how to customise our theme.
We’ll make our site dynamic so that it can be updated from the dashboard, looking at custom post types to better organize our content. We'll also convert our site into Korean before putting it live with a custom domain.
We’ll start with a new project, Nomad Sun: a travel blog featuring the most beautiful places in the world. We'll dive into creating WordPress sites with multiple pages, rearrangeable content using components and styling using design systems.
Our second and final week building Nomad Sun, we’ll explore responsive design systems, working with galleries, using functions, animating page transitions and optimising our websites for maximum performance.
Starting on our third and final project, Alter Ego, we’ll lead with our client proposal and learn how to build an online shop using WooCommerce. We’ll also use Flywheel to develop and host our websites in a much quicker and easier fashion.
This week we’ll make strong progress on the design of our store and understanding how to really customize WooCommerce using hooks, actions and filters. As a rewarding finish we’ll get our site accepting card payments using Stripe.
For our final week we’ll style our site using a UI sticker sheet, batch import products to save time, add contact forms and customise WooCommerce templates even further. To finish off we’ll get our site online, working fast and fully secure.
Lawrence is a full-stack web developer and teacher who has also taught over a thousand people how to code. He was previously an instructor at London code school Steer.