Monday, Feb. 15: Get your Site Rolling

For Monday, Feb. 15

Start your blog. Our goal for now is to get familiar with creating posts and pages. You can perfect your content later.

1. Choose one of the preinstalled themes. (Use it provisionally, for now. We can look at other options later.)
2. Create an About page, with basic information about who you are and the purpose of this website. (Be brief for now. You can perfect this later.)
3. Create a post that lists and provides links to approximately 3-7 excellent resources in your field of interest. Entitle it something like: "7 Great Sources of Graphic Design Inspiration," or "Social Media Trends: Five Great Resources," "Blogging Journalists: Seven Sites to Follow," or something similar to that.
4. For bonus, create two more similar posts listing resources for slightly different topics: Web Design, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Bloggers, etc.

Limit your total number of posts, for now, to 2-3.

On Monday, we will work on details such as:

• Creating categories for organizing your posts. (We will create a "Blog" category for blog posts and a "Portfolio" category for portfolio posts.)
• Including screenshot images with your posts.
• Creating a homepage thumbnail image for your posts.

In succeeding days we will work on developing other aspects of your site, such as:

• Expand your theme options beyond the preinstalled list. (For those of you wishing to design the details of your theme, I will provide you with a theme that you can easily modify.)
• Modifying your theme — for example, simplifying the homepage, moving the blog posts to a blog page, modifying the site navigation, showing excerpts instead of entire posts, etc.