Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Website Creation Reflections

For a class assignment, I was required to create a mock library website via wordpress.  Here are my initial reflections on the process...

I did not encounter any difficulties in setting up my website, thanks to the explicit instructions of Dr. Oguz.  Once I had installed the wordpress script and reached my dashboard, I experiemented for quite a while with themes.  I decided that a two column layout would work best for my purposes.  After trying the Two Twelve, the Catch Evolution, and several others whose names I no longer remember, I chose the Two Thirteen.  The Two Thirteen is actually not set up as a two column site (although there is a side widget area provided), so I had to move the available widgets around to create a right side column.  Trying out the various plugins was by far the most time intensive part of the process for me.  I ended up installing quite a few plugins, but these are the ones that I ultimately used on the site:  Business Hours, Contact Form 7, Faster Image Insert, Image Widget, Slideshow, Social Media Icons Widget, and WP Mobile Plugin.  I had a difficult time getting a captcha plugin to work on my site, and I ended up installing three (SI Captcha Anti-Spam, Really Simple Captcha, and Captcha Code).  At this point, I'm not 100% positive which one is working, but I'm pretty sure it is the SI Captcha Anti-Spam.  I'm not sure why the first two that I tried did not work... I can only guess that they were perhaps incompatible with the theme for some reason.?.  I found it very simple to add users to the site and define their roles.  I made the home page a static page and created a separate blog page entitled Library News Blog.  I don't have a great deal of content on the site, but I do believe that I managed to naviagate the process of creating the necessary elements of a library website.

2 comments:

  1. I used the WP-reCATPCHA Plugin for the comments section and this seems to work nicely (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-recaptcha/). Did you link your blog posts to automatically post to Facebook or Twitter? If so, which Plugin did you use for this?

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    1. Hi Ellen! No, I did not link blog posts to Facebook or Twitter.... that would be cool, though. Since I didn't want to link the social media sites to my personal sites, I just used the general URL address (for instance, the URL for facebook login). I don't think a plugin would have worked in this case. I'll check out the WP recaptcha... thanks for the tip!

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