Women Unlimited (using our Springmedia skills) are running a workshop to help you create your own website in 1 day. During this six hour workshop (plus lunch), you will create your own website using Wordpress.  Wordpress is a blogging platform that is used by people all over the world to manage their websites and blogs - and also the platform that Women Unlimited is built on!

You will be given all the software you need and we will lead you step by step on your own laptop through the process of creating your own blog or website.

We will help you define your menu, choose your design, show you how to change your designs, how to add functionality without ever needing to get your hands dirty with the code.

What you will NOT learn:

Firstly, (and this is really important), you will NOT be learning how to write html or coding language.  Wordpress has an easy to use interface, everything is available to you through an easy to use panel. 

We specialise in making technology simple and will be on hand through the whole day to show you and assist you.  This is a practical course in the extreme in that at the end of the 6 hours you will have your own website that you can be proud of.  That will look professional, that will be easy to update (as Wordpress will be your content management system), and will be Google friendly!  What more could you ask for?!

Specific agenda items

1. The language of  websites - FTP, HTML, MySQL, PHP ?  Don't worry, we teach you the language of websites and how to use the tools
2. How to upload files to the internet
3. The 5 minute install with Wordpress
4. How to add templates to your site
5. How to apply your design
6. How to customise your design
7. How to add pages to your site
8. How to add and remove elements from your site
9. How to add functionality to your site (ie Twitter, Google sitemap - don't worry, we'll give you a few of our favourites and show you where to find the rest)
10. Where to find more information

How will it work?

You will bring your own laptop to the workshop, we will not be providing computers - only our own for demonstration purposes.  We will provide you with all the software that you need and the templates that you will be using.  For the purposes of this workshop, you will need to use the templates that we have provided as they have been chosen for their quality and suitability for business sites.  However, we will direct you to other sites where you can choose from thousands of other designs (most of them free!) 

What you will need to have in place

All of these things  listed are necessary, but we are happy to talk you through the requirements and how to get them on a one to one basis with each person who books on the course.

Hosting:  You will need to have hosting in place  and not just any hosting, you need Linux hosting with a MySQL database.  Typically this costs about £5 per month (and we are offering this as an option at  £50 per annum)

Laptop: You will need to bring your own laptop so that you can install the software required

Domain: Not explicitly necessary to build the website, but your site can't go live without a name.  We can also go through how to connect your domain to your hosting company, set up your emails etc - we recommend reg123 or UKreg for domain purchasing.  Never let your web developer buy your domain as you are likely to pay over the market rate and this will become one of your most important assets and you want to make sure you own it completely.

Images: As part of the workshop we will show you were to find images, but will not be able to spend a lot of time on this.  If you would like to have specific images on your site, we recommend you purchase or source them in advance.  Best site for this is http://www.istockphoto.com

Content: Ideally you will have your own content to add to the site.  But don't it stop you if you don't - we can put in holding pages for the content you don't have and using the magic of the Wordpress CMS you can change it at any time

Who is this for?

• Anyone who wants to create their own blog
• Service based business such as accountants, Virtual PA's, Coaches, Marketing Consultants, Graphic Designers etc
• Anyone who is interested in creating their own sites for internet marketing

Type of sites this workshop is this not for

• E-commerce sites (sorry, while it can be done, it is out of scope to create this type of site in a day)
• Payment based sites - see above

Wordpress is one of the most powerful tools on the internet today and once you have the skills to create your own website, your only limitation is your own imagination.

Logistics:

Where: British Library

When: June 4, 2009

Time: 10:00 - 5:00

Plus you will get 30 minutes free support on the phone after the workshop to help you continue to develop your site.  There are only 8 places on this workshop as it is quite a complex course and so that each person can get the full support that they need. So don't delay and book your place today!