Building a Site for Classwork with WordPress on DoOO

Signing Up on DoOO #

This guide is intended to be a brief overview of things to consider when creating a site for a class with WordPress on Domain of One’s Own. If you are building a digital project site or a portfolio you may want to look at those guides. It assumes that you already have a Domain of One’s Own account. You can get signed up for an account on your own or book an appointment with the Digital Knowledge Center to get help help getting started.

There is no one right way to build a site with WordPress on Domain of One’s Own. How you design your site will depend on your goals.

If you are just getting started with WordPress we encourage you to check out all our WordPress guides on Domain of One’s Own or book an appointment with the Digital Knowledge Center.

Getting Started with WordPress #

1. Create a subdomain for your class site
   • This is the URL you’ll want to use for the class. Creating a subdomain is like building another house on your plot of land (i.e. your hosting account). It will be a separate site from your main site. An example would be if you registered janedoe.net a subdomain for your class could be dgst101.janedoe.net.
   • The prefix can be related to your class (or not). Just remember the root URL will always be the domain we purchased for you.
   • Creating a subdomain in cPanel only creates a folder on your account for things to be installed into. The next step will be to install WordPress into that folder.
2. Install WordPress and launch WordPress to access the backend of your site
   • Make sure you are installing the application at the subdomain you created in the previous step.
3. Change your theme from the default theme by adding a new theme
   • By default in in Domain of One’s Own the theme will be a block theme. We highly recommend you do not use a block theme. You can see some themes we recommend but Twenty Seventeen is a good starter theme. If you are not sure if you installed a block theme or classic theme, here is one way you can tell the difference between theme types.
4. Add a new page (maybe an About Me) and try creating some content
   • Try out different block types like:
     • Paragraph block
     • Image block
     • Buttons block
   • If you have questions on how WordPress’s content editor works these guides can help:
     • Intro to WordPress Block Editor (this covers broadly the editor screen)
     • Work with blocks (goes into more detail about how the blocks work)
5. Publish your page and see how it looks on the frontend (the publicly visible side) of your website.
6. Create a navigational menu with pages you want people to find (these directions only work with classic themes)
7. Other things to do to setup your site to be more your own:
   • If you need to blog (i.e. create posts for class) consider adding a test post. You can always delete it later.
   • Delete the default “Hello World!” post
   • Change your front page from blog posts to a static page if you don’t want blog posts to be the first things people see
   • Use the Customizer for your theme to change the look and settings

Updated by Shannon Hauser 08/28/24