Building a Digital Project Site with WordPress on Domain of One’s Own

This guide is intended to be a brief overview of things to consider when building a digital project site with WordPress on Domain of One’s Own. If you are building a site for classwork 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.

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.

Before diving into building your site you should define the project scope of your site. This will set the foundation upon which everything else is built. Here are some things to consider:

Objectives #

• What is the goal of your project? Is it to share a collection of sources, provide educational resources, share research findings, or something else? Your site can serve multiple goals, but defining them will help you stay focused on what matters.
• What features will you need?: Based on your goal, what features will your site need? For example an educational site might need downloadable resources or interactive quizzes.
• Who is your audience?: Are they fellow students, professors, or a general audience interested in your field? Knowing this will determine how you accomplish your goals.

Plan Your Content #

• What content needs to be developed?: Decide what content you need. Consider how you can integrate multimedia (video, audio, interactive maps, etc.) to take full advantage of the digital medium.
• What workflows exist to create the needed content?: Content doesn’t just happen overnight! Think about all the steps and tasks that will need to happen to accomplish your content goals.
• How should your site be organized?: Thinking about how you want to organize your pages can begin to help you think about the design of the site.
• How will you cite and attribute?: When building a scholarly digital project site it is important to consider how you will cite your research and how you will work with potentially copyrighted material. The library has a guide on using information responsibly that includes a brief explanation of Fair Use and links to other resources.
• How will you copyright your work?: Any content you create belongs to you but you may want to consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so that others can reuse your work. The library on using information responsibly includes information on Creative Commons licenses and what they mean.

User Experience #

• Can visitors to your site easily find what they need?: Focus on simplicity, consistency, and accessibility. Ensure your design is visually appealing and easy to navigate. You don’t need to be complicated to be good!
• Can all visitors find what they need?: When designing a site it is important to consider that anyone may show up! Check out the Accessible Web Design guide that is intended to help you think through these considerations but here are some key things to take note of:
  • Is the text legible?
  • Does the color scheme have good contrast?
  • Is it colorblind friendly?
  • Have you used alternative text on images?

Team Members #

If you are building a digital project site as a group here are a few key things to consider:

• Who is on your team?: Beyond your immediate group are there other people who need to be involved in your project being successful? For example you may need to work with a Librarian to help you with your research. While they may not be highly involved it is important to remember to factor in the time it may take to work with outside collaborators.
• What are the teams roles and responsibilities?: It is important to determine who is responsible for what part of the project. This doesn’t mean they necessarily do all the work for those things, but they make sure they are accomplished. Be specific
• How does the teams roles and responsibilities align to the project goals?:

Examples of Digital Projects #

Getting Started with WordPress #

There is no one right way to build a digital project site with WordPress on Domain of One’s Own. How you design your site will depend on your goals. Below are some basic things that you may need to do and will help you get familiar with WordPress and can provide you a starting place.

The Basics #

1. Create a subdomain for your project
   • This is the URL you’ll want to use for the digital project site. 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 coolproject.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
   • If creating a subdomain make sure you are installing the application at the subdomain you created in the previous step.
3. Add a new page 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)
4. Publish your page and see how it looks on the frontend (the publicly visible side) of your website.
5. Create a static front page
6. Change your theme from the default theme by adding a new 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. Not sure if you installed a block theme or classic theme, here is one way you can tell the difference between theme types.
7. Create a navigational menu with pages you want people to find (these directions only work with classic themes)

Additional Things to Consider #

1. Creating footnotes.
   • Does you need in text citation? In the paragraph block you can add footnotes on which can be handy when citing your sources on a page.
2. Plugins
   • Plugins add additional functionality and extend the capabilities of your site. If you are trying to do something in WordPress and it doesn’t seem like it can you should ask yourself, “is there a plugin for this?” because often the answer is yes!