So, you’ve armed yourself with knowledge about Web 2.0 and social media, and now you’re really ready to tap into the power of the new, social Web? If you’ve decided to build your own Web 2.0 and social media optimized Web site to that end, here are a few steps you can follow to get started:

The most effective way to easily build an optimized site is with WordPress. Yes, WordPress is a blogging platform, but it can also be used as a content management system (CMS) to power your entire Web site.

Sorry to be so long continuing this blog, but there has been much to do.

Since the last post, we have built several more newsrooms. Two for authors Owen Egerton and Joe O’Connell; one for improv guru and author, Les McGehee; and another for Accolades Public Relations.

As Christine so kindly pointed out, I did not finish the entry I promised about adding content boxes. So here goes…

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Yes, folks, I have taken a bit of a side trip on documenting the birth of Kelley’s WordPress site; but the resulting product was well worth it, as you will see.

While building Kelley’s site, she directed me to SHIFT Communication’s Social Media Newsroom (SMNR) template, saying “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had one of these?”

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Customizing Colors

Kelley’s site has come leaps and bounds from where I left off last; but I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves. So I want to explain how I got from the before to the after in the last post.

Here is a list of the main changes to the original theme (Sheep Theme VI 1.0)at the stage you see in the previous post.

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Kelley’s sheep-theme turned out to be the perfect choice for her - even though it was difficult for me to see at first. Kelley already had a good idea of what she wanted as far as visuals and functionality, so integrating her ideas into the theme went pretty smoothly.

Here is the front and back of her business card, which has many, rich design elements:

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Step Three: Installing WordPress

Yes, this could have easily been step two, but I figure having a theme picked out, and a vision of what your site will be at the end, will be good for you to have through this more technical portion of the tutorial.

Kelley’s site is set up on Westhost, so this lesson will reflect that. I want to make it clear, however, that there are many other options for hosting your WordPress site - I choose Westhost because they have proven reliable to me over many years.

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Step Two: Choosing a WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme is a template of sorts that contains design elements and other code that determines the look and feel of your WordPress site. For a much more detailed explanation of WordPress themes, go to the WordPress Codex. My purpose, here, is to empower you, not to bog you down with a lot of technical information.

Before choosing a theme, keep in mind that we can customize all of the colors, and change out any of the images - we can also resize or eliminate images, and rearrange or remove any of the elements, like categories, archives, calendars, links, etc.. In addition, we can replace the sidebar elements with any other elements we want, where we want them. The only thing that will not change is the content or “blogging” area itself; however, we can customize things like images designed into the entries, how the dates are displayed, etc.. This will all make a lot more sense when you see how we customized Kelley’s theme from the one she chose - chances are, you will not even recognize it.

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