WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

2

Planning Your Site for WordPress

It's beyond the scope of this book to go into the entire planning process for a website; rather, the goal is to take a plan for a website and make it work using WordPress. If you're setting up a blog and nothing more, WordPress has done much of the structuring for you and you can skip to the next chapter. For everyone else, this is a very important step because with the right kind of planning up front, not only will you save yourself lots of time and energy down the road, but it also will help you think about ways to make your website even more useful and easier to navigate. To build a site in WordPress, you have three key things to consider:

• How are various kinds of content going to be entered in WordPress?
• What categories are needed to organize that content?
• What do the layout and design roughly look like?

The sample site you'll be working on is for a company called Island Travel, a small travel agency with two locations that specializes in vacations to the Caribbean. Its primary goal is to have a website that provides a very personal touch, with information largely written by its staff, and of course, the company wants it to be as easy as possible to update and expand.

What I've learned over the years from my clients is that “easy” doesn't just mean having a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor. It also means being able to clearly understand how what they see on the administrative side fits with what's seen on the site — how ...