Chapter 2: Kicking Off a WordPress Project
So, you've landed a plum WordPress project or you have big plans for a personal project that's going to make your fortune. The way you get started will have a huge impact on the success of your project, the satisfaction of your client, or the number of sales you make.
Before diving into code or opening a design tool, you need to spend time setting the project up and communicating to all stakeholders what will happen and what's expected. You also need to set up your development environment, agree where the development site will be hosted, and configure WordPress for your client and team.
You need to take time to consider the site content and how best to display and structure that content—for example, by identifying areas of the site that need to a different layout. You need to identify where you plan to use custom post types and taxonomies, and then proof them for reuse, so if clients or users add more content later (and you hope they will), it will be displayed as beautifully as the content added during the site build.
This chapter describes the necessary aspects of starting a project, including all the preliminary research you should do before embarking on the site build and a detailed checklist of tasks to complete.
Getting started on a project to develop your own themes or plugins entails some extra steps—I cover these in detail in Chapter 12.
Setting Up Development Hosting and Domains
The first step is to set up your development ...
