Total beginner wanting to learn to create Wordpress websites.

RaveyDaveyUK

RaveyDaveyUK

RaveyDaveyUK

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Joined
21 Nov 2006
Posts
247
Hi guys,

Call it a quick career change / extra feather to my cap, but I'm keen to learn how to create Wordpress based websites.

I have no html or coding experience and would welcome any thoughts about where to start and how to progress to achieve this.

Should I start with html or is there any other recommended path to follow?

Any pointers very gratefully received.
 
I'd start with HTML, get an idea of how to structure basic pages and create links etc.

This is great: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

I'd then look at CSS and how it allows you to create templates etc.


Later down the road, look at JavaScript. That's where the real magic and demand is.
 
I wouldn't use w3schools for anything other than a quick reference, I know they've had a lot of issues in the past with things being correct on there, or showing bad practice.

Codecademy is great and free, interactive development environment and active forums if you get stuck. It'll start you with everything you need and move on to PHP, Python or Ruby.

As for Wordpress, you don't need to know code to start using it. get some free web space, most have a wordpress installer or use FTP and do it yourself (best way) then go from there using the templates etc :) Code comes in when you want to start editing more in depth things and creating custom templates etc
 
I've recently started doing this myself (years experience now), got a little bit of cash from it as well and want to be able to start a small business doing websites for small businesses over my time at Unviersty.

I started with just weebly and their website builder and messing around with the CSS and such. Figure out how to totally change one of their templates, like fonts, colours, positions of everything. Got better at creating my own things with photoshop as well (such as buttons, icons etc).

Spend the next few days/weeks really messing around with wordpress and creating yourself a website, then get onto the CSS train.
 
AHarvey said:
I wouldn't use w3schools for anything other than a quick reference, I know they've had a lot of issues in the past with things being correct on there, or showing bad practice.

Codecademy is great and free, interactive development environment and active forums if you get stuck. It'll start you with everything you need and move on to PHP, Python or Ruby.

As for Wordpress, you don't need to know code to start using it. get some free web space, most have a wordpress installer or use FTP and do it yourself (best way) then go from there using the templates etc :) Code comes in when you want to start editing more in depth things and creating custom templates etc
Click to expand...

Just noticed you mentioned codecademy :P
 
Just wanted to say thanks for the info.

Jumped onto codeacademy last night and its exactly what I'm looking for.

Any recommendations for editors?

I was thinking notepad++ on my pc, but any thoughts for the mac?

A friend has suggested i look at MS visual basic too.... ????
 
RaveyDaveyUK said:
Just wanted to say thanks for the info.

Jumped onto codeacademy last night and its exactly what I'm looking for.

Any recommendations for editors?

I was thinking notepad++ on my pc, but any thoughts for the mac?

A friend has suggested i look at MS visual basic too.... ????
Click to expand...


Personally, I'd not go with VB / Visual Basic now. It's an old hat language. Good for macros in Excel using VBA but there isn't a great deal of demand for VB.NET. C# is, without doubt, the way to go. A very modern and powerful programming language and almost identical syntactically to Java. Don't start with it though. Work up to it by learning HTML etc first.

In terms of IDE, Visual Studio 2015 will be out soon and is free! The best IDE going. It'll be all you need. Notepad ++ is very useful tool for basic stuff too.
 
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For WordPress you really want to get a good understanding of PHP.

As an IDE I'd recommend Jet Brains' PHPStorm, it's what I use at work, also has WordPress support to recognise when you're working on a WP site.
 
No no no no. Dream weaver is awful. The one feature of DW I like is the image mapping. Not found any other program that does that.

IDE/Text Editor + browser window
 
RaveyDaveyUK said:
Any recommendations for editors?

I was thinking notepad++ on my pc, but any thoughts for the mac?

A friend has suggested i look at MS visual basic too.... ????
Click to expand...

Atom and Sublime Text are the go to text editors these days.

Atom is free, Sublime Text is not.

Both work on Mac/Linux/Windows.
 
Do you know which editor I came across recently that I find great, ShiftEdit.net.

A browser based one that covers html, CSS, PHP, Javascript right up to Perl, C#, C++ and a few less used ones like Dart or Autohotkey.

Free for the basics too :)
 
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