Build a WordPress Calling Card Site

Having completed a first WordPress installation kit for the experience and understanding how it works, it’s time to create a site for ourself, a landing page or a calling card site for our domain. We have four to offer that can be installed in one-click:

These themes offer a lot more flexibility and customization than the ones created in the Build a Front Entrance for Your Domain with Site Publisher kit.

The three themes we are suggesting are relatively simple yet flexible (but are hardly your own options). You can create sites using these WordPress Calling Card Themes:

• WP Big Picture: demo (see more examples…)
• WP Dimension: demo (see more examples…)
• WP Highlights: demo (see more examples…)
• WP Eventually: demo (see more examples…)

Below under “Creating a Calling Card Site From Scratch” you can find the steps for installing a new WordPress site in your domain, downloading and uploading one of three special themes for making a calling card, and how to start customizing it.

If your domain is served from Reclaim Hosting including the ones on StateU.org, we do have a quicker route- a one click installer that not only puts WordPress in place, but also creates a site with one of these themes fully set up and some demo content. The other big advantage of these one-click installers is that your site’s theme will be automatically updated when there are new versions available.

You can find these installers in your cpanel, click the icon for Applications, and look for the first three items in the Featured Apps at the top.

The installer for Eventually can be found below listed under Apps for Content Management:

Just follow the same steps for creating a WordPress site as you have done before in the Setting Up WordPress kit. You may want to install it over the simple landing page you created earlier with the Site Publisher (unless you are really attached to what you made!)

You can put also a new WordPress calling card in a subdirectory directory (e.g. like gadgets.stateu.org/card or in a new subdomain (see the Creating Subdomains For Different Sites kit).

One special note on these installers – keep track of the username and password for the admin account created in the WordPress installer. The Installatron installer in cpanel will not remember the login details for you like it does for a blank WordPress site..

Look for instructions on how to change elements of your new sites:

• WP Dimension Theme – start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Big Picture Theme – start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Highlights Theme – start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Eventually Theme – start with Customizing with the Customizer

Creating a WordPress Calling Card Site From Scratch

If you do not have access to the one click installers or just want to do everything from scratch, you can do a clean install of WordPress (see the kit) in the desired location. Then, from cPanel, look under Applications for My Apps. Find the newly installed site in the list and follow the link that ends in wp-admin (this takes you to the administrative dashboard of WordPress).

You know you are logged in as an admin user of your site when you see the black menu bar at the top of your screen, it will be there too when you visit your site.

Get to know how to navigate between the Dashboard view and the Site view (and back, the animation below is for a different site, but it works this way on all WordPress sites).

The themes we are going to be trying are not available (yet) in the standard place you add themes to your site, you will learn to directly install a theme.

Pick which of these themes you want to experiment with first (you can later switch to another one).

• WP Big Picture: demo site • download from here
• WP Dimension: demo site • download from here
• WP Highlights: demo site • download from here
• WP Eventually: demo site • download from here

All of these themes are available on Github, to get a copy from the links above, look for the green Clone or Download button, and choose the option for .zip to save a compressed version of the theme on your computer. In the WordPress Dashboard go to Appearance -> Themes, then click the Add New button.

On the next screen, click Upload Theme, and locate the .zip file you downloaded from the steps above, and click Install Now. When the process is completed, you will see a confirmation message “Theme installed successfully.” and a link you can click to Activate it.

You gave just installed a new theme. But there will not be too much to see, as your site will have no content, plus each theme has a few more steps for choosing images, and perhaps adding some new plugins.

See if you can find out where to install plugins (it works like adding themes, in the Dashboard go to Plugins -> Add New, enter name or keyword to find the one you want, click Install then Activate).

A useful feature in WordPress that many people miss is a great system of contextual help; if you are on the Plugins screen of your dashboard, click the help tab in the upper right to get some assistance specific to Plugins.

Each of these themes comes with detailed and illustrated instructions:

• WP Dimension Theme start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Big Picture Theme- start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Highlights Theme- start with Customizing with the Customizer
• WP Eventually Theme- start with Customizing with the Customizer

Your goal for this activity is to get a site working, change its visual settings, insert your own images, add the menu for social media links, and create the content areas (even if they are placeholders for now).

And if these themes are not your cup of tea, you might find more possibilities in the landing page themes available to install directly from WordPress.

Example for "Build a WordPress Calling Card Site":
http://www.kimjaxon.com/me/