Cale and Carter’s Assignment 5

by Cale Simpson and Carter Hughes

I have been looking through all of the different themes that WordPress has to offer. There are various reasons why one would have a certain theme. Whether you are uploading a page discussing your favorite genres of music or promoting your family’s restaurant that just recently opened up, the possibilities are endless when it comes to creativity. In the first article, I found the top 7 WordPress plugins that would be best for a music website. The website pretty much explains what useful plugins that there are to help you save both time and money when it comes to building a website. Some of the useful tools that were mentioned on the site included: Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, and more. In the second article, I found more of the same. This article didn’t necessarily explain every tool back to back, but it did include hundreds of different themes, vibrant fonts, and colors to help match the mood and vibe of your music. You can select what is compatible with your specific network, and you can view all of the various themes, plugins, and template kits that the website has to offer. The third article that I found actually felt like a mix between the first two articles. There were 27 different WordPress themes, which is a lot of different themes to choose from, and each theme was explained thoroughly to ensure that these were truly the best of the best and would grab the most attention from a bigger audience.

Installing WordPress Locally

STEP 1: Download and run XAMPP: Go to Download XAMPP and install from here, based on whichever version works best for your computer. From there, you open XAMPP and click start on Apache and MySQL. WordPress runs on the Apache server and uses MySQL as a database.

STEP 2: Install WordPress: Go to Download – WordPress.org and click download. Go to your XAMPP files on your computer, click “htdocs” and unzip and drag the WordPress files into there.

STEP 3: Connect WordPress to the database: Click back onto XAMPP, then click “admin” next to MySQL. This will open a page where you click “new” to add a database for WordPress, name the database (something like “MyWordPress”) 

STEP 4: Set up the site: On your browser, type in localhost/MyWordPress (or whatever you named it). The setup will ask for your database name and username (which is “root” by default). From there, the setup is pretty simple. You will select the site title, username, and password, etc. Then, you will be able to log in and use your own version of WordPress.

Will I use WordPress in my final project? In short, no. Simply because I am already happy with my current site, and can, however, see the appeal to using WordPress, as it is much more intuitive and easy to use than HTML once you get past installing it. Perhaps I may use it in the future, as it would be much easier than creating another HTML page from scratch.