Let’s talk about the kind of site that we’re creating using the Genesis theme and WordPress. The kind of site we’re creating is a website that is suitable for service professionals that looks good on mobile devices.
Building a Site with a Responsive Design
This is the first course that I’ve taught that includes responsive design as one of the key elements of it. A responsive design is a design that responds to the device that is viewing it. We’re trying to create a site that is suitable for service professionals but that also looks good on mobile devices.
Service professionals can be taken very generally. I’m talking about Architects, Engineers, Design Professionals, Coaches, Consultants, maybe Contractors and subcontractors. This is really for any kind of a small business person who wants to display and describe their services to somebody.
Business Purpose of the Website
We’re not really building an ecommerce site or internet marketing site, we’re not building a blog, we’re building, in this case, a website that is suitable for a service professional. The business purpose of this site is to help prospective customers find you when they’re searching for your services online.
We do that by presenting your services, we want to establish your credibility and we want to reflect your uniqueness by having a unique site style.
Unique is kind of funny in the conversation of the web because of course, it’s pretty hard to be unique on the web these days. You only have a square or rectangular pallet, you only have so many colors, it’s only so much shape, it’s only 2-dimensions so it’s difficult to be unique but nevertheless, we want to create a site that isn’t obviously a copy of somebody else’s site.
Phase 1 – Static Site
This website is only going to have 2 phases. The first phase is just a static website and by static, I mean it’s not going to have any blog component to it at all. We’re just going to create a bunch of static pages. Everything associated with using the site as a blog we will leave to the end which is essentially phase 2.
Phase 2 – Simple CMS
In phase 2, we’ll discuss how to turn WordPress from a static site into a simple content management system. We’re going to do that by adding blog functionality but there’s no reason to think about that as blogging. You can think about it as is adding content to your site in a format that makes it easy for people to access.
Anyway, we’ll have 2 phases. We have the simple phase where it’s a static site and we’ll have phase 2 which is when we add in the blog functionality and create this simple content management system.
Use of Specific Tools to Create the Site
We’re going to use a specific set of tools in order to create this site. We’re going to use WordPress and the Genesis Theme, we’re also going to use the Agency Child Theme, we will be using at least a couple of plugins that I’ve written for Genesis which I’m at the moment referring to as the BYOB Genesis Plugins.
If you’re familiar with me at all, you know that I have a handful of plugins for the Thesis theme called the BYOB Thesis Plugins. I’m not actually creating analogies of those for Genesis at the moment but nevertheless, there are a couple of plugins that I’ve written for this class that we’ll be using.
We’ll also be using the NextGen Gallery Plugin which is a very powerful image gallery which I think many people need to learn how to use. We’ll be using the Genesis Slider Plugin for showing the sliding content, we’ll be using the Contact Form 7 Plugin for our contact form and we’ll use various Google products.
Why am I Using those Tools?
We’re using those tools specifically because I’ve tested them all together and they all work together and because they can all be used without learning CSS or PHP. So much of the conversation around using Genesis involves doing some kind of code modifications and what we’re going to do is focus on doing this without using any kind of code.
I know that all of those tools together can be combined to create this site because I built this site with those tools.