How to building a wedding wordpress website: Creating a guestbook

Looking at the site inventory for my project you see there's quite a lot of content that has to be copied over and pasted into my site, and to save you from watching me do all that work I've taken a page out of the TV chef playbook and cheated. So here you have the same site as I did before, except I've added in a bunch of more pages. So I go to the back end of my site now, and go to Pages. You'll see that in addition to the Your Invited page I've also created a Contact page, a Guest Info page with two child pages, Hotels and What to Wear, and then I have a Registry page and an RSVP page.

Now these are all standard pages. The only thing that you notice that's different is that the Hotels and What to Wear pages are children of the Guest Info page, and it can do this simply by going to Quick Edit and setting the Parent here to whatever page you want to be the Parent of the current page you're editing. You could also do that in the Page Editor itself, and I'm only doing this to structure the content as you'll see it later in the course. Now I want to create the Guestbook. Now here you have to think about what a guestbook is.

If you remember back 10, 15 years ago, the web was full of guestbooks, and it was simply a page that had some sort of welcoming message,and then allowed people to leave a little message on the bottom. So, essentially a guestbook is just a page with comments. The only thing is instead of having threaded comments where people can comment on a comment, you generally just have a string of comments on their own. And we can do that with WordPress and the standard commenting feature so we don't have to add any extra functionality to get a guestbook up and running.

In my prepared content, I already have the welcome message for a guestbook. It's right here. So I can copy that out, and then I can go and add a new page. I'll simply call it Guestbook, and I'll use Paste as Text to paste in the text, and then I'm going to make sure that Allow comments is on, but Allow trackbacks and pingbacks are off. Then I can simply publish this page, and it will now have a comments section.It's really that simple. If I go and view the page now, you'll see, in addition to the welcome message, we now have the section that says, Leave a Reply, and if you read the text you'll see it actually instructs people specifically to leave a reply below.

The cool thing about the WordPress comments section is that it's built into the core of WordPress and has things like validation and spam protection, and can instruct people to enter their email address and other information before they leave a comment. Now, once you choose to use the comments section for this particular purpose you also need to go change some of the commenting settings. Those settings are found in the dashboard under Settings and Discussion. Now depending on when you set up your site, these settings might be a little bit different, but what you want for this particular purpose that we are talking about here is the following: Allow people to post comments on new articles.

If you would have this unchecked then no one can leave messages anywhere. Then, under Other comment settings check Comment author must fill out name and email address and uncheck Enable threaded or nested comments. That way you'll just get one string of commentsstraight down. You don't have a bunch of different comments that are responses to other comments and so on. Now, this again is an option.If you want people to communicate inside the guestbook you can, but if you want to make it a traditional guestbook then you just want one string.

Under Email me whenever I would check both of these, and under Before comment appears I would uncheck both so that people don't have to wait for the comment to be approved before it appears. This does mean you need to make sure that you have spam protection on through Akismet, which we'll talk about later in the course, but chances are you'll be able to manage whatever spam comes in. At the very bottom, you also want to turn off this Avatar Display. So by default WordPress toggles this on and shows avatars which are actually the images from people's Gravatar accounts, but I'm gonna make a wild guess that not everyone who's gonna come to your wedding or special event will have a Gravatar account so you'll get a lot of these weird little icons instead, and for our purposes it actually makes sense to turn this feature off.

So once you've made these minor changes, click Save Changes and voila! You have a properly functioning guestbook using only the standard features in WordPress.

What are primary colors? The importance of color in Design Wordpress Theme

if you want to get good at choosing and applying colors to your works of art and design, you need to know a thing or two about color theory and color goes deep. Is it important then that you clearly understand that color is a pulsation of Electromagnetic energy and when wavelengths this energy measuring 635 nanometers passes through our pupils and hits the photoreceptive cone cells at the back of our retinas information is passed along the optic nerve to our brain to let us know we're seeing red.

Is it important that you clearly understand this? Well you know, in our line of work it's really not that important. I mean, it's pretty darn interesting and all that. But most designers can get by without knowing quite this much about color. So what do you need to know? Well, here's one thing that's really worth knowing about, the standard model color wheel. The color wheel that's been in use by artists since around the 1700s or so. Why know about this color wheel? It's because it's a really useful schematic when it comes to understanding how colors relate to each other.

So let's start with the wheel's three primary spokes; the Primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. These colors are called primaries because without them, the other colors wouldn't even exist. Primary colors can't be made through mixes of other colors. These are the foundational, starter hues of the color wheel and all the other colors on the wheel are made through mixes of primary hues. When two primary hues are mixed you get Secondary colors. Red plus yellow creates the secondary hue of orange, yellow and blue make green, and blue and red make violet.

Orange, green, and violet are the secondary hues of the color wheel. When you mix a primary with a secondary color, you get a Tertiary color. There are six tertiaries: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. And there you have it: all 12 colors of a standard color wheel. From here it's super important that you understand that each slice of the color wheel, it's just a placeholderfor an infinite number of dark, light, muted, and bright versions of that color.

For example, if you want to apply a red-orange to a logo that you're working on, you aren't limited to just this default red-orange, of course not, you could go with any dark, light, muted, or bright version of that color. This brings up the whole thing about the way colors are named.Some of the red-oranges we just looked at, for instance, they could be called things like crabcake orange or cinnamon spice, or autumnal sunset, or whatever and that's fine. And words like these, they can be useful when, for instance, like you're trying to convince your seaside restaurant client that this is a perfect color for their menu, right? Crabcake orange.

But personally, when I'm talking color with other designers and artists I like to stick with straightforward color language in which case, I'd simply refer to crabcake orange as a medium shade of muted red-orange. This designer name for the color, it's less likely to be misinterpreted. Now, before I wrap up, I want to mention one more thing about the standard model color wheel. It's not the only color wheel out there. For one thing, there's also a wheel that deals with colored light and that's the RGB wheel.

And light behaves differently than physical media like paints, feel free to google the RGB wheel, if you're interested, I'm just not going to get into it here since the colors designers deal with on the computer and with paints, they behave very closely with the standard model of color.And speaking of the standard model color wheel, you want one? Well download and print the pdf color wheel that goes with this video.Maybe tack it up in your work space or somewhere nearby, at least for reference until this thing gets thoroughly embedded in your brain.

How to building a wedding website: Publish content for your website

Once all the content from my site inventory has been created, it's time to move that content into the live site and build out the structure and framework of the site itself. I've set up a standard WordPress site on our SiteGround account. You can see it right here and you can visit it at wedding.wpdiy.net/wp. Right now, there's nothing here that wouldn't have come with WordPress, except for two small configurations. I've given the site a title and a tagline, and I've also changed the permalink structure to display the post name.

Now, all of this was covered in "Wordpress DIY: Setting Up WordPress", so you should be at this point when we get started. In addition, I have a document full of all the content that's going to go on the different pages. Here is where you have the "Home" page, "Our Story" page, and so on, and so on. This information will be copied out from my document and into different pages in WordPress. Finally, I have lots of photos from Capin Photography that I'm going to add into my site. I've even organized them in folders based on the pages that they're going to go at, so when I start adding it into my site, it'll be really easy going.

Now, all this may seem like a lot of extra work, but trust me, when you're managing something like this, especially if you're planning something like a wedding or another big event, it's important to stay organized so you don't sit there and wonder, "Now, where did those images go?" and "In what document is this image supposed to be at?" Everything is planned out and ready to go and all I need to do is just slot it in to the correct pages. The first two pages I want to add are the "Home" page that I then want to make into the front page, and then "Our Story". So, I'll start off by going to my WordPress site.

I am logged in already, so I'm going to go to the WordPress toolbar, and select, "New" and "Page". So, this is going to become the "Home" page, and here I'm going to give it the title, "You're Invited", and then I'll go to my Word document and find the text for the front page. Now, there's not a lot of text for the front page, and you'll see later on why I don't need a lot of text. Now here I'm going to copy this text out, then go back to WordPress and paste the text in. But I'm not going to just paste it in. I'm going to use this tool here called, "Paste as text".

Now, if you don't see the second toolbar, go click on the "Toolbar Toggle" on the first toolbar and you'll get the second row of options. The "Paste as text" option allows me to paste and text and at the same time, strip off any extra styling that comes from wherever the source of that text is. Microsoft Word and other websites will add in lots of extra styling content to text, and I need to remove all that when I put in on my own site, otherwise things can get broken really easily. So, now that I've activated "Paste as text", I'm going to paste the text in, and click "Publish".

Now, I can go in and view the page and see what it looks like in my current theme, which admittedly is quite boring now. I don't have any images and I haven't done any customization, but at least the text appears. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is move this to the front page. And if you've done this before, you know you can change what the front page displays in Wordpress either from the "Reading" settings in the admin panel under "Settings and reading", or by using the customizer. So, I'm going to use the customizer. I'll go to the toolbar, select "Customize" and then at the bottom here, it says "Static Front Page".

Now, when I open this, I can choose "Front page displays", either "Your latest post", which is your blog, or "A static page". Now, here's the trick. Normally, if you use a static page you would create two pages, one that is going to be the front page and another that's going to stand in for the blog page. So, if you made a page called "Blog", and then assigned it as the "Posts" page, that would then become the "Blog index". But, in my project, I don't want to have a blog just yet, so I'm just going to assign a page as the "Front page", and leave the "Posts page" alone.

That means, there will be no "Blog index", so there's no way for people to find the blog posts, which is fine because I don't have any blog posts. So, I'll select "A static page", and then go to "Front page", and select "You're Invited". Now, I'll click, "Save and publish", close the customizer, and click on the site title, and here you see, I now have my static front page. Now, when I scroll down here, you see I also have a "Comments" section, so I need to turn that off. So, I'll go back and edit the page, go up to "Screen options" and activate "Discussion", then I can scroll down and toggle off "Allow comments" and "Allow trackbacks and pingbacks".

Now, we'll do this for almost all the pages we're going to create, because we don't want comments on regular pages. And you can also do that globally for the site under "Settings" and "Discussion", if you want to. Now that I've created the front page, I'm going to add an additional page, so I'll click "Add new". This time, I'm going to add this "Our Story" page, so I'll start by copying out the text and call it "Our Story". Again, click on "Paste as text", and here you'll see the formatting will strip away so when I paste this in, all the formatting from the document disappeared, and I have to add it back in, so I'll add bold here, and bold here, and bold here, and bold here, and then I realized I also need to add some headings here, so I'll say first, "How we met", make that a heading, too, and then for the second section, "How he proposed", make that a heading, too.

Again, once I've formatted my text, I click, "Publish", I go down and turn off "Comments", if I don't want them, and update my page. And then I can go view the page on the front end and see that everything works properly. It looks nice and this is pretty much where I want to be at this point. Now, later in the course, we're going to work on this "Our Story" page some more, and we'll work on the front page and other sections. But by watching this, you'll get a general idea of how you can add in content to the site.

How to building a wedding website: list the need for website content

 One of the most useful tools I have at my disposal when building a new website is a spreadsheet. Yep, you heard me right, a spreadsheet.For every major project, I create a spreadsheet with a complete site inventory. It's actually the site inventory that's useful, the spreadsheet is just where it lives. A site inventory is a list of every major item that will go on the website. What is it? How is it organized in relation to the other content? What does it contain? Is there anything special about this piece of content? Etc., etc.

All this info goes into a spreadsheet. That way, you can keep track of each item, make sure it's organized properly, and as content is created, each item can be checked off as "done", "waiting", "draft", "not started", or something else. What you see here, on the screen, is a typical inventory for a site like the one we're building. You can see, I've listed out the core assets of the site, which is the site title, and also the tagline, which I want to change, depending on whether people visit the site before the wedding, or after the wedding.

I also have the public pages, this would be the homepage, our story, engagement photos, and eventually wedding photos. The registry, guestbook, contact, and so on. Then I have the private pages, the guest info, hotel info, and most importantly, the RSVP section. You'll notice that in my site inventory, I don't have any blog posts, and that's an important component of this particular project. The site I'm building right now doesn't have any blog posts because it's just a site about a wedding.

That's not to say a wedding site shouldn't have a blog, in many cases you can use a blog. As we set this up, you'll see you can easily add blog posts to your site and get people to visit that blog. But, for the scope of this particular project, I'm gonna leave the blog out of it, and then at the very end, you'll see how I would use the blog later on, after the wedding. In addition to tracking content, the inventory will also help you create an information architecture for your site, and identify content models. This will come in handy when you start a practical build of the site, because you now have a list of exactly what you need, and where everything goes.

Once the inventory is complete, go through each item and build it, and all the associated content, so everything is ready to go when you start publishing the site. I have all my content in documents and folders, and before you continue, so should you.

How to building a wedding website: Identifying special wedding day

 we can now identify requirements for both the content and the presentation of content on the site. This list will help inform our content creation as well as the selection of a theme, and supporting plugins. The goal here is to create a guideline to use as we decide how the site should be put together. For the site I'm building, I've created the following list. First, the site must display all the wedding details in some fashion. The date itself, and information about the couple and whatever else is relevant.

I also want to have a guestbook feature of some kind. Now, guestbooks may seem archaic on the modern web, but for a wedding or special event, they actually make a lot of sense. Photography and videography have become a big part of weddings and events, and guests love to see photos. There is also an easy way of adding some visual panache to a site, so I have to make sure image galleries look amazing. And finally, for my site, I want to keep guest info and the RSVP section private.

This is a personal choice and you can choose one way or the other. I've been to weddings that left all the information open, and weddings where everything was kept tightly under lock and key. Whatever makes sense to you is the way to go, and the techniques I'm showing you in this course allow you to pick public, private, or a combination of both.