For your group project, you’ll be creating a website using the Macaulay eportfolios system. The eportfolios system uses the WordPress platform, so once you get through the process of creating a site, everything you need to know about building it can be found in the hundreds of helpful online tutorials about WordPress.
Learning WordPress requires some fiddling around and trial and error, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy! You can always contact your ITF (Bronwyn) if you run into any trouble that googling won’t solve for you.
1. Creating your site
Login to Eportfolios. Once you are logged in, there should be a greeting in the top right hand corner of your screen that says “Howdy, [your name]”. Hover over the greeting, choose “sites” from the drop-down menu, then “create a site”:
When you reach the “create a site” page, you’ll need to choose the site name and the site title. The site name is the words that will come after eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ in your site’s URL. The name is difficult to change, so think it through before you choose it. The site title can be changed later if you change your mind.
You can change the privacy settings of your site at any time. You may want to choose “visible only to administrators of your site” while you’re building your site, then you can change it once your site is ready to go public.
When it asks “what type of site are you creating?” you can answer in whichever way you think is most appropriate. Probably most of you will be creating “A Basic, Flexible, Reflective Eportfolio”.
2. Add your group members to the site.
Once you have created your site, add your group members as Administrators so they can access the site’s dashboard and edit the site. Find your site’s dashboard by clicking on the site title on the top part of your page, and choosing dashboard:
Find “Users” in the menu and choose “Add New”:
Add your group members using the email addresses they have used to register with the Eportfolios system (this should be their Macaulay email addresses). Add them as “Administrators”:
3. Sketch out an Information Architecture
How are you going to organize the information on your site? And how are you going to design your site to ensure users are able to easily find what they’re looking for, and what you want them to see?
Here are a couple of great articles about Information Architecture and specific WordPress capabilities to make your site do what you want it to:
Information Architecture with WordPress: Tips and Tools to Use
WordPress Information Architecture: Why a Beautiful Site Can Still Suck
4. Choose a theme.
Before you get started on filling in your site, choose a theme. When choosing a theme, don’t just think about how you want your site to look – also think about what you want your site to do, and how the themes match up with your planned information architecture. Some themes are designed to look like magazines, others are designed in order to most efficiently facilitate online discussion. If you like the look of a theme, google it and learn about it’s capabilities.
Choose a theme from the dashboard of your site. If you like the existing theme, click “Customize your site”. If you want to browse other themes, click “change your theme completely”:
5. Start Building!
Once you’ve customized your theme and thought about how you want to organize the information on your site, the possibilities are endless. I recommend watching an online introduction to WordPress to get yourself oriented to the different features available to you. Here are a couple of starting points:
WordPress Tutorial: Getting Started
Because you don’t need your own WordPress install, you can ignore the first 1 minute and 20 seconds of this video. Your Dashboard might look a little different from the one in the video, but the same components will be there. This video is particularly useful for its information about the distinction between pages and posts. You won’t need to choose free themes from the web because the Eportfolios system has its own themes you can use (instructions above). The same goes for plugins, which you can choose and activate by choosing “Plugins” from the Dashboard menu.
Start at 1:22.
A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress – This site has a list of some of the basic components of WordPress. Again, ignore the first part about installing WordPress. Unless you know coding and want to put it to use, you can also ignore the part about creating a child theme.
