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Let us introduce you to our lightning-fast, beginner-friendly course that’ll have your website up and running in no time. If you have any trepidation about designing your own website, this course will set you at ease.
Some people like to plan and some people like to explore. When it comes to building a website, there is no right or wrong way to approach it, the key is to take the approach that works best for you.
This is why you’ll find the materials in our learning hub are set up to be progressive, and why it’s perfectly acceptable to jump around lessons, courses, and webinars to tap into the information you need, when you need it.
This Quick Launch course works well as an initial starting point, or as the next step after our Getting Started course. It all depends on how you like to approach learning and creating.
Whatever your desired approach, we’re particularly fond of this Quick Launch course because it is hands-down the fastest way to get a new site setup, and we think you’ll be as thrilled with the process as we are.
When it comes to creating a website there are three primary components:
- Planning what you’ll include in your site. The pages, the content for the pages, the media within the content, the words you want to use. This side of creating a website doesn’t require any technical skills at all, and is often best done in a digital or physical notebook.
- Designing the general look of your site. This is about the arrangement of the content on any given page. This requires an eye for what displays well on a page to create a good visitor experience, and may involve a learning curve to understand the various options and features and how to use the available settings.
- Editing and customizing your site. This is about putting the content you planned into the design you created to bring it all together.
Our Getting Started course is a great starting point for the planning component. It covers the birds-eye-view of creating an entire site, provides explanations of how some of the key aspects of the software works, and gives you a solid blueprint for how to plan your content.
This Quick Launch course focuses on the designing component of your site. Since many people aren’t designers this leg of the journey can feel a bit daunting. How do you decide whether to use columns? Should a heading go above or below an image? How do you make an attractive call-to-action?
The key to this dilemma lies in a secret weapon we can use called patterns!
You can use patterns within any WordPress.com website, and in fact, after you get your initial site setup, that’s exactly what we recommend you do when you want to add more to your site. But even with access to a library of patterns, staring at a blank page and trying to figure out which patterns to use can still feel a bit overwhelming.
With the release of our Design your own feature, that’s no longer the case, and our Quick Launch course walks you through exactly how to use this.
Think of it like a website creating wizard where you get to click on things, see what it looks like, rearrange pieces, try new pieces, and remove pieces to get the overall layout of your homepage just right before moving on to adding your own content. The feature also allows you to choose some initial colors, fonts, and even add additional pages as the base foundation for the site you’re creating.
There is no registration process or signup required. You’re free to roam and explore the materials at your own pace in whatever order you like. But we also provide the materials in a recommended, progressive manner so you also won’t feel lost. Our Learning Hub Roadmap is a terrific guide for finding your way around too.
Go ahead and take a look at what’s inside!
And if you’re wondering, our Create Your Site course offers deeper explanations to complement both the Getting Started and Quick Launch courses, while also focusing on editing and customizing your site to bring it all together!