Architect’s WordPress Website Part 1: Intro to WordPress

Hi, Enoch here. Today I'm going to give a brief intro to WordPress for all of you architects out there who may be wondering what WordPress is. I'll be showing some of it's capabilities and how you can use it for your website.

If you've been researching how to launch a website for your architecture firm, or maybe considering an upgrade to your website, sooner or later you are bound to hear mention of WordPress. But what is WordPress and why should you consider using it?

Watch the video to learn more and let me know what you think! (P.S. If you have a fast internet connection click “play” and then click the “gear” icon in the lower right corner of the video to up the resolution to 720p. Then click the arrows in the lower right corner of the video to watch fullscreen.)

Transcript:

Hi, Enoch here from the businessofarchitecture.com, helping architecture firms excel by getting the most out of the internet.

This video is the first of a series on web site design for architects. Today I'll be demonstrating WordPress, and showing why it is an excellent option for an architect's website.

This is WordPress.org, where you can go to download WordPress and install it on your own web server. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog.

The beauty of wordpress is that it allows you to easily update your own website.

Some other advantages of wordpress are:

• It's FREE to download.
• The look of your website is 100% customizable using one of thousands of premade templates. This is the free theme directory on WordPress.org. Each one of these themes is a template which allows you to change the look of your website.
• If you want to get a custom look on WordPress, it is very easy to hire a web designer who can give you that custom look while you still have the ability to update your website.

One of the common misconceptions about WordPress is that your website must look like a blog. While it is true that WordPress is used for blogs and is a great blogging software, WordPress is also great for non-blog websites as well. And that is what I am going to demonstrate today.

This is a small and simple website I threw together to demonstrate the functionality of WordPress for architects. Today I am going to show you how easy it is to add a project, say we have a new project we want to add to our website, and also how to add a new page to our website.

I divided this website up into three different areas, the “Architecture” which is the home page, the “Work” page which is the project portfolio page divided up into residential and commercial projects, and here if we click on one of these we get our project description, and finally the “Contact Us” page.

Let's test out this web form to see how it works. Say Mies Van Der Rohe came to our website. I'm going to demonstrate how easy it is to…this form I've added here was created by clicking a button in WordPress. No programming knowledge was needed. So I just submitted that and we got our first email from a client.

That is a brief overview of the front end of the website, let's jump into the backend and I'm going to show you how easy it is to add a new project, and also a new webpage.

So in terms of adding a new project, this is what you see when you log into WordPress, behind the scenes. This is where you are going to manage your website. Let's say we designed the “Freedom Tower” so I'm going to go ahead and add the project verbage in here. I'm also going to add a project image. Now the beauty of WordPress is that it is setup sort of like a word processor, with these button up here which allow you to do things such as add headings, bold text, underline words. So it doesn't require and special programming knowledge. What they are going for here is ease of use.

Let's go ahead and add our project image. I'm doing the “Freedom Tower” and I've already uploaded it here so I'm going to set that as the featured image and insert it into the post. I'm going to set this as a commercial project, and publish this.

Ok, so there within 30 seconds I added a new architectural project to our website. Now, WordPress will automatically update our website with that new project. And I'm going to show you that it did that.

Go to our “Work” category, and there is the “Freedom Tower”. We can click on it here and read the project information we just entered.

So once again, this is what makes WordPress and excellent option for architects that are solo architects or smaller architecture firms that can't afford or don't have the time to hire an in-house web designer or web specialist- a website designer or someone who will be updating the website for them. This allows the firm principal or someone in the firm to update the website.

Alright, now I'm going to show you how easy it is to add a page with WordPress. We don't have an “About Us” page, so what I'm going to do is add an “About Us” page to this website. I'm going to come over here, add a new page, “About Us”. I'm going to call this the DKY Architects, I don't know what that means, I just made that up.

We'll add in a description of who our architecture firm is, publish that. Ok, so there I added an “About Us” page. WordPress will now add a new link to the menu up here. We can click on “About Us” and we can read about our firm, DKY architects, our design philosophy, etc.

Ok, so that is all for today, I just demonstrated very quickly how we can easily add a new project using WordPress and how we can add a new web page, and how we can have an architect's website that doesn't look like a blog.

Now in terms of installing and setting up WordPress, and some sort of tutorial to show you how this is done; I'll cover that in some later videos.

Today was just a brief intro to show you what WordPress can do.

Thanks for watching, go to BusinessofArchitecture.com as always to find out more.