Today we’ll begin work on Project 1, which means we’ll be diving into WordPress and learning about all the features built into the tool.

1. To get started, let’s talk about what makes a website “good” in our Google+ Community. Here’s the discussion question that I posted there:
   

   Let’s talk about what makes a website “good” to establish some guidelines for the web portals that you will make for Project 1.

   For homework, I asked you to find general advice on what makes a webpage work in one of the Lynda.com tutorials linked in the 1/23 blog post. Add a post that tells us the advice you found and whether you agreed with it.

   After you post your advice, read some of the other advice people post and respond. Add +1s for advice that you particularly agree with. Add a comment to at least one other person’s post.

2. After everyone posts and comments, we’ll talk about the characteristics briefly and then go over the assignment for the first project, Building a Web Portal.
3. We’ll get started on building our WordPress sites, and work on them in the time remaining in the session.

Homework

• Read Chapter 1 of Writer/Designer so that you are familiar with the terms we’re using in class as we discuss multimodal projects.
• Explore the resources in WordPress. We’ll spend Thursday’s class session working on the sites further. I’ll go over any WordPress tools we haven’t covered and give you time to work on your projects and ask questions.