WordPress Experience
I have been working on WordPress since 2016. I have done this as a volunteer, independent contractor, and employee of WorshipTimes. Scroll through the sections below for what I have under my belt in terms of:
- Job experience with WordPress
- Website creation and maintenance
- Page/menu content development and update
- Media editing and media library management
- Form creation
- Sources of skill/training re WordPress
Job experience with WordPress
Wells Foundation of Minneapolis (2017-present)
According to their mission statement, Wells is “... a non-profit organization that supports fundamental societal change through innovative and entrepreneurial action“. In recent years their focus has been on youth and adult homelessness. Each year they disburse approximately $100,000 in grants across between 10 and 20 local agencies who have applied for those grants.
My most significant contribution to the Wells Foundation has been (a) initially maintaining their website on Joomla and (b) later rebuilding the site in WordPress. The new site went live in June 2017. Here are some kuso coming out of that effort:
- Comments from board member
- Comments from one grant applicant using the Wells Foundation site
- Comments from another grant applicant using the Wells Foundation site
Worship Times (2017)
Assisted in converting legacy websites for churches over to new WordPress sites using Divi/Elegant Themes templates. Projects I worked on included:
- Broadway Christian Church
- Christ Church La Plata
- Corbin Presbyterian Church
- Liberty Presbyterian Church
- St Paul’s Episcopal Church
St Mark’s Cathedral Choir Canterbury Residency
This was a volunteer project. I created a small website for the singers of the Cathedral Choir for their residence in Canterbury (England) Cathedral in 2019. The site has been deprecated but the link above is to a screenshot of the homepage.
Website creation and maintenance
- Creating, registering, and transferring domains (Network Solutions, DomainIt)
- Installing WP locally (Flywheel) and on host and creating child theme (Child Themify)
- Working on cPanel and WP Administrator page
- Migrating “legacy” websites to WP from Wix and Joomla)
- Analyze existing website in terms of how best to move into WP
- Working with themes and frameworks (WordPress, Genesis, Divi)
- Comparing, loading, testing, and configuring plugins
- Measuring website speed (Google Tools, WebPagetest, GTMetrix)
- Creating copies of website for testing on local PC (Duplicator) and staging footprint (WP Staging)
- Tailoring security to user needs — implementing SSL certificates (SSL Insecure Content Fixer, Let’s Encrypt), creating “members-only” pages/menus (Simple Membership), protecting members-only Media Library access (Wordfence)
- Managing backup (Updraft) and WP updates (Softaculous)
- Creating documentation. Here are examples of end user and technical documentation for the Wells Foundation (see above)
- Evaluating hosting services and implementation partners
- Moving WP site from one hosting service to another
- Working with helpdesk of hosting service (A Small Orange)
Page/menu content development and update
- Creating/adapting/cloning pages and linking them to menus
- Adding anchors/jumps between and within pages
- Adding capability for search (Search Everything), user comments, graphical hotspots (Draw Attention), tables (TablePress), FAQs (Accordion Pro)
- Creating favicon
- Using editing tools (Grammarly)
- Embedding external content (LinkedIn, YouTube, SoundCloud, Amazon, Google Drive)
- Implementing events management (Events Manager) and organizational calendar (WP FullCalendar)
- Testing for responsiveness across tablet and mobile platforms and adjusting pages as necessary
- Editing pages for SEO attributes such as keywords, slugs, titles, captions, readability (Yoast)
- Reviewing for consistency of fonts, headers, links/jumps
- Flagging duplicate posts and broken links (Broken Link Checker)
- Creating sitemap (Slick Sitemap)
Media and media library management
- Managing the WP Media Library — uploading bulk content via FTP (FileZilla) and removing unattached content
- Photo editing (Paint.net) — cropping, adjusting colors, resizing, adding frames
- Creating/editing video (PowerPoint, Wondershare Filmora) and audio (Audacity)
- Configuring sliders (Soliloquy, WP Header Image Slider and Carousel)
- Creating galleries containing images with and without links
- Adding captions, alternate text, hover text
- Permitting WP website access to archived documents stored on Google Drive (Google Drive Embedder)
Form creation
- Creating forms (Gravity, WPForms)
- Editing and flagging fields (optional/mandatory)
- Allowing upload of documents
- Generating tailored, automated email messages acknowledging completion of the application
- Storing email and other information entered for subsequent communications (MailChimp)
- Generating SQL reports showing data entered into forms
Sources of skill/training re WordPress
- Attending online lessons in WordPress, HTML, and CSS at Lynda.com
- Attending the Minneapolis St Paul WordPress user group and receiving additional coaching from the chair of that group, Matt Christenson
- Building the site you are on now in WP
- Attending the 2017 and 2019 sessions of the Minneapolis/St Paul WordCamp
- Being mentored by my friend and WP guru Richard Rasch (website and LinkedIn profile)
- Serving on the vendor selection committee for a rewrite in WP of the website for St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis
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