Why WordPress? (for community partners)
Here’s an article on the instructor’s professional blog where she describes how WordPress is good for organizations
http://edurhetor.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/wordpress-blogs-as-organization-or-association-newsletters/ For example,
- Here’s a real organization’s website based on our course’s default theme, TwentyTen, in WordPress http://www.trentcentre.ca/
- Here’s the blog I set up as a board member of the Canadian Alliance for Community Service Learning and installed on their website host. http://blog.communityservicelearning.ca/
WordPress.com is a free blog hosting service where students in the past did do their drafting of online content: http://wordpress.com/ However, WordPress.com is primarily for simple blogs and does not allow full access to all the themes and plugins that an organization may desire or need.
Therefore, students’ online content sites this term will be located on a new site associated with the instructor’s professional blog, edurhetor.org, where a full slate of free themes and plugins can be installed from WordPress.org.
On your special subdomain in eduretor.org, students will build your site and post draft content and refine it in this semi-public space where community partners can watch it grow while their existing site remains untouched. The site/blog “under construction” by students cannot be found through search engines like Google or Yahoo, so this enables a degree of privacy, but it can be viewed by anyone without logging in if they know the exact URL.
The free website/blog software is downloaded from http://wordpress.org/ (note the ORG at the end to distinguish it from their .com where they host free sites/blogs). After students finish the project, community partners can upload WordPress software onto their existing website domain (contact your web hosting service or IT person), either as a replacement for your existing site, or as a sub-domain that your main site sends people to for further information.