1. Introduction

1.1 Why You Need a Website

Hi, I'm Andrew Childress, an instructor for Invototuts Plus. In this course, you're going to learn how to build a responsive website using WordPress and a custom theme from Invoto Elements. In the last few years, I've seen a lot of small business owners and freelancers skip building a website and switch over to having only social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. But many small business owners have seen trends for social media come and go, like Facebook now showing fewer posts in timelines. And don't forget, many people skip social media all together. And you can't just disregard them. You're going to have some people just searching for your site with a search engine and they need a place to find you as well. A website gives you a place to really tell the story of your business in a way that social media can't. If you're a freelancer, you can use it to showcase your best blog posts. Small businesses can really dive deep on the services or products offered on their site. While social media profiles are good enough to list your business address or post updates, they typically lack the ability to really showcase what you do to visitors. All of this means that you really need a website. Even if it's simple and contains only a few pages, a website gives people a place to land when they're looking for you. So what do you do when you need to build a website but you aren't a programmer. The answer is that we turn to pre-built themes that you can install on top of WordPress, a free content management platform that makes it easy. At the end of this course, you'll know how to build up our responsive website that looks great on any device. Let's dive in.

1.2 What Are We Building?

So in this course, I'm gonna help you build a responsive website using a combination of WordPress, and an easy to use theme. We'll invent a fictitious business, and build out a site that helps us connect with potential customers. This course will really emphasize the importance of responsive design. Responsive design is a must when it comes to building modern websites, but what does that term really mean? Well, in short, it means that not everyone will see the same website when they visit your URL. The modern web is accessed by people on countless types of devices, you might have one visitor visit your site on a smartphone, another on a tablet, and another on a desktop. Each of these different users are viewing the site on vastly different sized screens, and resolutions. They might be using a mouse and keyboard, and they might be using a touchscreen. That's why responsive design is so important. It's all about accommodating those different users, so that everyone has a good experience when they visit our site. We run the risk of not connecting with the visitor, if we don't support the device that they're seeing our site on. So the solution is to build sites that accommodate responsive design. When we build out responsive sides, they reformat and re-flow content for devices. You don't have to build out three separate sites for tablet, desktop, and smart phone users. A single responsive site will adapt to the conditions that a user's viewing the site under. In this course, what I want you to see, is you don't have to be a web developer to build successful responsive sites with WordPress. Combining WordPress, a content management system, with a WordPress theme from Envato Elements, is one of the fastest and least expensive ways to build out a website. Let's find out more about why this combination works so well.