I appreciate Matt Squirell’s description of setting up his Word Press site. I felt very much the same – like I was on a high speed boat ride without quite knowing how the controls work. I was a boat out of control for a time. I consider myself to be tech-savvy, however, it took some time to become familiar with the Word Press platform and how all the components worked together. I knew what I wanted, but did not know how to catalogue and build it. It took some time to play with different elements and try them out on my site, deleting them, re-arranging them, to get to a place of understanding. I also found that the page was not refreshing well, so I had to actually close the tab and relaunch my website to see new changes. This was frustrating. Though I felt like the platform looked “intuitive” I didn’t quite yet have the intuition for how to use it!
Through this process I ended up figuring out the power of categories. I started out with them initially, but my menu bars were not picking them up the way I wanted. So I decided to just have pages which seemed easier to attach to a menu. But then I found it difficult for the pages to keep a running and organized system for my posts. So then I went back to categories, and by then I “had the controls on my boat” and this then made sense.
In the end, I decided to make a menu across the top which will list each course. The courses will have a drop down box with the categories from that courses. I added widgets that included archives, recent comments, and my categories, which would make it easier for others to find what they need. The widgets were a nice addition as a way to include the information I wanted to, without adding more to my menu bar.
I think over time, as I add more courses to my page the menu might get cumbersome, but I think I will be able to create broader parent groups when I need to in order to nest them more efficiently.