I am surely open­ing myself up to ridicule a lit­tle for this one, but I have recently had a few peo­ple ask me how I cre­ated my class­room site. My school pur­chased a web host­ing pack­age from School­Cen­ter which is a web-based design soft­ware that I hate. It quickly became inad­e­quate for my needs and is becom­ing inad­e­quate for my col­leagues. Word­Press to the res­cue. I won’t waste time here espous­ing the great­ness of the plat­form, just know that it is great.

Note: This arti­cle is intended for a self-hosted Word­Press instal­la­tion and takes for granted that you already have a web-host and have installed Word­Press. If you haven’t, look here.

1. Theme

When set­ting up a Word­Press instal­la­tion for a class­room web­site you will be using what is pri­mar­ily a blog­ging soft­ware as a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS). Although this is not the platform’s pri­mary pur­pose it does an excel­lent job thanks to the amaz­ing com­mu­nity behind it. To that end you need to be care­ful when select­ing a theme for your CMS. I rec­om­mend you select a theme that is sim­ple and easy to cus­tomize. I use a theme called Atahualpa, which has the most sophis­ti­cated cus­tomiza­tion options of any Word­Press theme I have ever seen (and I have been through a lot of themes). This theme will allow you to use 1–3 columns in any page con­fig­u­ra­tion you wish. It also has a built in CSS menu bar and SEO options.

2. Essen­tial Plugins

I employ many plu­g­ins for aes­thet­ics and for ease of use on the back-end of the instal­la­tion, but these are the plu­g­ins that I feel are essen­tial for a class­room website.

Con­tact Form 7. Of course we need a way for par­ents and stu­dents to get in touch with us.You could add a mailto link to your site, but that would launch another pro­gram. The more ele­gant solu­tion is a con­tact form. Sim­ply put, Con­tact Form 7 is the most cus­tomiz­able and user friendly con­tact form plu­gin there is.

NextGEN Gallery. The most fea­ture rich way to man­age all of the images on your site. Set up a slide show, sort by tags, inter­act with Cooliris, this plu­gin does it all.

Word­Press Down­load Mon­i­tor. You need to have a way to make resources avail­able to your stu­dents and to par­ents. Word­Press Down­load Mon­i­tor is the eas­i­est way that I have found to do this. This plu­gin has an inter­face that will upload and tag your files for you. It will also count the num­ber of times your file has been down­loaded. If you need to have pro­tected files that only reg­is­tered users can have access to you can set that up with this plu­gin as well.

WP Events Cal­en­dar. The built in cal­en­dar wid­get for Word­Press will only post infor­ma­tion about your blog arti­cles, not so handy for things like test dates or con­fer­ences. WP Events Cal­en­dar will let you place any infor­ma­tion on the cal­en­dar that you want and will also allow you to make a sep­a­rate cal­en­dar page, which is handy for par­ents and students.