Soronko Rotary Girls Coding Project Cohort 4 – Week 5 Report

It’s been 4 exciting weeks of learning about Digital and Social Media Marketing, HTML, CSS and essential soft skills. The fifth week of the fourth cohort of the Soronko Rotary Girls Coding Project began on 20th April 2021 with a recap of what they did last week which was CSS. In today’s session, the tutor introduced to the students the process of creating websites without using a programming language and also talked about the content management system (CMS) which she gave an example of which is WordPress. Miss Oreo explained that there are a lot of examples of CMS but, for this lesson they would be using WordPress and also a lot of companies in Ghana use WordPress for their websites and so if you want to be a website developer in Ghana it is important to have such a skill to be able to navigate the industry.

Next, students delved into WordPress but, first students installed Local and Xampp on their Desktop. Local hosting involves using your computer as a server for your website and can be set up via a local web stack such as XAMPP or a virtual sandbox environment like Local by Flywheel. After these installations, the participants started working on their WordPress Platform and interacted with the various features. Students would be creating a three webpage website which consists of the home button, menu Button, and the order button. To bring today’s session to an end, the trainer took the student through the process of installing plugins. Plug-ins, are also called add-ons or extensions, computer software that adds new functions to a host program without altering the host program itself and enables programmers to update a host program while keeping the user within the program’s environment. Students stayed longer to work in teams to enable them to practice what they had just been taught.

The objective of the second session for week 5 was to understand how WordPress works and use it in building a website.In the previous session, they had learnt the theoretical aspect of WordPress but, today they explored the practical aspects of this interface.  To celebrate Girls in ICT Day, the students of the rotary coding for girls project joined in a fun and interactive campaign organized by Soronko Academy. The students shared a photo of themselves and told their success stories and experience with the hashtag “#GirlsinICTare…”

The session started with everyone logging into their WordPress account, which was to enable them to build their websites. They uploaded a restaurant template, imported it onto their websites and started editing with Elementor(a plugin they had installed in the previous class). The lead trainer explained further the uses and meaning of the various widgets on Elementor and how they can be used effectively to design or build a website.  Their websites were specifically for a pizza restaurant whose webpages consisted of “About Us”, “Menu”, “Location” and “Order”.

The trainer explained to them how the body of a website is created and how they can edit it to suit their wireframe. There, they explored the various options under the customize settings tab, explained concepts like the widgets, sidebar settings, and adding to a WordPress site. She then demonstrated widgets such as heading, accordion, image box, and inner section are used for the website. According to the lead trainer, it is always advisable to pen down basic information like color code, font size, and style among others before one begins to build a website.

After the breakout session the students created logos using Canva and imported them onto their websites. They were taught how to change background images and colors, how to edit text, how to insert captions and reorder sections. Also, they downloaded pictures from their google classroom and inserted them onto their websites. The session continued with students teaming up to help each other in completing their websites. Miss Oreo encouraged everyone to explore more features on this interface to enable them to make amazing websites which would go a long way to help them.