MET workshops
Website creation and cultural customization
Editors and translators may wish to create and run websites to promote their own professional services or may want to provide copywriting, localization and editing services directly in their clients’ content management systems. This workshop offers practical knowledge on how to do this.
Developer and facilitator: Michael Farrell
Purpose: To give attendees hands-on experience of working with WordPress, the most widely used content management system in the world, and to provide some notions of cultural customization and search engine optimization (SEO).
Description and structure: The workshop will cover
- best practices for web design
- cultural customization of web content
- content management systems
- WordPress themes
- WordPress pages, posts, menus and widgets
- WordPress plugins
- basic SEO techniques
After providing some insight into best practices of web design and discussing various aspects of cultural customization, the facilitator will move on to the practical use of WordPress. Attendees will create WordPress pages and/or posts (including menus, widgets and plugins) in the computer lab at the workshop venue. No special software is required other than a common web browser. The workshop concludes with a presentation of some essential basic SEO techniques.
Who should attend? Anyone who needs to create or localize websites using a content management system.
Outcome skills: Attendees will gain enough knowledge to start working confidently with WordPress and will be able to add a new skill to their range of services.
Pre-workshop information: For the practical exercises, the facilitator will set up a WordPress account for each participant shortly before the workshop. Participants are therefore asked to provide an email address they can check on the day of the workshop and to bring a USB stick with some ready-to-use content (text and images) that they can paste into WordPress. They may also provide a website name and choose a theme from among the free ones available here. The WordPress accounts will be deleted immediately after the workshop.
About the facilitator: Michael Farrell is an untenured lecturer in web publishing and website editing skills, machine translation, post-editing and computer tools for translators at the International University of Languages and Media (IULM), Milan, Italy; the developer of the terminology search tool IntelliWebSearch; a qualified member of the Italian Association of Translators and Interpreters (AITI); and a member of MET Council (webmaster). Besides this, he is a freelance translator and transcreator. Over the years, he has acquired experience in the cultural tourism field and in transcreating advertising copy and press releases, chiefly for the promotion of technology products.
