WordPress 101 – speaker notes – WordPress Meetup 7/8/10

Starter WordPress Plugins

• Akismet is the comment spam fighter that comes built into WordPress and it works.  Activate this plugin it does 99% of the work for you.
• Google XML Sitemaps Having a sitemap will help the search engines index your posts and pages properly. This free plugin will create your sitemap for you automatically and also notify Google, Yahoo, MSN about any updates to your blog.
• WordPress Database Backup You need to backup your blog because sooner or later either you will do something destructive, or you’ll be hacked. Search the WordPress Codex for “Restoring your database from backup”.
• All in One SEO this is the most popular SEO plugin. It allows you to optimize your wordpress blog for search engine to get more traffic. You can customize our blog’s title tag, keywords, Meta tags etc to gain more exposure in search engines. Read carefully the recommendations of your Theme provider. Thesis theme recommends that you not install All in One SEO plugin as it conflicts with the build in theme SEO.
• Tweet This A plugin that encourages your readers to share your post on Twitter.
• WordPress Related Posts Generates a list of related posts according to the tag and categories in the post to encourage readers to stay on the site and read other posts.
• Contact Form-7 This very useful plugin lets you quickly generate a form to allow users to contact you using a form.
• Sexy Bookmarks Adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.
• Ultimate Google Analytics Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness

Ways to Find Additional WordPress Plugins

• Search the internet for WordPress Plugin lists
• From the WordPress Admin menu/Plugins submenu, click on Add New and then on Featured, Popular and Recently Updated. Unless you have a specific requirement, don’t upload plugins with less than 4 stars. Let everyone else beta test plugins. When you become a superstar, you can help test plugins for those with less experience.

Premium Plugins

• Special purpose, usually associated with monthly subscription sites – such as Wishlist.

Themes

Choosing a Theme

• Make a list

Have to have

Nice to have

Look at blogs you like – what features do they have?

How easy is it to work with?

Installed from WordPress dashboard

• Where to find Free Themes

In WordPress Dashboard – Appearance submenu/Featured and Newly updated

Check the bottom of your favourite blogs for theme

Check for 10 best free WordPress themes

Free Themes

• Pros

Free

Plentiful

Easy to use

• Cons

Not configurable

Not supported

Not as secure

Examples of Free Themes

• Twenty Ten (Default WordPress theme .. 3.0)

Emptiness

Arjuna X

Neoclassical

Premium Themes

• Pros

Supported

Configurable

Offer more features

SEO optimized

• Cons

Cost between $75 and $200

Learning curve to use features

Some require technical skills to use advanced features

Examples of Premium Themes

• Thesis from DIY themes
• Studio Press
• Builder by iThemes

Widgets

WordPress Widgets (WPW) is like a plugin, but designed to provide a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content (known as “widgets”) without having to change any code.

• Code is supplied

Affiliate site such as Amazon

Social site like Meetup

• Create your own code for a text widget

Drag a text widget to the sidebar and save

Add a new post

Upload graphics and place in the post

Add linkable graphics to the post

- Highlight the graphic

- Click on hyperlink icon

- Add url

- Switch to html view of post

- Copy code

- Open text widget and paste code from post into the text widget

- Save and close

Windows Live Writer

Offline WordPress Editor

• desktop application for publishing to blogs
• cut and paste from Word
• More control over photos
• save your posts and pages locally
• post to multiple blogs