WordPress | Web Training Wheels

WordCamp San Diego 2012 – All The Knowledge!!

WordCamp San Diego took place this past weekend, and as usual it was a day of learning, community and fun! Tickets to this event sold out extremely quickly so many folks missed out. Below you will find links to all of the slides from the presenters so if you missed the event you can still glean some of the knowledge that was presented. There were 2 tracks – a more basic, less code-y one for End-Users, and a Developer track for hardcore coders. Find a WordCamp event near you

END USER TRACK:

Start-Ups and WordPress
Chris Lema
WordPress can be used for more than just your Blog or your Web Site. It can just as easily power a variety of other parts of your business model – including validating your product concepts, supporting existing customers, capturing feedback, and more. Here’s the scoop on how to use WordPress for landing pages, project hubs, support systems, video membership sites, and surveys.
Get the slides

Essential WordPress Plugin When Using Category Name In Permalinks

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Basic

Many WordPress users like to use a custom permalink structure which includes the blog post category in their url for additional SEO value. If you create relevant, keyword-rich category names for your blog, having them in the permalink can be useful. If you are one of these people, you NEED this plugin in your life!

Planning Your Website Effectively- WordPress Is A Tool Not A Strategy

Online Marketing, WordPress

One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

6 Common WordPress “Gotchas” To Avoid

WordPress Tutorials - Basic

I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.

1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky

Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well, a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.

Creating Password Protected Pages and Areas in WordPress

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Intermediate

I had a client recently who needed to create private, password-protected sections on her WordPress site. She wanted each of her clients to have a private page with information related to what they were working on together. Easy! Password-protection is an in-built feature of WordPress, in case you didn’t know.

When creating a page, you simply click “Edit” next to Visibility in the Publish box on the right. Choose “Password protected” and set the password as you choose.

WordPress Widget To Display A Twitter Hashtag

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Basic

Need a Twitter plugin that does a little more than simply display your own Tweets in the sidebar? Tweet Blender does a ton of stuff:

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.