Getting Started With WordPress – Explaining Settings

Once you’ve got your WordPress blog installed, there are a few tweaks you’ll want to make to the default settings. This is a quick overview of  the Settings area of the WP dashboard. You don’t have to tweak, or necessarily understand every single option – you can use this a rough guide as to what to pay attention to.

PERMALINKS

This is a Very Important Section!
I was going to go over each section in the order they appear in the navigation bar, but the permalinks setting is at the bottom and this is one of the most important sections. You are definitely going to want to change the default setting here so that your blog posts will have search-engine friendly urls with words in them, instead of the numbers that come with the default.

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Notes from Wordcamp Los Angeles

I attended my first WordCamp this weekend and had a great time listening to some info-filled presentations and mingling with my fellow nerds. :)
Here’s some nuggets I gleaned from the day….enjoy.

WordPress will soon run the world. Their other products include:

bbPress – lightweight, WP-style forum
BuddyPress – social network in a box
BackPress – shared code library for WordPress and bbPress

WordPress MU – allows for multi-blog management i.e. you can allow users of your site set up their own WP blogs on your site. A common misconception is that MU is designed for those who have several of their own blogs they’d like to manage from one dashboard – not true! If this is your situation you need a plugin like WP-Hive to make your life easier. WP MU currently uses a lot of server resources so it’s probably not great for shared hosting accounts.

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Matt Cutts – Wordcamp San Francisco 2009

Matt Cutts is a blogger and head of Google’s Webspam team. On his blog he gives a lot of great information regarding SEO and ranking well in Google. He gave a fairly in-depth talk at this year’s Wordcamp San Francisco, basically about how awesome WordPress is for SEO purposes. The video of his talk was just made available. Watch it below. If you are just starting out with WordPress it gets quite detailed at times, but there’s some great info here.

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6 Great Resources For Finding WordPress Themes

Hunting for WordPress themes can be a challenging task. Not only are there aesthetics and functionality to consider  – does my theme look good and work the way I want it to?  But there’s also the issue of reliability. How well is the theme supported, is it stable, have bugs been worked out, is it compatible with the latest version of WordPress? When it comes to free themes, sometimes you get what you pay for and you might install a theme that looks great, only to find out it’s buggy and doesn’t work correctly. Generally speaking, themes that you pay for are better supported and more reliable, but I have come across some good resources if you’re looking for free, reliable and good-looking themes. Give the following a whirl.

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