WordPress | Web Training Wheels

Speaking at OC Wordcamp – WordPress for Marketing

I’ve been given the opportunity to speak this weekend at OC Wordcamp (thanks Brandon!) on the topic: WordPress for Marketing. I will be discussing ways to optimize your blog to market yourself, your business or service. I’ll be covering things like:

Some plugins you can use to help make your site ‘sticky’
How to discover what people really want from your site
How to collect information from your visitors and develop your mailing list
Making sure your site effectively communicates your desired message
Find out what’s working and what could be more effective on your site

How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Design & Functionality Considerations

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This post follows on from – How To Choose A WordPress Theme -Free, Premium or Custom

When choosing a theme you must consider design, layout and functionality.
When considering these, keep in mind the general type of theme you are looking for (see previous post). If you are looking for a free theme, you need to find something as close to what you want as possible (or be savvy enough to tweak it yourself). If you are looking at Premium themes, you may have some flexibility on colors and admin options. The closer your theme is to what you want to begin with, the less tinkering you will have to do. Determining what options the theme gives you will be important.

Remember as you are looking at themes that colors and fonts are easier to change (with a little CSS) than things like sidebar placement, and changing the layout/ structure, unless you’re comfortable with PHP.

How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Free, Paid or Custom?

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One of the biggest sources of frustrations I hear from clients when using WordPress is choosing a theme that looks good and does what they want it to do. The next couple of posts will attempt to provide some guidelines to help make this process easier.

Selecting a theme is about more than the way it looks. Functionality and the ability to control options from your WordPress dashboard can be just as important. Many people choose a theme on looks alone and then become frustrated because it doesn’t work the way they want it to.

Generally speaking, there’s 3 types of themes available – free, premium and custom-built. To help decide which category you might be in note down your answers to the following questions:

Mobile Blogging With WordPress

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Mobile networks are finally getting fast enough, and smartphones nimble enough to enable you to do some real stuff on the go. WordPress now has apps for the major players so you can have ready access to your blog away from your computer.

WordPress for Blackberry
The new WordPress app for Blackberry allows you to write posts, upload images, manage comments and more. You’ll need to enable the XML-RPC setting in the Writing submenu of Settings in your WP admin. This allows for remote publishing.

Notes & Resources from WordPress for Business Meetup

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The Southern California WordPress Meetup was a lot of fun as usual. Natalie Maclees was our gracious host and even provided dinner for everyone. WordPress provided swag, and Packt publishing gave away a free copy of their “WordPress for Business Bloggers” book. We had a full group of awesome WP lovers at various levels of experience, and with a diverse range of businesses.

We covered a variety of issues under the umbrella of ‘WordPress for Business.’ Here’s some of the resources that came up during the course of the evening. If you’re in Los Angeles and using WordPress, you’ll find this group to be a great resource for information and networking.