WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials | Web Training Wheels

Learn WordPress – Los Angeles Workshop March 27th

Getting Started With WordPress For Business (and Serious Bloggers!)

UPDATE: This workshop is now SOLD OUT. Sign up to be notified of future workshops and for discount pricing.

The next WordPress workshop has been scheduled! If you would like to learn how to use WordPress to create your business site or blog, but prefer to learn in-person rather than via online tutorials, this is your chance!

Have an idea for a business or blog and need to get a website up and running at minimal expense? This hands-on workshop will provide step-by-step instruction for using self-hosted WordPress and plenty of hand-holding where necessary! Get all your questions answered in a friendly,comfortable environment.

Sunday, March 27th – 1:30pm – 5:30pm – $75

WordPress 3.1 Released – New Features

WordPress

WordPress 3.1 was just released. Here are the highlights according to the WordPress site, along with some commentary by your truly ;)

Highlights

Internal Linking – click a button for an internal link and it allows you to search for a post or browse a list of existing content and select it for inclusion.

Here’s how the new ‘add link’ box looks:

This is a really handy feature – it makes internal linking to your other posts and content much easier. Internal linking is helpful to guide your readers to more of your content, and good for SEO!

Image Editing Tools For Web and WordPress

Blogging Basics

Although WordPress allows for some image editing capabilities, it’s not ideal to upload large images into your WordPress admin and use that for re-sizing or cropping images. You’ll end up storing a lot of extra images on your server and over time it could affect the performance of your site.

It’s much cleaner to do your image editing outside of WordPress and upload images at the size you need them. This is especially true if your theme features a slider, or uses featured images that need to be very specific dimensions.

Image-related terminology

When dealing with images for the web there’s a few concepts you should become familiar with.

How To Provide RSS Blog Updates Via Email With Mailchimp

Email Marketing

Offering blog updates via email is a must-have feature for most blogs, since many real, non-geek people are not familiar with RSS, but are very comfortable with email.

I mentioned this possibility in my post on updating readers when you post a blog, but since this wonderful feature of MailChimp seems to remain largely undiscovered, I thought I’d dig into it a little further.

You’re probably already using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed, and while it does offer email subscriptions as an option, it’s not the best solution if you want to build an email list for marketing purposes.

Here’s how you can integrate RSS-via-email into your WordPress blog using MailChimp. You will of course need a MailChimp account which is free for up to 2000 subscribers.

Los Angeles WordPress Workshops For Small Biz & Blogging Success – Jan 29 & Feb 5

WordPress

Getting Started With WordPress For Business (and Serious Bloggers!)

THIS CLASS IS FULL. JOIN THE EMAIL LIST TO BE NOTIFIED FIRST ABOUT UPCOMING CLASSES, AND RECEIVE DISCOUNT CODES

Have an idea for a business or blog and need to get a website up and running at minimal expense? These workshops will provide step-by-step instruction for using self-hosted WordPress and plenty of hand-holding where necessary! Get all your questions answered in a friendly,comfortable environment.

This is a 2 part workshop, although each part stands alone, so you may attend either day separately, or purchase both days at a discounted price.

Part 1 – The Basics – Installing and Using WordPress – Saturday, January 29th – 1:45pm – 4pm

Part 2 – Essential Features For A Successful Site – Saturday, February 5th – 1:45pm – 4pm

each workshop is $50, or buy both for $75

@ Blankspaces
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Bring your laptop, this is a hands-on workshop!

Space is LIMITED so register early. There will be a max of 10 attendees on each day.
If you have any questions about the workshops, please email me: [email protected]

Improve Your Site’s Effectiveness With Google Analytics Event Tracking

Online Marketing

This post is a taste of what’s to come in my forthcoming Google Analytics Ebook. Sign up to be notified of its launch and for a special promotional price.

Internal Link Tracking Using Google Analytics

On your blog or website you may have multiple links –such as icons or calls to action in different locations – leading to the same page, product or piece of content – but do you know which link placement and type is most effective?

Heatmap software and services such as CrazyEgg will give you this type of information in great detail and in a visual format. But there’s usually a cost involved and for a lot of cases it might be overkill if you just need simple comparisons. So while not as elegant, you can use Google Analytics to do some simple testing and comparison.

Warning – Don’t Use Link Tagging!

Google Analytics offers a link tagging feature which allows you to label links with a referral source, and other tracking info. On first glance you might think you could simply use this to tag your internal links in a similar way. However link tagging is designed to track promotional campaigns with traffic coming from external sources. If you use it for internal links, you will screw up your data. If someone arrives at your site via a link from another site, this would be tracked in GA as a referring site. However if that visitor then clicks an internal link that you’ve tagged, it erases that referral source and replaces it with whatever you’ve used in your link tagging.