This primer is the perfect guide for WordPress newbies. What WordPress is, how to install it, themes, widgets, plug-ins and more.

1. WordPress 101in 30 minutes Dennis Deacon dennis@dennisdeacon.com www.dennisdeacon.com

2. What we’re covering… 29:43 On a high level… What is WordPress, history, em, ok we won’t go there… Types of WordPress (yes, there’s more than one) Installing WordPress Posts & Pages Themes Widgets Plug-ins Demo

3. What is WordPress? It’s a blogging platform. It’s a Content Management System (CMS) It’s capable of both! Great for small to medium-sized web sites & blogs. Not great for large sites with robust needs.

4. Dreamweaver vs. WordPress 29:05 Dreamweaver WordPress Tool for creating static & dynamic web pages, either through WYSIWYG or code environment Each individual file/page contains the content or requests the content from a database Management of content across many pages difficult CMS where content is managed/stored in a central repository (database) and code is used (php) to pull out that content based on instructions (queries) Uses template files to query the appropriate /contextual content and display onto designed pages. You can use Dreamweaver to design/create the code that you would then implement onto a WordPress CMS platform.

5. 28:14 Two types of WordPress (actually three) WordPress.org (self-hosted) Download WordPress to install on your server/hosting Use your domain/url Can select from thousands of free/fee-based themes, plug-ins & widgets, or create your own WordPress.com (hosted) Hosted WordPress Blogs blogname.wordpress.com Limited selection of established themes to choose from No access to extra plug-ins & widgets What’s the third type of WordPress? WordPress MU is a multiple-user version of WordPress. It is similar to the WordPress.com version. WordPress MU & WordPress will be consolidated for version 3.0 of WordPress.

6. Installing WordPress Two methods: Hosting service control panel (Fantastico, Simple Scripts, WordPress, etc.) Manually (download from WordPress.org, FTP to your server, edit config file, run installation) Prompted for username, password, (database name, password for manual installs) Run install (<5 minutes, scouts honor) 27:54

7. header.php index.php sidebar.php footer.php styles.css How it works 26:32 WordPress MySQL Database (content) Web Server

8. WordPress Settings Settings in the Admin offer options for customization throughout WordPress

9. WordPress Settings (cont.) Reading Settings: Homepage Blog/Posts Page # of posts to display

10. WordPress Settings (cont.) Permalink Settings: Default URLs arewww.dennisdeacon.com/?p=123 With custom Permalink: www.dennisdeacon.com/professional/do-online-presentations-right/

13. Hierarchical in natureEasy Keyword Research with New Google Search ResultsPosted May 7th, 2010by deconspray Google recent released a change to its search engine results page. While the change is subtle, one of the new features is a handy, easy to access tool for performing keyword research for optimizing your web site for the search engines. Continue Reading » Do Online Presentations RightPosted April 3rd, 2010 by deconspray I’ve done several presentations in my time. They tend to be text heavy, as I want the presentation to have value long after I’ve delivered it.Continue Reading »

14. Creating/Editing Posts & Pages 25:01

15. WordPress Themes Group of PHP, CSS and graphic files that make up the look & feel of a WordPress site. 24:30

16. WordPress Widgets Widgets provide content Misc text Add feeds to website (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, Video Player, etc.) Posts by category 23:51

18. Add additional SEO capabilities

19. Contact/Tell-a-Friend form

20. Google XML Sitemaps

21. Automatically post to social networks

22. Database Backup

23. Google Analytics / Stats

24. Image slideshows

25. Social Network creator (BuddyPress)

26. Polls & Ratings

27. Mobile Phone Styler

28. Breadcrumb Navigation

29. Site Security

30. Chat

31. eCommerceOver 8,702 more to select from!

32. Demo Time 21:47

33. WordPress Resources 6:23 WordPress Codex - codex.wordpress.org WordPress Showcase - wordpress.org/showcase Designing for WordPress- css-tricks.com/designing-for-wordpress-complete-series-downloads Digging into WordPress- digwp.com Digging into WordPress (The Book) Chicago WordPress Meetup