Wp 3hr-course

Wordpress 101
marketing your business with…
the power of blogging.

What is this class?
• You’ll Learn how Wordpress works
• Modern marketing principles mixed
in so you understand why 
Wordpress works

What you get...
• An overview of:
• What Wordpress is
• How it works in the Internet
Ecosystem

• How it integrates with social media

Who are you?
• Why have you chosen to take this
course?

• Why Wordpress?
• What is your business?
• What level user are you?

How hard is this?
• What’s your background?
• What’s your ambition?
• Recipes vs. Concepts
• Yes, some concepts are HARD
★ but you’ll need them!

How to be successful
with Wordpress...
• Be ACTIVE. Work at it every week.
• Get help, if you need it:
• Grammar, Style (can you write?)
• Images, photography
• Ideas... Customers and Employees

Mistakes WELCOME!
• It’s all ﬁxable.

Questions WELCOME!
• It’s about you getting the info you need.

Wordpress
What it is...
What it is not.

The Internet Ecosystem
• Once mostly informational,
increasingly functional

• Is made up of “services”...
• “The Web” is just one of those services

It’s made up of...
A bunch of content
Might be:

• Personal expression
• Educational publishing
• Government info & services
• Mostly business, for marketing

Business on the web...
is mostly static marketing content:

• About <the business>
• Contact form
• Location, Directions, Phones
• Products and/or Services
These are: “Brochure Sites”

Web businesses...
• Websites that ARE businesses
• E-commerce (buy stuff online)
• Social Networks
• Ad Networks
• Software or Platform as a Service
★ SaaS or PaaS

Web businesses...
63% of businesses in the US do NOT
have a website...
97% of consumers search online for
businesses!

Other ways to use the
web for business
• #1: Customer Support
• Market research
• know your potential customers
• follow ‘trending’ topics
• survey users through online
communities

Most biz sites are
‘cobwebs’
• Haven’t been changed since 2009
• 1999???
• Never show up on search results
• Don’t drive sales
★ They just sit there!

Why Wordpress?
• The ﬁrst few answers emerge...
• Acts as ‘brochure’ site
• You can edit your own site!
• Makes contact forms easy...
• Search engines LOVE it. 
 
(more “why” later)

What is Wordpress?
• It’s a Content Management System
(CMS)...

• content goes into a database
• requested data is pulled out on

demand for viewing (or editing)

• it is wrapped in a ‘template’ for
consistent formatting

• links are managed automatically

a CMS:
Web Form
Title

!
Body
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

Database
Title

Body

Cat

Category

Web Page

Template

What is Wordpress?
• It’s a kind of CMS called a blog:
• content is displayed with the most
recent articles (posts) ﬁrst.

• you can click to view content by...
• category
• author
• date... etc.

What is Wordpress?
• It doesn’t HAVE to be a blog
• it can have a simple  

page-by-page structure

• it can act like a simple  
e-commerce system

• it can have forums... etc.

How does a CMS / Blog work?
• It’s better to experience it than to
try to explain it.

• but basically...
...it takes a URL, and uses it to pull
information out of the database, and display
it in various ways. It gives you tools to put
in media (images, videos, audio ﬁles) and
text, link to stuff, and make it available to
people in a friendly, useful way. It can also
communicate to social media, and gather
data, and other nifty things. It’s a
publishing platform. It’s fun!

What is the Web,
technically?
• Why should you care?
• It’s a protocol, uses http/https, port

80, web server software like Apache
or IIS... all of which we can set aside.

• Uses HTML, which is text, following
a format with tags that look like...

• <html>Dragons!</html>

What is a web page?
• A text ﬁle sitting on a computer. The

computer runs web server software:

<html>
<head>

<title>The Title</title>
</head>

<body>

<h1>A big headline!</h1>

<h2>...a smaller headline</h2>

<p><strong>Some</strong> <em>text</em>
in the form of a paragraph</p>
</body>

</html>

What is a Server?
• It’s a computer, always connected,
with an address that looks like:

• 128.56.24.0
• It runs server software, perhaps for
email, web, database, ﬁle transfer...

Types of Servers...
• Email Server Software (IMAP, POP,

SMTP servers, MX records, Ports 25,
465, 587

• Web Server Software (Apache, IIS,
etc., Port 80, 8080)

• Database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.,
Port 3036)

• IRC, FTP, and other TLAs you (may)
never have to worry about...

Domains
• Domain Name Servers (DNS) look at the Top Level Domain (TLD)
like .com, .net, .biz, etc. and pass to...

• the Nameserver assigned to the Second-Level Domain, like
“facebook” or “google” or your domain name.

• That may point to another DNS server, or directly to a specific

server address, which is a number like 123.213.21.0 called an IP
address.

• The IP address may point to a specific computer running server

software. Based on the port and other info, it may be directed to a
specific type of software. That software will look for certain files
which may be some text or a script or a program which returns
information. Some is used only by machines, some is for humans.

Subdomains
• www...
• most people think all websites start

with www. But that's just an optional
thing. It can be any word or number
combination*

• So...
• www.richwebster.com
• subdomain.secondlevel.toplevel

And to the right of that...
www.richwebster.com/directory/ﬁle.html

And to the left of that...

But wait...
• Wordpress can make urls that look like
www.richwebster.com/?p=123

• The “?” tells a script on the server to go
the the DB and do something

• In this case, go to the DB and get “post
#123”

Even better...
• Wordpress can make urls that look like
www.richwebster.com/postname/

• The “postname” is the title of your post,
like: top-10-reasons-to-buy-a-top-hat

• This is big-time Search Engine Mojo
(more on that, later).

Review:
• Your website is on a server: 

— a computer with special software

• You get to it with a URL: 

— protocol//sub.domain.tld/dir/ﬁle.html 
— http://www.richwebster.com/about/me.htm

• The domain is registered; on a DNS server
• An HTML ﬁle + images make a web page

Why Wordpress
VS.
Something Else

Other Options
• There are hundreds of CMS solutions
• Wordpress is usually compared with:
• Joomla (similar to WP)
• Drupal (more powerful than WP)
• These are both open-source solutions

that are based on PHP and MySQL and
have strong, vibrant communities.

Power vs. Simplicity?
• WP is relatively easy for users
• WP is powerful, especially for
developers (like me).

• You control it (unlike Facebook, G+,
Tumblr, blogger, etc.)

• It’s “Open Source”

Open Source is...
• All the code is visible, and can be
modified by a developer.

• Closed code is ‘compiled’ and can’t be
viewed or modified.

• “Open” means thousands of people can
work on it, improve it, and extend it.

• If your expert drops dead, you can find
someone else who can work on it.

Wordpress is good...
• Thoroughly documented
• Frequently improved
• Clean architecture
• Core is separate, shared with all sites
• Themes deﬁne the user experience
• Secure as anything ever is, ﬁxed fast
when new ‘exploits’ are found

Why not?
• It doesn’t have complex user roles
• It doesn’t do complex page layouts well
• You might need a speciﬁc functions WP
doesn’t have.

• Consider Drupal… or Concrete5

Reason #1: Wordpress is
SEO Catnip...
• People at Google help develop it
• It has lots of hidden attributes that
make it ideally ‘semantic’

• Google takes cues from how it works, it
takes cues from how Google works.

• ...more later

Will this be a good choice
in the future?
• Over 60 million users
• A very strong community
• Devotion to open source
• ...so, probably.
★ But the net changes fast!

What makes blogging
special?

• Blogging serves people, but it also
serves machines: Search Engines

Blogs Serving People...
• people get to a site occasionally, not
regularly

• they want to know what's current, ﬁrst.
But then they want to know the “back
story”, history, or story line.

• whether they are back after a week or a
month, they can scan what has
happened since they last visited.

Serving People...
• they can scan and then 'drill down'
easily

• they can search, easily (content in DB)
• they want consistent, easy navigation
• they want to ﬁnd out about new things
through other channels:

★ Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS

Serving Search Engines
★ Search Engine Optimization: SEO
• There's more than meets the eye:
Search Engine 'spiders or bots'
consume information too.

• Google tries to ﬁnd and judge info the
way people do, or better

• It looks at the URLs, HTML, page
structure, relationships to other
websites

Serving Search Engines
• Google looks at time and location
• How old is the domain?
• How fresh is the content?
• Where is it published? (geolocation)
• <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <p>, <strong> etc.
• there are special hidden ﬁles (XML site

maps) just for them, that WP can generate
(with a plugin).

Optimal Patterns
★ Post 2 times/week
• Fresh content
• After a year, you have 100 articles
focused on your business.

• Each article can act as a de facto

“landing page” for a product, a target
market, or a “keyword set”

Optimal Patterns
★ Keyword-driven content and menus
• Figure out your “Keywords”
• 1-3 word phrases
• describe — or appeal to — your
target audience

• describe your products, services,
brands, community, aesthetics,
humor... think broadly

How do people describe
your business?
★ Plug ‘em in
• URL:
https://adwords.google.com/ko/
KeywordPlanner/

Keep these in mind
★ Write posts with these keywords
• Monitor the biggies:
• Google Alerts
• Twitter
• etc...

Your front page isn’t
always your ‘home’ page
★ Customers may land anywhere.
• Based on search or links-in
• What did they come for? Are you using
that page to do a “Call to action?”

• It’ll get trafﬁc soon, but may years
later, too!

create targeted content:

★write articles about

things that will draw
the right visitors

Once they’ve arrived
• include calls to action: how to use this
information to act now!

• use energetic and positive writing
• choose who you alienate (if anyone)
• write your headlines carefully (do they
make good tweets?)

Before they go...
• friend you?
• tweet this?
• sign up for a newsletter?
• buy something?

What did we learn on the
show tonight, Craig?
• There’s a thing called the Internet...
• If you use Wordpress, you can have a
great hub for your brand

• A Blog is a CMS is a Website that you

can control without being a ‘developer’

What did we learn on the
show tonight, Craig?
•URLs really matter
•You can’t avoid HTML forever
• Keywords drive SEO
• Content tuned to your target audience
will deliver trafﬁc.

• Once you have someone looking, get ‘em
signed up so you can bring ‘em back.

Next...
• What's your site going to be about?
• What do you want to name it?
• What's a good subtitle? (think
'keywords')

• Do you have a domain?

First: a tour

• Generic Wordpress Site
• This is the TwentyEleven Theme

Browser:
• I can recommend Chrome, Firefox &
Safari. I do not recommend the
ubiquitous IE (Microsoft Internet
Explorer) in any version before 9.

• Nonetheless, your visitors will use

them, so you need to look at your site
that way sometimes (back to IE7).

The Parts of the Theme
• Site Title in Browser Tab
• URL
• Site Title on page
• Navigation
• Post
• Pages

Anatomy of a Page

• Title
• Content
• that’s all

Anatomy of the Blog
• Multiple posts, in reverse date order
• Each post exists by itself: the
Permalink

• Posts can be listed by date (archive),
author (archive), search results
(search match), and more.

The Admin Area

• Your admin area: /wp-login.php  
or /wp-admin

Settings
• Site Title
• Site Description
• Front “Page” or “Blog”?
• Creating a Page
• Creating a Post

Touring the Editor
• Called “TinyMCE” shared by many
other CMS/Blog platforms.

• This is not a Word Processor, like
you’re used to

• Limited by HTML
• Very basic, but can be extended

Peek at code...
• Bold uses the <strong> tag
• italic uses the <em> tag
• strikethrough uses the <del> tag
• underlined uses the <span style="textdecoration: underline;">.

• The old way to do this were the <b>, <i>, <s>, <u>.
This relates to the increasing use of "Semantic"
tagging... The ' style="" ' is an 'inline CSS style',
so it's your ﬁrst glimpse at CSS.

Wordpress 101
Links & Images (in a post or page)

Creating Links
• Go to a page or post
• Highlight text
• Click ‘chain link’ icon
• URLs from other sites
• Open in new window
• Existing content

Links...
• Find a site to link to, or just type
in http://google.com

• Click the “Open New Window”
checkbox

• submit

Links...
• Now we’ll link to an internal page
• Highlight some (different) text
• Click the ‘link’ icon
• select a page from the list
• Note the title?
• submit

Links...
• Know your URL structure:
• http or https
• ://
• subdomain.domain.tld
• /folder/ﬁle?argument
• A look at a Google Map URL

Images...
• Add an image to a post (demo)
• Upload an image or images
• Make a gallery

Image Formats
• GIF: smallest, best for art, like
logos (unless transparent)

• JPEG: best for photos or other
“continuous tone” images

• PNG: best for transparent logos

Image Size
• Image in post can be full width
of post area

• 1/2 width (roughly) also good
• Thumbnail is pretty small  

(but what automatically is used
in Galleries)

Image Links
• Images can link to:
• image by itself (media)
• image in a page (attachment)
• image in a lightbox 

(requires plugin: jQuery
Lightbox or similar)

Slideshows
• Require a plugin 

(or may be in theme)

• SliderVilla.com is a good

source for slideshow/slider
plugins

Videos
• Easy to embed from:
• Youtube
• Screencast.com
• Vimeo
• Slideshare... and more

Videos are HUGE
• Lots of data: let YouTube

(Google) pay for the server
space instead of putting it on
your server

• Also has SEO value:
• YouTube links to your site
• You link to your  
YouTube video

Content Plan
• Pages vs. Posts 

= Static vs. Timely

1. Make a list for your pages
Titles
Basic idea of what goes on each...

What should be in every
business site*
• Contact Page
• phone, address, map, contact form
• Photos of you, your staff, building?
• Newsletter sign-up
• Testimonials
• Social Links
• maybe an FAQ

Plan your ﬁrst 10 posts
• What are the most common questions
customers have?

• What is new in your store, or industry
• The history of industry, products,
people

• Things that prompt discussion...

Should you accept
Comments?
• People can comment on posts  
(or you can block that)

• Should you allow this?
• If you do, should it be ‘hands-off’
• Think of it as a customer-support
channel

Using Other’s Content
• Most photos & original art/music are
off-limits without permission

• OK to summarize & link including
‘quotes’ from original text.

• Most sites want this... more trafﬁc!
• Most YouTubes can be embedded

You can do delayed
publishing...
• Write a bunch of posts
• Publish at later date/time
• spread it out

Cross publish
• Using tools like “dlvr.it”
• http://dlvr.it
• To Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In
• Subscribe2 plugin, MailChimp,
Constant Contact or Aweber

• notiﬁes users via email of new
content

Links to Social Media
• Link to YOUR Facebook or Twitter
• User’s can “Like” once there...
• AND allow users to post your content

to THEIR Facebook & Twitter, & other
sites as well...

• spread your content far and wide...
it all links back to you!

• “Sociable” plugin

Other Links-in
• SEO Concept: Link Building
• You want more links to your site
• You want “High Quality” links
• major news sites
• wikipedia
• social media & other blogs
• You want to “disavow” spammy links

Review
• Post (2x week is optimal)
• Cross post to social
• Schedule posts
• allow people to subscribe to be notiﬁed
• allow people to comment?
• allow people to post to social
• write useful stuff

What is a theme?
• A collection of
• styles
• templates
• functions

What is a theme?
• May also include:
• plugins
• widgets
• custom admin-area forms

How to ﬁnd themes
• Find some you like, don’t buy yet.
• Free themes are fun to play with
• Commercial themes can be a

headache that you feel trapped by...

• Did you spend a lot?
• Is it really going to be easy?

Custom Themes
• Tools you can use
• Artisteer
• A theme with options in the
Admin – not that easy!

• Genesis, Atahualpa, etc.
• Hire a pro... it’s worth it.

Custom Theme
Advantage
• No one else looks the same
• It has only those features you
need, none you don’t

• It lets you focus on content

Custom Theme Samples
• RosevilleHyperbaric.com
• NevadaCounty.com
• BrookDesign.com

Installing a Theme
• wp-admin > appearance > themes
• Select a theme
• Install & View
• Switch Back
• Demo of “full install” options

What happens when the
Theme changes?
• Image size issues
• ‘orphaned’ content
• but nothing is ‘lost’
• It might not land in the same
place when the original is
reactivated, though

What a Theme really is...
In wp-content/

All the stuff that
makes this WP
installation
“yours”

In wp-content/themes/

All the stuff that
makes this
“Theme”

PHP ﬁles
CSS ﬁles
Images

PHP:
page.php

What is a plugin?
• Extra functionality, in a tidy
package (hopefully)

• May be simple, or may require
expertise to implement

• Can turn your Wordpress site into a
forum, e-commerce system, or...?

Adding a Plugin
• Admin > Plugins
• Search or Upload
• Activate
• Keep updated

Examples of Plugins
• BackWPup
• XML Sitemap
• Sociable
• Gravity Forms
• Subscribe2
• ...and many more

Major Hosts
• GoDaddy (warning: slow!,

restrictive, problematic, icky)

• HostGator (well liked, basic)
• 1and1 (good host, not great

support, nice interface, dual
hosting)

• DreamHost (old favorite)
• Bluehost (current champion)

Cheap Shared Account
• Go with any of these hosts (except

GoDaddy), it’ll take you a long way.

• IF lotsa trafﬁc (you wish) you can
upgrade to “Pro” account, try
DreamPress, or WP-Engine

• Can support multiple sites/domains
• Hosts take care of a lot of hidden

complexity: Not rocket science; harder

Cloud Hosting
• It’s all the cloud, really
• The big two:
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• Services like WP-Engine layered on

the cloud. But so is Netﬂix, so it’s not
cheating, it is smart.

On Your Device
• A Mac or PC can have Wordpress
• Easiest
• MAMP or WAMP or XAMPP
• DesktopServer

Learning More…
Are you interested in more classes on the
details of WordPress? Let me know.
!

rich@richwebster.com

Wp 3hr-course

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