Pick up tips, tricks, and techniques that illuminate how WordPress can become a viable opportunity for you to provide professional web design and maintenance services to your clients. Explore free and premium themes, plugins, and other resources that are available to help jump-start your next project. You’ll also learn step-by-step instructions to customize themes with ease.
Presented at AIGA Minnesota's Design Camp 2011.
5. • You want to learn tips, tricks and
techniques on how WordPress can
become a viable opportunity for to
provide professional web design and
maintenance services to your clients
• You want to learn more about
premium and free themes, plugins
and other resources to help jump-
start your next project
6. • You want to customize WordPress
themes with ease
• You want to learn ways to prevent
headaches and heart-attacks when
deploying a WordPress site
• You have great taste in session choice
8. History
• First released on May 27, 2003, by Matt
Mullenweg
• Grown to be the largest self-hosted
blogging tool in the world, used on
millions of sites and seen by tens of
millions of people every day.
- wordpress.org
9. Stats
• WordPress is used by over 14.7% of
Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites
• Powers 22% of all new websites (As of 8/11)
• Wordpress is the most popular CMS on
the internet
• Version 3.0 has been downloaded over
32.5 million times (As of 2/11)
- Wikipedia
10. Why WordPress?
• Open Source
• Full Standards Compliance
• Free
• Flexible
• Awesome
11. .com vs .org
.com + .com -
• Free • Can’t run custom
themes
• Easy to setup
• Everything is taken • Can’t hack PHP code
care of: setup, • Can’t upload plugins
upgrades, spam,
backups, security, etc.
12. .com vs .org
.org (a.k.a hosted install)
• Can upload themes
• Can upload plugins
• Complete control to change code
• Need to pay for web host
16. Anatomy of a
Great Theme
• Customizable - can add your own logo,
color scheme, change layout, etc.
• Flexible - can handle a variety of
different post types
• Adaptable - can grow with your needs
• Ongoing support and upgrades
31. However...
Recent investigation of the current state
of the WordPress plugin repository found:
• More than half of the plugins in the
repository are not compatible with
WordPress 3.x.
• Only 32% of those 15,000+ plugins have
been updated in 2011!
- wpmu.org
32. The Times They Are
A-Changin'
Plugins not been updated in past two
years will be hidden both in the repository
and in the WP admin plugin search.
- Announced by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp
San Francisco in August 2011
33. Do your homework
• Check compatibility, when last updated
• Average rating, others’ comments/issues
85. Web Fonts/@fontface
Allows you to use virtually any font as a
true text element. No longer limited by
traditional browser-safe fonts (Arial,
Verdana, Times, etc.)