Jan

24

WordPress Essential Training

General

Intro­duc­tion

This video tuto­r­ial series will take you through all of the things you need to know in order to get going with Word­Press. We will cover aspects rang­ing from host­ing require­ments right through to some of the best plu­g­ins. This page will be updated as new videos are released.

1. Get­ting to Know WordPress

What is Word­Press?
Cloud host­ing and Self-hosting

2. Get­ting Started with WordPress.com

Set­ting up an account
Set­ting up a new blog or web site
Nav­i­gat­ing the WordPress.com back end

3. Build­ing a Profile

Edit­ing your pro­file
Cre­at­ing pro­file images with Gravatar.com
Mod­i­fy­ing per­sonal set­tings
Adjust­ing site set­tings to improve pri­vacy and find­abil­ity
Advanced shar­ing options

4. Posts

Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between posts and pages
Cre­at­ing a new post
Advanced text for­mat­ting in a new post
Cre­at­ing text links
Adding images
Adding images from URLs and exter­nal sources
Adding cat­e­gories, tags, excerpts, and other ele­ments
Pub­lish­ing a post

5. Pages

Writ­ing a basic page
Orga­niz­ing page hier­ar­chy
Using page templates

6. Man­ag­ing Images, Video, and Other Media

Man­ag­ing media from the Admin panel
Man­ag­ing Media Library assets from within posts and pages
Insert­ing exter­nal media from YouTube and other services

7. Word­Press Settings

Cus­tomiz­ing the front page of a site
Man­ag­ing users
Man­ag­ing com­ments
Cre­at­ing rat­ings options
Cre­at­ing polls

8. The Appear­ance Tab

Select­ing a theme
Under­stand­ing page wid­gets
Cre­at­ing cus­tom side­bar wid­gets using text wid­gets
Cre­at­ing cus­tom menus
Using Type­kit to inte­grate spe­cial­ized fonts

9. The Twenty Ten Theme

Chang­ing the back­ground
Chang­ing the header image
Cre­at­ing fea­tured header images in posts and pages
Using asides to cre­ate short posts

10. Mov­ing to Self-Hosting

Tran­si­tion­ing from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site
Option 1: Set­ting up a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment using Bit­Nami
Option 1: Log­ging in to and nav­i­gat­ing a local Word­Press instal­la­tion with Bit­Nami
Option 2: Set­ting up a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment using WAMP on Win­dows
Option 2: Installing Word­Press into a WAMP instal­la­tion on Win­dows
Option 3: Set­ting up a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment using MAMP on a Mac
Option 3: Installing Word­Press into a MAMP instal­la­tion on a Mac

11. Using Plug-Ins

Installing plug-ins from Admin
Trou­bleshoot­ing when a plug-in crashes the site
Ten must-have plug-ins for all Word­Press sites

12. New Cus­tom Themes

Installing new themes from inside Word­Press
Trou­bleshoot­ing when a cus­tom theme crashes the site

13. Under­stand­ing the Word­Press File Structure

Work­ing in the wp-content folder
Man­u­ally installing themes and plug-ins

14. Basic Theme Hacks

Intro­duc­ing child themes
Mod­i­fy­ing a child theme
Cre­at­ing cus­tom page templates

15. Launch­ing Your Self-Hosted Word­Press Site

Set­ting up the host­ing ser­vice
Con­fig­ur­ing Word­Press before upload
Upload­ing Word­Press to an exter­nal web host
Run­ning Word­Press on your server for the first time
Import­ing and export­ing exist­ing con­tent from dif­fer­ent sources

16. Word­Press Site Main­te­nance and Security

Back­ing up a Word­Press site
Trou­bleshoot­ing when some­thing goes wrong
Keep­ing a Word­Press instal­la­tion current

17. Get­ting Readers

Cre­at­ing user-friendly perma­links
Set­ting up a Word­Press site for search engine opti­miza­tion
Set­ting up and writ­ing good con­tent to get more readers

18. Con­clu­sion

Where to go from here

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Jan

17

What is WordPress?

Featured / Wordpress Essential Training

This video is part of a series.

To start off this course, let me answer a sim­ple ques­tion: what is WordPress?

Word­Press is an open source appli­ca­tion that was orig­i­nally designed to cre­ate blogs but now is used to build almost any web­site you can think of.

Using Word­Press, you can design any­thing from a sim­ple blog to an advanced web­site. There are 2 options, either using WordPress.com — which is a cloud hosted ser­vice — or you can install Word­Press on your own server and host it, which one to choose and why we will cover in later sections.

Word­Press was cre­ated Matt Mul­len­weg. On his blog you can read about what he is doing.  Matt’s blog is a stan­dard blog that out­puts a lot of con­tent, and you can read it, you can click around if you want to, and it also has pages that you can go to that have more information.

How­ever Word­Press doesn’t have to be just a blog; it can be pretty much any­thing you want. A lot of mag­a­zines use Word­Press because it’s an easy way of orga­niz­ing content, and you can also style it and make it look like pretty much what­ever you want. The Huff­in­g­ton Post is a good example. It’s a mag­a­zine, but it has kind of a blog struc­ture and a lot of advanced fea­tures, like social media fea­tures such as Face­book like and rec­om­mend buttons. It has advertising. It has lots of nav­i­ga­tional tools, and it’s pretty easy to read. There are also other sites that have no blog like fea­tures at all, such as eCom­merces and some busi­ness port­fo­lio sites.

As you progress through this course, we will be build­ing a site for the fic­tional com­pany Joe Blogs Plumbing. This is a self-hosted site, and it has a lot of inter­est­ing features.

Not only is it easy to build con­tent, but more impor­tantly, man­ag­ing that con­tent is very easy through the Word­Press dash­board.
The Word­Press dash­board is some­thing you will find both on WordPress.com and also on your self-hosted sites.

If you want to just set up a basic web site and you have no idea how to do any type of web design or web devel­op­ment, you can set up a Word­Press web site and never have to worry about the code.

Word­Press ships with a full Admin­is­tra­tion panel that appears inside your browser. So all you have to do is acti­vate Word­Press, set it up, and then you can man­age all your con­tent, write new posts, new pages, man­age pho­tos and videos, all from within this Admin panel, through your browser.

That means you don’t have to con­stantly upload and down­load files and man­age the HTML and CSS code; you sim­ply work in this very easy to under­stand panel. This is the true strength of Word­Press: easy usabil­ity for everyone.

Any­one can set up a Word­Press site and any­one can make it work to their advantage.

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Jan

10

Why would you want to use WordPress for your next website

wordpress

Howdy, at Hyper­stream we are proud to tell peo­ple that we use Word­Press for pretty much every project that we do. Some web devel­op­ers at this point may say that we are crazy to be using just one sys­tem, how­ever we see it as a ben­e­fit to know one sys­tem inside and out rather than flip flop­ping between projects, there is an effi­ciency fac­tor to be had here. I am going to tell you the secret why Word­Press is so pop­u­lar today over all the other CMS sys­tems. Word­Press works. It’s that simple.

It is easy to use from both the devel­oper and users per­spec­tive. From a devel­op­ers point of view it gives a good foun­da­tion to explore and extend php, javascript and mysql knowl­edge. There is also a huge com­mu­nity to sup­port it. Num­bers matter.

Although Word­Press started life as a bloging engine it has become much more, this was mainly due to it’s highly exten­si­ble plu­gin archi­tec­ture which allowed it to grow so rapidly and allow so many advanced uses of WordPress.

Some of the most inno­v­a­tive devel­op­ment right now is com­ing from devel­op­ers mak­ing plu­g­ins and themes for WordPress.

In con­clu­sion Word­Press is here to stay for a very long time and is a great foun­da­tion to almost any web project.

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Dec

20

Web Form Design best practice

Featured / web design

One of the major ele­ments of web design that often gets over­looked is form design. I will admit that I have been guilty in the past of neglect­ing this major part of web design. It is only recently since I have been read­ing the work of Luke Wrob­lewski that I remem­bered how impor­tant this is. One of the many rea­sons we don’t spend enough time design­ing forms is because “Forms Suck!”. No one likes fill­ing in a form. As a web designer it is our job to make the process as quick as pos­si­ble for the user.

Here are some of the top form design tips I have picked up:

  1. Get rid of fields that are unessential
  2. Keep your labels on top of your input boxes
  3. Make your sub­mit (action button) button clear and left align with the form
  4. Get rid of can­cel but­tons and allow peo­ple to save progress on longer forms
  5. Use input masks to indi­cate what needs to be entered into the field
  6. Help text should go under the input field  if required
  7. Save peo­ple time and use smart defaults

Pay­ing atten­tion to the details of form design can have a very big impact.

Luke Wrob­lewski

What ele­ments do you think makes for good form design?

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Dec

20

Do I need a professional web designer as a small business owner?

web design

Depend­ing on your require­ments as a small busi­ness owner you may not always need to hire a pro­fes­sional web designer to make your web­site for you. In fact there are a num­ber of ser­vices out there that will allow you to build a web site for lit­tle or no cost (other than your time of course).

Here are some of the options if you are very lim­ited on your budget.

  1. Use a web build­ing ser­vice from your host­ing company.
  2. Use a bloging ser­vice such as wordpress.com
  3. Go on a course to teach your­self web design. The for dum­mies books are pretty good.

Before tak­ing any action with build­ing a web site you should always start with a good plan with clear goals and objec­tives. Mak­ing qual­ity web­sites takes a long time so be pre­pared to put in the hours even if you use a free service.

What have your expe­ri­ences been in build­ing your own web­site. Was it a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence, or would you do dif­fer­ently next time?

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Dec

01

Hyperstream making Facebook marketing simple. Click here to find out how...

Business / Daily Tips / Facebook / Featured / How To / Social Media / Social Networking / Tech News / Technology News

Just like our Face­book page to start learn­ing the secrets to Face­book mar­ket­ing or book a con­sul­ta­tion now…

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