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WordPress 101 to be offered at Drexel University in Philadelphia

Newsflash — for those of you living in or near the “city of brotherly love” – and/or folks who prefer a classroom environment:

WordPress 101 will be offered at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in a 6- week session starting Monday March 15!

Registration link here.

Cheers,

Marc

Funniest thing I have seen in weeks: my colleague Christina Hills on “The Julia Child website cooking show”

This from my colleague Christina Hills:

Expanded “WordPress Quick Start” eBook and Atahualpa video tutorials just published

I have greatly expanded the WordPress 101 Quick Start eBook (version 1.00!) and added three, 10-minute video tutorials in HD on styling the Atahualpa theme.

The eBook is available by subscribing to our mailing list.

Watch the videos on my YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/everymanmarketing

These are the first free, comprehensive, HD videos ever produced on styling this powerful free theme framework.

If you enjoy them, please rate them and comment!

Best wishes,

Marc Beneteau
Websites, blogging, video, social media for ordinary people
http://WordpressAcademy.biz
W: (215) 376-4345
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mbeneteau

“WordPress 101 Quick Start”: Introduction the program

I made a new promotional video today for our free eBook and video course, that will come online within a week.  If you enjoy, please comment!

Session 2: WordPress UI; Posts, Pages, Links; Sidebars and Widgets; Theme selection in depth; recommended Plugin set; Atahualpa customization; Windows Live Writer

The Workbook for this session is available to free subscribers below.

Content of this session

  • Make sure everyone understands hosting options (including using localhost)
  • Theme selection: Free vs. Paid, regular Theme vs. Theme Framework
  • Review basic WP configuration
  • Review Posts, Pages and Links
  • Review sidebars and widgets
  • Creating content: the WP built-in Visual editor
  • Installing a recommended plugin set
  • Atahualpa theme configuration (basic)
  • Creating content with Windows Live Writer

Continue reading…

How to create a website banner using free image editing software Paint.Net in 15 minutes

I love the free image editing software Paint.Net.  It’s a serious competitor for Photoshop CS4 ($799!) in the do-it-yourself market.  Another (reputedly) more powerful, but harder to use free software is Gimp.  But Paint.Net does the job for me.  Here is a typical application: making a banner for a website.  Below is a step-by-step guide.

But first, here is the result:

swan2

Continue reading…

Installing and using the free screen capture utility “Cropper” on Windows

This is useful not just for capturing screen elements, but also for measuring the pixel-width of items on websites.

Note: you don’t need to use screen-capture to capture images on websites.  Just right-click > Copy. You can also get the image dimension through right-click > Properties.

Continue reading…

How to install WordPress + PHP + mySQL to a local development server environment on Windows or Mac, in 3 minutes

This is so easy it will knock your socks off.  It took me 10 minutes, but that was because I wasn’t clear on mySQL security – it should take 3 minutes, so this article could save you 7 minutes.  I did it because I was doing a lot of development with short testing cycles and was tired of the server lag-time of my remote server.

Continue reading…

Session 1 recording + Course registration deadline

The session 1 recording of WordPress 101 is available here:

http://wordpressacademy.biz/2009/12/session-1-recording-1212009/

We covered an introduction to the course (what you can expect to learn), WordPress installation and configuration for a business website, the user interface, and theme installation.

The course registration deadline is Tuesday 2/16 (for the Tuesday evening session) or Thursday 2/18 (for the Thursday afternoon session). For pricing and registration click here.

There are two parallel sessions (come to either one or both, plus access the video recording):

  • 7 Tuesdays starting Feb. 16, 7:30-9:30pm EST (the last hour is a practice and group coaching session – optional but highly recommended)
  • 7 Thursdays starting Feb. 18, 3-5pm EST.

If you would like to discuss the various packages with reference to your needs, please reply to this email or call (215) 376-4345.

The course curriculum is below.  This is going to be the best course ever, with expanded practice and coaching time, a more interactive web conference system, and new theme frameworks getting demonstrated (some of which are included in the Platinum package).

Warm Regards,

Marc Beneteau – Everyman Marketing
Websites, blogging, video, social media for ordinary people
http://WordpressAcademy.biz
W: (215) 376-4345


WordPress 101 Curriculum

Note: Session 1 already complete – see above for the recording link

Session 1 – Course introduction and WordPress installation, configuration, and basic content creation

  • Opening a hosting account
  • Installing WordPress
  • Configuring WordPress for a business website
  • Understanding the difference between Posts and Pages
  • Adding content using the built-in editor
  • Configuring side-bars and widgets
  • Installing Themes and Plugins

Check out the Free web conference recording and Powerpoint of Session 1.

Sessions 2 through 5: Theme selection and customization; designing banners and ebook covers; creating content

In these sessions, we will style class participants’ sites while exploring different theme frameworks and design options at some depth.

  • Recommended plugin set
  • Using widget controls
  • Creating content offline with Windows Live Writer (Blogo on Mac)
  • Choosing a good theme for your professional or corporate website
  • Understanding theme frameworks, including where to find free or inexpensive high-quality WordPress themes
  • Reviews and demos of the following themes: Atahualpa, Thesis, Headway, Studio Press, and iThemes Builder
  • Design your own banner or ebook cover with Paint.Net
  • Styling all the elements of your site
  • Beginners guide to HTML and CSS
  • How to copy the styling of another website you like using Firebug and Colorzilla
  • Best resources for banner creation and logo design
  • Best graphic design ousourcing sites

Session 6 – Keyword research and Search-engine optimization (SEO)

  • Using the powerful free Market Samurai keyword research tool
  • Optimizing meta-tags on your site
  • The importance of Wordpress “tags”
  • Using free Google Analytics to track your traffic
  • Google ads (paid inclusion) versus “organic” search-engine traffic
  • Conversion strategies

Session 7 – Newsletters (mailing list management systems), auto-responders, and shopping carts

  • Understanding the popular mailing list management systems
  • Creating a Constant Contact newsletter and adding a sign-up box to your site
  • Creating an Aweber newsletter and adding a sign-up to your site
  • Adding a Paypal “Buy Now” button to your site
  • Understanding shopping carts and ecommerce systems
  • Using the WP E-commerce plugin

Session 8 – Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

  • Creating a Facebook account
  • Creating a Twitter account
  • Differences between major Social Media sites
  • Adding social media links to your site
  • Using Social Media marketing in business

Bonus sessions

Bonus sessions are given twice a month as part of your WordPress 101 membership.  Some sample sessions:

Online video

Online is a very powerful way of promoting yourself.  Post it on your website or send it in emails.

  • Shooting a promotional video – choice of camera, lighting, script
  • Editing your video
  • Uploading your video to YouTube and to your site

Membership sites

  • Introduction to membership sites based on WordPress
  • Review and demonstration of Wishlist Member

Advanced SEO tactics

  • Market Samurai in depth

Becoming a professional blogger

  • Tips from the world’s most successful pro-bloggers

HTML tips: floating image and paragraph/text alignment: starting a new paragraph after a floating image

Image and text alignment are a very frequent source of frustration for website owners.  Unfortunately, mixing text and images in HTML isn’t quite so simple as in Microsoft Word.

A common problem is horizontal alignment of images and / or positioning new paragraphs after a left- or right-floating image.  See for example:

Continue reading…

Changing list and bullet style in WordPress to add a background image

Sometimes you want to spice-up your WordPress pages (especially sales-letter pages) to replace the standard list-bullet dot or square with a custom images, for example compare:

  • Feature #1
  • Feature #2
  • Etc…

To:

  • Feature #1
  • Feature #2
  • Etc…

Continue reading…

Using the Wordpress advanced visual editor (TinyMCE Advanced) to apply CSS styles, edit tables, search-and-replace, spell-check and more

There is a superior visual editor for WordPress that you can install and configure to your site in 2 minutes.  It’s called TinyMCE Advanced.  It offers a rich expansion over the default editor, particularly:

  • Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list.
  • Support for making and editing tables (with a very cool context sensitive menu to add, delete and merge columns and rows, set table properties etc).
  • In-line CSS styles.
  • Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options.
  • Search and Replace while editing.
  • Support for XHTML specific tags
  • Add/remove (div based) layers, with relative or absolute positioning via drag-and-drop etc.

Continue reading…

Session 1: Introduction and the Wordpress user-interface

The Workbook and Video recording of this session is available to free subscribers below.

Session 1 Content

Today’s session goals

First hour:

  • Using Adobe Connect web conference, how to ask questions and interact (2 min)
  • Goals of the 8-week course (5 min)
  • My story, what is WordPress (10 min)
  • Understanding hosting and domain + difference between self-hosted WordPress and Wordpress.com (10 min)
  • Demonstrations: Installing, configuring, navigating WordPress; theme configuration; sidebars and widgets (25 min)
  • Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) (5 min)

Second hour:

  • Week-by-week – what the course includes
  • The various options and how to sign-up
  • Q&A

Goals of the 8-week course

  • Get clients, make sales, build your platform, or spread your message via the internet
  • Teach you the ins and outs of the WordPress platform for developing your own website(s)
  • Teach you basic internet marketing and social media concepts and practices
  • Expect to come out with an attractive website that converts to leads, clients, sales

How the course works

  • About an hour lecture / presentation each week followed by a practice period
  • A fast-paced, beginner to intermediate course on website development with WordPress (first 4 weeks)…
  • …plus internet marketing for small business (last 4 weeks)
  • Condenses hundreds of hours of research and experimentation on best practices
  • You can make yourself an attractive and effective internet presence (in fact, you can do just as good a job as most “professionals”. Why?)
  • Will teach you “everything you need to know” and show you where to find “everything that you want to know”
  • My Story
  • How I got started
  • Up until quite recently (last 2 years), you needed a web designer to make an attractive website
  • Problems and limitations of traditional web design methods

What is WordPress

  • WordPress is an open-source web-based software, written in PHP / MySQL, that runs on Linux-based hosting platforms
  • WordPress is, by far, the most popular Content Management System (200 million sites hosted) — other open-source CMS’s include Joomla,  Drupal and DotNetNuke
  • Difference between self-hosted WordPress install and WordPress.com
  • WordPress is an excellent platform for small business websites
  • WordPress is an excellent platform for (paid) membership sites

Why WordPress

  • Can be configured as a blog (shows posts on home page) or as a static website
  • Simple to use yet infinitely customizable
  • Huge adoption guarantees availability of excellent themes (many free) and plugins
  • Publishes content to RSS for true “Web 2.0” compatibility
  • Optimized for search-engines out-of-the-box
  • Perfect for membership sites

Domains and Hosting

  • You need a Domain Name Registrar company (i.e. Godaddy) and a Hosting Company (i.e. BlueHost). Sometimes they are the same company.
  • Go to your Domain name registrar control panel, and from there set the Name Servers of your domain as instructed by your hosting company (i.e., NS1.BLUEHOST.COM, NS2.BLUEHOST.COM)
  • Go to your Hosting control panel, and from there:
  • Host your domain (if primary domain of the account, this is automatic), OR:
  • Create an “add-on” domain (if its an additional domain)
  • Then run the WordPress auto-installer
  • Hosting platforms

Your web server (or hosting platform) holds or “serves” your content to users over the internet

  • Hosting platforms are optimized for different purposes: online stores, selling on eBay, complex applications, simple websites, membership sites, etc.
  • WordPress (with additional Third-party apps) is so powerful it renders most specialized hosting platforms obsolete for creating small business websites (i.e. Site Built It or SBI)
  • One of the most popular general-purpose hosting platforms is called cPanel – it’s a Linux-based server
  • You want your hosting company to support multiple websites
  • Most hosting companies are very good and a few are terrible.  Don’t risk it.  Use the ones I suggest :).  Use http://everymanmarketing.com/bluehost
  • Changing hosting when you already have a site can be a pain – best to choose right in the first place

Demonstrations

  • Installing WordPress on cPanel hosting
  • Configuring WordPress for a “normal” website
  • Sidebar Widgets
  • Installing and configuring plugins: PageMash, My Link Order, SI Captcha, Subscribe to Comments, TweetMeme, WordPress DB Backup
  • Installing and configuring Themes
  • Uploading files via FTP: changing your banner images

Content of the series

  • Week 2-5: Theme selection and customization.  Work with Atahualpa, Thesis, Headway, and iThemes Builder. Making banners with Paint.Net.  Publishing content with Windows Live Writer.  Introduction to HTML and CSS.
  • Week 6: Keyword research and search-engine optimization. Market Samurai
  • Week 7: Newsletter management systems, autoresponders, shopping carts. Work with Constant Contact and Aweber.  Paypal and WP-Ecommerce.
  • Week 8: Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin

Purchase options

  • Just get the videos ($99)
  • Attend the webinar ($299)
  • Attend the webinar and have me work on your site + get premium themes ($449)
  • Site subscription is $10/mth and kicks in after 3 months (cancel any time), gives you access to a growing library of bimonthly session recordings on topics such as membership sites, blogging for profit,  advanced site SEO, etc.


Continue reading…

Free Thesis theme clone (based on re-styling of Atahualpa)

The  Thesis theme for WordPress truly is a great theme for a business website, for the following reasons and more:

  • It installs “out of the box” with a clean, professional look
  • Wide range of configuration options
  • Easily customizable through custom CSS and with a large support community
  • Add content anywhere with the Thesis open hook system, which plays very well with OpenHook plugin.

Thesis does, however, cost $87, and so several people have attempted to create a theme similar to Thesis (emulate the Thesis look-and-feel).  The limitation of these is, of course, the lack of customizability — Thesis is much more than “just a pretty face”, there is a tremendous amount of thinking that has gone “under the hood” as well for changing the layout to your needs.  For more on themes vs. theme frameworks, see Choosing a good WordPress theme for your business or corporate website

Short of buying the real thing, however, you now have a better solution.  There is another excellent theme framework that offers an overlapping (and in some ways superior) feature set called Atahualpa.  What’s more, it’s free, and it can be downloaded directly through your WordPress site’s dashboard.  Only problem is, the default styling of Atahualpa is a bit clunky.

No problem — CSS to the rescue.  After procrastinating on this for some weeks I finally “bit the bullet” and styled Atahualpa to a Thesis look-alike.  Here is the result:

image

(Click the image for the demo site)

I deliberately left the banner image (which is not provided by default in Thesis) since I find the need to write custom CSS to put a banner image in Thesis a bit tacky (Atahualpa comes with a dashboard option to display a rotating banner).

Update: I have now got the styling of the page menu bar right as well and, thanks to the brilliant contribution of Larry Wilcox, a top right widget area that can be used for rotating image, video etc.

Continue reading…

Free webinar: create a professional website with WordPress

As always, the first session of WordPress 101 is free.  Hope you can join us – just choose one of the times below.  If you can’t make it, I will send out the video link afterwards.  This is going to be the best course ever – see below what participants of the previous class had to say (this is enough to make me blush, but hey, I didn’t pay them to say this, I swear…)

If you are already registered for the course, you can get a jump-start by signing up for hosting from Bluehost and replying to this email – I may be able to install WordPress and a basic plugin set on your site during the webinar as part of the demonstration.

Session 1a – Tuesday Feb 9, 7:30-9pm EST
http://connectpro86967983.na5.acrobat.com/s1a/
Phone: 702-473-3463, Passcode: 383796#

OR

Session 1b – Thursday Feb. 11, 3-4:30pm EST
http://connectpro86967983.na5.acrobat.com/s1b/
Phone: 702-473-3463, Passcode: 383796#

“Excellent course to get started with building a website and web presence. The course was well paced, full of great information, and easy to follow. Marc has a knack for hitting the key points necessary to get a quick start across the wide spectrum of relevant topics.” image
image “Marc is such a delight to work with. With his expertise and instruction, I now have a beautiful and adaptable website for my business “In The Garden, Design, Care & Workshops.” Quite amazing – workable pages up within 2 weeks; looking good in 6 weeks! After many years of procrastination….
I’m enjoying learning “how to” and so excited to finally say “YES, I have a website – www.inthegardendesign.us.”” — Charlotte Kidd
image
image “I started Marc’s training program with little knowledge of Wordpress and within a few weeks had a functional, clean site up and running. Anyone with an average knowledge of tech and the willingness to put in a few hours will find the rich underbelly of Wordpress much more accessible. Mark tells you all you need to know to avoid the big mistakes saving hours of time, and pre-screens all the “ingredients” you need for a successful Wordpress site, such as Themes, Plug-ins, and the like, so you don’t have to”. – James Moche, www.premiumeldercare.com
imageMarc’s enthusiasm for and understanding of Wordpress is infectious, and helped navigate my own confusion, fears and frustrations. I’m so proud of my new website, and it’s comforting and empowering to know that I now have the skills and confidence to design, build, and maintain as many websites as my little heart desires… look out world!” — Amy Childs, www.unschoolingsupport.com,
www.whateveramen.com, and www.amychilds.com “(not yet a WordPress site… but it’s ONLY a matter of time…)”
image
image“This course is amazing. It’s gotten me started in all the topics I’ve always wanted to know more about –creating web sites using WordPress (including themes, plugins, widgets, sidebars, pages, and posts), RSS feeds (and FeedBurner and FeedBlitz), newsletters and contact management programs like Constant Contact, auto-responders, shopping carts, keyword research and SEO, creating video content and YouTube, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. We covered so much material. Marc has the knowledge and experience to make any and all of these technologies make sense.
I had thought about improving my small business’s web site for years, but this course actually had me do it. Marc is patient and able to explain complex subjects in ways that are easy to understand. With Marc’s help, I see how each tool can benefit me and my site. I recommend this course to anyone who wants to create their own web site but has been afraid to attempt it, or to anyone who simply wants to gain a better appreciation of what’s out there so they can tell a web site developer what they want.” –
David Horowitz, www.soundsidesoftware.com
image“Marc’s extensive knowledge of web development and marketing helped me to see that there is really no need to spend thousands of dollars on a fantastic website. Hiring a web developer to design a single site would have cost much more than the class and now I have the knowledge to do it myself. I highly recommend this class for anyone who wants to have a web presence” — Geoff Young, www.goorganics.com
“Until I retired seven years ago, I was developing websites professionally. I’ve been “out of the loop” for many years now, and Marc has brought me up-to-date in a short time on the latest methods and strategies. Marc has done his homework. His course is thorough, well-rounded, and full of helpful tips. And Marc is a great teacher! Highly recommended.” –- Stephen S.
“I’m very happy with my website so far, and I really appreciate the time Marc spent working on it. It’s just what I need and wanted. I learned sooo much from his class! I was kind of a ludite about things like hosting accounts, using templates, and choosing and installing the various necessary software. I dragged my feet a little at first, but as I watched Marc build classmates’ websites from week to week, I gradually felt inspired to learn. My website isn’t finished yet, but his class gave me the information and inspiration I need to continue building a fabulous website for my freelance editing business!” –- Linda Huff-Paul

Easily and affordably create your own website, with David Steele

imageVideo conference recorded on Feb. 2, 2010, with David Steele of http://BuildingYourIdealPractice.com (for the original announcement click here)

See below for the video recordings (free registration required to view)

The next 8-week webinar series begins Wednesday, March 10, at 7:30pm.  Register here.  For the curriculum list click here.

“Easily and affordably create your own website”: Webinar preview

  • Part 1: How’s and Why’s of WordPress as a web development platform for small business (30-40 min)
  • Part 2: Demonstration of creating an actual WordPress website from scratch  (30 min.)
  • Q&A

Introduction

  • My story
  • Traditional website development: problems & limitations
  • Traditional website builders (hosted applications): problems & limitations
  • WordPress is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP / mySQL.
  • Other open-source CMS’s exist (Joomla, Drupal) and are very powerful but much more complicated

Why WordPress

  • Can be configured as a blog (shows posts on home page) or as a static website
  • Simple to use yet infinitely customizable
  • Huge adoption guarantees availability of excellent themes (many free) and plugins
  • Publishes content to RSS for true “Web 2.0” compatibility
  • Optimized for search-engines out-of-the-box
  • Perfect for membership sites

WordPress & Web 2.0 learning curve

  • Self-hosted WordPress vs. Wordpress.com
  • Theme selection: free or paid?
  • Do I need to know html?
  • Do I need to know CSS?
  • What about image alignment and manipulation? (use Windows Live Writer)
  • Search-engine optimization
  • Newsletter management systems (Constant Contact etc)
  • Social Media
  • Online video

Free registration required to access the videos – Register for free or Login


The rest of this article is available to WordPress 101 Club members only. Registration is free, it takes 15 seconds, and we’ll send you (if you opt-in) the eBook WordPress 101 Quick Start: Your first site in 2 hours.
Login now or Register for free

Interview Tue. Feb. 2nd: Build your ideal private-practice website, with David Steele… and more

This coming Tuesday February 2nd at noon EST, I will be interviewed by David Steele with the company Building Your Ideal Practice on the topics of WordPress website development. There will also be a 30 minute webcast / demonstration in which we’ll build an attractive website in half an hour! See below for call-in information and the full announcement.

image

David has been a prominent relationship coach and “coach for coaches” in the Bay Area for more than a decade.  His sites are a rich resource for private-practice marketing on a budget, conscious dating, relationship coach training, and relationship building for coaches and entrepreneurs, and contain a bunch of free downloads.  Click on the links to the right for more information.

Also mark your calendars for two important upcoming events:

  • On Tuesday Feb. 9th at 7:30pm (and also Thu. Feb. 11 at 3pm EST) begins the next 8-week series for the WordPress 101 course. With new content, a new web conferencing system that doubles the screen resolution and makes the presentation much easier to follow, and professional WordPress theme giveaways, this is going to be the best course ever.  Click here for information about our affordable training packages starting at $99.

image

  • Starting Monday March 15th WordPress 101 will be offered at Drexel’s Baiada Center for entrepreneurship!  This will be a 6-week x 3 hour course, perfect for those who live in the Philadelphia area and prefer a face-to-face classroom.  There will be lots of time for individual assistance / tutoring.  Expect to come out of this course with a nice site and an internet marketing plan.

Warm regards,

Marc Beneteau
215-376-4345

______________________

Learn how to create your own website easily and affordably.  Your invitation to a private webinar.

On Tuesday February 2, at 9:00am pacific/Noon eastern I will host an interview and webcast (live demonstration) of how you can use WordPress to create your own professional website. You will learn how easy it is to create an attractive, effective and affordable website using this technology.

I’ve invited Marc Beneteau, who runs a training company called WordPress Academy to give us a presentation and an actual demonstration (via webinar) of how to create your own website in WordPress. We will create a simple but functional website before your eyes in real-time in this demonstration.

In this program you will learn:
* What is WordPress?
* Benefits of WordPress as a web development platform
* Blogs vs. static websites
* WordPress as an ideal SEO (search-engine optimization) platform
* Demonstration: installing WordPress on your web hosting account
* Creating pages and posts
* Selecting and and configuring a theme
* Configuring side-bars, adding newsletter subscriptions and social media links, etc
* and more…

Mark your calendar!

DATE: Tuesday, February 2nd
TIME: 9:00am pacific/Noon eastern
TO JOIN: Point your browser to:
http://connectpro86967983.na5.acrobat.com/ds10/
and dial 408-490-3078 PIN 466194#

We will record this webinar and will let you know how to access the recording afterward.

No cost and no need to register for this exclusive, complimentary webinar.

I look forward to having you join us!

David
http://buildyouridealpractice.com

Session 8: Social Media

  • Introduction to Social Media
  • Use of Social Media for business is exploding
  • Very complex field – I am just a beginner and so this may  be brief
  • My story: how I started two businesses with social media
  • What you can do that won’t take too much time (and make your grandchildren happy too)
  • Major sites to know: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Meetup.com, and specialized mailing lists / professional association lists
  • Putting it all together: Facebook tour
  • Linkedin tour
  • Twitter tour

Continue reading…

Session 7: Web video basics

Web Video Basics, with Rob Kates of Kates Media.

In this session, Rob will teach you all the why’s, how’s and where-to’s of professional web video for self-employed people.  Inlcudes topics such as:

  • Why web video
  • Effective uses of video, with samples
  • Production
  • Editing
  • Distribution
  • Using with Wordpress
  • Equipment
  • And much more.

Introduction to Rob: “For nearly 20 years Kates Media has produced videos for everything from national TV shows to local commercials. We are experts in web video. Let us apply that experience to make you a video that will increase your revenues and get you more exposure”.

For the Powerpoint click here.

Continue reading…

Session 6: Mailing list management, Newsletters, and Shopping Carts

Mailing list management systems

  • Understanding RSS and RSS readers
  • Only WordPress Posts (not pages) get fed to RSS.  Both Posts and Pages are indexed by search engines, however
  • Mailing list management systems automate subscriptions to your blog or newsletter
  • Difference between single- and double opt-in.  Some newsletter systems require double opt-in on import as well.
  • Autoresponder sequences
  • Popular RSS-to-Email services: Feedburner (free), Aweber, Feedblitz
  • Popular newsletter systems (makes pretty newsletters): Constant Contact, Emma.
  • Popular autoresponders: Constant Contact, Aweber, 1ShoppingCart, Feedblitz
  • Demonstration: Adding a Feedburner newsletter to your site
  • Demonstration: Creating a Constant Contact newsletter and adding to your site

Shopping Carts & Payment Gateways

  • A shopping cart must integrate with a payment gateway (in the case of Paypal Standard they go together)
  • Paypal is easy to signup and use.  Can provide subscription service also.  Note difference between personal (no commission) and business (about 3%).
  • Popular payment gateways: Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Authorize.net (attaches to a merchant account and takes credit card
  • payments card-in-hand, over the phone and over the web)
  • Popular shopping carts: Paypal, e-junkie, WP E-commerce plugin, OSCommerce, ZenCart, 1ShoppingCart

Continue reading…

How to control image size and type (.jpg or .png) in Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is a marvelous tool for putting rich content (images and video) into a blog post and pasting / cropping / resizing images mixed-in with text.  It only suffers from one limitation that I can see: when  pasting an image from the clipboard it always generates a .png image which tends to be at least 5 to 10 times larger than its .jpg equivalent.

Of course for small images this is not so much a problem.  I have a problem though when it creates 300-400kb images that ought to be 50 or 70kb.

Here is a solution: save the file to .jpg in your image editing software.  Then in Windows Explorer just Right-click > Copy the file name.  Now when you paste it into Live Writer, it creates it as a jpg!

Session 5: WordPress Keyword Research, Search-Engine Optimization (SEO), Tracking traffic

Session 5 Goals

  • Traffic sources (Direct hit, Referrals, Organic search, Pay-per-click)
  • Search-placement algorithms & Meta-tags (Domain name, Title, Heading, Description, Keywords)
  • Google & Alexa pagerank (SearchStatus — Firefox plugin)
  • Traffic statistics: Awstats and Google Analytics
  • Keyword Analysis tools: Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/ )
  • Bringing it all together: WordPress meta-tag optimization (SEO): Using “All in one SEO” plugin
  • Link-building strategies & Affiliate programs

Marc’s simplified Keyword Analysis

  1. Research competition – jot-down keywords and descriptions that they are using
  2. Find popular keywords using Market Samurai
  3. Restrict geographically (if necessary)
  4. Look at SEO competition, and restrict yourself to “viable” keywords (not necessary if you have geographic restrictions).  A “viable” keyword is one where you have a shot at getting on the first 3 search-result pages.
  5. Set site meta-tags to a mix of “viable” keywords and brand-names (your company or product name)
  6. Always be mindful of Title and Tags as you write new content, especially new posts.  The Title is the most important meta-tag and adding “Tags” to your posts creates very highly-indexable content.

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Session 4: Theme selection and customization 3

Session 4 goals

  • Import/Export posts and pages
  • More plugins: My Link Order, Page Mash, Tweetmeme, WP-DB-Backup, Emailshroud
  • A free theme: Whitehouse
  • StudioPress theme test-drive
  • Thesis theme test-drive
  • Headway theme test-drive

Audio recording available in the Member’s Area

Elements of a WordPress website (default install of Atahualpa)

Here is a screenshot of the default WordPress installation with the Atahualpa theme:

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Session 3: theme selection and customization 2

Session 3 Goals

The recording for this session is available to paid subscribers from the Member’s area.

Why traditional website publishing is dead (and why you should use Wordpress or similar CMS instead)

Summary: This articles discusses the benefits of using a Content Mangement System (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc, for creating your website; and compares the new technology to the old way of creating a website, that involved using a web designer and a static html site that went through various stages (mockup, conversion to html or “slicing”, feedback / review, and publication). In particular, it discusses the benefits of the WordPress platform for creating a small business or professional website; and the basic procedure for getting a WordPress professional or corporate website up and running.

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How to find a good WordPress theme for your business or corporate website

Summary: Choosing the right theme for your WordPress business or corporate website is probably your most challenging first task.  You should choose your theme fairly soon after you begin your site, since it does have an impact on how you create your content (i.e., two or three-column layouts, screen width, etc); however, note that in WordPress, content is mostly separate from presentation, so you can always change your theme later. This article discusses the process I suggest to my customers, including some wise choices to start, some of which are free.

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How to resize and and publish images (or other rich content such as video) to a WordPress blog in one step using Windows Live Writer

Summary: Windows Live Writer is a marvelous tool for creating rich content on WordPress offline.   It is much more powerful than the built-in web-based WordPress editor and is particularly useful when publishing text with a lot of images or video.  With Live Writer, you create your content offline and publish it using WordPress’s built-in XML-RPC protocol (this must be enabled for your blog – see your Settings menu). This articles discusses how this can be done, step-by-step,and the advantages.

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Using FeedBurner or FeedBlitz for your newsletter (mailing list management system) on WordPress

Summary: This article discusses using the Feedburner or Feedblitz services, in conjunction with your WordPress blog, to publish / manage your company newsletter (mailing list management system).  It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this system, compared to competitive newsletter management systems such as Constant Contact, Emma, Aweber, Vertical Response, etc.

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Installing/Integrating bbPress and a a script-install of WordPress into the same database, for sharing users

I found significant problems with the bbPress documentation on integrating bbPress into a WordPress site, which had me puzzling for well over an hour.  Here is what I did in the end:

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Firebug screenshot

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Wordpress elements 2: Sidebars and Widgets

wp-elements2