WordPress Beginners Archives - Austin WordPress Meetup

Structuring and Developing a Winning Content Strategy

WordPress Beginners, Meetup Meeting Notes, Content Development and Management

Many of our WordPress Beginners have asked for a dedicated session to address the best approach to developing a winning content strategy. Nick and Sandi Batik led this month’s discussion. They reviewed a few tools to help you get the most from your pages and posts. Nick demonstrated some navigation tips and an internal linking structure to help build effective information architecture. The session concluded with 5-step system to write copy that consistently attracts your target clients and organically build SEO.

Here is the link to the slide deck:

How to structure a content strategy that works from Pleiades Publishing Services / Hands On WordPress Training

How to Implement Website Design Best Practices in WordPress

Meetup Meeting Notes, WordPress Beginners

Last month Rich Plakas covered what those new to WordPress need to know about Best Practices for Website Design. Based on our member’s requests, this month Rich showed attendees how to implement them in their WordPress sites. Rich reviewed some websites to help attendees to know what to look for in a best practices-designed site.

Here are two links Rich Plakas spoke about in regards to sliders or picture carousels:

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/#.

http://makeyourselfvisible.com/internet-marketing/should-i-use-website-slider/

Website Design Best Practices & How to Implement them in WordPress

Uncategorized, WordPress Beginners

Rich Plakas lead a lively presentation that covered what those new to WordPress need to know about Best Practices for Website Design and How to Implement them in WordPress. This presentation guided attendees through the types of questions and thought processes you need to keep in mind when developing a site for yourself or others.

Who is the target audience?

What is the primary goal of your website?

How do you plan to drive traffic to your website?

Is your website mobile responsive?

Using Analytics to gain insight to visitors.

Are Mailing Lists useful?

Rich reviewed some websites to help attendees to know what to look for in a best practices-designed site. Additionally he reviewed some of the attendees’ sites and made suggestions for improvement.

You can find the slides from last night’s presentation at:

http://www.slideshare.net/richplakas

Effective Content Creation: Austin WordPress 09.15.14 Meet-up Notes

Content Development and Management, WordPress Beginners

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series WordPress For Beginners

Best Practices for Effective Content Creation

This WordPress for Beginners presentation focused on the tools and processes available to help those new to WordPress develop and implement a winning content creation strategy. After making all the hard choices to design and develop a great looking website every website owner faces the same problem — the “feed the beast” syndrome. How do we continually produce steady stream of engaging content for our WordPress site? How often should we update the content on our site’s ‘static’ pages? What can we do to add some dynamic content to our static pages to keep the Search-Bots coming back?

Nick and Sandi Batik discussed and demonstrated both offline and online tools and resources to use for brainstorming Blog topics, producing relevant content that targets the site’s audience, and ways to use that content to build an on-line community. The class discussed the correct use of categories in content organization, and the styles of written content that are most effective. Sandi introduced the topic of curating content and discussed the tools needed to conduct a content audit.

The link to the 09.15.14 WP Meet-up Best Practices for Effective Content Creation slide deck is:
http://presentations.handsonwp.com/category/09-15-14-wp-meetup-best-practices-for-effective-content-creation/

As promised I’ve included the links to the resources, plugins, process tools and apps we discussed during the meetup. All the links can be found at: http://handsonwp.com/knowledge-base/best-practices-effective-content-creation/

The goal if this session was to give beginners a starting place. As you continue to research your site’s content strategy — question your assumptions, and refine your website’s objectives.

If you have a good reason, consciously change your content creation plan.

Don’t drift into decisions.

Make changes based on facts — keep close watch on your site metrics.

Make sure that the content and the appearance of your website, are in alignment with your stated business goals and the needs of your target market.

We hope the resources and tools provided will help you get all those words and phases out of your head and organized into a site that does what you need it to do!

All of the organizers of the Austin WordPress group look forward to seeing you all at the next Austin WordPress Meet-up!

How to Choose and Install a WordPress Theme

Theme Feature Review, WordPress Beginners

Meetup notes from August 18, 2014 Meetup Session.

To access the slide deck (that includes the various check lists and site tester) for “How to Choose and Install a WordPress Theme” please go to: http://presentations.handsonwp.com/category/how-to-choose-and-install-a-wordpress-theme. For the complete notes for “How to Choose and Install a WordPress Theme” go to: http://handsonwp.com/series/how-to-choose-and-install-a-wordpress-theme/

Additional information requested in last night’s Q&A

There a number of questions at last night’s meet up about Membership site themes and plugins. As Nick and I mentioned, the setting up and management membership sites is a topic worthy of a meet-up session of it’s own. In order to best answer the questions and give our members the best resources available I am including links to a series of Blogs and a POD-cast by Chris Lema. Chris has made a study of membership sites. In the spirit of full disclosure Nick and I sought Chris Lema expertise in planning and setting up a membership site we are currently building.

Lema’s blogs are well organized, well researched and carefully sited, and honestly the best body of work you are likely to find on the subjects of membership sites and eCommerce.

Yes, it is a lot of reading. Yes, for a while it might seem like information overload.

But this type of reading, and subject matter acquisition is what successful business owners / managers do every day — find a subject that is critical to your business process and learn from other people’s experience. Start-up capital burns too quickly to learn from your own mistakes. If you are thinking about building a membership site, read as much as you can from the folks who have successfully gone down that path.

I want to start with the link to an April 2014 POD CAST produced by WPSessions. It is still available as a $24 download.

Learn about WordPress Membership Sites — POD-Cast produced by WPSessions

The session features Chris Lema, Shawn Hesketh (WP101 Videos) and Drew Stojny. This is POD cast is a couple of hours that ANYONE who is contemplating building and managing a membership site NEEDS to see. Nick and I had already done a considerable bit of research on our own, and we still came away with tons of new information and a list of additional points to take into consideration before moving forward with our site design. If you are completely new to the idea of membership sites, listening to this POD-cast might help you get a better idea of how to structure your requirements and let you know about some of the pitfalls of membership sites in general.

The following is a list of Chris Lema blogs that Nick and I have found to be very helpful in designing and building our own membership blog.

Comparing WordPress Membership Plugins – April 6 2014

The Best WordPress Membership Plugin in 2014 — July 30, 2014

Building a membership site with iThemes Exchange

How the Lines at the DMV will help you choose a Membership Plugin —April 6, 2014

WordPress Membership Plugins & Payment Gateways — April 6, 2014

What if you don’t need a WordPress LMS plugin for your online course?

What is content dripping? —April 6 2014

What is the best WordPress membership plugin for me? — July 29, 2014

Can one WordPress membership site account have multiple logins?

WordPress membership sites take work – the myth of passive income

Managing a High Performance WordPress Membership Site

These are blogs concerning setting up eCommerce sites…

E-commerce plugins – choosing the right WordPress shopping cart plugin — April 6, 2014

Building a membership site with WooCommerce — April 6, 2014

Easy eCommerce & Membership Sites using WordPress –April 2014

As you can see I have Chris Lema’s Blog Posts on the Internet equivalent of speed-dial – I subscribe to his Blog. If you are seriously considering building and maintaining a membership or eCommerce site I strongly suggest you do the same.

As to the questions about How to design and build a directory site using WordPress please read:

Create a Paid Directory using WordPress – June 27, 2013

We have also had good reports about Connections Business Directory

Nick is a fan of all things wpmudev. They offer premium plugins on their membership site and their support is superb.
His choice for a Directory site is wpmudev’s DIRECTORY plugin. Which will turn your site into a fully-featured, listings directory complete with ratings, reviews, payments and more.

As to questions about Downloading PDF’s from a site…

If you are charging for the download, see this Chris Lema Blog:
Selling Pay Per View Documents with WordPress

Forcing PDF Downloads

If you just want your site visitor to be able to download information like a product spec Nick has posted a blog with detailed directions at:http://handsonwp.com/knowledge-base/tips-tricks/file-management/forcing-pdf-downloads/

Hopefully that addresses all of the Q&A in detail. As this is a WordPress for beginner’s series we try to keep the main presentation “on-topic and at the beginner’s level.” Thanks to all those who were patient with their questions and were willing to stay after the main session to deal with special topic questions.

We hope to see you all again at next month’s WordPress for Beginner’s session: Best Practices for Effective Content Creation. We would also like to invite those of you who attended the beginners session who are interested in learning more to join us at Build a Sign on August 26th for “Hooks and Filters.” It is an intermediate topic, but one that will help you understand how plugins work with WordPress.

Building an Information Structure for your WordPress Site

WordPress Beginners

This is part two, of a seven-part presentation series, structured to support those new to WordPress. The goal is to provide a contiguous set of WordPress Meetups designed to help attendees gain the skills to build and use a WordPress website. This series was developed in cooperation with the Four Points Chamber of Commerce.

This beginner’s session discusses how to plan your WordPress site and build it’s information architecture — your site’s navigation — to match that plan. This presentation will focus on the difference between a ‘Page’ and a ‘Post’, and how to use ‘Categories’ and ‘Tags’ to build your navigation structure.

We will also review how to use the WordPress linking strategy to give the search engine spiders clear and distinct paths to follow that will improve your site’s search engine rankings. The session closes with how to use a site maintenance schedule to keep your online business on track and making money. Bring your laptops and your questions! Rich Plakas will lead this class.

This is the second in a series of seven sessions designed to support those new to WordPress. The goal is to provide a contiguous set of WordPress Meetups designed to help attendees gain the skills to build and use a WordPress website. This series was developed in cooperation with the Four Points Chamber of Commerce. This session was first presented in August 2013 under the title of Sensible Site Navigation —Building an Information Structure and is being repeated based on membership requests

Building the information structure of your WordPress site keeping the end in mind

Just because the WordPress features give you the capability to set up a complete WordPress site in 30-minutes doesn’t mean you should.

It is easier to do it right the first time then go back and rework, restructure. The great news is that Word- Press is such a powerful tool, changing your mind, reworking and restructuring, can be handled a magnitude easier than with the old-school static sites.

The time invested in planning and organizing your WordPress website will net a successful website that meets clearly identified goals and provides compelling content that draws your audience to your site again and again. In addition it will be easy to navigate and is attractively designed to complement the content.

You do not need to invest an inordinate amount of time planning your WordPress website. Some would-be website owners use the “Planning Process” to avoid the actual “Implementation Process.”

We advocate the middle path.

PLAN your site

DO your site,

CHECK to see if the site is doing what you PLANNED

then ACT on the information your analysis has indicated.

A successful site is the product of continuous process improvement. The time you invest in the improvement process will help you develop a site that will invoke a positive response from search engines and help convert site visitors into customers.

Your Website Is A Business Unit

Commit to treating your website as a business unit and follow a set schedule for updating content

Make sure that your website reflects and supports both your business plan and the marketing strategy you have set for your business.

To go directly to Sensible Site Navigation —Building an Information Structure Presentation Slide Deck:

http://presentations.pleiadesservices.com/category/building-an-information-structure-for-your-wordpress-site

To review the Creation and Organization of Pages go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages

To review the Creation and Organization of Posts go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Posts

Review of the Post Categories Screen: http://codex.wordpress.org/Posts_Categories_Screen

To review Linking Posts Pages and Categories go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Linking_Posts_Pages_and_Categories

The guide to using the WordPress Menu system to Build a Site Navigation Organization can be found at: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Menu_User_Guide

One of the reasons we are so enthusiastic about WordPress as a solution for business websites is that there are so many Free resources available to the beginning user.

In addition to the Austin WordPress monthly meetups, you can find answers to most of your questions on the WordPress Codex [codex.wordpress.org]and if you are more of an audio/visual learner there are hundreds of videos at [http://wordpress.tv].

If you have questions between meetup you can always post them on the Austin WordPress Google Groups Forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wordpress-austin.

Next month we will present: How to Choose and Install a WordPress Theme.