Austin WordPress Meetup

Bringing together WordPress users of all levels

WordPress Beginners

Hands-On WordPress, 3.10.11

WordPress Beginners

Navigating your dashboard and admin panel

Topics include:

  • Logging in to your site (http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin)
  • Dashboard and Admin panel features
  • Pages & Posts
  • Adding media files (images, video, etc.) and accessing media library
  • Categories, tags, links
  • Comments
  • Users (see http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities)
  • Settings
  • As time permits: basics of design/functions: plug-ins, widgets, themes


Other useful info:

WordPress.com or WordPress.org
If you are building a website and want to have creative control over the site, including access to all WordPress themes (or your own design), plugins and stylesheets, we recommend you do a self-install either by installing via your host or downloading from WordPress.org. See WPBeginner’s infographic for more info.

Installing WordPress
Every server/hosting company will have a different process to install WordPress. The folks at WordPress.org recommend a number of companies that optimize for WordPress and make installation simple. For those who need to install WordPress on their own server, visit the Codex entry on Installing WordPress.

Future reference

Presented by:
Jackie Dana, Getting Dirty Designs
Sandi Chevalier-Batik, Pleiades Publishing Services

Summary WordPress 101 Meeting

WordPress Beginners

Thank you to the WordPress enthusiast who posted the idea for WordPress 101, to Lysa Saavedra who took the initiative to find and secure a venue and those 20 WP Austin members who attended.

This ‘viral’ Meetup has been an amazing experience. It is gratifying that the membership of the Austin WordPress Group moved so quickly from expressing a need, to organizing a class to meet that need.  Pat always says that the Austin WordPress Meetup is comprised of people passionate about WordPress. This impromptu, member-organized Meetup event proves that to be absolutely true.

The WordPress 101 Meetup has inspired a teachable moment for the Austin WordPress Organizers.  Obviously, we have enough beginner WordPress members to justify a second monthly Meetup that focuses specifically on their issues.  It was suggested that  “Hands’ on WordPress” might be a better designation for the second WordPress Meetup of the month than “Beginners’ WordPress. We will also review the suggestion of starting a FaceBook page to communicate with the Austin WordPress Community.

The regular Austin WordPress Meetup will continue to meet at the ‘Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel’ — The first Tuesday of the month, 7 pm time at Cospace. The Austin WordPress Meetup will hold our first dedicated “Hands’ on WordPress” Meetup 7 pm, Thursday March 10th.at CoSpace.  The majority of those who attended the WordPress 101 at the Brick Oven this evening thought that Monday evening would be a good night to set up our regularly scheduled Meetup. I’ll check with Kurtis Dixon, our Cospace sponsor for availability and announce the April and subsequent 2011 dates on March 10th.

We polled the attendees for the types of WordPress-related classes that might be helpful and thought the suggestion of publicizing a schedule similar to an Editorial Calendar a good one. Jackie and I will meet to discuss all the suggestions made by tonight’s attendees and come up with a possible curricula plan for the balance of 2011.

Thanks again to Lysa for securing the meeting room at the Brick Oven. It offered a warm inviting atmosphere that encouraged an informal discussion about how to best meet the needs of those just starting their WordPress Journey.

All Austin WordPress Meetups and Classes are held at our Sponsor, Cospace.

CoSpace (http://cospaceatx.com/) is located at 911 West Anderson Lane #203 Austin, TX 78757 Cospace is home to a community of collaborative, professional, and entrepreneurial people coworking in a shared space. Cospace promotes coworking, but looks to go beyond it, by providing a mix of flexible workspaces, meeting spaces and the tools and resources necessary to turn ideas into realities. Through strategic partnerships and sponsorships, Cospace continually offers workshops, training sessions, and events that help the members of our community grow professionally.

Thank you for an invigorating evening. It was a pleasure meeting each of you and Jackie and I look forward to getting to know you better.

Here are the URLs for the resources we spoke about this evening:

Austin WordPress Meetup:

Where to look for information, help and resources:

Austin WordPress Meetup site

http://www.meetup.com/austinwordpress/

The Austin WordPress Meetup Discussion Group

http://groups.google.com/group/wordpress-austin

The Austin WordPress Meetup Website

http://wpaustin.com/

Upcoming WordPress Classes

http://wpclasses.slash25.com/

WordPress Users Association

http://wpua.org/

WordPress CODEX Glossary

http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary

WordPress Beginners Track: Sitemap Plugins

WordPress Beginners

From Austin WordPress Meetup 08.03.10

Request for Additional Sitemap Plugin Information

In the beginner’s track we discussed the use of sitemaps. A common point of confusion is that the term “sitemap” is used interchangeably for two completely different but related functions. The first (and the original) meaning is a visual guide to your users so they can quickly see the organization and overview of your content, in much the same way as the Table of Contents does for a book. The second meaning – and one that came much later in the world of the internet – is one that was created by Google in 2005.

The good folks at Google realized that with more and more sites including embedded links between pages, posts, authors, archives, category and tag pages, and so on, that the search engines were spending a lot of time following links to pages they had already indexed. To help with this they created a file format called a Google Sitemap. This is an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) file that contains information about the content and organization of your website in a way that search engines can understand. While this was designed and used extensively by Google, many other search engines are beginning to use the sitemaps.xml file.

Both types of sitemaps are helpful, but if you do any regular updates you will soon find that maintaining them by hand can get very difficult. Thankfully you don’t have to. There are several plugins for WordPress that will do this for you, but my favorites are “Google XML Sitemaps” located at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ,  “HTML Page Sitemap” at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-sitemap/ . Both these plugins are easy to install, and the default setting generally work quite well.

To use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, go to Settings –> XML-Sitemap and click on the link to “Build Site Map”. After that it will automatically update the sitemap and notify the search engines any time you add or update a page or post.

The HTML Page Sitemap requires you to create a page and place the short code [html-sitemap] within that page. When a user clicks on the link to view this page, the plugin will scan your pages and posts and create a nicely-indented Table of Contents for your page. There are options that let you control how much to display and how to format it.

The HTML Page Sitemap is also useful for creating navigation links within a page. Let us say, for example, that you have a parent page about Baseball and sub-pages about game schedules, player stats, and free-agent status. By placing the short code [html-sitemap depth=2 child_of=CURRENT] on the Baseball page, it will display links to the the child pages of Baseball (schedules, stats, and free agents) but not any further down the hierarchy.

In the next article we will discuss specialized sitemaps such as Google XML sitemaps for your News (RSS feeds), Images, Videos, and for Mobile Devices.

Thanks to Nicholas R. Batik, Pleiades Publishing Services, Co. for the above Sitemap Plugin information.

Best Practices Beginners Track 08.03.10

WordPress Beginners

Life After WordPress Installation

The August beginners track addressed how to actually use the WordPress functions to structure site navigation and how to begin building the site with the end in mind. We reviewed how to  use Categories and Tags  to build the ‘silo’ navigation structure and linking stategy to give the search engine spiders clear and distinct paths to follow to improve search engine rankings. The session closed with how to use a site maintenance schedule to keep  your online business on track and making money.

Class outline:

Developing a site map/plan based on the purpose of the site.
How to set up a site structure to match the plan
Explaining  dash board features and functions
Delineating the difference between a page and a post.
How and why to use tags and categories/sub categories
Why Silo content / how it effects search engine indexing
Site maintenance schedule

To view the PowerPoint Presentation, go to:

http://www.slideshare.net/sbatik/word-press-meetup-getting-started

I will post the sitemap plugins we talked about in the next post.

Thanks,

H. Sandra Chevalier- Batik, Pleiades Publishing Services