WordPress Training Seminar - Vorian Agency

WordPress
Training Seminar
Wednesday 12th March, 2014 10:00am – 12:00pm

Matt Lynch
• General Manager of Vorian Agency – Delivering integrated online and offline marketing
solutions to business wrestling with how to market in today’s changing environment.
• With over 20 years Information Technology and Online Marketing Experience, primary
speciality being Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), working both within agency and in-
house roles as a digital marketing specialist.
• Enjoys keeping up with the 'bleeding edge' of technology advancements and social media
evolvement to ensure current knowledge in an ever changing landscape, leading to early
adoption and determination of opportunity for marketing enhancement.
• Local, national and international project experience particularly in the field of Travel with
companies such as Trafalgar Tours, The Travel Corporation brand and travel properties,
Stella Travel and Best Flights; Matt has earned a reputation as an online marketing expert
and search evangelist for thoroughness, quality, technical knowledge and success driven
results. Matt's previous role was as the Global Online Marketing Manager for Trafalgar,
coordinating the online marketing efforts with international teams for this global brand.
Your Presenter: Vorian Agency General Manager

Connect with Matt…
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/mattlynchseo
About Me: http://about.me/au.mattlynch
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattrlynch
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattrlynch
Google+: https://plus.google.com/100121124281684757846
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/mattrlynch
Instagram: http://instagram.com/#mattrlynch
FourSquare: https://foursquare.com/mattrlynch
Klout: http://klout.com/#/mattrlynch
Email: matt.lynch@vorian.com.au

Interactive Questions?
During today’s session, you are welcome to tweet
questions to our Vorian Agency Twitter Account
@vorianagency using the hashtag #voriantraining
https://twitter.com/vorianagency

Housekeeping
Before we start, please note the following:
• Exits
• Toilets
• Mobile Phones on Silent
• Question & Answer session at end of the Presentation
• A link to the Presentation Slide Notes and Video will be emailed to you
• Vorian Agency info packs are provided to showcase our service offering
• Vorian staff are available to arrange an appointment or answer specific questions
• Please provide your feedback on today’s seminar on the supplied questionnaire
• Please invite others you may know to register for our free seminar series

In today’s session…
We’re going to walk through an introduction to the world’s most popular Content
Management System (CMS) - WordPress.
• What is WordPress
• Blogs as well as Websites
• WordPress Themes
• PHP and MySQL – the building blocks of WordPress
• Tips and Techniques of using WordPress
• Upgrade cycle
• Editing
• Optimisation, Compatibility, Validation, Link Checkers and other website stuff
• Security
• WordPress Plugins
• The WordPress App
• <html> and .CSS
• Design Principles

What is WordPress?
• WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like
to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
• Today the core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, based upon
the initial work from Matt Mullenweg in December 2003. The GNU General Public
License (GPL) is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
• There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into
almost anything you can imagine.
• Over 70 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they
call “home”.

The System behind WP
• The WordPress software is a CMS (Content Management System), personal
publishing system that uses both a PHP and MySQL platform, providing you with
everything you need to create your blog, or website and publish your content
dynamically without having to program the pages yourself. With this platform, your
content is stored in a MySQL database in your hosting account.
• PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side web scripting language for
creating dynamic web pages. When a visitor opens a page built in PHP, the server
processes the PHP commands and then renders the results to the visitor’s browser.
• MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that
uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding,
accessing, and processing data in a database. MySQL is simply a big filing cabinet
where all the content on your blog or website, is stored..

Themes
• If you’re using themes or plugins, use the WordPress.org theme and
plugin repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes and
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins, respectively). Each plugin and
theme you find there has gone through a documented review
process, which reduces the risk of downloading dangerous code.
• Theme files: Widgets and options you’ve set for your current theme
are stored in the database; however, the physical theme template
files, images, and stylesheets are not. They’re stored in the /wp-
content/ themes folder. Connect to your web server via FTP and
download that folder to your local computer.
• http://wordpress.org/themes/responsive
• http://techidate.com/free-wordpress-themes-2014-responsive/
• http://www.wordpressthemes2014.com/
• http://www.wpulti.com/best-free-wordpress-themes/
• http://wplava.com/best-free-wordpress-themes-january-2014/
• http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2014/02/the-best-free-wordpress-
themes-february-2014/

Plugins
• Plugins allow you to tailor WordPress to meet your site’s needs.
• “There’s a plugin for that.”
• Plugin files: Although all the plugin settings are stored in the
database, the actual plugin files are not. The plugin files are
located in the /wpcontent/ plugins folder. Connect to your web
server via FTP and download that folder to your local computer.
• Plugins can be very simple — for instance, a plugin might change
the appearance of the Dashboard menu. Or they can also be very
complex, accomplishing hefty tasks such as providing a complete
e-commerce solution with product listings, a shopping cart, and
payment processing.
• Look at the version number of the plugin. If it shows Alpha or
Beta, the plugin is being tested and may have bugs that could
affect your site; you may want to wait until the plugin has been
thoroughly tested and released as a full version. Generally, the
higher the version number, the more mature (that is, tested and
stable) the plugin is.

Recommended Plugins
• Gallery: http://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
• Redirection: http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
• Banner Slider: http://wordpress.org/plugins/jj-nextgen-jquery-slider/
• Shopping Cart: http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/woocommerce
• Contact Form: http://www.gravityforms.com/
• Editor: http://wordpress.org/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
• SEO: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
• User Roles: http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-access-manager/
• Calendar: http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-event-calendar/
• Booking Calendar: http://wpbookingcalendar.com/

Running WP on your desktop
• http://serverpress.com/downloads/
• Free test server program for Windows/Macs for developing WordPress.
• http://www.instantwp.com
• Instant WordPress is a free, standalone, portable WordPress development
environment for Windows that will run from a USB key. It comes complete with a set
of dummy WordPress posts and pages so that you do not have to create any data or
posts to test themes and plugins.
• http://www.apachefriends.org/download.html
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl.
Just download and start the installer.

Feeding your readers
• RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a standard feature that
blog readers have come to expect. So what is RSS, really?
• RSS is written to the web server in XML (Extensible Markup Language) as a small,
compact file that can be read by RSS readers.Think of an RSS feed as a syndicated,
or distributable, auto-updating list of “What’s New” for your website.
• By using tools called feed readers, readers can download your feed automatically —
that is, they can set their feed readers to automatically discover new content (such as
posts and comments) from your blog and download that content for their
consumption.
• For blog readers to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest content you post, they
need to subscribe to your RSS feed. WordPress allows RSS feeds to be
autodiscovered by the various feed readers. The reader needs only to enter your
site’s URL, and the program automatically finds your RSS feed.

Tracking back
• Trackbacks are comments left on your blog by other blogs, not people.
• A trackback happens when you make a post on your blog, and within that post, you
provide a link to a post made by another blogger on a different blog. When you
publish that post, your blog sends a sort of electronic memo to the blog you linked to.
That blog receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in the form of
a comment to the post that you linked to on their site. The information that is
contained within the trackback includes a link back to the post on your site that
contains the link to theirs — along with the date and time, as well as a short excerpt
of your post.
• Trackbacks are displayed within the comments section of the individual posts. The
memo is sent via a network ping (a tool used to test, or verify, whether a link is
reachable across the Internet) from your site to the site you link to. This process
works as long as both blogs support trackback protocol.
• Almost all major blogging platforms support the trackback protocol.
• Sending a trackback to a blog is a nice way of telling the blogger that you like the
information she presented in her blog post. Every blogger appreciates trackbacks to
their posts from other bloggers

Akismet
• All WordPress systems have one important thing in common: Akismet, which kills
spam dead. Akismet is a WordPress plugin brought to you by Automattic, the maker
of WordPress.com.
• The Akismet plugin has the sole purpose of protecting your blog from comment
spam. Although other plugins address the issue of comment spam, the fact that
Akismet is packaged with WordPress and works quite well means that most
WordPress users rely on Akismet for their needs.
• Free for personal use blogs, but costs USD$5 p/m for commercial and professional
sites (USD$59 p/a).

8 Essential WP Security Tips
• Change Default "Wp_" Prefixes in your database
• Hide Login Error Messages
• Keep Wp-Admin Directory Protected
• Maintain Backups
• Prevent Directory Browsing
• Keep WordPress Core Files & Plugins Updated
• Pick A Strong Password
• Remove Admin User (use a different administrator name)

Upgrading your WordPress
• The public schedule for WordPress updates is, roughly, one new release every 120
days. The WordPress development team is constantly striving to improve the user
experience and bring exciting and fun new features to the WordPress platform. Each
upgrade improves security and adds new features to enhance your (and your
visitors’) experience on your website.
• Security: When WordPress versions come and go, outdated versions are no longer
supported and are vulnerable to malicious attacks and hacker attempts.
• New features: Major WordPress releases, offer great new features that are fun to
use, improve your experience, and boost your efficiency and productivity.
• Plugins and themes: Most plugin and theme developers work hard to make sure that
their product is up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress. Generally, plugin and
theme developers don’t worry about backwards compatibility, and they tend to ignore
out-of-date versions of WordPress.
• Point release: Point releases usually only increase the numbered version by a
decimal point or two, indicating a relatively minor release.
• Major release: A major release most often contains new features and jumps by a
more seriously incremented version number. For example, WordPress going from
2.9.2 to 3.0

How to Install Google Analytics
There are several ways to install Google analytics in WordPress.
1. Direct paste it in your theme’s header.php right before the closing </head> tag.
2. Add to the functions.php
3. And by far the easiest, install a plugin. (Google Analyticator, Google Analytics for
WordPress,… and more!)
• The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your websites or blog
easily and with lots of metadata.

Using Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager lets you add or update your website tags and mobile applications,
easily and for free, whenever you want, without having to ask your website developer
to add code changes in on each page each time.

Google Analytics Dashboards
• Configure up to 10 ‘widgets’ to build your own Dashboard.
• Create custom Dashboards for different team members in the business
• Complete range of options, table and graph types, and parameters to choose from in
customising.

Google Publisher Plugin
• While it seems like Google is planning to add more functionality to the plug-in over
time, the current version is still pretty limited. Besides the Webmaster Tools
verification (which saves you the usual steps of copying and pasting code snippets
into your WordPress templates), it only offers the ability to easily place ads on your
site.
• To get started with this tool, all users have to open the plug-in and then select if they
want to see a preview of their site’s homepage, or of a single page or post. Google
automatically places markers on the screen for spots where ads would fit, and all a
user has to do is select one of these spots to start service ads there.
• The service currently supports four ad formats: automatic (which chooses the most
appropriate size), horizontal banner (728×90), vertical banner (160×600) and
rectangle (300×250).

Apps Access Anywhere Anytime
• Check out the free WordPress app on your favourite tablet or smartphone
• Access the posts, pages, comments, and stats for your site so you can update whilst
on the move.

HootSuite
• Did you know you can use HootSuite with WordPress to schedule content posts,
reblog noteworthy posts and create a stream to monitor blogs you are following.

Domain Names
• http://www.auda.org.au/industry-information/registrars/
• Do a WHOIS to find if your domain name choice is available.
• Use a Registrar to register your domain name.

Speed Testing
• http://www.webpagetest.org
• Run a free performance review of your site/page to determine which areas can be
improved for the user experience.
• Google Page Speed Test
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Website Code Validation
• http://validator.w3.org/
• http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
• Run a free website code markup validation check to review your site/page to
determine if there are any coding <html> that can be improved to ensure different
browsers break your website when rendering or impact Search Engines.

Link Checkers
• http://validator.w3.org/checklink
• http://xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com/
• Review your website for any broken links to correct these, or update redirects to point
to the final destination.

Browser Compatibility
• http://browsershots.org/
• Review your website to see how it renders on different Operating Systems and
different browser versions.

Tablets and SmartPhones
• http://ipadpeek.com/
• Responsive design vs scaled design – review your site on different devices.

Learning <html> and .css
• http://www.w3schools.com/
• https://www.udemy.com/
• If you stray from the WYSIWYG editor, you start to enter into the world of website
markup language <html> and .css. If you are interested in learning look online.

Stock Images
• http://www.istockphoto.com/
• http://www.bigfoto.com/
• http://stockfresh.com/

Fonts
• Psychology behind font type choices.

User Research Feedback
• http://www.usertesting.com/
• Cost: from USD$49. You can get feedback from your target audience about what
frustrates them about your site (or a section of your site) and how they expect it to
work.
• https://www.surveymonkey.com/
• https://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Follow-up Questions?
After today’s session, you are welcome to tweet questions
to our Vorian Agency Twitter Account @vorianagency
using the hashtag #voriantraining
https://twitter.com/vorianagency

Keep Connected
After today’s session, I encourage you to explore WordPress
further for your business. Please feel free to connect with me
if you have additional questions:
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/mattlynchseo
Don’t forget to follow Vorian Agency on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/vorian-agency
All of my other Social Media links are available on About.Me:
About.Me: http://about.me/au.mattlynch
Email: matt.lynch@vorian.com.au

Please… invite others
We would like to thank you for your attendance
to today’s seminar on WordPress.
• A link to the Presentation Slide Notes and Video will be emailed to you
• Vorian Agency info packs are provided to showcase our eight key areas
• Vorian staff are available to arrange an appointment to assist your specific needs
• Please provide your feedback and hand-in the supplied questionnaire
• Please invite others you may know to register for our free seminar series and
forward them a copy of today’s seminar email.

WordPress Training Seminar - Vorian Agency

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