Mastering the “three Rs” was essential for knowledge workers in the twentieth century. Today, knowledge workers need to master the “three Cs” in order to succeed in our connected economy. Learn about the “three Cs”, and learn how your blog, the search engines, and social networking sites cooperate to create and enhance your professional reputation. Discover the limitations of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as publishing platforms, and learn the critical features of WordPress that make it the premier platform for sharing your talents with the world.
This presentation was given at WordCamp Dallas 2009 at UTD in Richardson. A video recording of this talk will be posted sometime soon.
WordPress is an open source platform that can empower your web site to effectively run your business. By “run your business” I mean marketing, public relations, sales, communications, networking, ecommerce, distribution, and even customer support. This article covers the basics of getting WordPress installed and running. Fine-tuning and adding special features to WordPress such as ecommerce, auto-email responders, and active feeds to and from other websites will be discussed in a future article entitled “Supercharge Your Web Site with WordPress”.
WordPress 2.7 Make it Easy To…
post articles
add media
add sidebar widgets
upgrade the core code
add and upgrade plugins
manage comments
add and switch themes
Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress on your web site should take no longer than a few minutes. Some hosts provide one-click installations (GoDaddy, Dreamhost). Others provide the Fantastico installer within a CPanel hosting interface (Hostgator, Geekstorage).
Much of the user interface and visual appearance of the site is the responsibility of the Theme. A theme is a collection of program files, CSS text files, and images that are copied into a special directory called “themes”. The themes directory sites inside the “wp-content” directory. wp-content is where most of the site-specific files are placed. Outside of this directory most WordPress configurations are very similar.
The WordPress.org sites hosts GPL-licensed themes which are, by definition, open source and freely modifiable. You can also purchase a theme from a third-party like iThemes, Elegant Themes, Graph Paper Press. WordPress Remix has a unique theme package specialized for using WordPress to build regular websites that are not specifically blogs.
What to look for in a theme:
SEO: designer should have tags and titles designed properly
Widget-ready sidebars: a feature of all contemporary themes
Valid XHTML + CSS: this means clean, lightweight code for your site
configurable: options for color, header, and layout
Gravatar ready: supports comment avatar images
spam-free: some themes come preloaded with links to the designers AdSense account, or worse, links to pr0n or gambling sites. All themes in the WordPress.org repository have been checked for spam, but “in the wild” you’ll need to do your own hand-checking and validation.
“Out of the box”, WordPress works just fine, but it will be plain and not optimized for the search engines. We fixed the appearance by selecting and tweaking the theme. There are several other settings that we need to edit to make the site run optimally.
Title and Description
In the General settings you set the name of the site and the description. Be sure to include the most important keyphrases for your site as these words will probably be on every page. On this settings page you’ll also set the Timezone, and whether your site accepts new registrations of subscribers and authors.
Home Page Settings
In the Reading settings you select if the front page (home page) is a static page or a series of recent blog posts. You also set the number of posts per page that will display.
Permalinks
To get fancy search engine optimized URLs you need to set the Permalinks to something other than the default ?p=999. Permalinks should include realwords and descriptive keyphrases that tell the search engine what a page is about. I set my Permalinks to /%post_id%/%postname%/ this gives each post a unique ID number and adds an optimized version of the post title at the end.
Comment Settings
In the Discussion settings you select whether your site is open for comments and whether you will need to approve each comment before it gets posted.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins add functionality to WordPress websites. The WordPress development team strives to keep WordPress as “lightweight” as possible, leaving specialized functionality to third parties. WordPress currently has over 4200 plugins in the official repository.
Some plugins interface with other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Others handle media–making it easier to embed videos or podcasts into web pages.
WordTube – manage your videos, create playlists, embeds full-featured video player
WP Super Cache – prepare for traffic surges with this full-featured caching system
WordPress developers have created some gorgeous websites that do not look like ordinary blogs, they look like, well, gorgeous websites. To see some showcased sites, see the WordPress.org showcase.
Visual search, with an iTunes-like visual scrolling (Cover Flow), seems like a the logical next step in the user-interface of search. searchme.com shows off an excellent demo of their visual approach.
Is this the next killer app? Should Google be concerned? It’s too early to tell how this will work in real life settings. Like the, thumbnail-focused www.pixsy.com, searchme believes that the future of search is visual.
The history of visual approaches to search, including 3D flythroughs and other graphical models, has been littered with failure. VRML comes to mind, in the 1990s this was going to be “next-gen” the 3D web. In early-2008, with broadband and ubiquitous dual-core cpu power, we still have not seen a visual approach to user-interface gain much traction in the marketplace. (The desktop metaphor–invented at Parc in the early ’80s, popularized by Apple, and copied by Microsoft–has been the last major epoch in user-interface development. We really haven’t moved much past overlapping windows in the past 28 years.)
Enabled by Adobe’s® Flex 3® software Searchme emphasizes that their technology is more than a slick UI.
“The Searchme visual search engine, which leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex, is an innovative rich Internet application that could help fundamentally change the Internet search experience,” said Chris Rogers, West Region Leader, Adobe Consulting at Adobe. “It’s more than a slick UI; it’s an engaging search experience that emphasizes relevance and usability to help users more easily find what they’re looking for on the Web.” [press release]
I believe that people think primarily in verbal concepts, our brain has uniquely evolved to the complex task of reading in ways that cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Maryann Wolf are just now discovering. While, plain text is not as sexy as animated flipping thumbnails, I believe that relevance and simplicity are still king.
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