“At the core, open source is about freedom – it’s the freedom to run the software for any purpose, it’s the freedom to be able to get under the hood and modify any code you want, and the freedom to really do whatever you like with the software. So, celebrating that on a day when America also celebrates its freedom seemed great.”

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I never expected WordPress to have the growth it has had, its beginnings were very humble. I think the reason WordPress has been successful, however, is because people have found themselves empowered to create beautiful blogs and websites without having to learn a ton of technology. The entire team behind WP is dedicated to making it as easy to use and elegant as possible. Full article

In the article Matt mentions the WordPress Showcase – a little something to get your creative energy flowing!

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Learning Requires Skilled Instruction & Practice

Have you ever taught someone to drive? Remember how difficult it was to explain what you knew by instinct—like making a left hand turn? Or when to begin braking at 60 m.p.h. as the stop sign looms ahead?

My daughter cried, “But how do you know that? I’ve been riding with you all my life. You think I’d know how to do this by now!”

Learning how to use WordPress is similar.

The gap between knowledge of and knowledge how is often wide.

Knowledge theory defines how to do something as procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious; best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice. It focuses on how to obtain a result.

“I know I can watch videos or read a book, but that doesn’t seem to work for me. I need someone to show me.“

You can Google “how do I make my WordPress site look like I want it,” and yet the instructions are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks for people who already know the basic procedure.

Asking other people is effective because they can respond to requests for clarification and physically point out where to click and what to type. This approach works best in a user group, yet patience often wears thin after 10-15 minutes for one or two tasks.

I remember my white knuckled grip on the armrest when my daughter was learning to drive. (Not to mention the tension of repeatedly stepping on an imaginary brake!) In time, we commissioned an instructor who was knowledgeable, experienced and patient who taught her the basic procedures.

If you are serious about learning WordPress, hire us for patient and gifted WordPress training and coaching. We let you get behind the wheel and do all the driving.

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With the default installation and using 7 of the 8 settings below, WordPress is about 90% there, as far as search engines go. With a couple of SEO plugins (or SEO -aware themes), you can get to 95%.

1. Make sure your site title is descriptive.
2. Make sure you have changed the tagline from “Just Another WordPress Blog” to a description of what your website is about.
3. Install and activate Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack (or WordPress SEO by Yoast) plugins.
4. Set your permalinks to something that includes %postname%; we use /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ for the majority of our clients. (Yes, our site is set at something different. Like most of you, we jumped straight to Appearance when we started and learned the best practices later in the game.)
5. Create categories for what you’ll be talking about on your site. Remember, these are general topics; specifics are best as tags.
6. Edit your About page (or Sample Page). Make sure it’s either about you or just delete it. Remember that all content on your site will be indexed.
7. Delete the first default post (Hello World!) and comment.
8. Change the name of the default category from “Uncategorized” to something more descriptive about your site. (Refer to step 5.)

There’s not much to the list, right? When you get through step 8, you’ve hit the 95% mark. To get to 100% (or at least 99%), you also need to adapt how you write your content.

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So, you decide a personal approach is better. You attend Meetups, Tweetups and user groups, yet are still not sure how to get started. Is it me?, you ask.

Maybe you made headway with your WordPress site and like the way the colors and fonts capture your personality. Now you are questioning if you set the site up right.

Over the last several months I have met many folks  eager to learn WordPress. They are coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs struggling to take charge of their business while operating on a shoe string budget — just like you.

They feel powerless to make simple changes on their “old” website. Some of them feel hurt and abandoned by their WordPress designer when they reach out for support and guidance.

So, I’m asking my three readers who are tech-savvy:

• Are you a self-taught blog / website designer?
  
• What is your learning style?
  
• Do you recommend others follow your path?
  
• How would you approach the project differently today?

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Learn how to use WordPress plugins, widgets, and themes to customize your site

You will learn how to create relevant content, build an audience, and turn your website into whatever you want it to be — a business development tool, your very own online publication, a community hub, a multimedia journal and more. We’ll chat about what you want to accomplish with your website and tailor the session to fit your specific needs.

There will be lots of time for Q&A and one-on-one attention, so bring your laptops and as many questions as you want.

When you leave this session, you’ll know how to get your WordPress website set up the way you want it to be, and why you want it that way.

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The most frequently asked question I hear — often not verbalized aloud.

There are a host of responses. Here are a few…

As easy as some aspects of WP are, there’s no way somebody could set up a site like this without a good knowledge of html to start with. The navigation links, tables, bookmarks and IDX would drive anyone else insane. -Linda Slocum

Social media is not free or easy, but if you employ the right people who can utilize these tools effectively, it can be an efficient choice to augment your other efforts. We should focus less on selling people on shiny new tools and more on building strategic plans and how tools can help us achieve the goals we have established. -Cara Keithley

I tell clients that I conservatively think I spent well over 500 man-hours learning Social Media and that was just to get started. I probably spend 2 hours a day learning each and every day… so at their salary, what is all that time worth? Funny how it makes the large number I just slid across the table seem not so large anymore. -brandmarken

If you want to trust your brand with someone who’s spammed their way to 100k Twitter followers in the last 6 months, then you weren’t the right client for me anyway. On the other hand if you’re serious about exploring the possibility of entering the social media space and are willing to dedicate the resources to ensure success, then we’ve got something to talk about. -Scott Schablow

Social Media isn’t free–depending upon the goals and size of the brand, executing Social Media strategies and programs may require monitoring, research, third-party software and services, development, planning, and resources to work effectively. – Augie Ray

Those “inexpensive” efforts take specialized knowledge and a lot more time to manage and execute. Things like public relations, guerrilla marketing, event marketing, and viral have always been more labor intensive and require a special kind of daily hands-on management. Same with social media. -Michelle Tripp

Wondering… How do you, as a buyer, determine the value of a service? Is it monetary? Time saved? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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I believe this is because the timeout value is too short: wp_remote_post($cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 0.01, ‘blocking’ => false));

When making a request to wp-cron.php, it won’t return until all cron jobs are executed. And 0.01 is too short. It doesn’t hurt to extend the time span, as much as 10 minutes even. It will return as long as the mature crons are fired up and executed; in most cases only a few seconds.

For those of you who know how to edit the /wp-includes/cron.php file, simply edit 0.01 to 10 and extend the time allowed for running future scheduled posts.

Detailed instructions for extending the timeout value in /wp-includes/cron.php are below. You need ftp access to your server and a text editor. I use Notepad++, however Notepad2 or Notepad may work well for you.

How To Correct Missed Schedule Posts in WordPress

1. Login to your ftp server account and locate the /wp-includes/cron.php file.

   
   The cron.php file is located within the wp-includes folder.
   

2. Open the cron.php file in your source code editor.
   NOTE: Save a copy of the original file to your desktop prior to editing.

   
   

   Locate the following source code in the cron.php file.
   }
   set_transient( ‘doing_cron’, $local_time );
   $cron_url = get_option( ‘siteurl’ ) . ‘/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron’; wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 0.01, ‘blocking’ => false, ‘sslverify’ => apply_filters(‘https_local_ssl_verify’, true)) );  }

3. Change ‘timeout’ => 0.01 to ‘timeout’ => 10
4. Save the edited cron.php file and upload to the /wp-includes folder, overwriting the current cron.php file
   REMEMBER: Backup the original file before overwriting.
5. Schedule a post and test for success.

Don’t Speak Geek?

Did your eyes glaze over simply looking at source code? Does the thought of getting into your hosting server account make you weak in the knees?

Take a deep breath. Relax. Send us a confidential email. Our WordPress tech team can do it for you.

Source

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SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings

Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images

Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin

If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link

The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links

Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

Do you have SEO favorites? Share them in the comments.

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Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me about it in the comments.

Did you miss these?

• 10 Crucial Social Media Widgets To Improve Content Traffic And Awareness
• Embeddable Waves: The Google Wave WordPress Plugin
• (Anti) Social Lists 11/22/09

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