WordPress Tutor

The sixth in my series about designing a WordPress theme for my personal website. Website: www.tom-rogers.com

This is a presentation given at WordCamp Seattle 2011. The title of the presentation is “Advice for Selling Themes” and covers topics including marketing, theme anatomy, support and other related topics. Some of the marketplaces discussed are ThemeForest, WooThemes and Mojo Themes. Chris’ work can be view on ThemeForest under the username ‘themolitor’: themeforest.net

WordPress is a powerful content management system that has long stretched its legs and moved beyond just being a ‘blogging’ system. This post gives you essential SEO tips to supercharge your WordPress site and help you take your site to the next level.

PubCon video content producer Vanessa Zamora sat down with Scott Hendison, president at Search Commander Inc., to discuss content management systems, specifically WordPress, the blogging platform that is one of his specialties. Hendison shared a number of his top plugin picks for WordPress development in this PubCon Las Vegas 2010 interview, including SEO Automatic’s own Core Tweaks WordPress Setup plugin that minimizes the initial content management system set up time, All in One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2 SEO for search engine optimization needs, as well as Yoast, which includes a plugin for SEO, an XML Sitemaps plugin, and an RSS footer plugin. Hendison also shared his preferred WordPress themes, pointing out that although the most popular theme to his knowledge is Thesis, a premium theme, he prefers a free theme called Atahualpa, and recommends others browse through free themes before spending money on a premium theme that ultimately might not have all of the desired capabilities. Hendison continued by sharing his recommendations with regards to selecting a Web hosting server, suggesting against shared servers that stifle page load time, now a factor in Google’s ranking system. In addition, shared servers do not provide as much security as dedicated environments, Hendison added. If looking for shared hosting, Hendison suggested Search Commanders PDXTC shared hosting service, as well as Bluehost. For dedicated options Hendison suggested Rackspace or Dreamhost.

In this video, you’ll learn how to start a new WordPress theme from scratch. You’ll also learn how to add metadata to your theme. You can register to be a member here: membership.thinkvitamin.com?cid=118

Part 2 of my series on setting up a local web development environment on a Mac, this video covers installing and configuring WordPress on a MAMP server.