Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress

Rocking Your Site Out With WordPress by Nile Flores www.blondish.net | @blondishnet

What I will cover today…
Why Use WordPress? (my answer to this question)
What site owners should focus on when developing their site both design-wise and content-wise.
How you can use WordPress in combination with social networking to drive traffic and convert visitors.

Why WordPress?
Easy to use.
Easy to teach to anyone.
Open Source software always updating and advancing far more quickly than other CMS
Easy to design once you know the code.
Flexible for most projects.
Great community that provides support
SEO ready
Lots of useful plugins to optimize and make your site dynamic.

WordPress is NOT just a blog platform!
Web directory
Forum
Social Bookmark Site
Photo Gallery
Wiki
Magazine
Auction Site
E-commerce
Site Showcase
You can do a lot of things with WordPress: … and more!!!

Here are a few examples 

IMAGINATION In thinking outside the box, you will create a site that is worthy of your brand and something you can be proud to share with others.

Two Key Factors to Your Site
Design
Content

Design and Content work hand in hand

Tips For Your Content
Provide unique information. Where one site might have information similar, you want to dig deeper and give your readers something they can find
Give your visitors a way to provide feedback. This helps you know what they are looking for so you can keep bringing them back.
Have a focus. Whether you have a magazine, a business blog, community blog, personal blog, or some other site, keep your site on-topic.

Tips For Your Content
YARPP is your friend. (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) This allows your visitors to see other related articles of interest, & successfully converts them.
Google XML Sitemaps plugin is your friend too!  Let the search engines know when you update your posts and pages.
Offer a way to subscribe to your site, even if your site has no a blog. Examples: RSS feed, newsletter, social network handles like Twitter and Facebook.
(Continued….)

Tips For Your Design
Always offer clear ways of navigating your site. You might even consider a couple ways like Breadcrumb navigation, top navigation menu, or bottom navigation menu
SEO techniques say you should not go heavy on graphics. While this is true, you do can still not sacrifice your design. Sometimes CSS can do wonders.
Try to use your page space (whitespace) wisely, but do not overdo it. Too much and it looks chaotic.
Not sure of a color scheme, try colourlovers.com

Tips For Your Design
Do not use a ton of plugins. They will slow your site if they involve database processes.
Be aware of how your site looks in other browser resolutions and browsers in general (www.browsershots.org)
Try to keep up with W3C coding standards. This will help cut down differences in your design from one browser to the next. You can check your site at validator.w3.org
(Continued….)

How you can use WordPress in combination with social networking to drive traffic and convert visitors.

Your Content Needs An Audience
Your content, whether you are selling a product or have a blog needs attention. In order to do that you need to tell people. These days, the best way is through social network sites or forums.

Good Tools to Use Twitter Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King – Automatically publishes your posts to Twitter Facebook RSS Graffiti Facebook Application – Grabs Your Sites RSS feed and publishes your post to your profile page or Company’s Facebook page These will help make your life easier when it comes to sharing your content with people on Twitter and Facebook. You will not have to manually publish, so you have more time engaging and influencing your followers.

Converting Your Visitors
While you might have the content up, you need to put it in key spots to get your visitors attention.
Above the Fold
In Your Sidebar
Before Comments
In your blog updates

A Few Examples of Attention Grabbing Elements For A Site
Banners
Specially designed widgets
jQuery content Sliders
Related Posts plugin (YARPP)
The point is to lead your visitors to where you want them to go other than your front page. If you do not have anything, then your visitors will just read your article and leave, rather than stay and go where you want them to go.

Great WordPress Resources
WordPress Codex (codex.wordpress.org)
WordPress Support Forums (wordpress.org/support)
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
WPHacks.com
WeblogToolsCollection.com
Yoast.com
WPRecipes.com
WPEngineer.com
WPBeginner.com
WPAddict.net

Any questions?

www.blondish.net
Twitter: blondishnet
You can follow me at www.wpaddict.net Twitter: wpaddict OR Email: [email_address] Skype Chat: blondishnet

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Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress

by Nile Flores on Nov 12, 2011

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Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress — Presentation Transcript