There are plenty of choices available when starting a blog – whether hosted on-line, or within your own domain – a large number of platforms exist to act as the foundation for your new on-line voice. We choose WordPress for us, and for our clients. Hosted within our clients own domain, it’s an awesome platform that is easily extended to cater for most content and blog management requirements. It’s very easy to use, but like any new tools, it does take some time to familiarise yourself with it’s features in order to get the most from it.
In order to help our clients – and others – to more quickly realise the benefits WordPress can offer, we have been in the process of producing a selection of video tutorial resources to help. However, those clever peeps at Automattic (creators of WordPress) have beat us to it by unvealing WordPress.tv – “Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress” – a mixture of WordPress how-to videos and presentations.
OK, so WordPress.tv is probably slightly more polished, and a little more in-depth, than our effort would have been, but the main thing is WordPress users of all levels know have an excellent resource for getting into, and around, the WordPress platform. The videos tutorials featured on WordPress.tv are short, precise, well produced, and well thought out.
The welcome to WordPress.tv post on the site’s blog gives an overview of the service, it’s objectives, and ambitions:
If you want to learn how to use WordPress, how to do cool stuff with it, how to push it to the bloody edge of reason – we’re building an exponentially growing library of video training content. You’ll find the beginnings of that in the How-To section of the site. There’s a lot more to come, both WordPress.com and WordPress.org side, but it’s happening, and fast.
So, you now have a great resource to accelerate the WordPress learning curve, and get more value from our favourite blogging platform. If your fairly new to WordPress, we’ve selected a handful of useful videos for you to check out:
New to WordPress…
- Introducing you to your WordPress dashboard (1:58)
- Writing and publishing posts on WordPress (1:59)
- Publishing posts at a later date (0:52)
- Adding categories and tags to your posts (1:56)
- Include images and video in your posts (1:46)
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, and are a little more battle-hardened, these could be worth checking out to add extra value to your blog:
Extending WordPress…
- See who’s linking to your blog (1:01)
- Set your blog discussion settings (2:23)
- Managing other users on your blog (1:32)
- Creating post excerpts, and the ‘read more’ link (1:04)
- Changing your post editor interface (1:28)
Most of these video tutorials are for WordPress version 2.7 – if we’ve set your blog up for you in the past, and are running an old version, get in touch with us by the end of January, and we’ll upgrade for you for free. We’ll make next week a ‘WordPress 2.7, anyone?‘ week at bpodr.
If you have any questions about WordPress, or need something that isn’t covered on WordPress.tv – let us know, and we’ll create a lil’ screencast video, showing you how to do it and talking you through our answer. Get in touch with us and we’ll make it happen.
