wordpress

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.

Your WordPress blog can now be published on your LinkedIn profile page – a neat way to extend your blog readership, and give potential business partners, clients or employees an insight into you and your business.

If you have a LinkedIn profile, check out the WordPress app here.

LinkedIn apps have just been released this week – a little like Facebook apps, but for grown-ups! (no poking here). There are only a handful of applications available at the moment, but I expect more will follow soon. I’m sure we’ll see some real innovative applications appearing over the coming weeks.

A couple of interesting apps available now for your profile:

• The My Travel app let’s you see who’s traveling where within your network – meet up for a cocktail, perhaps, before that big meeting.
• Google Presentation allows you to embed powerpoint slideshows into your profile – great for giving people a little more of you, or your latest project or pitch. (Just make sure you follow the golden rules of powerpoint)

If you are reading this post from our website, you may have noticed that we are in the process of refreshing this site with a new design, clearer messages, and more relevant content – whilst trying to eat our own dog food. Our blog forms the spine of our site (why a blog?) and we wanted a powerful, expandable, and easy-to-use tool to allow us to manage it all. Free would be nice too, of course.

Step up, WordPress. WordPress is a blogging publishing tool, which is free, and can be easily expanded to provide all the features of a complete content management system. From the WordPress site…

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.

It’s also open-source, which means anyone can open up the bonnet, have a play with the source code and make changes to suit. We use WordPress for all of the reasons above: Free. Easy-to-use. Lots of features. Free. Fully customisable.

Why choose WordPress for your business blog?

• It’s easy-to-use. WordPress gets out your way, just providing the tools you need to create and manage all your site’s content, through a secure, password protected admin interface.
• You can host within your own business domain. Choose to create your WordPress blog within your domain name and you retain full control over your own content, instead of hosting it elsewhere.
• You can fully customise the design. Skin WordPress with a free ‘theme’ of you choice, or get a bespoke design completed to compliment your existing site and brand.
• It supports multiple Authors. WordPress can manages multiple authors, which makes it more than capable of supporting a structured blogging strategy.
• Plenty of features and easily extended Boasting a vast array of plugins plus the ability to open the bonnet and code your own feature extensions, WordPress can cater for almost any requirement.
• Oh, and it’s FREE.

WordPress is used to power millions of blogs and web sites all over the web, including: Dell (yourblog.direct2dell.com), Xerox (blogs.xerox.com), Southwest Airlines (blogsouthwest.com), Digg (blog.digg.com), New York Times (walkthrough.nytimes.com), oh, and Stephen Fry (stephenfry.com/blog).