Author Archives: Chuck Ainsworth

WordCamp

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WordCamp Phoenix 2014

 

This past weekend I attended WordCamp Phoenix which is a convention for website users and designers.  It was great with 750 in attendance and 90% of speakers out of town.  The real gurus of WordPress were in attendance and spoke at the sessions. On Friday, tracks were broken down into levels of experience within WordPress: Beginner User, Advanced User, Designer, Beginner Dev, Advanced Dev.

I volunteered to help and got the assignment to help in the Advanced Dev Track.  I was glad for that as it gave me a chance so learn a lot about the development process.

During closing remarks, a raffle was held (ticket included in registration) and I was lucky enough to win a $100 gift certificate from Best Buy. If you are interested in learning how to use WordPress, I would highly advise you to start attending  local WordPress meetings and go to WordCamp when it is being held.  It is money well spent.  Here is a link to this years slides.  Click Here

Chuck

 

WordPress Course

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I am the webmaster for several websites.  One of the things that comes up quite often is how do I use WordPress to make changes to my own website.  With that in mind, I am in the process of creating a WordPress course on this site.  If you would like access to the course, just drop email to cdainsworth@gmail.com asking to be added as member.  I will then set you a login account and notify you when it is available.

The content of the course is about 50% completed so will be going through lots of changes over time.  However, I believe the basics are all in place so feel free to send me an email to get started.  As of right now, this course is free but I plan to move it to a paid course sometime in the future.

WordPress Birthday

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This last Monday evening (May 27th), the world celebrated the 10th year of WordPress development.  We had our own celebration at the Gangplank HQ in Chandler Arizona with about 30 people in attendance.  We played a game called WikiWars.  Very interesting…  Following are the rules:

Overview: Two players face off in a head-to-head race to see who can navigate the quickest from one Wikipedia page to the next using only Wi8kilinks (the links within articles).  Tournament is single elimination.

1.  Create two drawing bins; 1 with page start topic (must be a Wikipedia page) and 1 with end topic (must be a Wikepedia page).
2.  On Go!, players try to navigate as quickly as possible from the “start” page to the “end” page.  The only permitted navigations/commands are:

  • find: ctrl + f
  • scroll/click within the article
  • browser back button

3.  The player who arrives at the “end” page first must show or describe his/her search history before being declared the winner.
4.  The winner moves on to the next round of the tournament.

While at the party, also learned about Headway Themes.  This is a wordpress theme that allows you to define your own layout areas using drag and drop and then clicking on the desired  characteristics.  It is a paid theme starting at $80 but appears to be worth it.  I will looking into learning more about it.

Chuck

WordPress SEO

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I just recently started using WordPress SEO by Yoast.  It seems that I am a little late in the game as there has already been 4,298,169 downloads of this plugin.  If you haven’t started using it, you may want to check it out.  Be sure and take the tour as it gives a good guide on getting started.

One of the neat things about this plugin is the Snippet Preview that appears below your post.  It give you a good idea on how the search will result by the user and indicates whether you have included the proper tags and descriptions in the setup.  It provides space to add a Meta Description.

WordPress SEO

Chuck

New Design Website

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I have created a new design website powered by WordPress.  This site supports two purposes, #1 my landing site for web design and #2 testing new plugins.

One of the plugins I am testing right now is the e-commence plugin.  This plugin supports online sales.  So you may see a tab for Products occasionally.

Chuck