 Good morning everybody. Good morning. How many are brand new to WordPress? Don't want to do sites. How many do this for a living? Build place for a living? Raise your hands up high because everybody in this room, you don't want to meet you. Well I appreciate you all everybody coming to my presentation. Hope we'll get it all kicked off. If any of you had this kind of a feeling, remind who's lying, you download the presentation from my website. I have this back up at the last slide so you know it's a kind of beat down right now if you like it. So my intention today is to take you on a what I call my foreign journey as a mere mortal on building a website. Anybody here feeling a mere mortal? Not too technical? Raise your hands. Alright, we're on the same page. So what I want to do is kind of give you some planning tips for your trip into building your website. Is that something good? Sometimes you just need to get away. Sometimes you just need to get away. It's been really hot so I thought I'd bring a picture of Rochester, New York. When I'm trying to go down to the work camp down in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I put my garage door open and had quality pictures of the snow I had at the award so it was the same delay or triple of it. But anyways, my idea is that for those of us that are new to websites and WordPress, it's almost like, you know, you're going to go away, you're going on a new journey. So the first thing you need to decide is what kind of traveler are you? Are you an adventurer? It's the journey that excites you in your budget planning. Do you like to make detailed plans for yourself? You know, you're going to go to the websites like Trimalacity, kind of plan your trip, you know, make all your arrangements for your hotel and everything, and you're going to do it all yourself. Maybe you'll like to hire a travel agent and you're going to book all the sight-seeing trips in your hotel and your flights and whatnot for you, but you're going to go on your trip by yourself or with a friend. Maybe you like to travel at a likes and all-inclusive tour. You know what? I want to sit back and enjoy the scenes. Do you ever want to relate to traveling like this? How many people traveled to Kevin to this meeting? Who traveled the farthest? Take a guess. Anybody? Who thinks they traveled the farthest? You did. No, I didn't. Where'd you come from? Newark, New Jersey, four hours. I got your beat. Okay, I was six hours. So, if you can all relate to the different types of travelers, it may also relate to what kind of developer you should be. Are you an adventurer? Do you want to learn as you go? Are you a budget-binding? Are you a detailed planner? You know, sure. WordPress is easy if you plan for it correctly. You want a higher developer to sell up your site and then you're going to just add content and maintain it. Or do you want to completely outsource it? Just make me right number one on Google. See the comparisons and how we can relate to this? My real job is not wet design. My wife and I run a business called True Creations. My last any vector means true or genuine in German. I'm a wood turner. I spin wood. I already ate. I've been spinning wood for 40 years. It's an architectural journey. I have a whole chronic line of tools that I make for spinners, people who make yard. My last presentation I had a woman sitting there knitting away so she related to what I do. And then I run a wood-turning school. My wife is a long-arm quilting business. We're sewing machines 14 feet long. I'll fully compute her control. It's not for your average solar. So these are our primary jobs. But we wanted to you know, we're kind of adventurous. You know, we thought we kind of figure it out. You know, we're very budget minded. And besides, everybody says wordpress and easy. Right? When you go on a travel. When you're going on a trip. Of course, you need to think your suitcase and your trip. You start to think about your planning. We needed to define the itinerary for our goals. For our customers. So our primary thing was we wanted to replace our old Yahoo site. We built a site about eight, nine years ago. It's still operational. It still drives traffic. It's very dated looking. When it was clean it was built with something called Yahoo Site Builder. And you know, it got the job done. But it was an absolute bearer to maintain. As far as goals for our trip, my wife really wanted the ability to edit. She wanted to make some changes to the website and she gave them to me and six weeks later I think he would make the spelling correction. She wanted the ability to edit herself. I wanted to put up an e-commerce store and we wanted a system that was just easier to maintain. So these were the goals for our trip. So the first thing you had to do when you went on a trip is you got to change your tickets up. You're going to have your tickets, your passport, all that stuff. What were our tickets? I started where many of you are today at my first word camp in Buffalo in 2014. My wife had found out about this thing called Wordpress. She had gone to a local meetup meeting and she goes, oh, there's this word camp in Buffalo next weekend. You've got to go. She's like, well, it's a web development you know, environment you ought to go to. I don't know. I spent my twenty bucks that came home. It's the best twenty dollars I've ever spent in my life. I got breakfast, I got lunch, I got dinner, I got a t-shirt and I got to sit through six very interesting presentations. I think we can do this. So we went out to Pirates and Lobos and went to the library, got some books. Now in Rochester, New York, we've got a pretty active meetup group Facebook group. I'm assuming that you have it here in Boston also. Can anybody verify that? Our Facebook group you can post a question to it seven by twenty four and you'll have an answer in a couple of minutes. Somebody's always on it. I started to look at YouTube videos. I'm a visual learner. Just the way I like to learn. Now Google's my friend. When I finally figured out what the thing called Codex was, I didn't know what what's a Codex. It's the manual wordpress. It's a term that I hadn't heard before. If I had a question, I just Googled it to get an answer. We adopted a process of learn, implement and improve. That's really what we wanted to do for our corporate basis. This is our taking into the world wordpress and development of what's up. So some of the real basics. I'm assuming there's a few people here that are you know, again our biggest challenge is the terminology. It's a different language. You know it's like a little foreign country just a different language. And you have to go to wordpress meetings and you have to go to work camps and you have to read and you have to look at YouTube videos and then all of a sudden you start to understand it. So there's a thing called wordpress.word and wordpress.com You hear things like self hosting what does all of this stuff mean in a real simple manner wordpress.com is if you're going to put up a little one or two page website or have a little simple blog you can just go to wordpress.com you know it's that fancy that's got limiting support there's no plugins you aren't going to e-commerce on it or anything like that but you can put up a real simple blog or a little simple shop or a website for an authentic character wordpress.org that's where if I wanted to put up a store you wanted to pick a different thing you wanted to use these different plugins you know that's where you really control and maintain your own website terminology that you have to get you familiar with wordpress.word wordpress.com the next thing we had we had we started everything like css cms what are all these acronyms css is for cascading style sheets and it's really it just describes how html elements are displayed in old web browser you're not creating enough paper and whatnot it saves you a lot of work all your external styles sheets and whatnot are stored in css files now the bottom right is cwschools.com take a note as a place where you know character words stuff cwschools.com all the same information display two different manners in the css right so headers, they get different colors they got different menu structures all the same information so that's a basic look feel of a website makes sense people can understand it so how many people have not seen the WordPress dashboard there are people I'm going to be really brave to do you'll see this throughout the day in different presentations but this is your basic you have your first pattern to log into your site in your first dashboard you got the menu system on the side it shows you what codes you have what pages you have what theme you're using here I got WooCommerce I got products I got tools I got some settings I got some SEO I got sold something here the other day I got people who are coming in coming out there's a fence coming on I took this screenshot a little while ago we're camp Boston we put that on here you know what I've been slacking on my maintenance I've got five new updates that I have to do to the system so that's just what the basic I'm not going to give you a demo I'm just going to show it to you how many people are interested in doing e-commerce how many people have heard of WooCommerce this is the WooCommerce screen you can see you've got all your photos of each image and Excel I've got the title of the page whether it's in stock what the price is what kind of categories I've listed under the tag there's even some red light yellow lights about SEO I don't worry that much about SEO on an e-commerce site because the product is changing but anyways that's what a basic WooCommerce screen looks like so as you go back on your trip you have to start to unpack your clothes and that's the theme so you've got to get your swag out there's my WooCamp Buffalo shirt your site's appearance think about casual looking sites fancy looking site whatever so themes you can get from WordPress.org that's the repository there are three themes so her terms like 2015, 2016, 2017 so every time you bring up a WordPress environment you have to have at least one theme you don't have a theme, you can't see it so it basically ships with the theme guess what in 2015 they shipped it with the 2015 theme etc etc etc so now I can overlay it with a different theme I can go to the repository and go find a theme or I can go buy a theme so if I put in a secondary theme it's still oftentimes good to have leave one other free theme on your site so that if there's a problem or whatever you can at least revert to the simple theme and bring it up to your content so the themes are really what the look and feel of your site now as you travel you gotta get your guidebooks and whatnot have you ever gone to a trip or you ain't got a tour book you've gone on a trip with a tour guide you gotta find some tour guides to take us on our journey with WordPress so I had the great idea that the very first entry into WordPress I was going to put up a e-commerce store but then the second but I didn't know any better so I was poking around on YouTube and I found this guy Josh Jackson he calls the WP sculptor dot com and he had a YouTube video to create an e-commerce website and I looked at it and it was kind of cool he used something called a buy style so I put up my my e-commerce site easyspendos.com this video was about 3 hours long or something like that and I sat at the kitchen table and fired up my Roku YouTube and in one weekend I just basically start, you know, stop go do this and after 2 days I had a fully functional e-commerce site up and running and it was just it was still a little kind of like month to me but it was up and running and I could sell stuff my wife she found this woman Katrina she's got several YouTube videos up on videos up on YouTube so she put up TC poking and then I used it as a guide to put up TC charity using the virtue thing and it's the same thing and this is kind of like watching the video they were our tour guides and got us right along into building our first initial sites we found Corey Ashton Corey's actually she's here at the work camp she's speaking tomorrow she's from San Antonio, Texas it's a very shiny bashful she has these over 200 videos that are 3-5 minutes long and to the point here's how to go do this now she just wants last week or two ask Corey so ask Corey and she's got her videos all up there now and a wonderful resource I'd like to build a new site and she goes no I couldn't have done it without Corey she's just thrilled to have the opportunity to go beat her she has old things like gravity form that Divi and basic security I mean to name her topic she's got her short suite to the point no screwing around straight to her guy once you get to your room of course you've got to continue unpacking get your top kit out things like that so maybe plug-ins and tools as my doctor for plug-ins are these things that add functionality they're going to add a specific set of features for WordPress site again WordPress got to work is there a positive for it there are tools and jetpack are one of our major sponsors for this work camp they have a bunch of little different plug-ins it's all going to be combined it just has all sorts of little tools on it to collect names locate things on your site it's just a point box automatic you're the company that builds jetpack but there are also the people behind WordPress.com so you'll start hearing this name automatically as we travel the first language barriers which is our biggest channel just all new terminology any of you starting to experience that admit it oh yeah you know just a simple thing basic paid layout what's a menu box what's a sign of our head what's a footer what's an image slider what's an image gallery it's like okay I've been on websites what's that call I mean I don't know what I didn't know how to describe all as an image slider that makes sense oh I need to add a whole bunch of pictures oh that's a gallery you just have to come up with speed forms and things like that so just basic terminology and you're going to have to so tripping and stumbling points media is by far WordPress is actually pretty easy it's taking the photographs and editing the photographs and figuring out your PDFs and your videos and things like that that's a challenge so you have this thing called a media library you know so I made these things called drop spittles which are you could just put a twist in the file so I made hundreds of these things I mean I got a photograph of every one of those I got documents I got articles I written for returning journals and things like that you know all my media goes to so that's kind of like you're your media, you're the library ad new so I just found that that was a tripping and stumbling point for us when you're traveling of course you need to get your maps out we're going to go get information the nice thing is that just a ton of resources available WordPress.org WordPress TV Google YouTube books local meetup groups and work camp this is a whole community the things that's been my way of talking about this as we go over here this whole the whole concept of open source software was very important I used to sell software between two and six billion dollars a license years ago to go get open source software was just a concept and I was having a real tough time getting my head around and then you know we go to these meetings and we just found we met a very diverse group of people all had a common interest it was very helpful and you can ask anybody a question and if they didn't know how to answer if you go find somebody you can help you answer I mean it was just a nice community and the reason I give this talk is as a non-technical person I want to be able to get back to the community and so we were at these events this would not be available without the sponsors downstairs so go visit them they're throwing in thousands of dollars towards this thing to make this event happen check them out go to the after party sit down at lunch and talk to people who you've never met before and just talk to them who's an expert who's in their meeting and you know you know we've literally built all our sites and whatnot for the cost of free and we you know we bought some some add-ons and things like that but I mean essentially it cost us great little money to put up three almost four sites and you know you can do that you know I've hit a wall on something you know I'd call this person oh yeah here here's how you do it I mean that's what's wonderful to get involved go to the after party if you're thinking of going go to the after party so go to this work press journey you gotta hook a hotel you gotta figure out where am I gonna hook how am I gonna put this site up well the first thing you gotta do is register and your companies that do this their hosting companies can do it for you and then they're you know they're what we call the self hosting companies and then there's fees associated I mean you know they run data centers and whatnot and they're gonna put up an environment for you and you gotta pay them rent it might be 10 bucks a month it might be 2 bucks a month it might be 20 bucks a month and then you're in your situation so several of the vendors downstairs are here I mean below I got the I possible they do host it okay they're all sponsors they're all downstairs go talk to them hear their pitch and then you can make a decision as to where you wanna host your website so yeah work press is free free tool you may have to pay some for some tools and add on and things like that so now I wanna go into traveling and I gotta do some currency exchange right if you're interested in currency exchange on their website like money coming to you if you're interested okay the big guy is move commerce remember to move commerce get your sponsor in this event you're downstairs I believe also there's another one called equity try a very different move commerce, you own it it's on your site, it's on your environment if any of you gone to a website where you're trying to be a USPS as an example it was a postal service if you're trying to order a priority mail if you wanna pay with PayPal it sends you out to PayPal it brings you back equity does that in a e-commerce environment so if somebody wants to buy and look at something on your storefront it's gonna go out to the equity site and come back but they're gonna take care of all the maintenance and hosting and all that with commerce you're gonna take care of them all now downstairs there's some partners here jelta's one they'll work with move commerce jelta will do things like follow up emails if somebody comes to your site and log out it will send them a thank you email it will do a your cart is empty e-mail so if you're interested in a commerce environment talk to the jelta people follow pay, if you're wrong there's sort of PayPal there's sort of strike that's no not the strike because it's becoming a very popular credit card processing service it's got some add on information also so the biggest challenge I found with the storefront is image editing and it just takes a lot of time now just because you have the camera you can take an 18 gigabyte image doesn't mean you should use an 18 gigabyte image on your website we had an instance in Rochester six months ago somebody did their site they hired an expert and we do their site their front page was taking over 12 minutes to log because they were using 18 gigabyte images images now in the move commerce and your image only needs to be 500 by 500 dpi it's 72 dpi it's a pretty small image a photo of that a photo of that there's a pop-up tent it's a tube white it's got photo lights see a lot of them see a lot of them and all it does is give you filtered lights with no hotspots if you put your object if you're a jewelry maker or whatever you put your object inside it takes a picture of it it gives you nice diffuse lighting and I got mine at Harvard three years ago I don't know if they still sell them but you know it's a little bit of a pop-up or your purely fabric and five or six sides and I just got some chocolate so I used because my phone was editing again I'm on the budget of free so I didn't want to pay a lot of money for Photoshop so I used that again and I used about 0.5% of its functionality because I'm basically all I'm doing is cropping images with it and then I used a I made dropspills I made 30 dropspills and I sit there and I take 30 to 40 pictures and sometimes I'll take a picture of the bottom a lot of 30 to 40 images to have it so I've always used crimson but I'll take and crop them off so I put them into a directory of originals and then I go create another directory and I then I create another directory and I run them through fast home and I capture and what that allows me to do is take all of them and I say I want to convert these to 72 DPI 500 by 500 in a BNG format and it does it like that very nice tool and then there's a little add-on you can put on to Google it's called color zone it's a little picking pen so if you're poking around the web and you see something that looks interesting you can pick on it and it will give you the information so as you travel keep a journal and I've done this from the very first work camp I went to so I've got every meeting I've gone to I've got a journal I've got most because as you go to meetings and you start talking to people you will pick things up well that's an interesting plugin so that's a nice add-on it doesn't work so good but this person is an expert whatever and I just keep the thing a journal so he goes from meetings tips we had so many discovery if you put a YouTube video on you ever find a site where you click on a YouTube video it's all done it then brings up all the competitors videos have you ever seen that? if you don't like that well there's more code more characters that you put at the end of the YouTube video and it will stop that oh no good tip I didn't like that remember where it was I had to go search for it but every time I put a YouTube video up good plugins corporate standards whatever, plugins, vendors read a little dates just keep the journal safety tips for your journal you're going to hear something called a child thing talk a little bit about CSS put up your WordPress environment you start coding in it you start building your site and you say I don't like the color of that but there's no way of editing it through the theme so you go to a meeting some expert that you met at lunch Conway added this and they call up some tool and they look at it and it changes and they changed your button the problem is if you do an upgrade to the next version of your WordPress or your theme those items get laid out so you create what they call a child thing you've got the parent thing so that's your environment create a child thing and you do all your edits in the child thing and that way they're maintained so anytime you do an upgrade to WordPress and upgrade to your theme upgrade to your plugin or whatever those things are maintained and you don't move them so you always want to do any kind of customization in a child theme environment you walk away from one thing from this presentation child thing visit okay backup one of the first plugins you're going to put in is a backup tool and anytime you're going to do any kind of updates or major changes to your environment back it up you can take 10 minutes, 20 minutes for any amount of your cycles make a backup so if you do your upgrades if you're going to do the menu and you have five updates to be done I would have implemented one to five of the updates check my site if it's all working and make another backup put in your anti-malware security and brute force tools downstairs, we've got work fence site lag tradeware they all play in the space go spend some time with the processors that's in a span of an hour so if you get in this journey you want to go sightseeing and it's really a community to get involved with as you travel you need to take pictures I'm going to take a picture of my audience here in a pretty way thanks it was rather dirty so go sightseeing join your Facebook meetup groups we have once a month or so we try to do co-working days great way to a lot of us are independent thanks to get out of your shop out of your studios and be around other human beings take some plans go to work camps meet new people but the theme is getting about it if you asked me four years ago when I was speaking at a word press counter one word camp one word camp they spoke into four of these things get on and get them out I wish you all what you want to be good I thank you for giving me this book with just your kind and I hope this was interesting other feedback forms or anything like that talking time I think you need to get a survey or whatever provide feedback to improve our presentation want to download this just go to my website section some learning and then check the articles and videos thank you if you have any questions I can answer in my non deep manner hopefully this was helpful and have a wonderful time