 So how many people felt like this? Constantly I asked earlier real quickly who's brand new to wordpress Great how many people have built at least one site with it Okay, how many people are developers that can maybe help some of the beginners out in here I got a few people around great Well, I appreciate you all coming. This is the third time I've given this presentation And Tends to be trying to have some fun with it. Please keep it interactive If you want to download the copy of the presentation if you go to my site TC turning comm Tips and articles and videos if you just go to the main site go to the learning Tab and then tips and articles and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page And you can download the PDF of the presentation so what I want to do is Take you on a journey This is essentially the foreign travel that my wife and I went through We're mere mortals. We are not technical people We built successfully a couple three websites two for our companies ones an online store We're in the process of building two other sites for new businesses that we're launching and What I hope to give you is just some planning tips For your entree and your journey into web design So whenever you go on a journey or a trip you got to have a suitcase. You got to have your stuff with you Sometimes you just need to get away You know we get snow in this area. I'm from Rochester, New York This is I was good We were going down to word camp down in Lancaster, Pennsylvania when I put the garage door up This is what I was faced with last month when we had our last blizzard of the year And it took several hours for them to even plow the streets out so sometimes you just need to get away you need to go do something different and venture into something new So what I want you to think about is what kind of a traveler are you? Are you an adventurer? Do you like to journey? You know it's the journey. It's not the destination that gets you excited. You want to learn new things Maybe you're budget-minded. You know, you don't have a lot of money to spend on developing Your your website or planning your journey in your trip, you know, you like to just backpack and camp or whatever Maybe you like to make detailed plans yourself, you know, you know as a traveler You're using systems like travel OCD and you book your own hotels and all that Sometimes you're going to hire a travel agent And they're going to set up all the Excursions and things like that, but you're going to just kind of venture out on your own Or maybe you like to pay for an all-inclusive journey in a trip You know what I just want to sit back and I'm just going to enjoy the sights Okay So how many, you know, does this do you all kind of relate to the different types of people and different types of travelers and journeys Well, you can relate that To what kind of a web developer you might be So are you an adventurer? Do you like to learn as you go? Maybe you're budget-minded Are you a detailed planner? You're going to hear the word, you know, hear the comments. Sure wordpress is easy If you plan for it correctly Maybe you want to hire a developer to set your site up Do the fundamentals and, you know, get the get the basic look and feel of your site But you're going to add content and you're going to maintain it Or maybe you're just going to outsource it I want to know nothing about this. Just get me to be number one on google See the parallels between the, you know, type of trip you're going to do Take and kind of type of traveler you are or the type of a web developer you might be So a little bit about us. My wife and I We have real jobs and it's not web design We're not geeks So we're running companies called all in the umbrella of true creations My last name is Echter. Echter means genuine or true in german So I have a woodturning business. I do architectural turning These are eight and a half foot porch columns. I did for an historic house I have a whole product line of tools that I make for spinners people who put twist and fiber We have a knitter here in the audience I have portable spinning wheels and everything else And then we're on a woodturning school My wife has a quilting business She's got a 14 foot fully computerized sewing machine And so she basically is a sandwich maker quilters make the tops of the quilts and the back She puts a batting in it and stitches out the pattern to make the sandwich. So those are our primary jobs But we are adventuresome And we're also budget minded so When we found out about wordpress and whatnot, we still think you know what we'll just figure it out Because everybody says Wordpress is easy All right So a little bit about our itinerary We had set out some goals I built years ago our original website in yahoo site builder And you know what it's still up and running. I haven't touched it in years. It still generates leads I still generate sales from it One of these days I'm going to turn it off and just redirect it to a new landing page, but it works But it was a bear to maintain You know, if I went, you know, every one of these things Was a different page here You know The calendar changed to a new year. I had to go in and edit The copyright on every single page You know, you know all of a sudden I'm doing that 80 times I mean, it's just a bear to maintain So we wanted to replace our old yahoo site We wanted the ability to edit it a lot easier Kathy used to always complain because she'd give me edits and I'd get around to them a month later You know We all know that story I wanted to put up an e-commerce site And fundamentally we just needed a system that was much easier to maintain So we had to go out and get you know, you have to go home buy tickets So We got our tickets and our passports all lined up tickets And our journey started by my tending word camp off-flow in 2015 We have a very Active WordPress community in Rochester, New York And Kathy had been to one or two other meet-up meetings And she heard about this thing called word camp She goes jim why don't you go to it? I was like, what's word camp? So I went, you know showed up Didn't know what WordPress was You know my my first exposure to WordPress was at a word camp And You know When I came home that night, it's like that's the best 20 bucks. I've ever spent my life I got breakfast lunch dinner. I sat through six interesting presentations And I got a t-shirt Life is good So then you know when I got some books at the library, this was you know, create a website and a weekend type thing He started attending the rochester meet-up and and we have a very active facebook group You can post a question at our facebook group Seven by 24 and you'll have an answer within five minutes. Somebody's always on it. It's been very helpful Start watching some youtube videos Google is your friend And we kind of adopted a a match of learn implement and improve Just kind of continue, you know continuously improve our our knowledge and And our websites So real high level some basics you're going to hear some terms wordpress.org versus wordpress.com This is for the newbies So wordpress.org Is where you you'll hear the term self-hosted websites and this is where You're doing it all and wordpress.org you get full theme supports and plugins and you know, there is regular expenses But you can you know add seo features. You got analytics. You can add e-commerce stores and all that Wordpress.com really started out as kind of their first blogging platform And you can put up a real simple site there, but it's limited But it's free, you know, if you got a real simple site that might be all you need One of the biggest barriers we had was the language, you know, you start hearing things like, you know CSS and CMS and you know, what is all this stuff? So CSS stands for your cascading style sheets It really describes how html elements are to be displayed on the screen On paper and in other media It saves you a lot of work and All your external style sheets or your templates or whatever you set up are stored in the css files This is a great resource is w3schools.com for beginners It you know all sorts of information on there and how to how to learn Things about wordpress and web development and whatnot So here's two different style sheets Same content Just displayed completely different Colors green and red You got menus over here. You got menus over here. You've got content here, you know different footers All the same information just displayed differently And that's why when you're looking at different websites, you know You know the look and feel and layout is always a little bit different And these are all things that can be controlled with css For those of you that haven't seen it This is your basic wordpress dashboard I got step back so I can see it You've got your menu system here. You got some updates. It tells you, you know, oh, you know what you've been slacking off You got to install some updates. You've got some tools. You've got some posts. You got media pages Here's a your theme that I'm using. Here's my woo commerce I got products. I got appearances, you know seo all the different things that I've installed When you first enter in I can I can turn on some statistics. How many people are hitting the website? What are my top posts? Here's things that I've been, you know malicious login attempts Some spam that's been blocked Um You know here's a you know took an order already this month Uh wordpress and vents. Oh, look at this word camp hamilton happens to be today You know, you know, so it's just you know Uh, that's your basic dashboard You'll look and you'll see You know, I'm not going to go into a live demo on this but you'll see it throughout the day or go to the happiness bar And somebody will show it to you This is the basic woo commerce woo commerce is the is the uh plugin that I use to drive my my store And just wanted to show you the basic page layout. Here's all the different products Here's you know images. Here's descriptions. Is it in stock or not? What's the price? What's the category? Here's the tags um some seo ratings things like that, so Just again wanted to give you an introduction to what an e-commerce store would look like You know, you can add a new product here. You can import you can export, you know things like that so just The basic page looks like So now we get into themes and themes are really Uh, your site's appearance You know, so you got you know, it's clothes. You're going to be worrying, you know, you got to get out the You know your your sway, you know your your fancy word camp shirts and whatnot So it's your site's appearance Wordpress.org is the repository so you can go and search Wordpress.org for themes So wordpress is easy Selecting a theme that's going to look and give you the look and feel that you want could take you days I'm just trying to put it in a perspective. It just you know, there's so many options. There's hundreds and hundreds of themes available There are free themes that come with your basic wordpress install. You'll hear the term 2015 2016 2017 You have to have one theme In order to to have your basic site come up So wordpress when you do have it installed and you're hosting by your hosting company You always get at least one theme and then you can overwrite it and pick a different theme That's happening here And then there are paid themes. So you've got you'll hear Names like elegant themes theme forest i theme studio press And one of the sponsors for this this conference is this theme look So they all you know here you pay you might pay $50 or $100 or you know $10 or $2 I mean they're all over the board, but it's a paid theme The advantage of them is that that they're usually tested and bug-free and Security maintained and whatnot So as I continued on my our journey You need you know when you travel of course, you need a guidebook Right When we're all going vacation, you know, we have AAA you've got what cAA is that what it's called here You can go get a guidebook. Well, I needed somebody to guide me down building my systems So for whatever reason I had the bright idea I was going to start with my e-commerce site Now again, I'd just been to the word camp buffalo. I just learned about this thing called wordpress had never touched it And so I went on youtube and I found this guy josh jackson And he had about an almost a three hour video step by step on how to build an e-commerce site using a my My style theme So I sat down at my kitchen table I put my roku on and the tv big tv and I went start stop start stop and in a weekend I built my first e-commerce store Made no sense to me, but it was up. It was running. I had content in it I couldn't believe it would have taken me months to try to figure it out by myself But through a youtube video Step by step got me going Kathy my wife She wanted a general site. She found this woman katrina I can't think of her name Last name, but katrina she's got a whole series of videos the same thing how to create an online store with virtue and and she used it The virtue theme so two different themes my style versus versus virtue And my wife built it her general site with that I then built my general site Using my style And then in the last years or so we have discovered this woman kori ashton She's out of Texas and she's got every week she puts up up anywhere from a three to seven minute video She has drank she drinks way too much coffee. She goes 90 miles an hour But she she's got over 200 videos and they're just they're great They just you know if you got a question it's like, you know, how do I do such and such if she's got a video on it Boom, I mean, it's just short sweet right to the point get you to it Thank you very much and you go and put it So these are our these are the tour guides that we've we've been using So then of course, you know when you get to your hotel and whatnot you got unpacked You got your top kit and whatnot and these this is your plugins and your tools That you're going to use to to build your site so plugins Add functionality Typically add very specific set of features now terminology codex Codex is basically the user manual for wordpress You know took me a while to figure out what codex meant It's uh, it's uh Anything you want to go find out it's in there If you can't sleep at night go read it Uh wordpress.org is the repository or again our paid paid plugins And then there's tools like jetpack. You'll hear jetpack. You'll hear the term jetpack a lot And it's a it's a very popular major plugin created by automatic All right, and they're the people behind wordpress.com Of course, there's language barriers. I mean I flaunt with this for a while, you know Being a non-technical person It's like, all right. I know what I want to do, but I don't know what the what the call I can't even do a google search. You know, what's this thing with images that's that go by and when you bring up You know a web page. I don't know So you got to you know start to learn the terminology You know, so you got sliders. You got light boxes. You got menus. You got sidebars. You got footers I mean you just have to you know and and by attending Wordpress meetups going to word camps watching videos things like that all of a sudden that all this terminology will start to make sense But for us, you know mere mortals You know, you just don't get frustrated. Just keep participating And it will all of a sudden one day it starts to click for you So coming up with the terminology understanding basic page layouts You know, you can have a wide page. You can have a box page. You're gonna full width pages You can have sidebars, you know right side, you know both sidebar Yeah, you just these are just terminologies that you're going to have to come up and uh and understand You know, where's the menu bar sidebars? Image sliders image galleries That's a whole another topic Forms, you know, these are all things you just have to kind of you know muddle through Um, is this making sense? Yeah. Yeah So what are some of the major tripping and stumbling points because after all wordpress is easy All right Okay The big thing I found is media All right. Here's a media page All right So I've got images. I've got PDFs you know I've got Articles that I've written white papers you can download I mean, so every one of these pictures I've got to take the picture. I've got videos a sound pdf But every one of these things I've had to edit Crop I mean it just takes time to do all the back end work Actually deploying and filling out your you know the information on wool commerce is pretty easy Once I get everything ready for it So The next thing you got to do when you're traveling or you're all settled in you're in a just new New project a new visiting a new site you got to get your maps out and figure out where you're going to go right so Where do you go to get information? wordpress.org of course wordpress.tv so every word camp They're videoing me right now And and who knows at some point this will be put up on wordpress tv So you can search any word camp Any presentation you've heard about some good presentation in Ottawa or whatever You can go see it and watch it on your on your computer Google's your friend Just you know, how do I? wordpress Question mark and it will go you'll find it for you You YouTube has been wonderful Great place to get information books of course Your local meetup groups And word camps. I mean the fact that you're all here at a word camp is is is great, you know You're here to get information meet people Have questions answered so Booking your hotel All right, I go put up a website now what I do I got to go register a domain name So one of the sponsors for this event wordpress is a community for those are brandy new It's open source software Which means it's more or less free And there's a whole community That supports you and and helps you in this environment It's funded, you know, this this event is funded by sponsors So, you know, we need to support our sponsors and things like that. So out there in the lobby is is hover That's a place you can go register your domain name. That's how you get your dot ca Then you have your hosting companies and you've heard, you know, blue host site ground dream host These are all, you know dream host blue host Green geeks go daddy. They're all Help pay for this event All right, this their business is to host websites So you have your register your url And then I got to go pay somebody to host my website and do the wordpress install Then I can go build my site. All right. I got to put it someplace So even though wordpress might be free you're going to pay, you know, 5 10 12 bucks a month to one of these companies To house your website. You're going to pay an annual fee to register your url But in the scheme of things, it's, you know, very inexpensive I we happen to use um site ground It's in, uh, Bulgaria. A lot of us in Rochester use them. They've been wonderful High reliability. I can call them 7 by 24 You get to talk to somebody who has usually pretty good English and they um, um, I've been very responsive and And it's just a good company to work for work with So again, wordpress is free But you do have to pay to to house it and whatnot So of course Then we have a problem of how do I do currency exchange? All right, how do I you know if I want to put up an e-commerce store How do I how do I you know move money into my bank account? So The big guy is WooCommerce there's and The nice thing about WooCommerce is, you know, you basically house all your information. It's on your site. It's in your database Equid is a third party That's you know, if you've got a little smaller, uh, you know number of quantity of items you can use But that's actually outside. So, you know, if you've ever been to uh, a site where you want to go Do a PayPal payment and it leaves the site takes you to PayPal and then brings you back Like you have the postal service does that. Okay, you know, I want to go pay for it You know, I want to ship a package. I want to go pay for it with PayPal. It takes me to PayPal and then brings me back Equid does the same thing All right, WooCommerce. They never leave your site So the issue with putting up an e-commerce site is that image editing is takes the most time I mean, it's just a bear Sure Do either of these cost money I'm using a free version of WooCommerce If you need additional advanced functionality, you may have to buy purchase a plugin Um, I think the same thing. I think there's a free version for, you know 10 or 20 items and then, you know, you get above that then you have to pay so Your image editing takes the most time Get a photo booth You can't stress enough. You got to have quality photos You know, you can't be you know, if how many people are like In the craft business selling jewelry or stuff like that anybody like that You know anybody want to sell stuff like that? Oh never mind. We'll continue right Yeah, yeah, yeah, light box, you know, you know photo booth is a little You know, huh? Yeah, light box. It's a white box It's white And it just gives you it allows you to take a clear photograph You know without a lot of glare and things like that Now 72 dpi, that's all you need for your images We had a store recently in Rochester that Put up their new website Because I think somebody's daughter or whatever wanted wanted to be the web developer web designer The first page it was taking 10 minutes to load the first image. It was so big just because you have a camera They can take a 36 gigabyte image doesn't mean you need a 36 gigabyte image 72 dpi And in wordpress 500 by 500 dpi is very common. You don't need to go much bigger than that Now I use gimp, which is a open source Image editing package. It's like photoshop, but it's free I use about 0.001 percent of its capability because I basically crop and resize And maybe I do a little image enhancement I use fastone capture fastone capture. You can take a whole bunch of images So I'm making these little drop spindles. That's a stick with a whirl on it that you twist to put Twist and fiber You know, so I'm taking photographs. I you know, I'll set up. I might shoot 30 of them I'll then crop them And then I'll run them through fastone capture, which will convert them to 72 dpi by 500 by 500 And put it in a png format for me and it will do all 30 of them in about 20 seconds So I mean it's great. It's just a nice tool to do a you know a bulk Conversion of images and then colorzilla is a Picking tool It's just an add-on you can put on google so that you know If you're trying to match a color on a different website or whatever you can you can pick it These are all windows They may be available for mac 2. I don't know But they've been you know again very helpful so When you're traveling of course I would recommend keeping a journal This is my book wordpress the website wordpress And I started out first first page 9 13 14 word camp buffalo And every meeting I've gone to and every You know anything I've gone to or attended or video that I watched and made sense or whatever I got a page in here with a note And I can go back and reference it. So you want to keep a journal You know keep tips in there Uh, you can list out, you know, you hear about a cool plugin. You want to go investigate or whatever just kind of write it down Put your corporate standards in it All right, you're going to come up with a logo. What are your corporate colors? Things like that, you know, you want you don't want to be you know You want to be able to get that stuff quickly Have it quickly at your fingertips You maybe there's some logins your vendors your renewal dates things like that And most importantly, how do you how you did something? You know, how did I do this? I just did something that was great. You know, you want to document it Now safety tips when you're traveling, of course, you're all familiar with money belts and things like that How do you keep your information safe? Can't stress enough the importance of a child theme So How do I describe this? Bring We'll tell you, okay Uh, I bring up wordpress. It's got my standard, uh, you know 2016 or 2017 or 2018 theme I go out. I install the virtue theme because I like to look and feel a virtue I'm not recommending that. I'm just it's one I know. All right, so bring up virtue And I can just build my website like that and if I'm you know beginner And I'm not mucking with it. You know, I'm trying to do any kind of customization or whatever Perfectly fine Well, you know every month or every two months you're going to get an update to work to wordpress You're going to get an update to the virtue theme And if I've done, you know, nothing if I've done no real customization And The theme gets updated. No problem but Whenever you're doing something it's like, okay, I got three buttons here and and in the theme they come as green Well, I want them blue because that's my corporate color So I've gone in And in the beginning I didn't know how to do it. I wordpress one of our meetup groups I said, how do I change these buttons from green to blue and Michelle Ames who just spoke before me. She went over and sat down and said well here Here's the code line and you change this number to this number. It's now blue Well, I've changed the modified the css All right, but I showed you earlier the two different screenshots. So I've modified the css That's fine but If I get a new update for my theme it will rewrite that So I've lost that work So we do what we do is we create something. It's called a child theme It's basically a duplicate Or us, you know, it's it's a child of your basic theme and there's a plug-in that says create child themes. Yeah Right, you know, you install the plug-in and you say create me a child theme and it goes out and create you a child theme Now when you do your edits, it's all done in the child theme in the css and the child theme but when you Install an update to the theme it just updates the theme and you haven't lost all your edits So very very important that if you're going to do any kind of customization Tweaking moving changing padding Whatever that you do it in a child theme To create the child theme And then in your in your listing on the sidebar here, there's themes. You'll see my style dash child Or virtue dash child It will tell you I'll I'll come back to that image and show you I'm sorry No, I am up all the the child themes again. I'm not real technical how this works, but basically It updates when you do an update you're updating the parent theme And all your edits are would stay within the child theme So when a web browser calls it it brings up the The theme and then it brings up the the display of the theme and then the display of the of the edits Yep, yes, yes So you always if you're going to do any kind of customization to a website to your website You want to do it in a child theme The other thing is back up back up back up You can't stress enough because you will get hacked You will do something stupid Stuff happens There's going to be an update to a plugin and it's going to whack your site or whatever you need to be able to roll back to a backup and there's plugins that you can put in to um You know do that help you know back up your site don't read don't Depend just on your hosting services backup so When I showed you the picture of the image and it says I need five updates for my plugins Before I would update any of those I make a backup By pressing a button because I've installed a plugin Press the button that says make a backup. It goes out takes 10 minutes makes a backup puts a copy up on my drop box Okay Now I can go install the the updates to my plugin