 Ych yn ystafell ar gyfer mae'r ffantiau. Felly, rwyf wedi gweithio'r g original, y gallwn y tuch yn gweithio'r ffantiau. Ac rydw i'n creu pa amngodol fe ddim yn serfio'r gweithio a'r rhai'r ffantiau. Ac rydw i'n creu pa arall, ac rydw i'n creu pa'r gweithio, neu mae'r ffantiau i mi gyfnodol wedi'u gweld o'r cyfact. Mae nawr fel unrhyw ar y cyfacto'r cyflosol yn cyfio hynny. Ond, cymryd y ffordd o bobl yn ymweld y maen i gweithio gyda gwybod yn gweithio gweithio gwybod. Yn gweithio gweithio gwybod, y cyfwyrd yn gweithio gwybod, os ymweld y ddau'r barwyr ydych yn cael ei wneud. Mae'r ffordd y tutoriol hyn yn bwyntio'r barwyr o'r cyd-fawr, sy'n ei gweithio'r ffordd o'i ddau'r ffordd o'r cymryd. Mae'n ffordd o'r ffordd o'r cyfwyrd yn fwyaf i wneud o'r gweithio gwybod yn maen i gwybod. Felly, mae'n ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud yn ymdill, mae'n ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud yn ymdill, ddweud hefyd yn y ddweud eich ddweud. Ond, ydyn ni'n ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud i'r peth, ymwneud, yw'r wrthoedd, ymdill, yw'r ddweud, ymdill yw'r健 i'r odd yma, dyma'r cyfnod hynny yn ystod. Mae'n ddweud fel gweinol, Ac nid ydych chi'n gweithio'r problemau. Yn y gweithio'r hyffordd, ydych chi'n gweithio'r hyffordd. Can I get a hands up if you've ever published a WordPress tutorial? Cool. And if you're aspiring to publish your WordPress tutorial? Okay, interesting. Great. It's a good mix. I'm going to try and mix in something for everybody in the next half hour. I'll say, my name's Alex though. I've been writing WordPress tutorials since I was about 15 because I was an exceptionally cool teenager. So I had a website about video games because teenager video games, it's perfect. And I realised I could get sent free video games if I caught myself press and this was like 2008, 2009. And there were a few enough blogs around that having a website was unique enough that you could get away with emailing, PR companies being like, hello, I am the games review industry. Please send me free video games. Incredibly, this works. But as more people started making their own sites and this is running WordPress 2.5 or something, it was terrible to use. But you wanted to be able to differentiate. So I wanted to learn how to customise my website. But being 15 years old, I was not going to pay anyone to do that. Which meant I had to teach myself. So I started googling and trying to find these WordPress tutorials. I eventually found a website called WordPress Hacks. This was back in the day when you didn't get in trouble for using WordPress in your domain name. WordPress Hacks was kind of the spiritual predecessor to post status and WP talent. It sadly now defunct. But it had these wonderfully clear tutorials. This was kind of the first place, I think, that was widely publishing WordPress tutorials. And it took a problem. These are problems that I was having with my website. And it told you how to solve them. And so, you know, follow these tutorials, go out and solve these problems. And I remember I found this website just after I'd finished saving up for years to buy a laptop. And I literally stayed under the covers all night reading these WordPress tutorials. I'm just getting blank faces of how cool I was as a teenager. Eventually I started, you know, solving these problems and solving the problems faster than people were making the tutorials. So I started thinking I could write these myself. So that's what I set out to do. I started writing for WordPress Hacks. And eventually I set out my own site, which was called WP Shout, which I ran for about five years. Before I started university. In the meantime, I've written WordPress tutorials, documentation, video screencasts, all that for places like Smashing Magazine, Themify, WT Zoom, my Theme Shop, a bunch of other places. So basically I've just written a lot of WordPress tutorials. And I'm just going to share all of that knowledge with you in the next half an hour. Currently I'm a full-time student, part-time freelancer, which makes me a time management enthusiast. So if anyone wants to talk about the Pomodoro Technique, you know, come and find me afterwards. Yeah, so this is going to be kind of technical, but kind of fun. It's the final session in what's been a really great conference. We're going to be so excited about WordPress tutorials by the end of this. Yeah, so the first thing you need is a topic. You need to know what you're going to write about. It's likely if you're doing any sort of WordPress work, you're going to be finding problems. And either other people won't have solved these problems before, or other people will have solved them, but they won't have told anyone about it. And there's kind of an information gap. We'll call it the information gap, where this stuff doesn't exist. And these are the best WordPress tutorials to write when nobody else has written about the thing that you've solved. And as you come across these things, I'd encourage you to write them down and then go back and write them. And if you're kind of fine publishing sporadically, then that's fine, because you're kind of waiting for inspiration to strike, to strike, but you're relying on that happening to get ideas for your post. So, if you're wanting to publish more regularly, which I'd definitely encourage everyone to do, because it kind of maximises like your community output, you might like to make more concerted effort to come up with ideas. And there are a number of ways of doing this. The first one I recommend is simply asking people. And this is literally what it sounds like. It's really interesting. There's a guy called Sean McCabe who runs a very interesting business podcast at seanwes.com. And he recommends, if you have an email list on your site, when people sign up for that in the confirmation that they get, you ask people what they're struggling with. And you tell them that you'll reply and you can start a conversation that way. And that really gives you kind of an unlimited list of things to write about. And that really gives you an unlimited list of things to write about. Because it connects you with people who are directly having problems. If you're less keen on email, you might like to just ask on Twitter or Facebook. Or you can use forums like Cora, the WordPress subreddit, WP questions. Just find out generally what people actually want to know. And if you're looking to write consistently every week, maybe it would be a good schedule to try and set. Then sitting down, blocking out like an hour and writing as many post ideas as you can, will make starting writing so much easier when you come to actually do that. I like this quote from Maria Popover, who runs the exceptionally interesting brain picking store. She says, write for yourself, the key to being interesting is being interested and enthusiastic about those interests. This was on an interview with Tim Ferriss. If you google it, you'll find it. This is really interesting. You want to write about what you're interested in. But it's important to contrast it with this from Professor Will McCaskill, who's at Oxford University. He runs one of the fastest growing charities in the UK. He says, follow your passion. It's the stupidest career advice I've ever heard. Here's my slogan, do something valuable. You often hear these two thrown around, like the big P passion word. What does that mean? I think realistically, you've got to look somewhere in the middle. You want to write about things you're actually interested in, but you've got to make sure that someone actually wants to read it. Essentially. Certainly when I was running WP Shout, which I built is more like a, mainly on a development base, and then I decided, you know, I'm not interested in that anymore. I will write about what I want. That kind of went down terribly. I would recommend trying to keep a balance on that. The next step then, once you've chosen what to write about, is probably the biggest thing that you're missing that has the capacity to transform your writing. You need to plan and structure before you start writing. If you take nothing else away from this, then please start planning. A plan can be anything as simple as getting a piece of paper and setting out the problem that you're going to explain and explain what you're going to do about it. That's kind of the introduction. You want to then offer a solution. That's the main body of the text. You want to discuss alternatives and why the option that you've chosen is best. So you kind of look at alternative ways of doing it. And then you want to have a conclusion. You want to wrap up. Just summarise the main points that you've learned, but really don't forget the conclusion, because that's an exceptionally important point for making sure that people actually take away from your writing what you're trying to tell them. And then you're done. And it's that simple. Or if you're writing a longer tutorial with more nuanced points, you'll want to spend more time in the middle section properly planning out the different arguments and different points you're going to make. You can just bullet point it. The detail can be really light at this stage. That can come with writing. The important thing with a plan is to signpost what you're going to say. So when you start writing, especially, this really helps if you're perhaps not comfortable writing. If you've got a really good plan, once you start to write, you're essentially just filling in the gaps, and it's really easy. So if you're not so happy writing, then this really, really does help. And you often hear that content is king, but actually planning is king, because to get to the stage where you've got your king content, you've got to have king planning. And that's something that I would really encourage you to start doing. So now we've decided what we're going to write about and planned out specifically what we're going to be saying. The next stage is to write it. And there are a lot of tools available to do this. I certainly have spent too long, too much time and too much money on very expensive writing tools. I would not encourage you to do that. I would encourage you just to get on with writing. And the WordPress Post Editor is perfectly great for writing blog posts. It's specifically designed for that. Really, you can spend so much time looking for different writing tools that just get on with it, really. The only caveat is if you want to use Markdown, which is a web-specific writing language, then either use Markdown Pad on Windows, or Ulysees on Mac. Those are the tools to go for. Obviously, Markdown Pad on Windows is free and Ulysees on Mac is unreasonably expensive. But you'll just have to deal with that, I'm afraid. So you're starting to write. You want to make sure your writing is accessible. And that means two things. You want to make it easy to read and comprehend and easily accessible to people using screen readers and with access difficulties. And you achieve the first by using simple language. Don't overcomplicate. Don't use unnecessarily long sentence structures or vocabulary, lots of paragraph breaks, not massive chunks of text. And if you actually want to check how accessible your writing is, there's an app called Hemingway, which you'll find at Hemingwayapp.com. You paste in what you've written and then you'll then be told which school grade is required to read what you've written. It's not perfect and I, to be honest, wouldn't do everything it tells you. But it's a useful starting point and you can see just in the corner. This is Hemingway writing what I've just said. And it's saying that you need about grade eight. That's the US, so it's like year eight or nine. 13-year-old kids in the UK. And the aim here isn't to ensure that children are okay reading what you've written, although going back to 15-year-old me, obviously that's very important. The aim is to ensure that those with a wide variety of comprehension abilities can easily be on the same page as you. Reading a WordPress tutorial should not be like reading war and peace. It wants to be really very simple. The other part of accessibility is making sure nobody with specific needs is going to have a problem accessing what you've written. So that's kind of obvious things. Don't put lots of text in images. Make sure you've got alt tags for your images and captions and make sure you've got a large font with good line spacing. The only other specific caveat I'd add is something to watch out for is formatting code. It's surprisingly difficult to embed code in posts in a way that looks nice now and is going to look nice in the future. I can really tell you having had hundreds of posts break because I was using a short code that broke and you've got broken code everywhere. This is really a terrible thing that you do not want to have to deal with. The solution is to use pre and code tags and you can use pre and code tags and you want to convert your code into HTML before you paste it in. So instead of having angle brackets, for example, you'd have the HTML output for angle bracket and that way WordPress isn't going to try and output your code in your post. But use these. By all means use plugins that enhance this if you want to make your code have nice colours and things. But don't use anything that replaces those. That would be my very strong recommendation because it's a right pain to have to fix all of that once it's broken. So don't worry about what you're using to write. Don't overcomplicate your writing and make sure everything's accessible. Do all this and really the writing process will be painless and beautiful. And then the next step is engagement. I feel this GIF really shows that I used to work in social media so it's one thing to write a WordPress tutorial and it can be well planned, well structured, well written and that's fine. That'll do. But the next step is writing something that's really interesting to read. And if you're writing anything of any length then engagement is important. You want to keep the reader interested throughout. And sure, your topic's going to do a lot of that and you wouldn't be reading it if they weren't interested in what you're trying to say. But you kind of want to surprise and delight the reader. What's appropriate here will depend a lot on where you're publishing but to be honest, I think all the most corporate blogs will be perfectly fine with whatever. And the three secrets here are images, memes and GIFs. And these are actually the best way of keeping readers interested as mildly childish as they are. Relevant stock images is a really useful starting point. In the last couple of years there's been a much more of a movement towards high quality stock images which is great because the stuff that people were using before was terrible. But it means it's really easy to get hold of free, really good, really high quality images. And the site length here, sitebuilderreport.com slash stock dash up is the one to use. It will search 26 of the high quality free stock image sites that you're going to use anyway, but it has it all in one place and it just makes it really easy for you. I would bookmark this now because it will make finding images much easier. Relevant memes and GIFs are also good because they can visualize a point you're trying to say. They turn into pictures, an expression or frustration you're trying to convey. And it's humorous. Memes and GIFs are funny. And that's my meme. That's my GIF with the visualization of the realization that I am right about this. The other more subtle trick is calls to action. This is literally what it sounds like. It's kind of calling on your reader to take some action that you want them to take. And that might be integrating small tasks into your tutorial. So I just realized this is a terrible idea to keep this looping. But there's no real way of changing that now, so we'll have to deal with it. So calls to action. These are important because it's changing your tutorial from something that's been passively read to something that's actively consumed. And this is really important because in terms of learning experience and people actually taking away from what you've written, you know, your main point, this is going to make sure that they retain that knowledge. See what I mean by that? I'm going to go to the next slide and I'm going to have to rely on me memorizing this. Call to action. Change your tutorial from something that's been passively read to something that you might ask them to undertake small tasks using the example, give them a challenge, that kind of thing. Or you can simply start discussion, ask people to reply on Twitter, in the comments, email you, look at alternative ways of doing what you've done. And as I said, this is going to transform your tutorial from something that's passive to something that's active and that's going to make your learning from the reader's point of view much more effective which is fundamentally what we're trying to do here. I think I covered everything. Yeah, okay. With the content planned then, the bank's filled in from that plan, an accessible, engaging writing, all done. It's time to publish. Well, nearly. Doing publishing now, which is very easy to do, and certainly I'm guilty of finishing a blog post, finishing the last sentence, hitting publish, and then realizing, oh crap, I've got to add meta description, I've got to add featured images, I've got to add categories. Publishing straight away is a terrible idea, basically. Ideally, you're leaving 24 hours between finishing and publishing, and in that time, you're going to edit. Editing is where you transform your, like, okay content into really great content. And this is really important. And editing is often overlooked. This is kind of number two of key things that you might not be doing so much that you really want to be doing. And editing is a thing that people don't like because you've finished it, right? But it's important not to look at a complete blog post as a finished blog post. It is a draft, and you need to spend time improving that. And this happens in the editing process. There are a couple of basics you want to cover off. You want to get the spelling and grammar right. You know, like simple spell check will do the job here, but there's nothing worse than hitting publish and being, like, the first comment is, like, you misspell the word. You don't want that. Make sure you've got that right. It's built into your browser. That'll be fine. Make sure what you've written looks good where you're publishing it. So you use WordPress's preview function to check what it will look like in the place that you're publishing. You might find you need to add more paragraph breaks. You need to align your images differently. You need to resize things. Like, check all that now and make sure that we talked about earlier with accessible writing that's easy to comprehend. Make sure that what you've written fits in nicely where you're publishing it. Add style is the third point. Bold key points. Italicise for emphasis. This helps break up the text and lets people scan through what you've written because it's the sad reality. No one actually will probably read all of what you've written. People scan and, like, we all do it. And bolding key points helps people more easily get key takeaways from what you've written. Also, I said, leave 24 hours. It's because you want to kind of make sure that the blog post isn't fresh in your mind when you go back to edit because that way you're much better spot the mistakes that you've made or changes that you need to make. For longer posts, it's a little bit more involved. You're going to want to check the structure and flow of what you've written. Does each paragraph lead on to the next? Have you actually made a coherent blog post that makes sense from start to end? Like, your plan will help a lot with that. But in the editing stage, you can really make sure that what you've written is something good, which is really what we're after. The final point is not going to be something you want to hear, but you should delete a lot of what you've written. Personally, I try and delete a quarter of what I've written. And this doesn't sit too well, especially when you hear about you should write long form. Here's a killer secret. You shouldn't write long form. You should write good and long form for the sake of it is not helpful. So get rid of everything that is not necessary. Anything superfluous can go. Hemingway, which I mentioned earlier, is helpful for this. So superfluous was superfluous there. That should have gone, but I was making a point. If you can say something in short a number of words, then just do that. Do not fall into the trap of fetishising long form. You want to be fetishising good writing. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's long. It just means it's coherent and to the point. And then the final check is that all of your extras, like your featured images, your read more tags, your excerpts, your categories, your tags, make sure that they're all there. And then finally, you can hit publish. And with that, I offer you my congratulations because you've not only written the WordPress tutorial and shared your knowledge, but you've written kind of the gold standard for helping strangers on the internet. And that's really the aim here. You want to choose a topic. You want to intersect what you're interested in with what people actually need. Think about those two quotes about what you're passionate about versus what adds value. You want to plan before you start writing. Get a small notebook, A5, that'll do. This doesn't have to be complicated. Just bullet point or sign post the key points you're going to be making. You want to write clearly and excessively. Don't use extraneous language. Add lots of paragraph breaks. Make it a joy to read what you've written. Because, as I said, this shouldn't be like reading war and peace. It shouldn't be difficult to read a WordPress tutorial. You want to keep readers engaged. That means exciting them with exciting images of llamas and sheep. You want to edit profusely, which means cutting out a lot of what you've written, which is not a pleasant experience, but we're going to do it from now on. Then you publish. That's really all I have to say about writing WordPress tutorials. I really would encourage you to start publishing regularly. As sad as it sounds, writing WordPress tutorials has changed my life. It got me my first job, and it provided the basis of the freelance career I'm planning on starting when I finish university in a matter of days. You know, email me. Publishing is great. As I said at the start, publishing better tutorials, fundamentally getting better at this process, is something that can make the community, the world, people's lives just generally a better place. That's really all I have to say. We can be friends on Twitter if you like, or we can just be casual acquaintances, I don't mind. I'll link these slides, and maybe I will even put the transcript up in blog post format. Obviously it will be shorter and more condensed following an extensive editing process. That's really my best wisdom on beautiful WordPress tutorials. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Alex. Top talk there to end track B. I'll open the floor up now to any questions, and if you have anything to ask, pop your hand in the air and I'll come over with a mic. Yes, here we go. Hi. Do you have any tips on writing tutorials for our clients rather than just the general reader? Right. What works great with clients is video tutorials. These don't actually have to be that complicated. You can get free software. If you've got Mac, you can do this in a quick time. If you're showing clients how to do things, then the most foolproof method is to do it and narrate it. It doesn't have to be polished, so you'll appreciate that. To be honest, it's quicker for you to spend five minutes just doing it and then the client can learn from that. Something I didn't actually mention is if I'm kind of related to that, stick animated gifs of screen caps of whatever you're doing, that can be a nice hybrid. Did you have any ideas of software to do it? I'll try to find really good ones that don't make my gifs look like Jesus did them. I wanted something really high quality to put on my website or to give them to my clients. Does one call record it? Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's free. It works. I think that's for Mac. I don't know of any for Windows. Is someone that has diagnosed learning disability and my spelling is absolutely atrocious, even not for lack of effort. I slip past every time, every spell checker out there. Is there a way you would recommend addressing the audience in a consistent way to help them be more forgiving of that? I know for me it's definitely kept me from writing in public forums more, even though I'd like to be able to express things and thoughts. I think personally I recommend getting an editor, get someone else to do the editing process. That sounds expensive and complicated, but I'd get one of my friends to just check over it. That would be a way of fixing that other source rather than help letting the audience relate. Equally, you could put it in your bio or whatever, but the idea is that it's solid. It's just that you have... Struggle with communication sometimes. Sorry, I find it funny. Is it my life? Sure. In my experience with friends who have difficulty getting someone to edit it is the best solution. I'd really recommend that. Just to jump in there, there are many bloggers out there who record and speak. You speak quite eloquently, and they can send that off to get transcribed. Our captioning ladies at the front might be worth... I just actually wanted to add practice. Practice, practice. Don't let it keep you from writing. The more you do, the better you get. Yeah, yeah. After the same problem, I'm dyslectic, but for me it's as well like practice. Sometimes I say a regular posting is really important, so if I don't have time, I just hire somebody who I write notes and then write everything. For me it works really good, just video tutorials because I'm pretty good at talking. I just talk. But you're getting better if you just write. If not, I just use Google to check if it's right or not. It's like a few seconds. Any more hands for a question? Maybe. You should go for it if it's a maybe, it's a yes. So, as much as the WordPress community is incredible, but you also get so much bloat in WordPress blogs and stuff. Do you think it's... What do I want to ask? So if you want to actually write almost the same blog post, but yours, you're actually writing it, maybe hopefully changing something for the better or something more modern, is it okay to ask your portfolio? So people write a lot of crap. Maybe I shouldn't say this at a WordCamp, but WordPress specific blogs publish a lot of shit. There's a lot of... Nobody needs tens of hundreds of theme roundups, but there's always a space for quality. And certainly if you think, if you see what other people are doing and you think I can do that better, go for it. Sometimes I saw that there are the exact same issue or problem or tutorial. There are different ways to write, but I also found that sometimes every person has a very different way of loving a tutorial, how it's structured, and even how it's laid out. So I guess it's not a question anymore, I think it's me thinking out loud, improvising that maybe it's good even if you don't feel guilty about rewriting something, if you think that you're writing it in a new way or more. It comes back to writing what you're interested in but adding value. If you're writing essentially the same thing, but it's got a slight edge. Or better, then by all means, I don't really have a problem with that. Thank you. Great talk, by the way. I really enjoyed it. My question carries on from the chaps over there. Hi. In terms of building on somebody else's blog post that you could write better, do you sometimes explicitly respond to other people's blog posts and say, I've added to this, here you go, what do you think of this? Do you get involved with other bloggers in that respect? It really depends. It depends to say for example someone who you know or someone else who's prominent in the WordPress community writes a thing and then you think you can do it better and you publish that. I think in that situation I would definitely directly respond, maybe reach out to them beforehand or whatever, but if someone, anyone can publish anything on the internet. I suppose I don't mean in a conflicting way. I suppose you could kind of build on that, say hey. There are ways of doing these things without just being vindictive about it. Exactly. By all means be nice. That's definitely a thing to do. But as I mentioned in structuring you do want to be discussing alternatives. You do want to be setting out why you want to be able to defend why what you've done is the best way of doing it. I suppose it's interesting to get dialogue going as well if you have difficulty. I don't mean a YouTube fight or anything like that. Constructive dialogue. Just using that is something that you see a lot in the academic world. People have very constructive discussions even with people they very strongly disagree with. It's still pleasant. So by all means do that. Just really don't be unpleasant about it. I'll be nice. Thank you. Related to the earlier question do you do any content remarketing and active promotion of your contents to get more people to visit you? How do you do that? So I could talk for a very long time about this. I kind of purposefully didn't touch on it. So where to start really? There's no point writing something that's a tutorial specifically to help people if no one is going to read it really. But if you've written good content that adds value to the WordPress community there is still truth to the idea that if you write good content people will read it. There are some really simple things you can do. Submit it to the WordPress subreddit. There's a weekly email wpmail.me. If you email the people who run that they are very good at including things and if you've written something interesting they're typically very responsive about doing that. Share it on Twitter using appropriate hashtags like relevant Slack communities, that kind of thing. There is still a lot of truth that if you publish good things people will want to read them but only because of the power of the community in general. If you don't do those things it's perfectly possible that no one will read it. I think there are some simple steps that I would recommend doing because ultimately you're not helping anyone if no one reads it. Hey, thanks for the talk. It was great. I do have a question. Somebody talked about updates and that made me think of it. You publish your tutorial and then time goes by and something changes. Or maybe somebody points out something that you overlooked or leaves a comment and you said that's really great. I guess if there's really a big change maybe you would write a follow-up article but imagine that you just want to add something after the fact. Do you have recommendations on the best most effective ways to not only format but also then communicate? I have a lot of experience with this because I wrote a lot of WordPress tutorials that got out of date and then I left them. So don't do that. There are some simple things you can do to keep it up to date. You can change the published date on your theme or whatever. Change it to show published or last updated and so when you do update it recently people will be able to see that. You can perhaps add a note at the top. Add and put it in a nice box. Use a short code or something for that. And tell people that it was originally published on this date. You've now updated it with XYZ. There's css-tricks.com. The guy who runs that Chris Coyer is very good at keeping stuff up to date and communicating how he's updated it basically. I would highly recommend checking out his stuff because that's kind of the gold standard. Tell people when you've updated it. Whether you leave the original post in full and then perhaps add changes at the top. Personally I would just delete whatever's not necessary to add new stuff in but just say you've be open that you've updated it. Thanks. Oki doki, I think that was our final question. Any more hands up? A big hand for Alex.