Wordpress Tutorials

Have you heard people complain that Windows computers get more viruses and Apple computers?

There are many reasons for that but one of the ones most commonly stated is that there are just so many more Windows computers out there. They make a much more inviting target. The same is true with WordPress sites. They make up around 2% of all websites and so are a very attractive target. It’s common for WordPress beginners to end up with 100s of spam comments on their posts.

The solution? Akismet.com. They provide a great spam-blocking service. You’ll need it … around 83% of all comments are spam.

Continue reading “How to Block Spam Comments in WordPress”

We teach three kinds of website software: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. At each class people bring different preconceived notions:

• Drupal: “This stuff is really hard, right?”
• Joomla: “This stuff is a quirky, right?”
• WordPress: “This stuff isn’t very powerful, right?”

Our job is to convince them they’re wrong. One of the reasons people think WordPress isn’t powerful is because they believe it can’t be used to build an ordinary website with static pages.

Continue reading “Using WordPress as a CMS”

Unlike Joomla or Drupal, WordPress doesn’t have a default contact form. However, there are many good options to choose from.

We’re going to recommend a plugin called “Contact Form 7”.

Continue reading “WordPress Contact Form Tutorial”

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your WordPress site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate WordPress post. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

• Distributing our content to other WordPress sites.
• Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We’re going to use a plugin called FeedWordPress.

Continue reading “Importing RSS Feeds Into WordPress Posts”

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to place add “Print This Post” button to WordPress. The main reason you’d want do this is as a courtesy for your readers. Many still print things they read online and you don’t want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the post.

This is a themed tutorial because our sister newsletter with Drupal tutorials is covering the same topic this week: Creating Printer-friendly Versions of Drupal Articles.

Without this solution you’d likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles specifically for the printed page.  Fortunately the WP-Print plugin makes this much easier. It will automatically create a printer-friendly version of each post.

Continue reading “Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts”

Why Add a Sitemap?

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t believe sitemaps improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more pages get indexed and that they get indexed more quickly. This article presents evidence that the difference is astounding:

• Google with a sitemap: 14 minutes
• Google without a sitemap: 1375 minutes
• Yahoo with a sitemap: 245 minutes
• Yahoo without a sitemap: 1773 minutes
  

Continue reading “Add a Sitemap to Your WordPress Site”