Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

OKC WordPress Users’ Group March 2011 Meeting Notes

These are my notes from the March 28, 2010 Oklahoma City WordPress User’s Group meeting held on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond. Our group meets the last Monday evening of every month. My thoughts and comments are in all caps. I presented on mobile tools for posting to WordPress (including Posterous) and will share the audio recoding of that later as a podcast on Fuel for Educational Change Agents soon. (I ACKNOWLEDGE I FELL OFF THE PODCASTING WAGON IN MARCH AND PROMISE TO GET BACK ON SOON!)

Our first session on plugins was shared by Lynn Dye.

Some good plugins for WordPress
Akismet for Spam Control (note only personal sites are free, payment plans are available for non-personal sites)
– WordPress Backup: Backup Buddy

SEO
Google XML Sitemaps
WordPress All in One SEO Pack
HeadSpace 2
SEO Smart Links

Linking to yourself too much is considered a bad thing by Google and perhaps other search engines for indexing

Cool Plugins

After the Deadline (checks spelling, style and grammar)
Block Spam by Math
ServerBuddy (tests server configuration and compatibility with themes / plugins
WP Smush.it (reduce image file sizes)
WP Touch (iOS optimized theme)

Other Resources
15 Best WordPress Plugins to use in 2011
Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins
iThemes has a number of free Plugins

WordPress Stickers Everywherephoto © 2009 John Fischer | more info (via: Wylio)

(I shared a session on “Mobile Blogging to WordPress via Posterous, WordPress for iOS and BlogPress” – podcast audio coming!)
– I shared OnSwipe briefly too, a new theme in beta for iPad compatibility

Tim Priebe shared our last session (I HAD TO LEAVE EARLY AND MISSED ABOUT HALF OF THIS)

Fix Your Ugly Website: Minor Tweaks to Make Your Website Look Good
– text and fonts
– spacing
– colors
– graphics

Number of fonts
– rule of thumb: 2 (headlines and body text)

Link Colors:
– if you CAN use blue for links in your color scheme, design studies have shown it’s a good thing to do

Font Size
– 10 pixels is too small for reading generally
– 14 pixels is a good guidelines
– Google uses 13 pixels for their site descriptions on search results

Text and Background color
– use good contrast

Colors
– generally use 2-3 primary colors, but make sure they complement each other

Gradients
– only 1 or 2 gradients at a max
– cleaner look with fewer gradients

Great resources
hypergurl.com
– can enter hex code, and will generate color scheme around it

colorschemedesigner.com

DeGraeve.com creates a color scheme around a photo

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