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
photo © 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
DeGraeve.com creates a color scheme around a photo
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