Speed Up Wordpress
Presented by @grigs
- Sprite Me spriteme.org - automatically generate sprite images and CSS rules
- Use gzip to deliver files
- Set expires headers 10 years in the future and use versioned filenames
Analytics
Presented by lorelle
- Brand your most popular and landing pages. Make sure people know you have more related content.
- look at what people are searching for to land on your site and use that to decide what kind of content to write
- woopra.com looks like a pretty full-featured analytics program, and includes live visitor tracking and chat, and includes a plugin architecture that I might have to explore later
- real-time analytics you can respond to immediately. google is up to a 12-hour delay
Matt Mullenweg
- Marketplace for themes/plugins? probably not, but GPL provides a way to sell commercially
- How did you start?
- started creating sites long ago using MS wysiwyg editors
- "at the time I was really into typography because I was just that cool" - Matt
- Texturize - "so good it makes your quotes curl"
- 90-95% of the audience use Wordpress as a CMS
- Where do you see holes in the WP community that you need help? Wordcamps! peer-to-peer help
- favorite failure of your wordpress career? "trying to do everything myself"
Wordpress as a CMS
Useful Plugins
- exclude pages
- flexipage - expanding sub-menus
- pagemash - drag and drop pages into an order
- search for custom fields, custom metadata in codex
- my page order
- my category order
- more fields - can add a custom page type to the left menu and define custom fields
- customizable post listings
- multilevel navigation plugin
What is a theme?
- a framework and a paint job
- when evaluating templates, choose an architecture first, the look second
- wpsandbox theme - completely customizable by CSS
Categories and Tags
Presented by lorelle
- brainstorm a list of topics you want to blog about
- group them into 4-5 categories
- write down 5 blog post titles/ideas under each category
- if enough posts have the same tag, it's a category
- if you can't come up with 5 ideas, it's not a category -- get rid of it!
- tags aren't indexed by anybody except technorati
<a href="http://example.com" rel="tag">Example</a>- don't let one category dominate
- avoid synonyms for categories
Blog Content for Small Business
- jot down topics during conversations for blog post ideas
- businessblogging.net
- what questions are other people asking? find question sites (yahoo answers) and write answers on your blog
- categories for posts: events, news, q&a, special offers
- what questions are you being asked?
- sign the client up for google alerts for "blue widgets" so they get alerts for news in their industry, then write a post about it
- top 9 lists - connect with audience's emotions and what they expect
- category-based or referral-based sidebar
- winery tour guides - ask specific prompts, ask for 2-3 photos specifically. make it easy for them, make it part of their job
People
- Tyler Sticka - tylersticka.com sticka.us/wcpdx09
- Amber Case - caseorganic.com @caseorganic
