Lessons
Day 1
1What Can WordPress Do?
07:49 2WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
10:41 3Domains and Hosting
08:14 4Domains Q&A
10:00 5Demo: 1-Click Install on HostGator
08:53 6Audience Q&A
38:03 7WordPress Dashboard Oveview
32:31WordPress Dashboard: Settings
33:22 9Audience Q&A
03:42 10Working with Posts
33:44 11Working with Pages
30:46 12Audience Q&A
34:57 13Using WordPress Plug-ins
44:26 14WordPress Themes
27:13 15Final Q&A
04:05Day 2
16Managing Your Media
35:20 17Managing Your Media Q&A
05:48 18Working with Video
09:39 19Top 5 Photo Plug-ins
19:57 20Top 5 Themes for Video
13:56 21Top 5 Video Plug-ins
10:37 22Creating a Discussion
09:53 23Moderating Comments
12:26 24Creating Ratings and Polls
11:27 25Purchasing a Theme
17:58 26Customizing a Theme
08:23 27Editing Code for Non-Geeks
24:54 28Customizing Themes Q&A
07:43 29CSS Crash Course
24:15 30Using the WordPress Codex
13:13 31Creating and Using Menus
08:28 32Lightbox Plugins
13:13 33WordPress Codex, Menus and Plugins Q&A
08:43 34General WordPress Q&A
10:17 35Optimizing Images for the Web in Photoshop
32:30 36Optimizing Images Q&A
10:56 37Displaying High Resolution Images on the Web
11:35Day 3
38Protecting Images Online
22:06 39Adding Watermarks
17:56 40Copywriting Images
08:40 41SEO 101
24:00 42Engaging Your Audience
05:26 43URL Shortening
09:54 44Exporting/Importing WordPress Data
10:33 45Backing Up WordPress
13:26 46Security 101
24:20 47Spotting Trustworthy Themes/Plugins
24:32 48Trustworthy Themes/Plugins Q&A
21:13 49Battling Spam
18:38 50Dealing with a Hacked Site
15:41 51Protecting Your Site
10:46 52Using Web Fonts
24:08 53Web Fonts Q&A
11:36 54Thanks + Credits
04:04 55Monetizing Your Content
24:55 56Final Q&A
28:31Lesson Info
WordPress Codex, Menus and Plugins Q&A
question from Rose. Seven. Why do you upload images if you already have them in your media library? I'm just uploading Teoh. Show you how to upload. You know, we've already got those images and they're obviously I could have just used them from my media library. But I want to show you how to upload him from your from a computer. During would like to know, can light boxes be used with videos as well as photos? In some cases, yes, there are some plugging that support it more than others. It just depends. You have to look in the documentation to make sure it supports it. There's a lot of teams that will pop up videos in a light box to just look for a theme that do it well. Question from G Feller Studio This may have already been asked, but is there a limit to plug ins one should install on a site? There's no limit, but I'd be careful about installing too many. I mean, how many is too many is kind of subjective, but you know, when you get to a point where you're running like hundreds and h...
undreds of chickens, you're probably gonna have a really slow site because those air constantly making database queries and all kind of stuff. Question from Sam Cox. Is there a quicker, easy way of knowing what kinds of things require plug ins themes? CSS edits PHP code and so on? Or does this knowledge just come with experience? You know, we're kind of talking about that. It will come a little bit with experience, but you also have to understand the limitations of WordPress itself. So you know wordpress as it is out of the box. Everything you saw me do on Day one was pretty much WordPress out of the box. If if I if I'm showing you how to do it via a plug in, chances are WordPress doesn't do it by default. So that's that's kind of the nature of the beast. WordPress is meant to be more of a content production thing than, um, it is to be this whiz bang bells and whistles thing that we're turning it into with all of these themes and plug it right. If they if you know, in a developer centric world, WordPress would be that basic theme that you just blogged on all day long, right? But people have found ways to extend it and do all these stuff with co plug ins and everything. And so that's that's kind of the short answer there. Like I said, it will come with experience. You'll kind of figure out what WordPress doesn't do that by default. I have toe. I have to get a plug in for that. Well, a za follow up to that. It just seems like there are a lot of things that a theme will do that a plug in will also do. It seems like every every control feature in the WordPress environment kind of overlaps other things. And so I think that's where the confusion comes in. Yeah, I'm totally confused. I think I'll never get it until I go in there. There's a lot of there's gonna be a lot of overlap, depending on you know what you're trying to do? Number one and the number two. Okay. If you can find a theme that fits, you know, your functional needs, your aesthetic needs and everything else you can find that and that theme doesn't have a light box supporting it, necessarily. Okay, then, you know. OK, I need to go find a lightbox plugging right or if the theme does video. But it doesn't do social networking icons at the bottom of each post. Okay, I gotta find a plug in to do that. So what you need to do eating to spend a lot of time in the theme itself before you buy it, just looking at everything. And it's not even necessarily because there are some themes that come pre built with stuff that if I can find the theme, let me find it. A lot of teams that come pre built with stuff in them that otherwise plug ins would do. There's a lot of teams that don't, for instance, this team right here and this is the theme that I use on my personal site. This right here, it's automatically got the tweet button built in. A lot of teams don't have that, but the fact that it had that made it a lot easier for me. One thing it did not have was the Google plus button. If you go to my site, I have a group plus button at the bottom of each one of my posts had to use a plug in for that because this theme didn't support it. But this theme did support things like, you know, the featured images on the front like I like it had the layout that I wanted and so forth. So this is a great theme for what I was trying to do, but I did have to extend it in certain ways. Um, I spent a lot of time figuring out which they might want it. I've gone through three or four of his themes, actually, before I decided on one of them that worked for me. Um, and it may come down to the point and don't get like me where I Because I buy themes like, you know, candy. So But I do that because I like to try them, and I like to teach them and, you know, teach people how to use them. And so, you know, do your homework. If you want to buy him and try and go ahead eventually you'll have some kind of use for him. I've never bought a fame that is just set on the show. I found a use for it at some point. Yeah, so if nothing else, all snippet code from one to the other. So So you mentioned the Google plus button. Now on a static page, I would just go out to Google plus or whatever, and find a little piece of code. They want me toe put for button and put it on my on my pages. Sure you can't just do that? You can. You can do that, but you'll have to put it into the theme files. OK, But you said you used a phrase like going to do that. It puts it at the end of each one of my posts so that I don't have to do that. Okay, now, just a you know, and a lot of people would rather do it through a blood. And I think that going and finding a code snippet people that don't know about code snippets or whatever. So I chose to do it through a plug in simply because I was in a hurry trying to get my site up and running. Yeah, before I moved. So got you. Yeah. It is a time issue more than anything. Justin, can we ask Texas's question? Sure. Okay. I'm gonna get there. We're going to get there, OK, he asked. Or she asked, How do you create a specific menu for a sub page like, for example, under the About me page? And then they also say they'd like to create a menu that shows only on a sub page different from the main menu and specific to the sub page content. Okay, yes, I understand that now. Okay, so basically, what you're wanting to know is if I have something like underneath here, right or let's say, Mike, one of my categories here to do Alright, so I've got my categories. So like, let's say this is the page photos or something. And when I click on the photos paid, you would like for there to be another contextual menu on the next page telling me something about that page I get that the thing about that is you will have to develop a page template in order to do that, and the page template will then have to be applied to that page when you look at the the WordPress Codex. If you go to codex dot wordpress dot org's slash pages, it will explain to you, and it used to be in the middle. They may have moved it down a little bit. Page template Cerritos. It's about midway down page templates. It will explain to you the ins and outs of doing different templates. You will have to put a code snippet at the top of it. That looks like this, um, snore for I always laugh at that. I don't know why they call it snarf orbit. Um, if you're a big Thundercats fan, you know what Snarf is? Um, anybody know. Really? Thundercats? Yes, I love snarf. I have a snarf action figure. I bought it at a store last week was awesome. Anyway, Uh, okay, keep moment over. All right. So, basically, you'd have to create your own page template. And in that page template would have to be support for another menu system. And then in that menu, you could, you know, build that many yourself. Um, you know, hit me up any time, like offline or something like that. And I can I can kind of help you walk through that. We don't have time to go through the process of that, but if you send me a contact message to my website or something, I can help you out with that. Okay. All right. So we've covered how to do a lot of stuff, right? There's a couple things we haven't gotten into that we're going to get into when we get back from break. We got break here in about 10 minutes, but, um, the last part of the day is gonna be all be about the preparing images for use on the Web with photo shop. So today, you know, we've done a lot with images. I've I've let wordpress do the re sizing of the WordPress do the processing and all that kind of stuff, and that's great if you're, you know, needing a quick and easy solution. But photo shop or light room or Photoshopped elements or fireworks are in the other type of image editing application. Chances are they have a better re sizing algorithm that more press does
Class Materials
bonus material with enrollment
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
I watched all three days of the course. I am a photographer. The course was titled WordPress for Photographers. Only about 5% of the course was tailored to photographers. Most of the content and discussion was for pro website consultants and bloggers. That aside, Mr. Seeley is so well versed in what he knows well. Imagine sitting in front of the camera for 3 straight days remaining articulate and very professional! The class was really presented for bloggers, not photographers. An example of this is on day 3 where the presenter, after talking about photographers' concerns for an hour or two, said he wanted to transition out of photography into blogging. The class seemed short on the type of content that photographers need. It would have served photographers better if the students present in the studio were all photographers. Discussions on watermarking, photo file size and image theft/copyright infringement showed that Mr. Seeley's background in the needs of photographers is lacking, while his expertise in graphics and web design are VERY impressive. Too much of the class time was devoted to answering narrowly focused tech support questions from people other than photographers. It was a wonderful class for the audience that hijacked it, but it should have been titled and described differently if it was intended for web-blog designers. I really liked the energy, humor, and expertise of Mr. Seeley but the class was too-often off-mission. On day 1, it would have been very productive to show a photographer's WP website that was esthetically beautiful and had all the bells and whistles photographers are looking for. Then explain how you get from nothing to the final website using WordPress. That would have met the needs of pro photographers!
Shannon
Justin is an excellent presenter. He's easy to listen to and it's obvious he knows his stuff. As a presenter/trainer, I really appreciated his ability to stick with his outline while he fielded questions, both off and on topic. It takes some balancing to do that. He was good at noting questions that were too far afield and I think he actually answered all of them by the end of the three days. I would definitely attend more classes presented by him. Thanks, Justin and CreativeLIVE.
a Creativelive Student
Amazing class! Superb presentation! Justin kept the technical geek-speak to a minimal and made the entire class easy to understand and fun! I think this class should be called Wordpress for the Non-Geek! (As others have said there was not a lot of information specific to photographers, but when it was referenced there was great examples and information provided!)