Web Publishing & WordPress Introduction 16x9 draft 17

Editor's Notes

• #2: This talk may help you if you think you might want to create a web site. It is a record of the things I discovered in creating my very first WordPress website, and hopefully touches many of the things I’ll want to remember the next time I create a site with WordPress.
• #3: About 55% of all websites are created with some kind of CMS. In this talk, we will discuss what a CMS is, and why you’d want to use one. That number is growing rapidly due to the complexity of modern web design. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) requires modern web sites to be responsive and secure. This adds time and complexity to the old process of coding everything from scratch!
• #4: WordPress is the most popular CMS, used by over 60% of the sites created with a CMS. Droopal is more popular than WP for larger sites that require high performance.
• #5: Free hosting at WordPress.com does not include plugins. Note how many features require plugins! Depending on your needs, another CMS may have more of the features you want built in.
• #6: I would not pick WordPress just because it is the most popular, but if you want peer support, WordPress is a good choice. WordPress pays Meetup.com fees to list their groups. In April 2019, Google reports about 39,000,000 WordPress videos on YouTube. Just about any task is available in a video tutorial.
• #7: My number one reason to use WordPress, is that it is easy to find someone to help you! Wpbeginner is also an excellent site to learn many basics about WordPress. Another reason not listed, is that you can be well paid to create websites with WordPress.
• #8: You're not stuck with WordPress when you start with it, so it’s not a bad choice for learning a first CMS. Cms2cms.com can help you migrate a web site between a good number of content management systems.
• #9: The 9 Most Popular Free Content Management Systems page has an older sample of w3techs.com website analysis showing WordPress is gaining popularity rapidly. The last article goes into more WordPress Pros & Cons, as well as comparisons with Drupal & Joomla, which may help you decide if WordPress is right for you.
• #10: Free WordPress themes are often a teaser to get you to buy a Premium or Pro version. You might want to check that upgrade cost before investing time in a “starter” theme.
• #11: Beware of low promotional monthly fees that automatically escalate to rather high fees after an introductory period. Clout at Cost Yearly Maintenance Fee February 19, 2018 9.18 Customers with a onetime payment service are subject to an annual maintenance fee of $9 which will be invoiced 12 months after using our service. This does not apply to users that have a monthly paid service. This Maintenance fee will ensure proper hardware upgrades and maintenance to reduce degradation of onetime payment services. cPanel-WHM Reseller 10 (11 websites, the reseller gets a sales site too!) Domain Names10 Disk Space100 GB Data Transfer5TB Email Addresses100 MySQL Databases100 cPanel AccessYes WHM ResellerYes Custom Name serversYes Term Length: One TimePrice Per Term:$35.00
• #12: Before buying a hosting package, try running WordPress on your own computer. Edit your hosts files to use any domain name you like! These icons are just a handful of packages you can add to XAMPP (pronounced shamp) with a single .exe installer, however there are many other web servers that will run WordPress on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• #13: I thought I’d found the ultimate bargain in web hosting, but their server is not up to the average load of the customer base they have put on it. Still, many of their other services like unlimited free cloud storage for file sharing, and email forwarding for a domain work just fine.
• #14: Cpanel features vary from provider to provider. Cloud at Cost seems to include just about everything, except load balanced servers.
• #15: If you search online for web hosting bargains, you will find very little of use as the expensive options usually get top billing. I created a blog page to serve as a single record of the best deals around. http://www.free-webhosts.com/ Has one of the better lists, but the number of providers has dropped from the thousands to about 100.
• #16: 000webhost is one of the highest ranked and most useful free hosting providers. I wrote some simple JavaScript to demonstrate that it is possible to remove their branding ad they inject on every web page. I suppose it would be more fair to remove it after allowing it to be viewed for 5 or 10 seconds before it goes away. This would be a trivial addition to the code, left as an exercise for the reader. Hint, see the Window setTimeout() Method article at W3Schools.com! (How to code with copy and paste! ;-)
• #17: While there are many places you can buy a domain name, Freemom is my favorite, and you can probably tell why by looking at their pricing if you have shopped anywhere else. Many providers charge extra to keep your contact information private. Warning! Registering a domain, for even a few hours without privacy, can result in hundreds of spam emails and phone calls from web developers. (Annoying personal experience!)
• #18: You don’t always need your own domain to publish online. Google Chrome SSL paranoia is making subdomain use harder, as Chrome labels any site sharing an IP (ie. a subdomain certificate) as DANGEROUS! See a workaround on the 2nd last slide: https://troubleshooter.xyz/wiki/fix-ssl-certificate-error-google-chrome/
• #19: These humorous examples of real domain names may serve as a caution when selecting your own. You can use a dash instead of a space in a domain name!
• #20: Please reference the links for more detail on these terms, and the functions they represent. Posts, pages, and many of these terms have specific uses in the context of WordPress.
• #21: Before you even install WordPress for the first time, you should know to avoid the default administrator account name admin. It is the most common target for hacking your account for SEO and SPAM purposes.
• #23: When I first saw the WordPress dashboard, I thought this is the way I'd like to manage a website. However, there are a few things I have trouble remembering where they are in the menus, like the dashboard settings, which are under Users (used mostly to manage subscribers to the site) rather than Settings which manages site settings, not user settings.
• #24: WordPress was originally written to create blogs. I find this slide handy to remember how to make the site look like a regular website rather than a blog site.
• #25: Finding a robust and free WordPress theme can be like finding a needle in a haystack of teaser themes intended to get you to buy a Pro or Premium version. If anyone knows of a single free WordPress theme that does most everything a robust web site needs, please let me know where you found that holy grail! These video links skip over the domain registration, hosting, and WordPress install which are all quite simple, and may vary a bit from these examples. I do not recommend their suggested hosting provider for every use case.
• #26: These are just some examples of additional features that cost extra to add to the OceanWP theme.
• #27: Elementor is one of the more popular page builder and layout editors for WordPress. The free version of Elementor is functional and useful, however it is another teaser to spend more money on your website.
• #28: There are many alternatives to Elementor, and the new WordPress block editor Gutenberg may eventually provide much of its functionality. They let you build websites with what you see is what you get drag and drop functionality, usually avoiding the need to deal with the underlying code.
• #29: Pluggins are used to add many features to WordPress websites. The next few slides provide a few examples. Like themes, many plugins are free until you want to use some premium features. WordPress has a mechanism to take a site offline while you are working on it they refer to as maintenance mode. WP Maintenance Mode also works as a fancy under construction page that will email your clients when your site launches, and makes it easier to turn on maintenance mode.
• #30: This is probably the most common plugin for backing up your web site for free.
• #31: WP Migrate DB can be handy for moving your web site, and a very useful tool for WordPress site administrators.
• #32: Wordfence is probably the most popular security plugin. Sucuri, is most effective at the free level according to this review.
• #33: Elementor and OceanWP are some of the more extensively documented WordPress additions.
• #34: I found this side by side comparison of two very popular WordPress themes helpful in understanding the differences between themes. This presenter created two sites with identical content to show the differences in style and features.
• #35: If you allow European visitors on your website, you are subject to fine if you do not learn about these complex regulations, and comply with them all! These links will give you an introduction. If you work for a large company, GDPR compliance will require at least one full time employee.
• #36: The fines are not cheap!
• #37: This entire presentation is intended to give you an overview of many resources and links to step by step instructions you can find online. The links are easily copied from the text below the slides at Slideshare.net/msz. This page contains some additional links of interest that will not be reviewed during the presentation due to time constraints.
• #38: This email address will require you to respond to an email of your own before delivery to me. I hope this will help folks get started publishing web pages. Many of the details on certain steps (like favion creation) can easily be found with a web search.