Dallas WordCamp: Seven things I learned #WCDFW09

I went to the Dallas WordCamp 2009 a few weeks ago.  It was fun to be with lots of people interested in sharing what they know about WordPress.  These events are packed with good times and good info.  Here are a few of the nuggets I found.

Lots of people are interested in WordPress.  Men and [...]

Seven Reasons I Like WordPress

I have used WordPress to build websites for over six months.  Over that time I built  about a dozen self-hosted web sites.  I have fifteen years’ professional experience building web sites and web applications, so I have a solid foundation to compare against my WordPress experience.  I have no experience working with other popular tools [...]

Making Your Own WordPress Themes with Artisteer

One of the great things about WordPress is its ability to control the look and layout of a site with a theme. A WordPress theme primarily consists of the PHP and CSS files necessary to display the pages of a WordPress site. Lots of websites let you buy themes or download free ones.  Some themes are simple while others [...]

Best Plug-ins for a WordPress Blog

Here are my favorite WordPress plug-ins, the ones I use for my blog and others sites I have worked on.  They each provide a unique function that improves this website. You can find all the installs for these on WordPress.org.

Admin Management Xtended- makes it easier to update posts and pages.  Provides short cuts on edit [...]

Joy and Despair with Technology

Last night I was ready to move one of my WordPress web sites to production.  It has been completed for a while and we were using a pilot group to test.  Testing was done.  Everything was ready to go.
The old site was hosted on another hosting service. I logged onto it, unlocked the domain, got the [...]

Getting Twitter Tools to Shorten URLs

I use the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress to send my new posts to Twitter and to post my tweets on my blog.  Sending your posts to Twitter is a great way to build traffic.
On the first of April, I and others had a problem with the tweets about our blog post not getting shortened URLs.  [...]

Part 3: Using WordPress and Artisteer on a new Business website

The web site project is coming along.  WordPress is installed and working. The theme looks good. Now to get the details in place.  Just like most projects, the first 80% goes pretty well, then you start running into the final details that can go on forever without some good project management.  As my teams know, I am [...]

Problem: Need a place to host web sites Solution: BlueHost

When I started using WordPress, I needed a place to host the websites I was doing for myself, my friends, and some non-profits, but I didn’t know which hosting service to use. There were a lot of them.
Here are some things that I knew I wanted:

Host that was available (always up).
Host that had good performance (loaded [...]

Part 2: Using WordPress and Artisteer on a new Business website

Once we had WordPress installed and working,  it was time to make the web site look nice.  We wanted it to look like our current web site, but with a new color pallet.  WordPress is great about separating the function from the look and feel.  It uses themes to control the site layout.
What were the options for getting the [...]

Part 1: Using WordPress and Artisteer on a new Business website

My company, MBO Partners, is branching out to offer our services into some new markets. That means we need a new website.  I got an email from the Marketing Department asking if we could get a new site up for a launch in a few weeks. They are pretty happy with the look and feel of [...]