WordPress Plugins | WordPress Training for Website Managers

How to Create an Image Gallery in WordPress

March 14th, 2010 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

Whether you have a website for real estate, an art gallery, your vacation photos, or maybe your hot air balloons, there will be a time when you want to post all your images in a single page. In WordPress there are a few ways to accomplish that.

You can install an image gallery plugin
Manually add the photos and try to align them to look nice
Use the WordPress built-in gallery

I was confused and frustrated with posting multiple images, trying to get them all aligned 3 across to fit the blog theme, until I learned to use the Gallery button in the Media section.

This video will show you the manual way and the automatic method using the gallery that is built into WordPress, combined with the Lightbox 2 plugin that creates slide shows for you. Watch the video an see how easy an image gallery can be to create. Read the rest of this entry »

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

December 17th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

Using these WordPress plugins can make your blog more interactive, sticky to keep visitors coming back for more and used by novices and power bloggers alike. Not all of these plugins need to be used on a single blog, depending on the focus of your site.

Where there are multiple options to perform a single task, I like to spread them out across several blogs to see which ones work best, or fit the look and feel of that site. I use every one of these plugins on various sites, except the eCommerce plugins. Those will come later as those sites are built. The ones listed are the best I found and tested in the WordPress Plugin category. Since this was originally posted on Feb 14, 2009, the list has continued to grow. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress Page Loading and Hosting Tips

October 14th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

During the past few weeks my blog and other sites had been painfully slow. The page loading time was in excess of 15 seconds. When in the WordPress dashboard, I would click a button to update a setting and go do something else for 2 minutes while the page loaded.

As a marketer, we are told that we have 7 seconds to grab the attention of visitors. If the page takes longer than that to load, there is a good chance they will go someplace else.

The slow loading became so frustrating that I called our web host, Pagematic. Since some of the sites I run are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), things that others do on that server can affect the performance of my websites. For instance, if someone ran intensive or poorly written scripts on their VPS, the entire srever can slow down. In this instance, Pagematic located the sites that were running scripts which are not allowed on the server and shut them down. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Publicize Your WordPress Posts

October 10th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

There is a lot of publicity lately with a WordPress plugin that allows you to tweet your WordPress posts automatically with Publicize. That only works with WordPress.com though. For self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are other plugins you can use.

If you want to get the most out of publicizing your post, there is a more involved method that works even better than a single plugin. Using the steps below, you can make sure your posts are announced on all the sites you belong to. This will take you less than 30 minutes and well worth the effort!

Register for Ping.fm and choose all the sites where you want your posted.
Get a HootSuite.com account and add your Ping.fm application (API) key in the Settings.
- The API key is obtained by clicking on Application Keys from your Dashboard
Install the WordTwit (or your favorite Twitter announce) plugin on your WordPress blog

Now when you write a post, it gets sent to Twitter, which is picked up by Hootsuite, passed on to Ping.fm, then sent to all the sites you have enabled there (Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Yahoo!, MyBlogLog, plus many other sites). Sounds complicated, if you spend 30 minutes to set up, you will achieve greater results.

If you know of a better way, let us know.