WordPress for Business - Complete Recordings

Course details

WordPress for Business - The Complete Recordings is WP Academy's A-Z training for creating an attractive website, promoting it with the full power of email marketing, SEO, social media and online video, and monetizing it with a shopping cart or membership system. It is designed for busy small-business owners, self-employed professionals and non-technical people who want to quickly master web technologies for the purpose of creating additional income sources through the web. It has also been used to start successful WordPress webmastering businesses, and by social media consultants to add valuable web design skills to their service portfolio.

These lectures were originally recorded live in May-June of 2012 for students who paid $600 for the full course. Major sections were redone in professional video in April-May of 2013, with the rest of the content due for updates and expansion by July 2014.

WordPress for Business Complete Recordings includes the newly-authored popular short course WordPress Essentials for Business, Theme Selection and Customization, and WordPress Backup, Security and Performance , plus additional sections listed below. The first two short courses will show you how to create, in under four hours, a professional-looking website which may be indistinguishable from a site created by a professional designer that cost you $2000 or more; while the remaining sections will show you how to hook up your site to newsletter management systems, search-engine optimization, shopping carts and membership systems, social media, online video, and more.

There is no other course on the internet that gives you so much practical and directly actionable information in such a brief time to create an effective, business-oriented website. You can read the reviews for WordPress Essentials to give you a flavor for the style of teaching, and you can review the table of contents below to see the breadth and depth of coverage.

Unlike most courses on Udemy, this course is a living, breathing entity, continually adding new content as WordPress updates to new versions, new plugins and themes become available, and technology changes. We are actively working on expanding this content between now and July 2014 -- new sections are being added every month.

Note: we do our best to questions on the lectures, however we cannot guarantee support through this forum. If you want support, you should purchase the Live version of the course .

Update 11/08/2013

Included in this course is full (premium) access to the WordPress Business Encyclopedia 2014! See http://wpencyclopedia.com. Just look for the "Announcement" in the Udemy course sidebar after signing up.

Also the WordPress Essentials course is now free! Over 2500 people have already benefited, leaving 50+ four- and five-star reviews. Get it here.

Table of Contents

Items marked with (***) below have been updated to professional video standards, with the remainder of the updates in production

1) WordPress Essentials for Business*** (Also available separately Here)

• WordPress Fundamentals
  • WordPress: What and Why
  • WordPress.org or WordPress.com?
  • What you will need
• Hosting WordPress
  • Understanding domain, hosting, and name servers
  • Choosing a Domain Registrar & Hosting company
  • Installing WordPress on your domain
• Building out your site: content and navigation
  • Tour of an out-of-the-box WordPress site
  • Tour of the WordPress dashboard
  • Creating Pages and Posts
  • Using the Visual Editor
  • Adding an image
  • Hyperlinking
  • Configuring a blog, static site and mixed site
  • Removing home page comments box
  • Adding a flat navigation bar
  • Adding a drop-down navigation bar
  • Installing a free theme
  • Installing a commercial theme
  • Modifying your theme settings, adding a header
  • Working with Weaver theme
  • Setting up Post Categories and Blog pages
• Widgets and Widget Areas
  • Using the Latest Posts, Post Categories & Custom Menu widgets
  • Using the Text widget to post arbitrary Text or Images to your sidebar
  • Using the Text widget to post a Youtube video
• Plugins
  • Introduction to plugins: Akismet comment spam protection
  • Using the RSSImport plugin; plugins that require shortcodes
  • Installing a commercial plugin
• Fine-tuning your site
  • Permalinks
  • Discussion settings & Comment moderation
• Next steps
  • Commercial themes
  • Graphic sources
  • WordPress Security

2) WordPress Theme Selection & Customization*** (Also available seperately Here)

• Introduction
  • How to choose a theme
• StudioPress build
  • Outside tour of Associate theme
  • Inside tour of Associate and Genesis themes
  • Populating home page widget areas
  • Adding a slider
  • Other StudioPress examples
• ElegantThemes build
  • Outside tour of ElegantThemes Feather theme
  • Inside tour of Feather
  • Populating home page
  • Other ElegantThemes examples
• WooThemes build
  • WooThemes Fresh News build
  • Other WooThemes examples
• OptimizePress build
  • Tour of OptimizePress
  • Creating a squeeze page
  • Creating a sales page
• Thesis 1.8 build
  • Thesis 1.8 or 2.0?
  • Thesis 1.8 installation & quick tour
  • Adding header & navbar
  • Adding Meteor Slider
  • Adding center-page 4x2 table
  • Adding footer widgets in Thesis
• Firebug
  • Using Firebug CSS inspection tool; creating CSS overrides
• Weaver build
  • Weaver theme tour
  • More Weaver theme options
• Responsive themes
  • What is a responsive theme?

3) Images & Graphic Editing

• Image editing fundamentals
• Paint.net tutorial: Making a website header
• GIMP tutorial
• Pixlr.com tutorial
• Camtasia Tutorial
• Measuring screen element dimensions

4) Advanced Content Creation & CSS Styling

• WordPress user menu
• Visual Editor paragraphs vs. line breaks
• Pasting text in from Microsoft Word
• Windows Live Writer
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• TinyMCE Advanced Visual Editor: Table and Anchor links
• Embedding a private video
• Embedding audio
• Download and copy audio and video from other websites
• Importing content from WordPress.com and other blogs
• Migrating HTML websites to WordPress
• Hiding a website under construction
• Copying WordPress websites using Windows Live Writer
• Local Server Hosting
• HTML Primer
  • HTML Cheat Sheet: most important HTML tags
  • HTML Cheap Sheet: image tags
  • Learn HTML from W3Schools
• CSS Primer
  • Applying CSS Styling to your pages: 3 ways
  • CSS Class and CSS Id
  • CSS Selectors and Nesting
  • Inline CSS vs. Stylesheet CSS
  • CSS Box Model: Margin, Border, Padding
  • CSS Cheat Sheet: Common properties
  • Using Firebug (CSS Inspection and Debugging Tool)
  • Modifying your Theme's CSS
  • Using Firebug to copy a static HTML website

5) WordPress SEO

• Introduction to WordPress SEO
• Quick-and-dirty guide to WordPress SEO
• Using WordPress Tags to increase keyword density
• Installing Google Analytics on your site
• Understanding Google Analytics reports
• SEO Case Study
  • SEO Case Study Introduction
  • Setup Google Places
  • Research competitor titles and keywords
  • Keyword research in Market Samurai
  • Optimize Meta Tags with Yoast WordPress SEO plugin

6) WordPress Shopping Carts & Membership Systems

• Internet Payment Systems & Merchant Accounts
  • Online payment systems overview
  • Merchant account and payment gateways overview
• WordPress Shopping Cart Solutions
  • WordPress shopping cart options overview
  • Externally-hosted shopping cart solutiions
  • Introduction to WordPress shopping carts
  • Adding a Paypal payment button to your site
  • Adding a Paypal button with a plugin
  • 1ShoppingCart demonstration
• WordPress Membership Plugins
  • WordPress Membership Systems Overview
  • Wishlist Member plugin configuration
  • Wishlist Member: Setup page protection & Paypal integration
  • Wishlist Member: Create paypal subscription button
  • Wishlist Member: Managing users

7) Newsletters, Auto-Responders, RSS-to-email Systems

• Introduction to Newsletter Systems
• Mailchimp setup & configuration
  • Mailchimp initial setup & creating forms
  • Mailchimp: Creating html mails
• RSS-to-email systems
  • Introduction to RSS-to-email systems
  • Feedburner demonstration
  • Feedburner: feeding only a single post category to your newsletter

8) Online Video Production, Editing and Distribution

• Introduction to online video
• Why use video on your site
• Shooting online video
  • Introduction to video production
  • Shooting video with your webcam
  • Shooting with a video camera
  • Recording a screen capture
• Editing video
  • Introduction to video editing: tools
  • Sony Vegas: basic video editing
  • Sony Vegas: adding titles
  • Sony Vegas: noise removal with Audacity
  • Sony Vegas: green-screening
• Distributing video on your site
  • Converting existing video to mp4 format
  • Distribute video from Youtube or your website
  • Distribute Video via Amazon Web Services
  • Distribute video via RTMP streaming and Cloudfront

9) WordPress Backup, Security & Performance*** (also available separately here )

• WordPress Backup
  • Why a backup strategy is essential
  • Importance of regularly-scheduled, off-site backups
  • Best backup tools for your site
  • Best off-site storage for your site
  • Manual install and backup procedures
  • How to restore a site
• Security
  • Your best security strategy (and why security plugins alone won't work)
  • How to detect an intrusion and scan your site using free tools
  • What to do when you find a problem
  • Best WordPress security plugins
• Performance
  • How to rapidly get WordPress sites performing on a par with regular HTML websites
  • Free tools that will quickly and dramatically increase your site's performance and security both
  • How to measure (benchmark) your site's performance
  • How to keep your database tuned

10) Plugin Selection & Customization

(Content currently under development. This will contain reviews, feature tours and minimal configuration demos of the most popular WordPress plugins by category)