OKC WordPress Users’ Group March 2011 Meeting Notes

By Wesley Fryer On March 29, 2011 · · Add Comment

These are my notes from the March 28, 2010 Oklahoma City WordPress User’s Group 500 Internal Server Error- 十大线上网赌网址-欢迎您

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.

Fuel for Educational Change Agents soon. (I ACKNOWLEDGE I FELL OFF THE PODCASTING WAGON IN MARCH AND PROMISE TO GET BACK ON SOON!)

Our first session on plugins was shared by Lynn Dye.

Some good plugins for WordPress
– Akismet for Spam Control (note only personal sites are free, payment plans are available for non-personal sites)
– WordPress Backup: Backup Buddy

SEO
– Google XML Sitemaps
– WordPress All in One SEO Pack
– HeadSpace 2
– SEO Smart Links

Linking to yourself too much is considered a bad thing by Google and perhaps other search engines for indexing

Cool Plugins

– After the Deadline (checks spelling, style and grammar)
– Block Spam by Math
– ServerBuddy (tests server configuration and compatibility with themes / plugins
– WP Smush.it (reduce image file sizes)
– WP Touch (iOS optimized theme)

Other Resources
– 15 Best WordPress Plugins to use in 2011
– Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins
– iThemes has a number of free Plugins

(I shared a session on “Mobile Blogging to WordPress via Posterous, WordPress for iOS and BlogPress” – podcast audio coming!)
– I shared OnSwipe briefly too, a new theme in beta for iPad compatibility

Tim Priebe shared our last session (I HAD TO LEAVE EARLY AND MISSED ABOUT HALF OF THIS)

Fix Your Ugly Website: Minor Tweaks to Make Your Website Look Good
– text and fonts
– spacing
– colors
– graphics

Number of fonts
– rule of thumb: 2 (headlines and body text)

Link Colors:
– if you CAN use blue for links in your color scheme, design studies have shown it’s a good thing to do

Font Size
– 10 pixels is too small for reading generally
– 14 pixels is a good guidelines
– Google uses 13 pixels for their site descriptions on search results

Text and Background color
– use good contrast

Colors
– generally use 2-3 primary colors, but make sure they complement each other

Gradients
– only 1 or 2 gradients at a max
– cleaner look with fewer gradients

Great resources
hypergurl.com
– can enter hex code, and will generate color scheme around it

colorschemedesigner.com

DeGraeve.com creates a color scheme around a photo

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