An Introduction to Using WordPress to Build Your Nonprofit Website. An Introduction to Using

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Magdalen Montgomery
8 years ago
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1 An Introduction to Using WordPress to Build Your Nonprofit Website

2 Who is John Haydon? President / Founder of Inbound Zombie - a non-profit social media consultancy in Cambridge, MA Speaker / Presenter: Techsoup.Org, Philanthopy.Com, NetworkForGood.Com and more... Over 7 years of experience working with non-profits (plus 15 years of corporate sales and marketing) Implement blogs, Facebook Pages, NING sites, BuddyPress sites Training, Strategy and Bootcamps - WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, NING Clients include: Techsoup.Org, EpicChange, Grassroots.Org, Share Our Strength, 12for12k

3 Questions we will answer today 1. Isn t WordPress just for bloggers? 2. What are examples of nonprofits wordpress websites? 3. How can WordPress help me get more traffic? 4. How can WordPress help me make a beautiful website with minimal effort? 5. What kinds of social media features come with a WordPress website? 6. Is it easy to make changes to my website without my webmaster? 7. What are the first steps to getting started with WordPress?

4 Isn t WordPress just for bloggers?

5 Isn t WordPress just for bloggers? 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running on WordPress

6 What are examples of nonprofits wordpress websites?

7 What are examples of nonprofits wordpress websites?

8 What are examples of nonprofits wordpress websites?

9 What are examples of nonprofits wordpress websites?

10 How can WordPress help me get more traffic?

11 How can WordPress help me get more traffic? Businesses and orgs that blog get 126% more traffic than those that don t

12 Why should my nonprofit start a blog? You Readers

13 Why should my nonprofit start a blog? You Readers

14 How can WordPress help me make a beautiful website with minimal effort?

15 How can WordPress help me make a beautiful website with minimal effort?

16 WordPress Plugins

17 Recommended Plugins 1. W3 Total Cache Makes your pages load faster. 2. Gravity Forms This is without question the best WordPress plugin for forms. 3. BackupBuddy - Automatically back up your site 4. SEO Smart Links Do you inter-link your articles? You should. Linking within an article to other articles is a great way to build Page Rank throughout your site and it s a great way to get readers to find your other articles on similar subjects. This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you. 5. Digg Digg Social Sharing This simply WordPress plugin is what powers the floating social icons to the left of each post here at Site Sketch 101. With an easy to access Twitter icon, your friends and readers will be able to easily share and promote your content. 6. Feedburner Circulation The era of the feedburner chicklets are over. Install the Feedburner Circulation WordPress plugin and you ll be able to display your subscriber count just as you see in the top right corner of this page. 7. Revision Control With the revisions feature of WordPress, it doesn t take long for your database to get bloated and begin slowing down your site. With the Revision Control WordPress Plugin you can limit the number of post revisions that remain in storage. I have mine set to WordPress Editorial Calendar This plugin provides a crisp, clean editorial calendar of your posts both past and present. You can drag and drop articles from one date to another, edit them and much more. This is an amazing organizational tool. 9. Facebook Social Plugins - Facebook 10.Tweetmeme - Twitter 11.All In One SEO - Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). 12.Readability Plugin - Allows you to verify that your posts are easy to read.

18 What are the first steps to getting started with WordPress?

19 1. Choose A Hosting Provider. There are many differences between a WordPress.com (free) and a WordPress.Org blog. You want the.org the hosted blog. WordPress has a great list of hosting providers that support a 1-click install of WordPress. 2. Pick A Domain. Picking a domain will be one of the most important decisions you will make regarding your blog. You want to pick a domain that is short enough for people to write down, but long enough to contain a keyword or two that you want to rank for on Google. Finding a domain name that isn t taken yet will take some patience and creativity, but f you choose to use a Subdomain for your blog, you can pick whatever URL you like. 3. Install WordPress. If you re not that technical, go with the 1-click install of WordPress as demonstrated in this video. 4. Choose a Theme. There are hundreds of free themes and a few very good premium Themes (Headway is what I use on all my blogs). The main difference between free and premium themes is design flexibility. Premium themes will give you many more design configurations to choose from as you and your blog grow. Free themes give you less choices. 5. Create Basic Pages. Create a few basic pages in your blog. Pages, by the way, are different from Posts. The basic ones to start with would be an About Page, a Contact Page and a Subscribe Page.

20 6. Setting Permalink Structures. The default permalink structure in WordPress relies on the post ID, which is a unique number for each post.if you want to get found on Google, post ID is not the way to do it. Choose a permalink structure that is keyword rich, like categories and post names. If you re not sure how to do this, watch How To Create SEO-Friendly Permalinks. 7. Add Essential Plugins. There are a gazillion WordPress plugins out there to choose from, depending on what your goals are for your blog. A good list of essential ones can be found here. 8. Create Basic Pages. Create a few basic pages in your blog. Pages, by the way, are different from Posts. The basic ones to start with would be an About Page, a Contact Page and a Subscribe Page. 9. Set An RSS Feed Service. You ll want to use a service like Feedburner or Feedblitz, which are both free. These services add social media and promotion elements to a basic feed. 10.Start Blogging. If you re scared, read Michael Martine s series on dealing with Blogging Fears.

21 Questions?

22 Discount: 15% discount by using WordPress in the shopping cart at

Graduate to Self Hosting

Graduate to Self Hosting Joanne Waltham Magenta Sky Solutions Detailed Notes & Screenshots Available at / food-blogger-connect Why migrate to self hosted? With WordPress.com you can t Install any theme