I’ve been a subscriber to the lynda.com online training site for almost a year. I really enjoy the video training courses on offer there and find them especially useful for learning applications. Following along in books can quickly become dull and I find explanations which actually show the use of the product to be very effective. When I joined lynda.com, content management systems were at the top of the list of topics which I wished the site had more coverage of. I’ve therefore been very pleased to see recent training titles appear on Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress. Hopefully I’ll get around to looking at all these courses in time, but for now I’ve been going through the WordPress.com course hosted by Maria Langer.
Maria is a great host for the training and is very clear and enthusiastic. She uses a couple of her own blogs as examples through the course, which lends a nice personal touch. She also gives plenty of advice which sounds authentically drawn from personal experience. The training could easily be used by people with very little technical knowledge and starts from first principles: “What is a blog?” is the title of an early video. However, all the video lessons are free-standing and more advanced users could just skip to the later videos for the features they are interested in. The full version of the training has exercise files which let you develop the exact elementary school blog example built in the videos. However, unlike with some lynda.com titles, the files aren’t really essential and you could follow along easily enough without them.
Among the sections which would probably be most useful for a WordPress newbie, there is a clear description of the difference between categories and tags which people starting out with the package can find confusing. The section on working with comments is also very useful and contains some sensible advice for people new to blogging. The discussions at the end of the course on blog promotion and maintaining your blog are interesting and I would have welcomed it if these segments had gone on for longer.
However, the biggest issue for a lot of people with this course is likely to be that it only covers using the online service at WordPress.com and doesn’t include any specific training for the server install of WordPress. Although a lot of the subjects covered are still relevant for people using the standalone application, there is plenty to know about installing and upgrading WordPress which you won’t learn here.
If you want to hear Maria discuss some of the pros and cons of using WordPress.com vs a server install, there is a useful interview with her available on MacVoices which serves as a nice supplement to the training course.
MacVoices #8112: Maria Langer Talks WordPress.com Training and Why It Is Better on Video
The current WordPress.com training title is still a great guide for beginners seeking to start blogging and for people who’ve used other packages who want to get a basic idea of WordPress’s features. Maybe a good way for lynda.com to develop their WordPress training in future would be to keep this as the beginner’s level title, but also to produce an “advanced” WordPress course which includes discussion of the server installation, upgrades, backups and possibly further discussion of promotion and SEO for WordPress blogs. [Update (27/02/09) - I've noticed that an advanced WordPress course by Maria Langer became available on lynda.com in January - see Self-Hosting a WordPress site.]
WordPress.com Essential Training is available from lynda.com as a CD-ROM, or online via subscription.
Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO and Beyond by Aarron Walter is a book that I’ve got a lot out of. Its full of useful material which should be of real practical help to people involved in any facet of a web project. It has a refreshingly holistic approach which looks at website findability in the widest possible manner, avoiding the narrowly doctrinaire perspective of some writings on web standards, SEO or accessibility and including lots of examples which are immediately useful in the real world.
His wide-ranging remit means that the book will probably be most appreciated by webmasters or web project managers whose roles involve them needing to straddle a range of disciplines. Web developers, designers or SEO gurus may perceive some of it as unfocused as it switches rapidly between generalist explanations and low-level technical examples, with topics covered ranging over coding, server administration, marketing tips and WordPress implementations. However, this variety appealed to me and should ensure that most readers are going to learn at least something new about areas they may not know so much about.
After introducing the author’s concept of findability as a discipline, the book starts by discussing markup strategies. The importance of web standards and accessibility are predictably emphasised, but there’s also a spirited defence of the benefits of web standards for SEO which is interesting. The book then moves into a discussion of server-side strategies for findability with advice on domain names, search engine friendly URLs, redirects, 404 pages, optimizing performance and controlling search engine indexing.
The middle section of the book discusses content creation for findability and then includes a whole chapter on findability for blogs. This was probably my favourite single section and includes lots of specific stuff about using WordPress. There’s then a chapter on adding search to your site. This discusses a range of options, including both free and paid-for solutions. For me personally, the most useful tip in the book was on page 156 in this section. Here you can find out how to implement Google Custom Search Engine so that users who don’t have JavaScript won’t get an empty search results page, without having to direct all users to search results hosted on Google’s site. The apparent reliance on JavaScript had been putting me off using Google CSE where I wanted to integrate it into my own sites, so this was really useful to me.
The book continues with a look at solving findability problems with JavaScript, Flash and audio / video content. It then moves onto an overview of mailing lists before concluding with a chapter on “Putting Findability Into Practice”, emphasising the need to adapt the techniques introduced in the book to the specific needs of your own projects.
In general, the book’s got a nice readable style. The expected experience level of readers is pitched at “Intermediate to Advanced” according to the back cover and people just starting out may find some of the more technical stuff a bit daunting. However, there’s a decent effort made to explain even the more complicated concepts and beginners could still learn a lot. Good references are included to further reading and also to some relevant podcasts – which is something I really appreciate when authors include.
The companion site is a great addition to the published book. It includes a comprehensive list of links to useful resources and a further five chapters of the book available free. I thought the chapter on web traffic analysis was a particularly good introduction to the topic, but all of the free chapters are worth reading. There is also a Findability Strategy Checklist which acts as a quick reference for the topics covered in the book. This is a nice practical tool which could be useful for any web project.
Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO and Beyond is by Aarron Walter and is published by New Riders.