WordPress Orlando

Official WordPress User Group of Orlando, FL

WPORL

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WordPress Local Development Environments

If you missed the meetup on local development environments or need links to the software that we used, we’ve compiled a list of links to download all of the tools.

Demian Seiler – XAMPP (and MAMP and WAMP)

https://www.mamp.info/en/
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

Adam Soucie – ServerPress

https://serverpress.com/
Adam’s Slidedeck

David Laietta – Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

https://www.vagrantup.com/
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV
https://github.com/bradp/vv/

Setting up each of these tools is fairly straightforward with the instructions on their sites, but as always, meet us at the meetup if you’ve got questions, or post up in the Facebook group.

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/229106888/

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How to Handle Hosting and Site Migration

Do you have questions about hosting? How about moving your site from one host to another? This month’s meetup is all about hosting and migration, and we’ve got two presentations and a general QA planned. As always, we’ll be serving food and drinks, so don’t worry about missing dinner after work!

Chris Edwards – So many options for Hosting! How to choose the right one for you

Shared, dedicated, virtual private, WordPress optimized, apache, nginx, SSD, cloud and the list goes on and on. With so many options, terms and technologies, it can be difficult to navigate the world of hosting to choose the perfect host for you. Which type of hosting service should you pick? How much bandwidth and storage space do you need? What is a “WordPress optimized” host? How do you know if a web host is actually any good? What technology stack really matters to me? These are the questions that will be answered in this talk. I will not recommend any particular host, however, I will give you the knowledge you need to make an educated decision on which host fits your business or personal blog.

Get a copy of Chris’ slides on WordPress Hosting: Chris Edwards – WordPress Hosting

Roy Jossfolk – Migrating Your Site

Migrating a WordPress website can be a daunting task but in many cases a necessary one. Typically you will want to migrate a complete WordPress site if you have been building it locally on your machine or if you are moving to a new hosting provider or upgraded server. Depending on the complexity of the website this can be a very fragile process and requires you follow some key steps in making sure it all goes smoothly.

In this talk I will go over my personal checklist and steps I use when moving a WordPress website. It will include best practices, common plugins and also manual solutions depending on your specific needs.

Roy Jossfolk is a freelance Designer and Front-End Developer who has spent 8 years building websites with WordPress. Over that time, Roy has been lucky enough to work on a wide variety of WordPress projects like corporate, e-commerce, membership based and news sites.

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/229234856/

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Branding Yourself and Your Business as a WordPress Practitioner

David Yarde led the February meetup with a talk on personal branding. A bit of what was covered:

Personal Branding

  • How to set yourself apart in a growing marketplace.
  • The importance of contracts and project transparency.

Business Branding

  • The importance of search meta-data and social meta-data.
  • Using SEO Plugins to improve your brand.
  • Facebook and your brand.

David’s Slidedeck

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We’re getting an update!

This site has gone quite a while without some love, something about the cobbler’s children and shoes.

One of our members is working on an updated design, which we’re going to work on bringing to life over the next week. We think that this will give us more incentive to regularly update with recaps of meetups, notes from them, and more information about what we’re doing.

See you soon with a new look!

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WordPress Site Performance Optimization

Site speed is important, considering your users can quickly get tired of having to wait and will move on. Search engines recognize this user behavior, and use site speed as part of their ranking algorithms. Learn a bit about how you can speed up your website, and why it matters.

Irina Blumenfeld – Improve Your Website Performance

During her talk, Irina covered quite a few tips on improving the speed of your site, including:

  • Why speed matters – why should you care about website performance
  • How you can measure it – a variety of tools to measure your page load time, page size, and any bottlenecks.
  • Ways to improve it – several ways to improve your speed score
  • The new HTTP/2 protocol and how it can benefit your business.

Demian Seiler – Plugin TLC

Demian covered best practices to help keep your site fast, secure, and problem free by showing your plugin inventory a bit of TLC.

  • Security – Attackers have a special place in their hearts for un-patched systems.
  • Performance – Every line of code in a plugin adds to the time it takes to load your page so choose wisely.
  • Functionality – New plugins are created daily. What worked best yesterday, may not be the best choice for today.

We also celebrated quite a few January birthdays, including those of organizers David Laietta, Sandy Edwards, and Adam Soucie, and two of our attendees. Free pizza and ice cream cake is enough reason to attend, though there was a ton of great info shared too. Be sure to check our meetup page for any future meetups to attend!

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Meetup – WordPress SEO

Chris Edwards – Optimizing Your Website and Identifying Quality Content for SEO

SEO is a broad topic with many pieces and parts. I will dive into some of the secret tricks I have used on over 450 different websites that help them out rank their competition. I will focus on WordPress and one page websites/landing pages. Time permitting, I will discuss the importance of creating a blog for your business, covering how to write your topic title, best way to structure your article and how to identify the best content to blog about that will generate the best quality traffic.

Sandy Edwards – Local SEO and Why it Is Vital

Local SEO plays a large part in the overall placement of your website on the search engines. It involves 4 major players and 3 main ideas. Come and join us to see how to go about making sure your business, or organization’s Local SEO can be improved. I will discuss Google Plus, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp listings and how to claim and optimize them. Also, I will cover the importance of the local listing providers, local citations, and why reviews matter. Time permitting, I will walk you through some of the roadblocks you can run into with local listings and how to overcome them.

Tools covered during this meetup:

Desk.PM – Minimal Writing interface for all sorts of platforms

PostStatus – Daily WP news from a talented developer and writer

DeepCrawl – High Performance Website Crawler

Hemingway App – Improve your writing

Grammarly – automatically find and correct writing mistakes

Smart Manager – WP eCommerce bulk editor for product management