WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create
Don’t let WordPress intimidate you. WordPress 24-Hour Trainer is a unique lesson-based book that walks you through the essential parts of WordPress. Each lesson is streamlined to teach a specific aspect of WordPress, helping you to focus on just what you need in order to get the task accomplished. If you learn better visually, this book provides you with a video to accompany each lesson.
This book is the perfect guide to
- Planning and preparing your site for WordPress
- Installing WordPress
- Writing, tagging, and publishing a post
- Working with the text editor
- Styling paragraphs and creating lists
- Working with media files
- Linking, aligning, and sizing an image
- Working with image galleries
- Adding video and audio
- Naming, scheduling, and managing posts
- Making your site stand out
- Helping others connect to your site
- Becoming search engine friendly
- Optimizing your site
- Backing up your site
- Installing and activating plugins
WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD)
Price: $24.31
Features
- ISBN13: 9780470554586
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
User Reviews
I really like the way this book is laid out and easy to follow. I was asked to create a WordPress Journal at work and had very little time to get it up and running - I'm happy to report I spent about 4 hours going through the book and within a day I had a working website! Now don't get me wrong - it's my first WordPress but NOT my first website- I've been doing them for friends, family, work, job for about 16 years - just never used WordPress before - and now that I have, I really like it and can see how I'll be incorporating it into many more websites in the future. Good book - good reference - It was certainly worth it to me. -- A great resource!
When I say I'm new to Wordpress, it's as if I'd been wrapped in cellophane, lying in a cardboard box, like a new item on a shelf. I only wish i'd found this book first but I don't think it was on the market yet. It's the only book a beginner needs. Each chapter is like a little classroom where you learn a specific lesson. At the end of each chapter (or lesson) the author gives you supervised practice with step-by-step instruction. It's wonderful. He doesn't talk down to you ( although my ego could take that because of my zero level of knowledge) nor does he reach to a level far above the average person's head. I felt completely at ease with every chapter.
For instance, I like to do videos but I was always having trouble. The author explained so simply why mine didn't have controls when embeded directly. I was trying to put the round pegs in the square holes again. The whole book just made everything easier for me to understand.
The absolute zenith is a DVD that was included. It goes through each chapter showing all the boxes that you'll be working with. To me, it was as if a little bit of Wordpress information heaven dropped into my laptop. Now, I'm positive not everyone begins blogging at the lowly level that I started with. Even if you have your blog up and going with WP, I'm sure you'll be amazed at the new gems of information you will find. I don't know how anyone can understand on their own, all the reasons behind the working of WP and this book clearly defines them all.
I bought a lot of books before I came upon this one. I gleaned a bit of fragmented information here and there and spent a lot of money. Don't let the price on this book scare you away. $44.99 sounds a little pricey for a book BUT it's well worth it. I wasted many times that price before I found this book. Here's the good news. You can buy the book on Amazon for $29.69. -- The Only Book on Wordpress A Beginner Need's
George Plumley, WordPress 24 Hour Trainer (Wiley, 2010)
WordPress has, over the last few years, become one of the dominant forces in blogging software, to the point where users are stretching it beyond its blogging roots and using it for general website design. As such, since 2008, there's been a raft of WordPress books flooding the market. As I write this, George Plumley's WordPress 24 Hour Trainer is the latest, but give it five minutes and another dozen will come down the pike. And therein lies the challenge of writing a WordPress book: what can you do that will make you stand out from the crowd? Most authors specialize in one piece of WordPress (you can find an almost endless number of books on theme design, for example), but Plumley takes a more holistic beginners' approach: how to do everything shallowly, with easy step-by-step instructions. As such, it's a solid reference for anyone who's just starting out with WordPress. I'm sure there are those who will quibble with not enough depth in topic A or a different way to do topic B that Plumley didn't cover, but again, this is an overview. The flip side of that coin is the book's price, which seems way, way over the top for a beginners' overview. WordPress for Dummies can be had, if you compare both at full MSRP, for just over half as much as this book. Because of this, I'm reserved at giving it an outright recommendation, but if you've got the cash to spare, it's worth your time. ***
-- Decent, but wait for it to go on sale.
I'm glad I bought this book--I've never used WordPress and it's been at my side as I struggle to create a WordPress site. I am a graphic designer working to master rudimentary web development skills--understanding and intuiting file structure is not how my brain works but I'm motivated to educate myself. So I embrace being spoken to in the most elemental manner when navigating WordPress--it can't be broken down too basic for me.
But I wanted more discussion on exactly how to change the layout of a chosen WordPress theme. The author refers his readers to a developer for help with that, and I can see why: the CSS code is daunting. I realize for many, switching out pieces of a theme, and rearranging some divs, is pretty simple. But not for me! So I was wishing for more instruction in this book on that. I didn't expect instruction in CSS, php, or javascript, but I was hoping for much more guidance in picking through the style sheets. The word "customize" in the title promised more than what I found. -- A Lot of What I Needed, But Not All
If you are new to WordPress, you certainly could do worse in your choice of books. I have been using WordPress for several years and this is one of the better books I've seen on using WordPress. Even as an experienced user, I found some tidbits in here that were helpful. But as a new user to WordPress, you should also be aware of the fact that WordPress is under constant development and consequently upgrades are fast and furious. This is a good thing to the WordPress power user, but to authors and publishers must be a pretty big issue since any book released soon becomes outdated due to the relentless march forward of WordPress development. As I write this review WordPress is already at version 2.9.2 and version 3.0 is right around the corner. Unfortunately this book is written with version 2.8 in mind so it won't even mention many of the new features introduced with version 2.9.* of WordPress. However there is still a great amount of useful information presented in these chapters that will pertain to WordPress 2.9.*, but just be aware that WordPress is quickly marching forward so this book will become less useful as time goes on.
The author is gifted with an excellent style of writing. He presents his material in a very easy to read manner while avoiding being too chummy or too technical. Each chapter has exercises and if you complete the exercises, you will learn a great deal and gain hands-on experience. The book takes a fairly straightforward approach that a beginner will appreciate. The process of installing WordPress is discussed as well as a good explanation of the Dashboard and how to move around in the Admin area.
A few quibbles such as in Lesson 8 the author discusses Blockquotes, what they are used for and how some WordPress themes style them in different ways. He then shows a graphic of 4 different and attractive ways that Blockquotes can be styled. He neglects however to tell you how you can actually change the styling of your Blockquotes, probably because it involves modifying the cascading style sheet which he may have felt was beyond the scope of a beginner book. But he could of at least mentioned that instead of ignoring the issue completely. He also fails to discuss the Search Engine Optimization ramifications of using Headings properly.
One area of the book really disappoints, and that is Part X: Extending WordPress. Although not necessarily the fault of the author since his book was written with WordPress v2.8 in mind, I found that several of the plugins mentioned in Part X were not compatible with the latest version of WordPress due to the fact that the plugin authors had not yet updated their plugins to work with the latest version of WordPress. Perhaps they worked with v2.8 of WordPress, but they did not work with 2.9.2 at the time I am writing my review.
Overall though, this is a solid book on WordPress for the beginner to intermediate user. -- A surprisingly good WordPress v2.8 book. But WordPress is already up to v.2.9.2
