Another installment of cool sites to visit:

Tubetorial: Tubetorial is a great new website that shows video tutorials on web development tips and ticks of all kinds and how to do this and that on WordPress. It’s a great site for us visual learners. It’s quite easy to navigate and find videos. Tubetorial is also a new site so they’re building their inventory. You can also sign up for an rss feed or get the latest tips and tricks via email. Damn I love the web!

Last time on “Our Love Affair With WordPress” you learned about blog content. You learned that good content is relevant, engaging, mostly free, cites sources, should contain visuals and ultimately reflects you or your business. So, let the courting continue with the pretty stuff, design. The allure of WordPress is its seemingly infinite capacity to change its looks from one blog to another, keeping things fresh and interesting for designers and visitors alike. The WordPress publishing platform is the blog designers wet dream because it is so flexible, open, and capable of creating a look as simple a look as Simpla to a more involved design like Alexified. Before we continue, I’d like to make sure we’re all on the same page about what design means in the blog (and website) design world. Design means structure, look, navigation and technology, not just the look of a blog. Savvy?

I read this wonderful article by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 about the myth of user-generated content. He argues that the media and corporations aren’t always looking for the next great piece of user-generated content (like digital video, blogging, podcasting, news, gossip, research, mobile phone photography and wikis, etc.) that will make that “average user” famous. It’s poppy-cock! Sure once in a while something a user creates, a great video found on YouTube or a podcast or an excellent whitepaper may be so good that some media company or a corporate head finds it compelling enough to give the user his chance in the spotlight, or hell, a job making mucho dinero. But Karp is right, more likely than not the user is talented, not average, and that is the reason he or she is recognized. Great content isn’t published by your average wannabe who stumbled upon something amazing and publishes it. I doubt Apple or Microsoft or whomever discovers the user is going to give the person a job or accolades if he or she were a no talent hack that just got lucky. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. And even if you should, doesn’t mean you’re good at it, whatever “it” is.

What is website design? It’s not just how a website looks, I can tell you that much…and more. Website design is design in the truest sense of the word: “organization or structure of formal elements in a work.” Website design is like architecture. It’s not enough to look good, because otherwise the building will fall apart and injure people, right? Not that bad web design can cause fatal accidents (I hope), but it can and does leave a nasty taste in your mouth, perhaps blind you and cause you to run screaming the other way…or you can just hit the back button. Anyway, your website like your building has to be sound in structure, it has to be easy to “walk through” and it has to have purpose. A good website like a a great piece of architecture has a structure and navigation that serves the purpose. You know, form follows function. So, before building your fabulous website, ask yourself, “what’s the purpose of my site?”

So, back for more? Couldn’t resist, huh? Well, let’s get started then. Friday, we went over the The Essentials of Blogging and talked about how content, categorizing (including archiving) and commenting are the main staples of blogging. A blog exists for content and sociability for the most part. The goal of any blogger should be to make your blog as interesting to read as possible and that promotes interactivity (usually through commenting and often also through sharing and bookmarking, which we’ll cover later). Your content must also be categorized in such a way your readers know where to look for articles on a given topic or maybe even a specific article. Category listings, archiving and tag clouds are the most common methods of effective and simple ways to organize your blog articles without confusing or frustrating your readers.

Though categorizing and commenting are essential, content is king. More importantly, your written content is king and executioner. A blog is nothing without good content and everything with it. More to the point, good content is what brings in readership. Relevant content creates a following. Crappy content kills a blog.

When I took online courses at Sessions.edu, my friends and family looked at me cross eyed like they couldn’t understand how that could work. They also couldn’t understand how I could pay money for classes at a school with no actual physical location. Well, Sessions does have a corporate office, just no classrooms or faculty lounges. Fortunately I learned a long time ago to ignore the neigh sayers and do what I need to do to get where I need to go. I also learned that times have changed, and our methods of learning should change too. Plus, it’s not like I had a clone of myself lying around to take courses for me in the afternoons while I worked. Though online schools and courses are offered on every corner of the Internet, it still raises eyebrows and contorts faces. And even though, I can readily admit that being in a class room is preferable, I really benefited from taking courses online through Sessions and later, Academy of Art in San Francisco. You’re forced to pay attention, and heaven forbid, read! You’re forced to take initiative. And, you set your own pace, for the most part.

On Wednesday’s discussion Our Love Affair With WordPress: Part 1 - A WordPress Overview, we gave you a few essential links to visit on getting intimate with WordPress. Hope you and WordPress have bonded a bit. If you have and are already convinced that blogging with WordPress is ideal for you, contact Poles Apart Design to help you get your blog up and running. Otherwise, it’s time to take a step back and review the Essentials of Blogging on WordPress. The main thing to note is that WordPress’s self-hosted blogging platform is fast, light and extremely customizable. From a theme as basic as Kubrick to one as feature rich as Revolution, you can go from creating a personal blog that is a simple log for your thoughts to a robust community or business blog with a lot of content, advanced sociability functions and seemingly endless means of categorizing and archiving all content. Remember, a blog is just a regularly updated journal or chronicle of articles and other bits of information such as images and links, published as web pages. And with WordPress, you can create many, many ways to organize, archive and display your articles and bits of information in chronological or discontinuous order. Its up to you.

So before we get into how a WordPress blog works in particular, I’m sure you’d like to know how a typical blog works in general. Well, three main aspects of a blog are: content (and how it’s organized), comments and categorizing. Of course there is more to a blog than these three things, but these three Cs are the basis of blogging.

If it’s not yet obvious, we LOVE WordPress here at the WordPress PAD. We’d marry WordPress if we could, seriously. But alas, it’s not legal and well, sort of gross if you think about it. So, let’s not. Let’s instead focus on how to get the best out of WordPress. Our Love Affair With WordPress is a series we’d like to continue until you cry mercy and tell us enough already, we get it, we give up, we’ll join you in your love lust with WordPress, sheesh…or something like that. We love to blog. We love talking about how we love to blog. It’s a sickness we want no cure for.

First thing’s first. What is WordPress? Well, it’s a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Gibberish? Not really. But, to put it simply, WordPress is a very, very, very good and free blog publishing platform. What’s a blog? A blog is a regularly updated journal or chronicle of articles and other bits of information such as images and links, published as web pages. What makes WordPress a superior blog publishing platform is that it is free, user-friendly and the web designer and developers dream because it’s easy (and fun) to customize. This benefits blog readers too since many plugins can be used by many people creating a more dynamic and social blogosphere.