“Nearly a quarter of American adults who use the Internet are ‘creators,’” says a recent Forrester report, which means that they “write blogs, upload original audio or video, or post stories online.”

In September, 2009 I shifted my entire design theory to reflect this change… using WordPress as a platform for Website design – one that would empower my clients and enable them to become creators. The following is a work-in-progress, much like WordPress itself (at version 2.8.6 as of this writing). The intent is to provide site visitors and my own clients with a handy reference page that will make it easy to go from know-nothing-beginner to experienced WordPress blogger and publisher in a graceful, step-by-step manner. Starting with the WordPress dashboard itself, ihelpbloggers provides the following Wordpress 2.8 Tutorial:

I like visual tools, so you will find a growing collection embedded videos like the one above, as well as a collection of links to informative coaching blogs and other WordPress resources. I will also assemble a set of my top ten (or more) WordPress Plugins. As this project grows it will spawn a set of “child pages” for clarity and

What’s a plugin?

The official WordPress Glossary explains this along with defining all of the other basic terms you will soon become familiar with in mastering WordPress:

“A Plugin is a group of php functions that can extend the functionality present in a standard WordPress weblog. These functions may all be defined in one php file, or maybe spread among more than one file. Usually, a plugin is a php file that can be uploaded to the “wp-content/plugins” directory on your webserver, where you have installed WordPress. Once you have uploaded the plugin file, you should be able to “turn it on” or Enable it from the “Plugins” page in the administration interface of your weblog. The WordPress source code contains hooks that can be used by plugins.

Plugins are free customizations written by anyone of thousands of independent developers. They are just one of many features that make WordPress a very powerful and customizable content management system (CMS). You could write a plugin someday if you work at learning the coding mechanics of Wordpress…

But, first we’ll learn how to use more of the WordPress basic fetures like…

Tags and why they are important

“A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a Post. Think of it like a Category, but smaller in scope. A post may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Like Categories, Tags are usually linked to a page which shows all posts having the same tag. Unlike Categories, Tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field.

“Tags can also be displayed in “clouds” which show large numbers of Tags in various sizes, colors, etc. This allows for a sort of total perspective on the blog, allowing people to see the sort of things your blog is about most.

“Many people confuse Tags and Categories, but the difference is easy: Categories generally don’t change often, while your Tags usually change with every Post.

SIX OF MY TOP TEN FAVORITE PLUGINS:

Sociable Whether your visitors are on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, BlinkList, or any other social network/sharing site, the Sociable Plugin will allow your blog to be connected to the social media stream, making your content known to the world. There are also print, e-mail and pdf this article functions that can ne included in one simple plugin.

Apture makes it easy to add contextual images, videos, reference guides, links, maps, music, news, documents and books to your blog to create a connected media experience that keeps readers engaged on your site. It also has the capacity to automatically include Amazon affiliate coding to any linked content you create.

Akismet checks your user comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Contact Form 7 allows you to flexibly design user contact form that generate email. You can manage multiple contact forms as well.

WP Shopping Cart provides one of the very best WordPress Shopping Carts available. There are several inexpensive enhancements that you can add to their free plugin to make it even better.

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.