Category: Workshops

Making WordPress into a CMS

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be running some workshops at the Social Media Exchange, organised by Sound Delivery next month on the topic of ‘WordPress for good’.

The aim of the sessions will be to demonstrate how you can develop a really strong web presence quickly and cheaply using WP – not just as a blog but also as a CMS, to run a small but more traditional looking website.

This is possible due to WordPress’ ability to have static pages as well as blog posts, but more importantly in its amazing flexibility in terms of themes and plugins.

To try and be as helpful as possible, I am building a site to provide some resources for anyone wanting to build a site for their organisation using WordPress – it’s at http://wordpressforgood.com but there isn’t much there at the moment.

I’d like to make sure that I get as much material up there as I can before the event, so that those attending who get suitably enthused have something to get their teeth into straight away.

I’d really like to know what your favourite WordPress-as-a-CMS themes and plugins are so that I can add them to the site – and give you credit too, of course! There are a number of ways you could do this:

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can provide!

Planning workshops

I’m doing some work at the minute putting together the agenda for Tuesday’s socia media shindig in Coventry for members of the IDeA Social Media and Online Collaboration Community of Practice (…and breathe). It can be tricky keeping an eye on what it is that you want to achieve at these events, so I have put together a little template that helps me plan what we are going to do, why we’re doing it, how we are going do it, and what we all hope to get out of it.

Feel free to download and use/hack the template as you see fit via the link below:

RTF Workshop Planner Template

Here’s a quick run through of what I mean for each column in the template:

  • Time – pretty obviously, the time each slot on the agenda starts
  • Agenda Item – the name of each session
  • Objective – what it is that the session is trying to achieve
  • Task – what are we asking people to do exactly?
  • Format – talk, listen, discuss etc
  • Preparation – what needs to be done by whom to ensure the slot will work well
  • Output – what are we all going to get out of this?

It’s not rocket science, but it’s amazing how helpful it is just to have stuff written down!