Hi, I run Lookahead Consulting in Seattle. Follow me @reifman or email me.

Publishing with WordPress

WordPress is an excellent platform for building and maintaining your personal, professional, organizational or corporate website. But whether you’re building a basic web site, blog or sophisticated organizational site, there are a broad number of issues that you need to understand and be aware of.

This tutorial is designed to outline the complexity of managing your web presence with WordPress in a simple, easy to understand way. This guide is not an introduction to using WordPress, for that I recommend something such as the inexpensive Easy WP Guide to WordPress (on the web here). I cover the kinds of issues that especially trip up beginners or are often overlooked by even technical publishers.

For example, how will your website appear on mobile and tablet devices? How will people learn about your site? How will you communicate with your customers? How will your technology scale as your site grows in popularity? How much will this cost? Are there legal issues to be concerned about? How will you scale your site as traffic grows? What technical issues will you need to manage over time?

When a friend or relative wants to build a website, these are all the kinds of questions that need to be asked but often aren’t. This tutorial can help you communicate the complexity of publishing with WordPress to the eager but uninitiated. It may also help you with your own projects.

I use this template to initiate conversations with new consulting clients. It’s a framework for beginning our work together.

You can navigate this tutorial and its table of contents using the left menu (or top menu if you’re on a mobile device).

Please feel free to ask questions or post comments to this guide below. You can also reach me on Twitter @reifman or email me directly.

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