President of WebFX. Bill has over 25 years of experience in the Internet marketing industry specializing in SEO, UX, information architecture, marketing automation and more. William's background in scientific computing and education from Shippensburg and MIT provided the foundation for MarketingCloudFX and other key research and development projects at WebFX.

WordPress is one of the most popular publishing platforms currently out on the market. It’s free, highly-customizable, and very easy to install and use. It’s a great CMS for all types of web design in industries ranging from a law firm to a restaurant. Because of its popularity, you’ll find a wide array of resources that discuss WordPress development, administration, as well as plenty of user guides to help you get started quickly.

In this article, we take advantage of the merits of learning by way of watching video tutorials and screencasts. Video tutorials allow you to learn by following along with the instructor in real-time – a format that’s very effective for many people.

You can use these video tutorials a couple of ways: to learn about WordPress yourself or to send to your not-so-technology-inclined clients as a reference to help them get started. You’ll find the tutorials organized into several topics that include theme development and customization, site administration, beginner’s tutorials, and using some WordPress tools.

WordPress theme development

See Chris Coyier’s (of CSS-tricks) process for designing a WordPress site in this three part series. Also check out part 2 and part 3.

Here’s a tutorial series (also see part 2 and part 3) for creating a WP template using a variety of free tools such as MAMP (for local machine development) and TextWrangler (a text editor).

You’ll see a variety of useful WordPress theme customization tips and tricks through this video tutorial.

Learn how to create a WordPress site that’s more of a fully-featured content management system (like Drupal or Joomla) rather than a blogging platform using a few tools at your disposal such as the SimplePie WordPress plugin.

Install WordPress Locally

Learn how to run WordPress using a WAMP setup on your local machine for development and testing.

How to Modify WordPress Theme

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about some Theme Template tags in WordPress.

Learn how to install and set up the WP Twitip ID plugin to integrate Twitter into your WordPress site.

Replace the default WordPress header to a custom-made header so that you can quickly get started with your WordPress blog.

Create your first widget

This video tutorial shows you how to create a theme widget for WordPress.

Learn how to create a WordPress plugin that follows the WordPress plugin development guidelines.

Administration

How to setup PrettyURLs on WordPress

Learn everything about permalinks (including how to set it up on your WordPress site) in this video tutorial.

This video tutorial shows you how to create a member/user directory listing page to display member information.

This helpful tutorial teaches site administrators what to do in case a user loses his or her password.

Learn about HTTPS as it pertains to the security of your WordPress site in this insightful video tutorial.

Best Practices for Upgrading WordPress

Upgrading WordPress is a simple task but there are some steps you should consider before proceeding with a major upgrade (such as backing up your WordPress database). In this tutorial, you’ll learn about a good way of safely upgrading your WordPress installation.

If you need to move your WordPress installation to another location on your server or web host you should check out this general tutorial on the steps involved in relocating your existing WordPress site.

Learn everything about exporting and importing your WordPress data by viewing this excellent screencast.

WordPress blog admin settings

Get a run-down of useful WordPress admin settings to help you properly administer your site.

There are several user roles that you can assign to members of your WordPress site – this thorough video tutorial teaches you the difference of each.

Getting started with WordPress

One of the first steps involved in the installation of WordPress is the creation of a database. This tutorial shows beginners how to create a database for WordPress using phpMyAdmin, a freely available web application that most shared hosting plans have.

Improve search engine results using the Google Sitemap plugin – this tutorial shows you how to install and set up the plugin.

Geared for beginners, this tutorial is a great general introduction to blogging and WordPress.

Get up and running with a WordPress installation, as well as learn the basics behind WordPress themes, by following along this video tutorial.

WordPress users that want to learn how to upload PDFs to share to their audience might find this short video tutorial useful.

Photo Captions

Captions describe the photos displayed on a post and in this tutorial you’ll see a method for adding them to photos of a blog post.

This screencast shows beginning users how to edit a page in the WordPress admin section.

This tutorial shows you how to put together a picture gallery post in WordPress.

Learn the difference between editing content through the Visual Editor (the built-in WYSIWYG editor in WordPress) and good old-fashioned HTML.

WordPress tools

Set up Windows Live Writer for WordPress so that you can let authors write blog posts offline.

Make blogging hassle-free with ScribeFire, a Mozilla Firefox browser add-on that let’s you update posts on-the-fly.

Further reading

View the WordPress showcase on the official WordPress site.

Find useful tools (over 300 of them) on from this Mashable article.

Check out Smashing Magazine’s roundup of 100 free WordPress themes.

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