1. WordPress has two BASIC areas of functionality, the theme and the plugins. Sometimes the functionality overlaps.
2. Spend A LOT OF TIME EXPLORING both the theme and plugin settings. This will show you what you can do and how to do it. Get to know the Dashboard well.
3. The Theme Options page and Settings page will give you access to most of the theme and plugin settings. The plugin page will also provide you with access to plugin settings.
4. And when you need an answer to something – look at the help pages or Google it (or use the search engine of choice).
5. Thanks for helping out!!

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Helping out the search engines!

Create descriptive page titles

Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.

Here are a few tips for managing your titles:

• Page titles should be descriptive and concise. Avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page, or "Profile" for a specific person’s profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.

• Avoid keyword stuffing. It’s sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars" doesn’t help the user, and this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.

• Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site “Cheap products for sale”, for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information (“boilerplate” titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like "<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words “video”, “lyrics”, etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use "<band name>" as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site’s content. The HTML suggestions page in Webmaster Tools lists any duplicate titles Google detected on your pages.

Create good meta descriptions

• Meta descriptions are used by the search engines to get an “over all view” of what the page is about. We are using the plugin “Add Meta Tags” to create and populate all the meta tags that search engines look for at the top of each page. The meta description tag holds approximately the first 150 to 200 characters of the page. So the first two sentences should be “good introductions” to the overall page content.

• Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

• Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

  <meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author, 
  Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, 
  Length: 784 pages">

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Website Structure

1. The website is using a 2012 child theme the paritially overrides the parent theme named 2012. Both themes can be accessed and editied via Appearance/Editor. Any changes should be done in the child theme so they are not lost when the parent is updated. The style.css in the child theme is where the more detailed changes to theme appearance of the site are done.
2. Appearance/Themes is where the broad changes to the theme appearance are done.

1. Click on Details when you find a plugin you are thinking about using. Look at how many times it has been downloaded and the user rating. Also see if it is compatible with the current version of WP you are using. Also when was the last time it was updated. If it has been over a year, the developer may have moved on and is no longer maintaining it. If it has been downloaded tens of thousand of times, it is probably a safe bet. If only a few hundred times,you may have to refer to number 2 below.
2. How to undo an  plugin upgrade If you upgraded a plugin and for some reason it’s not compatible with your version of WordPress, theme or other plugins, you may get an ugly error that completely takes your site down. If you can no longer access your dashboard to disable the plugin you upgraded, you’re going to need to go into your plugins directory via FTP. Navigate to the plugin’s folder and delete it. That should bring your dashboard back up.If you want to revert back to the previous version you had, you’ll need to download it from the repository. Go to the plugin’s page. There’s a blue box in the sidebar that says FYI and it has a link to “Other Versions.” Find the version you were using previously and upload that folder to your plugin’s directory. You should be back in business with the version you had before upgrading. Do some more research to determine the source of incompatibility or wait for a more stable release. ( By Sarah Gooding)
3. When to update a plugin. View the release notes/version details. It will have the date when the update was released. Wait at least a week to update to the newest version. That way you will avoid some of the bugs in the new release.

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Ryumonji Email Setup

1. There are currently three email accounts setup, admin, office and shoken.
2. Admin is currently not being used and should  probably be reserved for comment moderation. Which is something that should be checked daily. A good volunteer position. WordPress has apps for mobile phones so moderation can happen anywhere. It is currently being forwarded to ryumonji.usa@gmail.com. I don’t know why.
3.  Office is used by the fast secure contact form. Any forms created will send emails to office@ryumonji.org. As of 02/08/2013 it is also being retrieved by Thunderbird on the Ryumonji computer.
4. Shoken is being sent to bluehost servers via shoken@ryumonji.org. The Ryumonji computer and Shoken’s netbook is getting the email via Thunderbird. shokenwinecoff@gmail.com account has been deleted.

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User Input from all the Fast Secure Contact Forms on the website.

1. As an editor/admin you can access and export all the data from the various forms that will be on the website. It can be found in Dashboard/Contact Form DB. The select a form
   in the drop down box at the top of the page. If no forms show up, it means they are
   empty. If you select a form, you then have the option to export it in various formats. The exported file will be downloaded to your computer.