In honor of WordCamp Orange County 2011 on May 14-15 at Chapman College, you can save 28% off the annual membership when you enroll in the WebDesign University training program. This includes top-caliber Live Webinar classes which are also recorded for your review and study.

Check out all that is included with your WebDesign Membership at WebDesign.com

To take advantage of this fantastic limited time offer, send a message to sales@ithemes.com and mention that that you heard about the  offer from Mark Burrell.

Looking forward to enjoying a relaxing evening home with the family and watching my alma mater battle the Hawaii Rainbows in Honolulu.  Our youngest family member (Rojo – 18 months) is in game day mode and ready to go!

Rojo Burrell

WordPress is the popular tool for building search engine friendly Website and blogs. With the release of WordPress 3.0 it’s added some great new features and capability for creating a high-traffic, lead-generation machine. Join me this week for a special “Blogging 101 with WordPress” session at a Friday Special tuition of only $9 (Regularly $39). It’s a two-hour Webinar plus a one hour follow-up Q&A/Review session. Click here for details and sign up link!

Here’s a quick checklist to help you in upgrading an existing WordPress site to WordPress 3.0:

(Note: it’s a good idea to check first with the author of any theme or plugin you are using to see if there are any special notes or issues they ahve with WordPRess 3.0)

Here are steps to take to upgrade to WordPress 3.0:

1. Back up your blog. (I recommend the Backup Buddy plugin – makes the process super easy)
2. Copy widgets (I would take screen shots of the code or copy out to notepad file just in case)
3. Upgrade Plugins to make sure you have versions compatible with WordPress 3.0
4. Deactivate all Plugins (you’ll reactivate them after the upgrade)
5. Upgrade WordPress
6. Reactivate plugins one at a time and check to make sure they are working properly.

Explore the new features of WordPress in your Dashboard.

Enjoy WordPress 3.0!

WordPress 3.0 was just released as an upgrade to WordPress 2.9.2. WordPress 3.0 is a major upgrade (hence the 2. to 3. version jump) offers some nice features and will definitely be worth your consideration – however it is a first release (hence the .0). I will be providing a more detailed analysis regarding 3.0 shortly, but my recommendation at the moment is NOT to upgrade just yet. Let’s see what shakes out in the next couple of days as many thousands of experimenters (suckers? LOL) upgrade and will (I’m sure) report the results (good and bad) on the various blogs and forums.

Having worked with WordPress 3 beta versions in testing environment shows it will be a very nice upgrade HOWEVER, maybe not at the 3.0 level. I would recommend waiting until at least the next several days as the reports come back. If you are setting up a NEW WordPress blog (vs. upgrading an existing WordPress blog) then you can go ahead and check it out, but I would not upgrade an existing important blog immediately.

My $.02 worth. Hope this helps. Stay tuned.

Here’s the official WordPress 3.0 video tour: