JeffreyMarx.com

The Westchester WordPress meetup group held its first meetup on Tuesday, January 26th at my newspaper’s (The Journal News) offices in White Plains, New York. The audience was comprised of about 10 people looking to learn more about the software. The group was started by Anthony Zeoli , who runs a local web development firm called Digital Strategy Works. We’re joining a cluster of groups that have been popping up to discuss WordPress, an open source blogging system which is becoming more popular by the day. Meetup.com is one of my favorite sites on the internet as it’s main intent is to use the internet to organize the groups that meet off the internet. I’ll talk more about Meetup.com in a future blog post.

Zeoli did a fantastic job walking through the WordPress installation process. He explained the basics of themes, Search Engine Optimization and plugins. The audience was very active in asking a lot of questions. I’m an assistant organizer of the group and would like to think that my experience overseeing a cluster of WordPress Powered blogs is a big help to people who want to understand WordPress better. I chimed in and relayed a lot of good information that the audience seemed to appreciate

Our second Meetup will be held on Tuesday February 16th, also at the Journal News office in White Plains. The agenda is not set in stone yet. Members have said they want to learn more about SEO, Theming, Permalinks and Hierarchy, and just a general discussion around blogging with WordPress and the various opportunities blogging presents. So our plan is to take one of those general topics, and delve much deeper into it for our February meetup. In March, I’m planning on making a presentation on how bloggers can build traffic through link building, and engaging the audience.

if you are interested in attending, please join our meetup group. It is a great opportunity to learn about blogging and WordPress from professionals who are in the field.

Here is a link to Tony’s powerpoint slides from the meeting.