It’s been many weeks since FoVA, and I just realized I haven’t told you about the last workshop I attended! I know quite a bit about WordPress, but I want to learn as much as I can, so I was pretty thrilled to learn that Frances Palaschuk was going to be doing a workshop on WordPress.

I knew from following her on Twitter that Frances would have lots of resources to share, and I was not disappointed. Here are a few of her recommendations:

• Studiopress for professional WordPress themes
• Jing for creating screencasts which can be used to demonstrate tasks to clients who are visual learners
• 123RF for royalty-free stock photos
• Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet
• Google Webmaster tools, which I knew a little about, but learned even more

I also learned that when creating websites (as opposed to blogs) using WordPress, it’s better to use a premium theme (as I did for the Golden Horseshoe Virtual Assistants Group and Maestro Quality sites), because most free themes are more suited to blogs. Furthermore, when using free themes that are not listed on WordPress.org, it’s important to watch for hidden ads which may lead to “bad neighbourhoods.”

Perhaps most valuable of all were copies of Frances’ Ultimate Blog Planning Workbook and WordPress Site Design checklist, which have already been very useful.

All in all, FoVA was a wonderful experience and I am so glad I went. If you avoid industry conferences because you don’t understand the benefit of networking with and learning from your peers, I urge you to reconsider – you just don’t know what you’re missing! For more on that subject, read The ROI of Attending a Conference.