WordCamp Baltimore 2012

My journey from a dirt slow site to a near perfect score and blazing fast load times. Learn from my mistakes and mishaps.

You’ve spent hours or days coming up with your best theme design yet. Now what? How can you put it together in a way that won’t get inadvertently mauled by a developer who isn’t as sensitive to whitespace or the grid as you are, or one who isn’t comfortable making guesses about some elements based on the rest of the design? We’ll talk about essential WordPress theme components to include, a little bit of Photoshop etiquette, and some of the things developers like to think about when they convert your lovely theme into an interactive reality.

This session will help designers and developers become more efficient through WordPress. Topics will include plugins that perform common tasks, the use of frameworks for rapid development and developing your own code snippet “cheat sheet”. Attendees are encouraged to share their own methods for producing high-quality work more efficiently.

In addition to the freedom that WordPress offers to its users, it also offers a great deal of flexibility to its administrators and managers. One of the greatest features of WordPress is the ability to set up a multisite environment that allows you to stand up an entirely new website in a matter of minutes. WordPress Multisite offers you the option to set up new websites using subdomains or subdirectories off of the original installation point. However, through various plugins and configuration settings, you can take it even further than that.

I will talk about how adding audio and/or video to your website attracts and keeps your visitors engaged and how easy it is to incorporate into your site. I’ll show how to add your media without a plugin and also demonstrate use of my favorite plugin (Blubrry PowerPress).