WordCamp Cape Town 2011

WordPress is the perfect platform to allow you to achieve excellent SEO results. It is only a tool though. Without SEO fundamentals in place you may not achieve the expected results no matter what plugin or tool you choose to use. This session will delve into the evolution of SEO from 1999 to present day and leave you with practical guidelines to apply to your WordPress blog before you’ve selected a theme, installed a plugin or published your first post

The story of Obox Mobile.

Obox Mobile: A WordPress plugin that converts your site into a gorgeous theme which is compatible for mobile devices. Stunning design, attention to detail and unique features make your site stand out when visitors hit your site with their phones.

How it works: Obox Mobile works by detecting supported devices like iPhones, Android & Blackberry and more, serving an optimized theme instead of your regular desktop theme.

Created using the Core: By creating our framework using the WordPress core you can understand the control panel without having to learn new code & techniques.

Give a man a fish and he’ll follow you for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll follow you for a lifetime. The way to get repeat and loyal WordPress clients is to get them involved and learning, not by holding all your cards to your chest. Here’s how…

We will give a brief overview of SEO and what it means to be #1 in Google search. Our main topic of discussion will be around Yoast’s SEO plugin for WordPress, how it works and what are its benefits.

Is content still king? The accessibility of CMS platforms such as WordPress has lead to an ever-increasing stream of content being pushed online, and the web is awash with clutter. If good content no longer holds the key to traffic, what is? In this presentation we take a look at exactly what ensures enduring success – regardless of the economic environment. This talk covers:

• The challenges facing content publishers in the digital economy
• How an aging rock n’ roll band managed to build and maintain a passionate community of fans
• Converting community members into ambassadors who still make the band $60m per annum in merchandise a decade after they disbanded.
• Online publishing success stories
• Lessons we can implement in our own strategies

How does a designer adapt to the ever increasing number of screen resolutions, devices, input modes and browsers these days? Creating different versions of a website hosted on multiple sub-domains is a very archaic way of trying to solve this problem. Jason will take you through responsive web design and how it could change your thinking when designing your next web project.

This session would offer useful information on how to maximise the multimedia features of WordPress towards blogging effectively or offering the best corporate CMS-driven websites.

This will cover a quick introduction on WordPress as a CMS, the advantages attached to it, achieving basic requirements of a website easily and quickly using already existing plugins, themes and basic customization of existing themes that do not require any coding. It will basically be trying to show the simplicity of WordPress and the power it has.

I will also highlight the SEO capacities within WordPress and why anyone looking to market themselves on the web should go to WordPress as a platform of choice.

I will also cover a little on achieving complex websites using WordPress without much coding.

WordPress has grown into a very diverse ecosystem, where its users have cultivated multiple different opportunities to create & build a business. Commercial themes have been the most obvious / mainstream success, but beyond theming there’s still so many untapped opportunities. This session briefly explores some of the more untapped opportunities.

Using the power of feeds to increase your readership by automate distributing your content. Learn how to increase your readership and gain more exposure to your blog. Learn how to use existing (and mostly free) tools to set-up a system get automatically display your blog posts on Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. Find out how to provide automated email subscription to new blog posts, and monitor which of these channels are most effective in increasing readership.

Having developed MobilePress, I have unique experience and knowledge about using WordPress as a mobile publishing platform. My talk will give some insight into the mobile world and why you should care about it, how to turn your blog into a mobile blog and some technical information about developing and optimizing mobile themes for your blog.

From my experience of making WordPress sites for clients, and for clients in South Africa in particular, there are a lot of people out there who get over-whelmed if updating their site isn’t quick and easy and involves too many menus and processes. As developers I think we can get too caught up in how clever we are being, without considering the needs of the end user. My talk aims to put across some solutions I’ve come across for making the whole process of updating a site as painless and simple as possible.

Dan is going to give everybody a quick over view of their e-Commerce Plugin, take everybody through the latest version, install a cool theme or two (maybe even a WooTheme Theme), and quickly take everybody through the purchasing process – just so that everybody is on the same page. Once everybody is on the same page Dan is going to give us an over view of the e-Commerce Plugin history, and then share with us the ups and downs of running an Open Source community.

Hopefully by the end of Dan’s session people will have lots of questions and you”ll all know what to do, and more importantly what not to do, if you have plans to launch your own Open Source project.

A profitable and vibrant ecosystem has evolved around WordPress with many leveraging the open source CMS to build successful businesses. Join us as our four panelists discuss the art of making money with WordPress at the core of your business.

Topics covered during the discussion include:

• Selling Themes and Plugins
• The Freemium model
• The conflict between the open source ethos and profitability
• Selling WordPress development services
• Giving back to the community
• Mistakes and lessons learned

Moderator: Ashley Shaw
Panelists: Adii Pienaar, Dan Milward, David Perel and Jess Green

How to scale your WordPress using similar technology to WordPress.com.