WordCamp Fayetteville 2012

Overview of the mobile initiative undertaken at SAU using WordPress and other tools. Presentation will highlight useful plugins and discuss responsive design and theme frameworks. Experience Level:

Intermediate – Assumes basic knowledge of topic and some experience.

Prerequisite Knowledge: Basic WordPress skills, knowledge of Extend and plugin installation.

Skills/Knowledge Gained: How to quickly launch mobile-friendly content. Awareness of practical tools and budget-friendly methods.

Responsive design has exploded this year, as have mobile apps and WordPress specific options in these areas. Is a responsive theme enough? Do I need to redirect users to a mobile-specific site version? What’s the difference between a web app and a native app? What about those of us running WordPress networks? We’ll have a discussion of plugins, responsive themes (frameworks & standalone), and mobile app builder tools that play friendly in the WP universe.

Otto, from Audrey Capital and WordPress.org, talks about the support forums, how he got started with them, why support is so important, and then he will open up the floor to any and all questions about WordPress, core, plugins, themes, anything. If you have any sort of support questions, this is the place to be and Otto is the person to ask.

Who knew that learning about graphs, keywords and other statistics could possibly be fun? Find out during this session that helps participants learn how to understand Google Analytics and why it’s important to pay attention. Whether you have a blog or a website, knowing your visitors and their actions on your site is important for success. Analytics information is used for planning and promotion, both which are vital functions of a successful blog or company website. Angela will share what the various terms mean and how to manage the mountains of data into manageable (and useful) morsels.

Gone are the days of building for a particular browser or screen size.  New form factors launch every day and the mobile world demands a new approach to site design.  Now all you’ve got to do is break your brain and you too can put together dynamic themes that work anywhere.

WordPress Inside Out is an approach/method for designers and developers that want their pixel-perfect designs without the ordinary blog look. For simplicity, WordPress Inside Out is based on the default TwentyTen Theme. The approach is to break down this theme into its bare, essential layout blocks.  The goal is to show that a simple approach and good methodology can lead to beautiful and maintainable web sites.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to grow traffic to your blog, find your audience or convert your readers into buyers, social media can be a powerful tool. We’ll talk about which channels accomplish what; who’s doing it right and how to copy them; and what you can do right now to reach your goals fastest.

In this session participants will explore ways to promote work and engage readers using design elements, text, audio, video, and social plug-ins. Lela has been customizing and maintaining her own website since 2009 and credits the site with increased print work, speaking engagements, valuable PR, and overall audience growth.

Imagery is becoming the one of the top ways to optimize content on the web.  In this workshop we will discuss how much imagery you need to use in your site, how to create your own imagery, how to protect your work, what kinds of imagery enhance content, how to optimize your WP site through connecting its imagery to other networks like Pinterest and Facebook, how to ethically obtain cost effective images and how to legally use images created by others.

A basic workshop in how to get from not having a clue to having a blog in under an hour. We will go over BASIC terminology and what it means in preparation for later sessions in the weekend.

Writing about your life may not pay as well as other types of blogging, but it’s rewarding in other ways. Sharing your innermost thoughts and ideas can sharpen your writing skills, broaden your world, release stress and help you build a community of enthusiastic, loyal readers. Learn the finer points of personal blogging and how to avoid common pitfalls. Use the tools, break the rules.

Express yourself!

Most of the time, we just get the perspective of how to build a blog by yourself, but there is another way. Bringing on additional authors can seem scary and like a lot of work, but it can also spur growth and bring added life to your blog. This session will tell you why you might choose to bring on other authors and how to do it.

The session will cover the basics of using WordPress to create — for free — both blogs and conventional websites for personal and business projects. WordPress.com will be the basis of demonstrations to create a site then create individual pages and posts. WordPress.org details will be integrated into the presentation.

A successful website should communicate with search engines as well as appeal to your customers. Writing your site content with both of these audiences in mind will improve conversions and visibility, the two metrics that define online success. We’ll touch on four things; keywords, audiences, SEO writing, and …beep beep boop beep.

During my talk we will cover the following:

• What is a theme framework?
• Advantages to using a theme framework
• What is a child theme?
• Setup & Configuration of Genesis w/ a child theme
• How to Extend Genesis w/ Plugins

During the session I will actually build a website w/ a sample child theme live and demonstrate the flexibility of the framework in terms of designing a website to look exactly how you want it to look. I will also demonstrate how WordPress can be a totally customizable content management solution w/ the help of Genesis Framework that can be turned over to your clients w/ total confidence that you have delivered a scalable, flexible solution to meet their needs!

This course will be geared toward helping bloggers get familiar with the other side of the web; design. The lessons taught will help bloggers understand the basics of design principal. I will teach you how to use basic color theory, basic grid structures, repetition and motif. I believe with a well-structured understanding of these basics, bloggers can come away with a good foundation of design and use it to make their sites look more professional in the future.

CSS – stop being afraid of it! I am going to teach you the basics of CSS and ramp it up all the way to new and interesting techniques with a bit of CSS3. But don’t panic! It’s much easier than you think it is!

So you have a WordPress website, great! So you have some of the best plugins and other customization tools that WordPress offers, all this just the beginning. Even with the best looking website in the world, how do you keep people coming back? How do you increase the time they spend on your website or blog? How do you get them to share your website or blog? My session will teach you the best way to do all of these things and more, I’ll teach you how to take things to the next level.