WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012

Spend some time in the theme repo, any premium theme shop, or design gallery and you’ll notice that a small handful of layouts  emerge as clear favorites. WordPress by its nature encourages many of these patterns, and the design/dev community has further solidified them. If we identify these patterns, define them, make sweet love to them, we can design faster and enable more efficient development.  Beyond just designing faster, once we know these design patterns, we can blow them up. We can break out of our handy patterns and use design to push WordPress into new and exciting areas. I’ll be focused primarily on design and layout strategies for WordPress created content, but will touch on some theme techniques for using WordPress to created non standard digital experiences.

320px and Up – Responsive Web Design, what is it, the benefits, a background on it, how to get started, and things to watch out for while developing sites that work on any mobile phone, tablet, desktop, and more.

Logic and statistics drive many usability discussions. How many users accomplished a task? How long did it take on average? What labels caused delays? etc.

Likewise, emotion is often discussed in context of interactivity and aesthetics. Emotion and usability sound like separate topics but they closely intertwined, so much so they are impossible to separate.

I will go out on a limb and claim emotion is actually the most important aspect of usability. Because emotion is the root of all behavior, how one feels ultimately determines what they will or won’t do on a website.

In this session I will demonstrate how one can design themes and websites that are emotionally engaging and intuitively usable; creating the most compelling user experience possible.

Customers as a whole don’t read instructions. They’re written for them, but they don’t read them.

I’m going to talk about good support, good customers, bad support, jerk customers, and combinations of all of those. More importantly, I want to look at how we can avoid support all together; in a good way.

tl;dr – You’re the person I’m talking about.

Most WordPress themes today won’t stand the test of time. Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven are examples of themes that do, unfortunately most commercial work doesn’t meet the standards you expect based on these free default themes. Topics of interest include bundling plugin functionality and shortcodes into themes, interoperability with plugins, and hostile theme options.

I would like to delve into the newest of CSS3, what can and should be used progressively, how to use these techniques, and what we can expect in the future from this amazingly sophisticated technology.

I would like to cover progressively enhanced techniques while developing in WordPress, responsive layouts, and a pragmatic approach to organizing and executing styles.

I have extensive knowledge in the wonderful world of CSS, and am excited at the prospect of sharing my knowledge of CSS3 with those who are interested in beginning, or learning more.

NOTE:  It is not my intention to deliver the core aspects and techniques of CSS to the audience, only to expand their current knowledge of the subject, and get them excited  about the future of styling sites.

Professional WordPress sites deserve a professional development and deployment process. “Doing it live” is not an option. I’ll take you through my ideal WordPress Git setup using WordPress Skeleton, then showcase a professional development and deployment workflow using WP Stack.

Version Control lets you track your files over time. Why should you care? So when you mess up you can easily get back to a previous working version! I will take you through what version control is, why it’s important and how to start using it today on projects you’re already working on.

The next natural step in this WordPress evolution is that it will become a widely adopted web application development platform. With the vast improvements in WordPress 3.x and the introduction of custom post types, custom taxonomies, and custom fields, the sky is the limit as to the kinds of web apps you can build with WordPress.  Find out how you can build your next web application using WordPress.

Implementing a WordPress site can become exponentially complex as more people are involved in producing content, structuring layout,designing graphics, and developing features. In this session, you will learn how to navigate WordPress development when you are forced to work with a committee.

This talk will showcase some of the awesome helper functions in WordPress core. These functions will break down into three categories:

1. Display helpers: This will cover some of the cooler display oriented helper functions, such as checked(), selected(), disabled(), paginate_links(), etc.
2. Data helpers: This will cover some of the useful functions for manipulating, getting, and returning data, such as __return_[true|false|zero|empty_array|null](), wp_list_pluck(), wp_list_filter(), [add|remove]_query_arg(), absint(), form_option(), url_to_post_id(), trailingslashit(), etc.
3. Action helpers: This will cover some of the useful functions for executing functionality, such as: media_sideload_image(), wp_remote_[get|post](), wp_localize_script(), wp_mkdir_p(), get_temp_dir(), wp_die(), etc.

This would be for people that know PHP and have written some in their theme functions file, but don’t know how to pull that out into a plugin.

Social media can be the black hole of online promotion. We can spend hours of time and never escape the gravity well of anonymity. Successful online marketing depends on mastering  key tools, and leveraging your social universe with a few essential tools. This session is for those who are online, and have strapped on their rocket suit, but aren’t sure how to navigate their ship from Planet A to Galaxy B.

Attendees will have some fun, and walk away introduced to key tools and metrics they can use to shift their  online promotion and marketing into warp drive.

I would like to cover and introduce the Pods Framework for WordPress as a tool to build and manage highly customizable sites. Applications for this range from custom taxonomy and content types to complex, multi-edit pages and posts. More information about Pods can be found here: http://podsframework.org/

Everyone and their dog can blog, so you need to do more to distinguish yourself. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a video is worth 10,000. Learn the tips and techniques to start video blogging in less time than it takes to write a post, for free and with ease.

Objectives:

1. learn 3 common myths people believe why they can’t do video
2. recognize the benefits of doing a video blog
3. configure WordPress & plugins to embed videos
4. choose the right equipment and software
5. create video blog posts in less time than it takes to do a written post

Abstract:
Setting up a video blog has never been easier. In fact, the entire configuration can be done in less than 3 minutes. And recording and editing a video blog post actually takes less time than a written post, doesn’t cost you any money and is easy and fun to learn.

Video blogging is great way to connect with your audience. You’ll see comments and sharing go up as you develop a personal and lasting relationship with your readers. And because many bloggers still feel video is too hard, you’ll distinguish yourself as an elite blogger.

In order to become an effective video blogger, you need to use video strategically and develop the right mix between video and words that will suit your content and viewers. Once you learn the 6 strategic uses of video on your blog, you want to start video blogging today. Of course, you can learn video blogging on your own or you can take a shortcut and learn the tips and tricks the experts use.

An overview of what BuddyPress and bbPress are, how they work, and why you would want to use them on your WordPress.org powered site.

Many Web Developers are requested to do SEO for new websites, or website re-dos. Often they claim to offer SEO. This session will walk through the basics, the must haves and the advanced (if you have time/budget) to do on client websites.

So you have a WordPress website, great you’re 10% there. How do you keep people coming back? How to you attract new visitors? How do you develop a cult like following for your website or blog?

Even with the best looking website, even the best pluggins WordPress has to offer, it’s still not enough. The best way to keep people coming back and bringing others is through the power of story.

My session will teach you the power of story and how to use it in a way that get people’s attention and builds a loyal and active following to your blog or website. Learn how to truly connect with people in this session. This session will also show you how I self-published and completely flopped (11 ebooks sold). Tapped into the power of my story and to date have sold over 50,000 copies using only my two WordPress websites and social media.

Many would-be entrepreneurs and and even current  business owners are just a few steps away from taking their business to the next level. By following the basic rules and building blocks of successful businesses, they can use WordPress to design and develop a lead generating machine. We will discuss best design practices for a business website, how to promote the website, and how to use it to to generate leads and sales for both online and offline businesses. Whether a beginner with WordPress, or more experienced, the ideas here will help them build their online presence in a way that will benefit their business.

In this session, I would like to record a live podcast. I want to promote the advantages of coming to a WordCamp event and answer questions from a live audience.

Participants that ask questions will have the opportunity to plug their website, share what benefits they have received from WordCamp and ask a question.

This session will be a workshop on how to configure WordPress for publishing podcasts. Learn which plugins to use, what settings to click and, finally, how submit your podcast iTunes and other directories. Stick around for the next session and you can also see how to record a live podcast.

I will launch into an introduction to WordPress Multisite features – explaining what it is, use case scenarios, sound advice for the user looking to take the Multisite leap, exploring Multisite use in the wild and the default set up/installation of Multisite, including hosting considerations.

Security best practices for WordPress installation, site hardening, and remediation after a hack.

Updated musings/rants/raves on using WordPress theme frameworks, third-party plugins (premium, free and non-WP, e.g. timthumb.php) and the actual pro’s and con’s of said frameworks/plugins in the real world (not in sales/marketing speak).

A reimagined version of Diet Pills, Theme Frameworks & SEO: There are no magic bullets.

I’ll take beginning users on a tour through the admin area, showing them how to navigate the menu and customize with Screen Options. I’ll jump into a few frequently used sections like Posts, Media, Pages, and Comments, and provide tips for working in those areas. Examples: pasting content from Word, formatting text, uploading and posting images, deleting and replying to comments.

The live walkthrough will be based on the self-hosted version of WordPress (WordPress.org), but will mostly apply to WordPress.com as well.

There are many ways to get started with WordPress, and thus, many questions surrounding where to begin. Should you choose WordPress.com or WordPress.org? Where should you look for themes? What plugins should you get? Come and learn how to get up and running quickly. We’ll navigate through the various web hosts, themes and plug-ins to get your website up and running in no time. Learn the best place to get started with your next website!