WordCamp Los Angeles 2011

Working as a freelance web designer and at several small studios, I’ve gained some experience in designing and marketing websites to small businesses. Since I started using WordPress for most of my websites, I’ve found that the value that independent designers are able to offer their clients increases exponentially.

Pairing WordPress on-site SEO advances with an intelligent and realistic internet marketing campaign will generate new focused leads with minimal upkeep. If you can design beautiful and eye-catching websites and gear them for better search engine visibility, then you’re in business.

It’s almost inevitable that you’ll one day need to transfer your WordPress site from one server to another. Our goal in this session is to explain the basics of a server transfer so that you’ll have enough confidence to never feel like you’re held hostage by a bad hosting company.

We launched over 170 sites in 4 months starting from scratch. In this session, I will give an overview of what’s involved in producing and launching a high traffic (many million uniques per month) network of WordPress blogs.

• Architecting for scale
• Coding practices
• Performance tuning
• Launching

This talk will be a continuation of the talk I gave at WordCamp Seattle earlier this year. It focuses on my experience creating a theme for public release in the official WordPress Theme directory. The original presentation can be viewed here.

My goal with the second talk would be to pull key elements from this presentation, but introduce some new concepts that I learned during the process creating my second theme for public release. I intend to create a totally new presentation; not just recycle the old one 🙂

You often hear about the two versions of WordPress – .com and .org. With the .com version users get a free, easy to use version that is limited in functionality and not very customizable. With the .org, users get a self-hosted version that is fully customizable but requires programming knowledge.

Developers have built an industry around the .org version creating and selling premium themes and plugins, offering membership to support sites, or creating custom sites for clients one at a time.
With the addition and growth of MultSite (formerly MU), WordPress is capable of a whole new way of doing things, bringing the best of the .com and the .org worlds together.

By creating a premium WordPress MultiSite installation targeted to a niche market, it is possible to provide an easy to use end user experience that provides premium themes and plugins and a level of customization tailored to that market.

I’d like to give a presentation on how to get started building a child theme. showing things like importing CSS, overwriting files, functions, etc…

Click to see the video

They say SEO is dead but that’s not true, it’s just a different animal now. By constructing well organized content you can rise through the ranks of the Internet clutter and gain key visibility and position your company and brand as subject matter experts.

Overview of the key concepts behind taking any design and turning it into a functional WordPress theme. Tips include base themes to work off, how to break up a PSD and its content into pieces suited for WordPress, the best plug-ins for heavy customization, etc.

Click to see the video.

This insightful workshop will take you from theory to practice by helping you understand not merely ways to do stuff, but also why and how stuff works. We’ll start by exploring the foundational philosophies that drive the social media and Internet communities; then we’ll discover three timeless principles for starting your online presence with audience. Most importantly you’ll walk away with a strategy you can start right away.

In an evolving digital journalism world you must focus on quality content, to keep driving traffic, subsequent revenue and site growth. Kapost (http://kapost.com) a WordPress plugin, helps online publishers manage multiple contributors with the Kapost online newsroom dashboard that seamlessly connects to all CMS’ including WordPress (our favorite integration).

Kapost helps editors assign stories to contributors, edit stories, manage their contributors with email notifications, track through an editorial calendar, pay their writers, performance metrics highlighting which writer brings in the most traffic,retweets and Facebook Likes and finally, posting directly to WordPress after pre-production.

With a background in online publishing, I will cover how to effectively focus on managing contributors and integrating WordPress with Kapost to help alleviate the often administrative tasks of managing contributors and content.

Many school and .edu sites are still stuck in the 90’s. They’re quite often still hand-coded, lack a CMS, and miss the mark on today’s design standards and best practices. WordPressis an excellent option for these sites and there are many great .edu sites that run on WordPress.

This presentation will cover basic design elements and best practices surrounding SEO strategy and content development. And having a kick-ass site is just half the battle. We’ll discuss ways to tackle slow-moving IT departments, secure buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and make your dream .edu site a reality.Additionally, we’ll examine examples of both good and bad .edu website implementations.

The goal of this session is achieve successful design principles overall for websites and how WordPress can help achieve this! We’ll be covering how to identify a bad design, how to plan for an efficient design, and cover best practices for user experience in regards to websites and suggest strong strategies.

The number of free and premium themes for WordPress has EXPLODED over the past couple of years. As such, the range of quality and consistency from one theme to another can be enormous.

The theme-ing business has quietly become a multi-million dollar cottage industry where single designers (like myself) are making upwards of $200,000 a year just by releasing themes.

Much has been discussed across the net about design standards, coding best practices, and the ever changing theme environment – I’d like to take the conversation a step further by examining the entire theme-marketplace as a whole and suggesting a ”manifesto” for theme designers.

The main points will include:

• Context: An overview of the theme industry as it stands right now.
• The need for higher review standards across the market
• The vast array of deprecated themes that stick around (but should be put to rest!)
• The need for themes to move AWAY from heavy options panels that lock users down to one theme.
• Where the true future of WordPress themes lies…

WordPress has been greatly improved over the last few releases. Along with interface changes, the release of WordPress 3.0 combined WPMU into the standard version of WordPress. Though the setup seems simple there still are a few added steps to get WordPress Multisite setup and working correctly at the site and server level. Multisite is a great tool for many businesses who have multiple product sites or even multiple storefronts. With some added tricks and a few hacks you can push the limits of Multisite and manage several sites with a little effort.

With almost 10,000 on the platform, I have probably made more mistakes than anyone else when it comes to using WordPress to launch a web site. From blog to corporate site, WordPress can do just about anything. So what should you know NOT to do? What are the best plugins to use as you get started? What other plugins might you want to consider? Should you use a free or premium theme, and is that even the right question? This and more is what we’ll cover as we talk about launching your site right.

http://www.slideshare.net/cflema/launch-right

Delivering compelling user experiences today means having all of the right elements in place. Everything from comments to social tools to performance and page load effect how and if your users interact and return to your site. In this talk I’ll walk through some user experience basics and bring it all together with a useful checklist of user experience elements that any publisher will find useful when it comes time to launch.

There’s a lot of material out there to help designers and developers make their themes mobile-friendly, but it can be difficult to find all the best sources and be sure that you have all your bases covered. I discovered this recently while making a new theme for my own site, and decided to make a WordPress-specific checklist of all the code I would need to make sure that my theme would work reliably and consistently on tablets and smartphones.

My presentation will take the audience step-by-step through the necessary HTML, CSS, and Javascript, covering what the code does and where it should go in a theme. Time permitting, I’ll discuss the more challenging aspects of mobile design in more detail, such as the difference between virtual and device pixels, how the behavior of view-ports affect page layout, and the different ways of detecting a device’s screen size.

Learn how BuddyPress can make your WordPress site social.

Topics to be covered:

• What BuddyPress is, an overview of it’s features.
• How you can get BuddyPress?
• How to install BuddyPress, adding to an existing WordPress blog.
• How you can extend BuddyPress to add more features. Plugins!
• Examples of what you can do with BuddyPress.
• and more!