WordCamp Phoenix 2013

An SEO primer for people who are using the web to communicate ideas and connect with audiences. Covering the very beginnings of what search engine optimization is and how to do the basics of preparing your ideas for being found on the web.

Have you ever thought about adding ads or an ad server to your website so that you can sell ads to more than one advertiser but didn’t know where to start? This session will cover when the right time is to make the jump to selling ads or upgrading to an ad server, best practices around serving ads, and other common questions relating to serving ads on WordPress based websites.

I would like to see more meetups stream their content and make it available both for their attendees and for people thinking about attending their meetups. I think this is uncovered territory and that more folks should be doing this at their local events. I am a big advocate for exposure and making your presence known in the community and I feel that a lot of developers are just not doing so well at marketing. I am not a marketer but as a small business owner I am realizing more and more that exposure, being an advocate and making your skills known is something folks like me need to do more of.

The most important thing on your web site is your content. Never ever think about it differently.

Your content is what brings people to your site and what they stay to read. But like any other design dynamic, if your content is hard to see or read, if it is boring, if it is not attractive or difficult to navigate, then no one will ever grasp the value of what you have created. That is why you want, why you need, to learn about WordPress themes.

A WordPress theme is made of a set of files that do the work to structure and layout your content. In our session, we will look at some themes and review the entire ecosystem of themes that are available to you, from free to premium to framework themes.

With all those choices, we will also review how to best choose the right theme for you.

“I help people think about distributed development differently, while enjoying themselves. So whether they are hiring a remote developer, working in a distributed team, or outsourcing work, my presentation will help them with tips and encouragement.”

“Not every site needs a redesign, but every site can benefit from some careful observation and reaction to users. Using free or inexpensive tools readily available online, any site owner can tweak, modify, and correct their site to optimize it for their users. This session would introduce the idea of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), give examples of it’s usefulness, and provide some getting started tips.

The topic is an essential element of effective ongoing site marketing: people think about optimizing their sites for the search engines… how about the users?

My goal is to help small business owners and starting WordPress users to effectively use and develop their own WordPress websites, whether for marketing, e-commerce or business development. By offering concise and simple best practices and breaking down the technical jargon into simple language, I hope to give attendees enough information to develop their site without getting overwhelmed, motivate them to actually take action and get them excited about all of the ways WordPress can help develop their businesses.

“Attendees will learn the basic history of web design, what Responsive Design is, why you should care, how you can get started using it, and some great tips for anyone who uses WordPress.

People will be inspired to make their sites responsive, as well realizing it is quite simple and easy to do so.”

Image manipulation in WordPress was an alchemy of mixing GD functions and WordPress functions together to (hopefully) turn out the desired result. Now, as of WordPress 3.5, GD is abstracted out, and a new class, WP_Image_Editor, allows easy manipulation of image files. This lets you perform simple resizing, crops, flips, rotates, and real-time streaming of those results using Imagick or GD. But, that’s not all! You can also easily extend WordPress’ classes to add your own functions, or replace the entire engine with your own.

I’m Mike Schroder, otherwise known as DH-Shredder. I work on WordPress at DreamHost, and had the pleasure of co-authoring the new WP_Image_Editor class with Marko Heijnen, Cristi Burcă (scribu), and other contributors for WordPress 3.5.

This session will walk through what’s changed for image manipulation in 3.5, and explain ways you can take advantage of the new APIs, both through using them directly and extending them for plugins of your own.

As a blogger, I have had a lot of questions over the years about what I can and cannot say on my blog. I have learned that most of the mistakes people make with their blogs are misstatements or inadvertent mistakes. Unfortunately, these mistakes can be costly if it results in a lawsuit.

I want to teach attendees about the most common mistakes people make with their blogs and give them these 10 questions that they can review before they publish any post to help them stay out of trouble.

Your theme is your site’s identity; it’s your brand, your design. It’s how you present yourself to the world. Are you happy with your current theme? Do you know how to customize and fix it, or find a better one?

How can you tell a great theme from a just a good one? Where should you look for themes? What do you do with it once you find it? Should you use a free one, make your own, or hire a pro?

Welcome the wild and woolly world of WordPress themes! We’ll tackle these critical questions, and more.

Learn what types of themes are out there, how to find and install theme, and dive into basic modifications to your theme it so it fits you perfectly.

Tools

Education Level: Intermediate

Ever wonder if your WordPress site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet? This session by Dre Armeda will show a demo on how quickly your site can be hacked, and your reputation put on the line. Dre will cover various scenarios that can affect your website like Pharma Hack, SEO Poisoning, and malicious redirects. He will then aid you by providing some tips to help reduce risk now and forever. Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

Takeaways

1. Better understanding of overall risks to running a website
2. Understand common website attack types
3. How to better approach website security
4. What to do if you or a loved one is attacked/infected
5. Tools to help you get back on track

Attendees will complete the session knowing the subtle differences between what makes a WordPress site function well as related to the specific site goals vs. something that falls very short.

Every job has it’s own set of insider tricks and techniques. WordPress development is no different.

We will talk about some of the techniques that web developers employ to make their lives and jobs easier and the products they create better.

For each technique I will outline some common tools that WordPress professionals use on a daily basis.

This includes discussions about techniques for graphic design, interaction design, development, system admin, and debugging.

Discover how the freedom and flexibility built into WordPress empowers relief teams working in war zones in Southeast Asia. We will explore the challenges faced and strategies used to create an application that tracks medical care and human rights abuses in the jungles of Burma. The power behind Custom Post Types and the Pods Framework enables doctors and relief workers to make critical data-driven decisions when treating 15,000 patients each year. Come see how you can use the same tools to power maps, charts, and interactive timelines in your own WordPress plugins and themes.

My presentation will be an opportunity for attendees to see the forest through the trees. For most people, WordPress is a tool to help them grow their business or their personal influence. At a camp like this, it is easy to get caught up in jotting down plugin names, best practices, code snippets, marketing tactics, and so much more, that you forget that WordPress is a tool, not the business itself.

My presentation will take lessons from biology, religion, economics, and other diverse disciplines to draw inspiring parallels about quickly growing enduring organizations.

I see a lot of people “start” their WordPress site by spending hours, days, or even months combing through themes and having nothing to show for all the time they have put into their sites. In this presentation, I will walk people through setting up a WordPress site from scratch the right way–focusing on getting the content and audience right first, then worrying about the look and feel. People will be more productive and will be able to get sites up and running in a fraction of the time and they will spend less time in the theme search phase. I will also include tips on choosing the correct theme and plugins.

The biggest differentiating factor between successful business owners & unsuccessful business owners, is a well developed, well executed strategy.

Successful businesses have a strategy and unsuccessful businesses do not.

My session will educate listeners on the importance of an integrated online strategy. More specifically how content, SEO, social media, a WordPress blog, and a user-friendly website, MUST have a unified strategy behind them, to have maximum impact.

My presentation would be a great capstone presentation to tie all the pieces together from all the other sessions. The audience will walk away with several clear action-steps to put all of their new knowledge from the entire day, into action.

I have organized and executed several of my own 2-hour workshops that were all very successful. I also was just recently invited to speak at Social Media Arizona (SMAZ) and my company, Entourage Marketing, was a sponsor of WordCamp Phoenix 2012.

I am passionate about helping small business owners succeed and be more strategic about their marketing. I think that WordCamp 2013 would be a great fit for my message and I would be honored to have the privilege and opportunity to speak at WordCamp Phoenix 2013.

Attendees will gain an understanding of how WordPress can be used at the K-12 level to increase student engagement and increase the effectiveness of parent/community communication.

We will show several of the most common vulnerabilities found in plugins and themes. We will exploit these vulnerabilities live and then show how they can be prevented with correct coding.

We will show several of the most common vulnerabilities found in plugins and themes. We will exploit these vulnerabilities live and then show how they can be prevented with correct coding.

Attendees will know where to get content ideas that attract traffic to their blogs. Basically., this session will help you address the pain of “I don’t know what to blog about.”

Winston Churchill once said,

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

Great for Winston Churchill, but what about you? In the digital age bristling with social networks, blogs, and Twitter, you can rarely control what is said about you and your work.

So what can you do? While you can’t control the conversation, you can influence it. A good author web site can serve you in this effort — helping you establish your brand, and putting out into the world the image and the story of yourself that you want people to know.

But, just as people judge a book by its cover, they will judge your work by your website.

In Saturday’s session WordPress for Authors, we will discuss the process of designing and building a web site that represents you as a professional and reflects your author brand. Some of the topics include:

– Structuring a site to reflect your goals
– Identifying your audience
– Incorporating your personal identity
– What to look for in a Theme
– Content
– Plugins and post types

We’ll also touch on ways to use your site once it’s built as part of a broader author platform to help you launch your next book.

These topics are relevant to anyone who writes or works with authors, but they can easily be applied to any professional or creative individual with a web site.

New WordPress users are often confronted with some initial confusion. Mainly from new terminology and a lack of understanding what all the different components of WordPress are and how to properly use them.

Three of these unfamiliar components are Post, Categories, and Tags.

In my training on Friday, I’ll be covering the fundamentals…

What are Post, Categories, & Tags
How these three components relate to each other
What are their core functions
How to create and use Post, Categories, & Tags

I will also touch on the different features available within the Post editor…

Excerpt
Send Trackbacks
Sticky Post
Format
Custom Fields
Discussion
Featured Image
Slug

You will learn enough about post, categories and tags to feel confident enough to start publishing on your WordPress website or blog. Although this class will have some structure to it, I expect to have plenty of time for questions, and addressing specific concerns.

So you want to make a website for your business or non-profit and you heard WordPress is the way to go… now what? Come and hear, from a small business expert, just how simple it is to create a professional looking WordPress website. We’ll cut to the chase so you know what to do, when do to it and where to find the tools you need to make it happen on a budget.

Some of us are designers, some of us developers: we are all creators. The venn diagram overlaps more than we think. Let us explore these roles, WordPress, and how we can stretch ourselves to create amazing beautiful sites outside and inside.

Attenees will receive a general overview of how easy it is to run multiple sites in WordPress using “multisite.”

Plugins are a quick and easy way to extend the functionality of WordPress without knowing programming languages. The WordPress plugin repository currently hosts over 22,800 free plugins that do everything you can imagine and more including adding social media icons, improving your SEO, displaying image slideshows, turning your site into a store, an online forum, or even your very own social network, plus much more! While plugins bring a huge amount of functionality to WordPress, they can also be the source of a lot of trouble. This session will show you what to look for in a plugin, how to download and install them safely to your site, how to provide and get feedback on the plugins you try, as well as some recommendations for plugins that will compliment every site you build.

If you plan on having a self-hosted WordPress site, you will need to have your own domain name and hosting. A good domain name helps a visitor to find your content, while web hosting provides the necessary hardware that your website needs to run on the Internet. Both are necessary and represent some very important decisions that you will need to make when determining to have a website. This session will cover the basics of domain names, registration and configuration, the typical types of hosting that you can select from, the questions you need to ask a potential host when setting up your new site, and finally, how to point your domain name to your hosting provider of choice.

“Ever wonder what process WordPress undertakes when someone visits your site? Or how it translates that nice permalink to the database query that ultimately delivers the content your visitors requested? Or what it takes to load the appropriate template from your site’s theme?

In this talk, I’ll walk through WordPress’ loading process and shed some light on the various APIs used. I’ll also discuss how these APIs work together to make the software function.”

While content as “king” may not be the best analogy, the importance of well-written, useful, textual content cannot be overstated. Tone can affect engagement, keywords can make or break your SEO, length can kill interest–great writing is vital. Content is not just blog posts or “About” pages, it is everything that gives information (including the way the information itself is presented).

You have a great business or cause, but there are countless others just a click away. How do you find the right people to get involved, and how do you make them care?

In this session, we will refresh how you view your own web content by seeing it through the eyes of the user, and we will discuss methods of improving UX by employing simple and effective psychology alongside common-sense SEO. We will also explore how methods of effective in-person conversation can be applied to web content strategy. Then, since better prospects will be finding and reading your content, I will show you how to target your audience, measure the results, and constantly improve your outreach.

Through being both appropriately satirical and data-driven, I take a unique approach to getting content creators to spend some time in the shoes of their audience, revealing some of the absurdities of our assumptions and demonstrating how to challenge and test them. Data, empathy, logic, and optimization, together, always lead to better engagement. More concretely, we will discuss:

• How visitors measure and absorb value when viewing web content (using data, psychology, and theories)
• How real conversation teaches us how to engage with visitors
• How to systematically and sustainably empathize with your target audience
• How to make content memorable through positive emotional interaction
• How to define and focus on your target audience
• How to identify and test your assumptions about user interaction

Cliff Seal
UX Designer at Pardot

“While content as ‘king’ may not be the best analogy, the importance of well-written, useful text content can’t be overstated. Tone can affect engagement, keywords can make or break your SEO, length can kill interest—great writing is vital. Content isn’t just blog posts or ‘About’ pages, it’s everything that gives information (including the way the information itself is presented)! I’m seeing a common theme amongst non-profits: no one cares about their content.

Why?

In this session, we’ll refresh how we view our own web content by seeing it through the eyes of the user, and we’ll discuss methods of improving UX (user experience) by employing simple and effective psychology alongside common-sense SEO. Then, since better prospects will be finding and reading your content, I’ll show you how to target your audience, measure the results, and constantly improve your outreach.”

“This session will cover the severe need for low-tech access to WordPress, but for content production and consumption – a problem somewhat unique to the developing world. It will cover use cases, user groups, and a few proposed techniques for making both content and publishing tools available to those without high-speed Internet, 3G connectivity, or traditional desktop publishing tools.

Attendees will hopefully achieve a deeper understanding of potential, unreached user demographics and the tools/techniques they can use to reach these groups.”

Understanding how to think forward about user experience and how to continue to shape the present and future of the web through WordPress.

I want people to walk away from my session with a much deeper understanding of how actions & filters work in WordPress core. I will cover some of the lesser-known but extremely useful hooks, such as template_redirect. I also want people to learn how to create & utilize their own hooks when making theme frameworks, parent themes, and plugins.

Everyone knows WordPress needs developers, but we also need people for translation, documentation, support, accessibility, UI/UX, testing, etc. I did a similar talk at WC Austin as well as at GoDaddy’s Tech Fest. It is a great way to help people get involved.

Everyone knows WordPress needs developers, but we also need people for translation, documentation, support, accessibility, UI/UX, testing, etc. I did a similar talk at WC Austin as well as at GoDaddy’s Tech Fest. It’s a great way to help people get involved.

Attendees will receive a practical guide to increasing their perceived value in the eyes of their clients and being able to work on projects they love, with clients who respect them and for the fees they deserve.

…Because life is too short to do otherwise.

I hope attendees will be comfortable creating WordPress.com sites that reflect their goals and personality, and that they are able to create a plan for content creation and community engagement that is feasible for long-term blogging.

This session will cover signing up for WordPress.com (with a brief aside about .org); picking a theme, title, and tagline; tweaks you can make without upgrades or CSS; developing a content strategy; and community building in a nutshell, all with an emphasis on developing your unique voice as a blogger. It will wrap up by introducing people to resources that will help them on their way, like Learn.WordPress.com and The Daily Post.