Class Schedule – Saturday February 25, 2012

Musicians get your music listened to and full shows. Artists get commissioned and book exhibits. Writers get noticed and published. Site examples and best practices will be discussed with plenty of time left for Q & A.

Learn why WordPress is one of the hardest rocking blog and web design creation tools on the planet … oh yeah, and did I mention it’s free? This session will formally introduce you to WP. We will cover how to manually install WP on a server and how to use the “one-click” install method available on many web hosting control panels. We’ll also look at how to do editorial calendaring (managing posts that will appear at future dates), site mapping (using internal and external site maps to improve navigation and increase a website’s search engine ranking), site analytics (tracking information about site visitors) and the location of some of the best online resources for learning about WP. Start your day off right by learning how to use this truly amazing software.

We’ve all probably heard of HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Design, and other “future of the web” buzzwords. Maybe you’ve even dabbled in HTML5 doctype declarations and “header” tags, or used CSS3 rounded corners or gradients. But most of us have only scratched the surface of these technologies, and for good reason – not everyone is using Chrome 16 or Firefox 9 yet, and even they haven’t settled on uniform implementations. We’ll look at how Responsive Design is already beginning to change the way we approach building sites for different screen sizes, and peak into potentially transformative HTML5 techniques that are only beginning to appear around the web.

The WordPress multisite feature is a powerful beast. With it you can run multiple web sites on a single WordPress installation. Add in some powerful plugins like BuddyPress and Gravity Forms and you’re on your way to building a powerful community network.

In this session we’ll discuss how to get started with multisite, some of the features and techniques you can use to build a network and we’ll look at some examples of some real world uses for the awesomeness that is WordPress multisite.

Your theme is your site’s identity; 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? Where should you look for themes? How can you tell a great theme from a just a good one? What do you do with it once you find it?

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 choose a theme, and dive into basic modifications to your theme so it fits you perfectly.

Looking at how to scale WordPress with different tips and tricks both within WordPress, and beyond. We will take a look at different coding techniques and things you can do within WordPress, such as utilizing its APIs. We will also take a look at infrastructure, caching ideas, and implementing CDNs.

We will explore WordPress tips, techniques, ideas, plugins, design and more to take your real estate (or small business) WordPress site where you need it to go. Using practical examples, backed with real-life data, you will get a no-nonsense look at what it takes to build and maintain an effective web presence. Looking to get your questions answered? This is the session for you.

Plugins are the most important aspect of a WordPress site. They allow you to customize nearly any aspect of the site, anywhere from a simple Hello, Dolly! quote to a fully functioning e-commerce system. I will go over what plugins are, how to find them, and how to manage them.

Walking through WP builds that ‘break the mold’ of the traditional blog / business site and showcase how powerful WP can really be with some imagination

WordPress powers over 71 million websites on the internet, making it one of the most popular open source projects on the planet. Learn how NASA is leveraging WordPress to communicate, share, and interact with citizens more than ever before through a open data portal that catalogs hundreds of terabytes of information daily, an open source code repository website, and a community blog enabling thousands of NASA employees and contractors to share their stories about working at Nation’s Space Program directly with the public.

We’ll look at the issues that surround the use of open source content management systems in organizations from the perspective of technology, policy, and culture, and how you can effectively address those issues when deploying your own WordPress site. We’ll also discuss important WordPress best practices, including accessibility, security, and extensibility, that will help you share your content with the widest group of people possible.

Learn what it takes to move your website up in the search engines using the best practices outlined by Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Looking to sell things with WordPress? It’s easier than you might think. Learn from veteran E-Com junkies who built their business, Snapbackhats.com, on WordPress and sold it just 5 months later.

Dont you just love the latest design trends and techniques? Want to apply them to WordPress using great technique? Or do you just need some inspiration? Come to “Design Swoon” where we will not only look at some of the best design on the web but also parse down technique of implementation with CSS3 & WordPress. A designers must-see.

In this session Ryan will explore the ways WordPress is uniquely positioned as a platform for journalists, the exciting ways it’s being used in journalism today, and offer ideas that you can implement right away. We’ll look at how independent journalists and larger teams alike are using WordPress to power their publishing.

Session Preview: Empowering Journalists with WordPress

Journalism is, very simply, the practice of reporting events and issues of interest to a specific audience in a timely fashion. As you can imagine, the internet has been playing a large part in the evolution of journalism for some time now.

When it comes to WordPress and journalism, there are two primary groups we’ll be considering in the session. One group is news teams, and the other is individual journalists serving niche audiences. We’ll look at each group and how they take advantage of WordPress, why they chose it, and how to implement what they do in your teams.

The session’s goal will be to highlight how to fine-tune WordPress specifically for a journalist’s purposes, and how to construct a publishing workflow that will work no matter the size of your organization.

Most creative ideas fly away or appear in a fuzzy form. Learn to capture, expand, iterate and deliver those ideas.

Creative, innovative solutions are often shipped in the real world when discipline and an innovation regimen is in place. This session will dive into knowing why, having intense focus, having systems to capture and organize ideas, the value of connecting and collaborating with others, iterating effectively and curating what’s good to deliver what’s great.

In this session we will discuss when and for what types of sites paid search is appropriate as well as the basics of setting up effective paid search campaigns. We will focus on:

– Google Adwords versus Microsoft Adcenter
– keyword research for paid search
– writing effective ad copy
– landing page content strategy
– bidding and budgeting strategy

In addition to driving paid search traffic, we will dive into the details of optimizing campaigns for return on investment. We will discuss setting up Google Analytics on WordPress sites as well as integrating with common commerce plugins. Through the insights that robust analytics provides, the site owner will learn to tweak elements of their paid search campaigns to drive more conversions at a lower cost and maximize their marketing online budget.

Not all content is created equal. Blogging for business is all about engaging content. A great blog post is one that that attracts visitors, addresses their needs and drives them to take action.

If you have the word “Marketing” in your title, you’ll learn a lot in this session. You’ll be guided through a helpful process to create compelling content that you can put into practice on you or your client’s blogs. If you’ve ever been stumped at what to blog about, I’ll explore the blog content ideas found right in front of you and reveal helpful shortcuts that will help you craft at your next hit blog post.

Enlightenment is knowing what your code is doing and why. Thankfully, instead of having to depend on your inner calm, there are a number of tools and strategies you can use to better see what’s going on. We’ll survey a range of topics you should explore to turn your frustration into bliss.

Feeling better already? In this session, we’ll touch on everything from debugging to best practices to coding standards to version control to performance and optimization. You’ll hear the insights WordPress.com VIP shares every day.

An overview of essential e-commerce concepts with some basic tips for implementing an e-commerce website on WordPress. This talk will cover things you need to consider when choosing and setting up an e-commerce solution as well as help give a basic understanding of some of the many things involved such as payment gateways, how credit card processing works, merchant accounts, SSL certificates, and PCI compliance. We’ll end with some basic WordPress security tips and a very brief review of popular e-commerce solutions for WordPress.

Security knowledge for the masses is what’s needed to stop the onslaught of web based attacks that hit everyone’s website daily. Everyone feels their site is safe, that is until the attackers find the next great exploit, and then … BOOM! You have a mess on your hands that no one ever wants, a hacked site. I’ll cover what steps you can do now to prevent these attacks from succeeding as well as details into what DreamHost sees and handles every day on our network related to web based attacks.

Learn about the most-frequent causes of plugin and theme conflicts, why they are an issue, and what you can do to avoid the problems.