WordCamp Buffalo is excited to welcome some of our area’s best and brightest WordPress and web-savvy minds to speak in just a few short weeks. We’re also excited to welcome speakers from outside our region, bringing just as much awesome knowledge and helping spread great tips and tricks.
We’re happy to formally announce those speakers (and their talks) below.
After The Install — Al Davis
“I am going to walk you through 10 things you should do to improve your WordPress install while it’s still got that new website smell going for it. There will be some security tips to keep you safe, as well as some SEO and productivity suggestions to help you get the most bang for your buck.”
Content Strategy — Adrian Roselli
“A content management system can only take you so far. You need to have a plan to make it work with both blogging and traditional site content. Mapping out a realistic one to fit your team is necessary first step.”
Custo(my)ze — Joe Rosza
“You don’t have to live with graphic elements in a theme just because it’s included in it. If you know a little bit (or a lot) about Photoshop and a little bit about WP, you can custo(my)ze your WP site.”
Inbound Marketing with WordPress — Aaron P. Smith
“WordPress allows you to start and maintain a website with ease. With over 555 million active websites on the Internet, how do you get your valuable content found? Learn the five steps of inbound marketing and how to put them into action with WordPress.”
Creating a Child Theme — Laurie M. Rauch
“You’ve bought a fancy new WordPress theme, but now your site looks like everyone else’s. So how do you make that fancy new theme look a little bit more… you? You create a child theme. Child themes build on top of the original theme, letting you change as much… or as little… as you want, while keeping all of the snazzy theme options and functionality built in to the parent theme.”
How to do better in Google: Optimizing your WordPress Site & Web Content for Search — Dawn Comber & Ruth Maude
“In this session you’ll learn the steps to take to help your site do better in search results. We’ll give you an overview of the WordPress SEO Yoast Plugin as we discuss tactics to optimize your web content for search.”
In our developer track…
Building for the Theme Directory — Dennis Gaebel
“If you want to submit to the theme directory, your theme has to conform to a lot of very specific needs. This session will walk you through the steps you need to take to keep your theme ship-shape for entry into the .org Directory, and one boilerplate that might make the process even easier.”
Responsible Responsiveness — John B. Hartley
“Responsive web design is becoming a staple in both designer and developer toolboxes, but with great power comes great responsibility. My talk will discuss “desktop-first vs. mobile-first” development and some of the caveats of responsive design. Code snippets and real-time examples will help drive points home. A little theory mixed with a lot of usable snippets makes this a great talk for both beginner and intermediate. I will also tie in ways to use responsive design in WordPress.”
WordPress as a Web App Framework — Sam Hotchkiss
“This talk is about using WordPress to rapidly develop complex web apps. Using your own Singleton class in WP, separating logic from your views, different, powerful ways to use post types and taxonomies and user accounts, and examples of all of these things.”
Making Social Media I/O Painless — Levi Neuland
“Creating fresh content and promoting it through social media can be a full time job, and for most of us that’s not an option. With proper workflow management we can take advantage of social media by making our WordPress sites more effortlessly ingest content and cross promote it. In this talk we’ll review user workflows, identify useful 3rd party APIs, and integrate them into WordPress with custom modules.”
Taking the intimidation out of plugin development: How a developer and designer created their first WordPress plugin — Jen Witkowski & Dan Rabb
“Our talk will be from a beginners perspective on plugin development. We will talk about how we approached designing and developing our first plugin for WordPress—a minimum quantity plugin for Jigoshop. Dan will talk about the development focusing on what resources he used and how he tackled learning WordPress functions, hooks & plugin limitations with little WordPress knowledge. Jen will speak about the design aspect focusing on the specific plugin behavior, user interaction and how it would integrate into the storefront.”
We’re also excited to welcome featured guest John James Jacoby (lead developer of BuddyPress, Automattic team member) to speak. His topic will be announced shortly.
We look forward to seeing you at WordCamp Buffalo on Saturday, October 20th!
I just want to give a big thumbs-up to the above comment by Levi titled “Making Social Media I/O Painless”. Some of us strive to contribute quality sites to “our internet” but it is difficult keeping up with all the constant shifts in strategy. Any help in the “leg up” area is much appreciated … for sure!
Thanks a bunch,
Ted