Author Archives: Morgan Kay

Slideshows from WordCamp Seattle

If you want to see the slideshows from WordCamp Seattle, here are links to most of them:

Most of the talks will be posted on WordPress.tv in the coming weeks, so you can catch up on the ones you missed!

 

 

Child Care will be available for WordCamp Seattle

We are pleased to announce that we have made arrangements with the Child Learning and Care Center to provide child care during WordCamp this year!

The Child Learning and Care Center is located inside University Congregational United Church of Christ, just across the street from UW’s campus. They will offer child care for children aged 15 months to 8 years, from 8:00am to 5:30pm. They have lots of yummy food planned (and can accommodate allergies and special diets) and lots of fun activities, including art projects, books, board games, and some outdoor excursions.

Cost for child care for the day will be $100. Parents will need to fill out registration forms and pay the Child Care and Learning Center directly.

We will make the registration forms and payment information available when WordCamp tickets go on sale.

Child Care Survey

We are hoping we can provide child care for WordCamp this year to make it easier for families with young children to attend. As we make arrangements with child care facilities, we need some information about whether people are interested in using child care, and how much they are willing to pay.

If you have children and are interested in attending WordCamp, please fill out our child care survey!

Speaker Coaching with Scott Berkun

We are very lucky to be able to offer a wonderful opportunity to WordCamp speakers this year: a speaker coaching session led by Scott Berkun. Scott is a best-selling author and speaker. In addition to his books, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, Forbes, USA Today, Wired, Fast Company, National Public Radio, The Huffington Post and other media. He has spoken at hundreds of events – in fact, he gave the keynote at WordCamp Seattle 2012.

Among his books are Confessions of a Public Speaker, which offers entertaining and practical advice for people who want to speak in public, and The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work, about the year Berkun spent working for Automattic (the company that runs WordPress.com) and how Automattic functions with a 100% distributed workforce.

This is an amazing opportunity for speakers to learn from a veteran speaker and coach. Speakers of every experience level will learn something valuable from Scott. We are very grateful to him for offering this opportunity to our speakers!

Speaker Brainstorming and Confidence-building Events

Are you thinking of giving a talk at WordCamp, but you are quite sure what to talk about?

Do you want to talk at WordCamp, but you’re nervous about public speaking?

Then come join us for our Talking About WordPress events! At these events, we will brainstorm ideas for talks you can give at WordCamp or at our regular WordPress meetups. We will generate outlines for our talks, and even get a little bit of practice speaking in front of a small group.

Please note that one of these events is for women only. Women face a few extra obstacles when speaking at tech events, so we’ll discuss those obstacles and how to overcome them.

We hope to see you at these meetups!

April 1, 7pm-9pm: Women Talking About WordPress
April 2, 7pm-9pm: Talking About WordPress

Survey Results

We published a survey to ask people what they would like to see at WordCamp this year. Here’s a summary of the results: if you’re thinking about speaking at WordCamp, this is a great starting place to get ideas!

Topics people want to learn more about (topics marked with an asterisk were requested multiple times):

  • *How to choose plug-ins and templates that will best serve my blog
  • Content strategy, marketing and business
  • Marketing your theme business
  • Theme design
  • *Responsive design
  • Integrating the theme customizer in your themes
  • *Best coding practices
  • What’s new with core WP
  • *Innovative web solutions using WP (not blogs)
  • Custom multiple loops, Pages and posts that do not need the loop.
  • Starting a WordPress based business
  • Working with / contracting Photographers
  • Best Practices in “training” new clients how to use their site
  • Best Practices in selling to people with horrible sites (out of date, poorly designed, etc)
  • *Creating Membership sites
  • Maintaining a WordPress site
  • Moving blog from WordPress.com to self-hosted
  • *SEO
  • Step-by-step talks on development that start absolutely from scratch
  • *Security in WordPress
  • Largely unknown uses of WordPress that are inherent in core (like Post Formats, or available WP Config lines of code that are being under utilized, and things that can be ‘turned on’ or ‘off’ easily to enhance the functionality and experience of just a core install – no plugins)
  • *Multisite
  • *Theme frameworks
  • *Starter themes
  • *Running a WP business, marketing, getting clients
  • launching wordpress sites from stage/local to live
  • how to get my wordpress site lean and fast, not bloated
  • Rich snippets for non-developers
  • business planning and why you need to set goals before starting a website design/build.
  • Git and WordPress development
  • wordpress core functions every new dev should know
  • enqueue files/scripts and how to clean up plugins that bastardize the function
  • combine/minify includes like JS and CSS
  • *SASS and/or Compass
  • *WP-CLI
  • Content creation
  • Social Media
  • *How to pick a good hosting company
  • Does managing your blog from a mobile device make sense?
  • Non-programmer’s guide to applying CSS to achieve desired effects
  • How to create cookie-cutter WordPress websites
  • Non-Core Contributing (theme reviews? documentation?)
  • Third Party Server Best Practices for WordPress
  • WordPress Small Business Best Practices
  • WordPress in Seattle
  • How WordPress integrates to enhance User Experience
  • HTML coding
  • Manipulation of themes, customization
  • Best plugins, most used, popular
  • WP as an app platform
  • how to run a dev agency
  • Using your blog as a resume to start a career
  • frameworks versus themes
  • are plugins good or bad?
  • modern design trends
  • important elements of business sites
  • beginner troubleshooting
  • How to leverage the built in JS libraries within WordPress
  • Using WP as a RESTful backend
  • integrating with other platforms
  • Logo Design for Web Developers

We asked what formats people prefer, and by far the most popular choices were lecture with Q&A and workshop.

If you have knowledge to share about any of these topics, head over to our call for speakers page and submit your talk!

Call for Speakers Now Open!

Our Call for Speakers is now open! We will accept proposals until April 18, 2014.

We know we have a really knowledgeable community, so we’re excited to see the topics you’re interested in presenting this year.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, I’d really love to speak at WordCamp, but I don’t know what to talk about!” we’ve got you covered! Later this month, we will host two brainstorming events where we can come up with ideas, start to outline talks, and even practice giving short talks. We also have a survey to find out what topics people want to hear about: we’ll publish the results of that survey soon!

If you’re thinking, “But I’ve never spoken in front of a big group before and that makes me nervous!” fear not! We are also planning some speaker training events, so if you’re nervous about speaking, you’ll get a chance to practice and get some expert advice before you speak.

If you’re thinking, “I wish I could do something other than just stand in front of the room and talk,” then we’re ahead of you on that one too. This year, we are open to a variety of formats for your talks. We will have a workshop track, where you can guide your audience through a task or project. You can also facilitate a panel discussion, group discussion, or series of lighting talks.

So what’s stopping you? Go submit your talk idea(s)!