Speaker Spotlight: Shannon Steffen – Simple SEO to Make Your Blog Stand Out

June 2, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Shannon Steffen – Simple SEO to Make Your Blog Stand Out

Hello everyone! My name is Shannon Steffen (@SKSDesigns) and welcome to what will be an introduction to the most easiest and quickest ways to increase your blog’s search engine rankings and authority online.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is both an art and a science. Some believe that SEO is dead and others believe that only a professional can understand the intricacies of this frequently changing industry. SEO is far from dead and the truth is that there are many changes bloggers can make on their own blogs to see positive results – for FREE!

Join me at 9:15am on Sunday, June 6th for WordPress SEO Optimization as I walk you through the key areas of SEO and provide you with simple tips and white hat tactics to help your blog not only be found on the top search engines but also get your content in front of your target audience.

Each attendee to my session will be given access to a FREE SEO Tips and Tricks Guide as well as be entered to win one FREE SEO Audit of their website or blog by my company, SKS Designs.

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Speaker Spotlight – Pete Mall: Beginners Plugin Development

June 1, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight – Pete Mall: Beginners Plugin Development

Pete is a self-described WordPress ninja and has been contributing to WordPress since 2005. He provides WordPress consulting services through Joint Forces Technology Solutions (jointforcestech.com). Pete has worked with multiple Fortune 100 brands, as well as smaller companies. He is known for turning around troubled development projects and improving the productivity and dependability of the team. You can follow his rumblings on his personal blog at developersmind.com or catch him on Twitter @petemall.


Beginning Plugin Development
This session will be an introduction to writing a WordPress plugin with a real-world example showing how to create a simple plugin.  Pete will be presenting his topic: Beginners Plugin Development on the second day of WordCamp Chicago – Sunday, June 6th at 11:30 am in the Developers Track.
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Speaker Spotlight: Chris Ross – WP Developer 101

June 1, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Chris Ross – WP Developer 101

Even with a formal education in and a decade writing commercial software, my first foray into working with the WordPress platform was..interesting.  But I soldiered on, thanks to a helpful community, good books and a lot of intellectual elbow grease.

Three years later, when I started my company and made WordPress part of our service portfolio, it became clear to me that we really needed to combine the tremendous capabilities offered with some old school dev shop fundamentals to insure our customer solutions were of high quality and we were contributing back to the community.

In my presentation, I’ll discuss some of what we’ve learned and how we have integrated WordPress-related services with our “traditional” offerings.  My hope is that I’ll share some things that will be worth considering even to WordPress veterans and help those who are considering rolling up their developer sleeves to learn from our experience.

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Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Harrington – WordPress UX Flight Check

June 1, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Harrington – WordPress UX Flight Check

Hello, my name is Jeremy Harrington. I’m User Experience Design lead for Voce Communications developing innovative and useful experiences for an awesome group of clients using WordPress.

Whether you’re developing your own custom site, customizing an existing theme or simply adding a few final touches to your current blog you’ve had to make decisions about user experience. Sometimes we get lost in the bigger details and it’s easy to lose site of the small details that make the experience great.

In this session we’ll talk about how to make smart and useful user experience decisions. And to make things clear and easy we’ll walk through a master checklist of details that will make your users happy campers.

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Speaker Spotlight: Brad Williams – Now That’s What I Call WordPress Security 2010 Edition

June 1, 2010 by Heather Acton • 1 Comment

As a follow-up to my wildly popular WordPress Security presentation, I’m back with an all new completely revamped WordPress Security presentation for 2010!  Explore new hacks and exploits to watch out for.  Learn the top WordPress Security tips to keep your website safe.  We’ll even cover tips on how to clean-up your website after a hack occurs.

Imagine losing all of your content including posts, pages, media, and comments. Even worse imagine spam links hiding in your content destroying your search engine ranking. Keeping your website safe from hackers and bots should be a top priority for anyone running their own website. In this presentation I’ll cover the essential WordPress Security tips that ALL WordPress administrators should use to keep your website safe and secure. If you run a WordPress website this presentation is not to be missed!

Make sure to attend for a chance to win a free copy of my new book: Professional WordPress!

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Speaker Spotlight: Josh Byers – Making WordPress Work for Your Client

June 1, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Josh Byers – Making WordPress Work for Your Client

Hey everybody!  I’m very excited to be speaking in just a few days and I look forward to meeting you all.

I’ve had the awesome privilege of working with a lot of great clients and even though every client and every project is different, I generally use the same principles when working with them.

We are going to take a journey with two clients of mine (Rachel McAdams & Willow Creek Baptist Church) and along the way we will discover how WordPress worked brilliantly for each.

We will also hit on custom post types, taxonomies, admin branding and more to help “WordPress work for your client.”

FYI, this is the second session of the day and will do my best to help wake you up. In fact, rumor has it there might be some Starbucks gift cards being given away during this session…but you’ll have to come to find out… 🙂

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