Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

For those who have not heard of a WordCamp, it is a WordPress conference. In fact, WordCamps happen nearly every week in just about any major city in the world. The conferences are sometimes 1,2 or 3 days and are jam-packed with topics from using to designing and developing with WordPress.

Becoming a speaker at a WordCamp can be fun, but not necessarily easy to become one as there are many people that apply. There are many things you should know before you send a speaker proposal in to any WordCamp.

You have to fully embrace the WordPress license. Nothing short of 100% GPL is allowed at a WordCamp. If you talk about it or review WordPress related products that do not have the same license that WordPress carries, then you will disqualify yourself from being considered as a presenter.

While it is not necessary to be from the area that the WordCamp is in, you actually have a higher chance of being considered as a speaker than say someone from the other side of the country, or even the world. Let us face it- you can get business from speaking at a WordCamp, especially if your presentation was extremely good. However, this conference is to help people and they are looking for people that show that they really care about helping WordPress users, designers, and developers of all sorts.

Make sure to contact the local WordPress meetup or the WordCamp organizers and check to see if they are are looking to cover certain topics that their community has requested. Working with them shows that you are eager to help in any way. Sometimes the organizers may see that you have a better and more interesting view on a topic that you mentioned on your own website and want you to present on that instead of your original proposal.

Be transparent about yourself and show that you have some type of authority and skill in your niche. You will be asked to for your site and the organizers will check to see who you are. They do want to select the best presenters for their WordCamp that their attendees will learn from.

Becoming a speaking is a volunteer job. You WILL either pay from your pocket or have to seek out a sponsor. WordCamp organizers sometimes hold speaker and sponsor dinners to thank those who helped make their conference awesome, but NEVER expect any form of compensation. As said earlier, this IS a conference that you are helping people. And by the way, you can put the expenses in your taxes.

Be thorough and show your passion in your speaker proposal. It allows the organizers to see how you are knowledgeable and passionate about what you want to present. They want people that will inspire others to do their best with WordPress. List at least 3 take-away points. Also, be open to suggestions as the organizers may want to make sure some important aspects of your topic need to be covered.

Be prepared to be asked questions if you are a speaker. There are a lot of attendees at WordCamps, sometimes even as few as 150 and more than 750. There are some WordCamps that do have a question and answer bar, also known as a Genius Bar or a Happiness Bar. However, you will be approached at anytime and ask questions.

Bring your business cards. Correction- bring PLENTY of business cards. People will ask for them regardless if they will do business with you. They may have questions for you outside the conference or they might refer another person to you for business.

These are just a few things you should know about becoming a WordCamp speaker. If you are considering to apply to a nearby WordCamp, good luck.

Have you spoken at a WordCamp before? Do you have any advice for future speakers?

A lot of people I have heard from like the idea of using a framework to use as a base to design their website. There are quite a few free and premium frameworks out there available that are great. However, it might not be for everyone.

The pros for using these are that these frameworks work and have been developed carefully. They can be applied to themes, however, if your has a big difference in design elements, you might have to move code or even add code to get what you want. Premium frameworks usually have become commercially GPL supported – meaning that you have someone that can coach you through and help you if you run into problems. Freebie frameworks, you might be able to get some forum support with the developer.

However, the huge con that you might run into is that if you choose a framework, your site might look like another cookie cutter layout. It is kind of like two actresses wearing the same gown to the Oscars – not cool and you definitely want to change right away.

If you have a layout design you want to convert to WordPress, frameworks might not always work in your best interest, especially if you are not code savvy enough about the framework and about WordPress coding. You may need to apply certain WordPress functions and some frameworks might interfere with your coding or even plugins. Of course, you can always get the framework, alter it and use it how you want. You could browse the WordPress theme directory, choose a theme that best suits what you are looking for, leave the credits intact. There are perfectly good layouts there.

However, if you are a designer, you may want to create a fresh theme with a fresh framework that you can personally market to those who are looking for a framework. Be unique! Make sure your framework offers different types of choices in navigation or features for the content. Offer different alterations of your framework to show your potential clients the flexibility of your layout.

Do you like to use a particular framework when designing a WordPress-based site or do you like to code as you go? What frameworks do you like best and why? What frameworks would you tell people to avoid, and of course – why?

Not everyone uses the Links section in the backend of their WordPress. However, there is Adding and editing links in WordPress.

It is important to note that the Links section in the WordPress backend does not have to just be for blogroll links. It can be used for many things like affiliates, relevant sites to yours, supporters, and much more. You have the capabilities in WordPress templating to make a template to call a specific link category to a page if you want.

I have put together yet another screencast for people who are new to using WordPress, specifically to help guide them through managing users in WordPress.

The biggest thing about the user section in the WordPress backend is that you have to be aware of the roles, especially if you are an administrator that is creating a new user. There are a couple plugins that do help distinguish exactly what a user’s capabilities are, like the Members plugin by Justin Tadlock.

A lot of times my clients ask me on how to add media, like images to their WordPress posts or pages. It is not difficult, but sometimes a screencast helps things along.

I have conveniently put together this simple WordPress screencast on how to insert an image to a post or page in WordPress.

Here is a video tutorial for newbie WordPress users on how to publish a page in WordPress. Pages and posts although seem alike, they are used for different purposes. Pages are usually more static, as mentioned in the video. Static is usually more for pages you normally do not update as often, like an About page or Contact page.

Hope the tutorial above helped for those still new to WordPress. I would recommend watching the video tutorial on posts too.

There are a lot of videos and as time goes on, I hope to cover more, so please feel free to suggest topics for WordPress videos. Those who are not newbies, please feel free to also suggest on topics that you really could have used when you started using WordPress. It really helps a lot.

The following is a simple video screenscast for new users to become familiar with creating a new post in WordPress. Hopefully this tutorial is helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

This is for WordPress users who are really new and are not sure how to use WordPress yet. One of the highlights is that I go through a lot of the different icons for the visual editor so newbies know. It is easy to learn by poking around and trying each, but I think adding this helps for those not as computer savvy.

For newbies, using WordPress might be a little hard to learn. Even though WordPress makes it easy for users to upgrade their software, sometimes it can be scary. And yes, even scary just for clicking the button to automatically upgrade.

No worries now! Below is a video screencast on how to use the automatic update with upgrading WordPress. As a note, it is important that you keep your WordPress install up-to-date so it stays as secure as possible. It is also important that when you do upgrade, that you have a backup of your website. This is for those times that maybe your host is having issues or the upgrade somehow failed.