Hope to see you there!

8:00 to 9:00 am – Register and mingle

9-10am

David Skarjune – Images and WP  (Beg and Int)

Eric Blackwedl Comparing SEO Plugins (advanced)

10-11am

Anne Miles – Inbound Marketing with WP (beginning)

Syed Balkhi -improving load times and Speed Optimization of WP(Intermediate)

Tammy Hart – Custom Post Types and taxonomies

11-12:30

Eric Deckers  11 secrets to Making Your Blog a Smashing Success (beginning)

David Yeser – Designing a Theme for Distribution (int and adv)

LUNCH  — On your own. We encourage you to hang out with an expert and pick their brain!

2-3pm

Steve from Educhalk – WP  Basic Installation and Setup   (beginning)

Eric Deckers Growing your personal brand via blogging (Intermediate)

Ryan Imel of WP Candy WordPress as a  CMS (Advanced)

3-4pm

Steve cont’d Moving WP from one host to another (beginner)

Tammy Hart – Designing with WP (intermediate)

ViaStudios – The Actors Theatre Project – DESIGN (advanced)

4-5pm

What Google teaches you about building a Search Friendly Blog

Panel Discussion – Managing Group Blogs and other Painful Subjects

Jason Clark and Jason McCreary ViaStudios – The Actors Theatre Project -CODE (Advanced)

5-6pm

Chad Seibert – Monetizing your blog 5 Ways to put money in your pocket (Beginning )

Plugin Fest – Group Panel on Their Favorite Plugins for Various Tasks. (Intermediate)

David Yeser – How to NOT let WP contstrain your design (Advanced)

6-finish

The FINAL PROJECT with Brian Wallace.

A group blog that will go from ZERO to Traffic LIVE with help from Everyone! (Beg, Intermediate & Advanced all working together)

So y’all thought I was kidding when I put out the call for someone from up north to compliment our friends like Tammy Hart from Birmingham AL…grin…I wasn’t! And one guy stepped forward to take me up on it. His name is David Skarjune and he is going to provide and basic / intermediate level look at using images inside of WordPress. Thanks for flying south to speak at WCL, Dave!

WordPress provides an array of features for embedding all types of media into blogs and websites. Recent versions have introduced sophisticated tools for working with images that meet the needs of web designers, graphic designers, photographers, and artists. Learn about both native tools and plugins to manage, manipulate, and maximize images in WordPress. See how galleries offer a dynamic means to organize and show collections of images. Discover how lightbox plugins extend image displays with overlay enlargements and slideshows. We’ll cover the basics of native WordPress tools, some advanced techniques, and demos of handy plugins and tricks to help images rock your website.

___________________________________

David Hedrick Skarjune has worked with the web for 15 years and with content management systems for a decade. Skarjune is a consultant with Word & Image, LLC and an Electronic Document Professional (EDP) with Xplor International. He’s worked in a variety of roles including webmaster, web designer, web developer, journalist, photographer, editor, instructor, and online community builder.

Skarjune champions open standards and utilizes open source solutions for creative and technical projects. In his home state of Minnesota he’s worked with many public service organizations, including Minnesota AIDS Project, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Windustry, building user-friendly cost-effective web systems with open tools like WordPress.

Skarjune attended the Center for Photographic Studies under the direction of C.J. Pressma in Louisville, and he loves the creative cultural scene that Louisville offers.

Only ONE (count it!) week to go!

And we have a good surprise for the final hour of our day! What several people have asked about is something to pull it all together and show them…start to finish…how a WordPress site gets, built, content added, traffic generated, correctly notice and indexed in search engines, and noticed in social media. ALL IN ONE HOUR. It is going to be a group project that will round out our day nicely.

It will be for ALL experience levels and will be a thoroughly hands on project that we are going to do LIVE. (Sound like fun?)

The domain we will be working on is <<TOP SECRET>> but suffice it to say, it will be something that will keep building the local WordPress community and will help EVERYONE involved. (Just the way we like it!)

So bring your laptops, fasten your seatbelts, and get ready for a final hour of the day that will put all of the speakers’ collective wisdom from the entire day on display and provide you with a RoadMap to Success for your own projects.

Our thanks to Brian Wallace for coming up with this great concept. I still have not heard a definitive answer as to whether he will be with us, but we thought the idea was STELLAR and will be using it for the last hour. We certainly hope Brian will be able to make it and lead the charge.

Ok. Time to start talking about another of the great people who are generously offering their expertise here at WC Louisville. We have asked Tammy to speak on two subjects. The truth of it is that she brings enough expertise to the game that she could speak on much more than that.

She is a self-taught designer and programmer with over 5 years of experience working with a variety of businesses, non-profits, and individuals. Tammy specializes in creating custom WordPress sites and is passionate about pixels and crazy about code. In addition to freelancing she also works full time at blr | further (a Birmingham AL based advertising firm) as a UI Developer. Here is a little more about Tammy.

If you want to see a little more of Tammy’s work and why we think she is awesome, take a trip on over to Tammy Hart Designs…and while you are there visit some of the stuff she has done. She truly has a passion for taking WordPress to the next level. We are thrilled that she is hanging out with us for a day and sharing some of her knowledge here in Louisville.

a) Dig deep and give our attendees SOLID discounts that will truly help them expand the WP user base. This ain’t namby pambyville…grin…We want attendees to pay $20 and get TONS of value for what they have paid.

b) Promote our efforts on your sites, forums and etc. Badge up. Mention Up. And help us promote the community. The long term winners are all of us.

Thanks again Adii for contacting us!

Other WP related vendors want to join in the fun? Bang the contact form! You can ask anyone who has we respond quickly.

That said, if you as vendors want to assist us in benefiting our charities – the Kentucky Autism Training Center and the WordPress foundation. PLEASE do!

I told you that we are going to keep adding speakers and subjects to the lineup for this thing, right?

So you have created a cool WordPress blog and hosted it on a reputable host…and still it runs slow.

What to do, what to do…(grin)  Google announced this past year that load times (and the resulting user experience) are an (albeit small) factor in search engine ranking. Of far MORE importance is the fact that you have worked hard to get people to your site and youdon’t want to get them all cheesed off and leave simply because it takes forever to get your page to load.

Syed Balkhi from WPBeginner.com will provide an intermediate level look at how to keep your site loading quickly and efficiently. He is a 20 year old blogger who is mostly known for his aggressive marketing skills. Syed is the founder of Uzzz Productions, a web design firm, and a popular WordPress blog known as WPBeginner. Syed has 8 years of experience working in the web industry.  He has worked with businesses and individuals on all different levels by helping them utilize blogging and social media to improve their brand.

His presentation highlights tips and tricks to reduce the use of server resources, improve site performance, decrease site load time, and improve SEO.

With Tammy Hart and Mitch Canter, this brings to 3 the number of WordCampBirmingham veterans that have joined our effort  here in Louisville. Are you sensing that we are bringing in the best of the best and building some other really talented WP folks so that we can all help each other? You’d be right!

Now we are looking for a Northern Alliance…maybe the folks up in Minnesota can pitch in with some speakers and networking!

And yeah,the Automattic folks…well they are Automattically welcome!

Tammy Hart – Custom Post Types and Taxonomies and Designing for WordPress  (if you have not seen Tammy’s work…wait til I post about her. )

Brian Wallace – Intergrating Social Media into WordPress

Anne Sallee Miles – Inbound Marketing with WordPress

Casey Mullins ( MooshinIndy.com), Jon Karlen (RealEstateIndustryWatch.com)  and Tim Piazza – Panel Discussion on Managing Growing Group Blogs and other painfully fun subjects – We may be adding another surprise panelist here as well!

David Yeiser – Designing a Theme for Distribution in WordPress (you need to see some of this guy’s work…impressive!)

Eric Deckers – will speak on two subjects – 11 secrets to Making your blog a Smashing Success and Growing Your Personal Brand Through Blogging.

Eric Blackwell - (EricOnSearch) Does WordPress REALLY need an SEO Plugin? (a look at the latest SEO plugins vs just plain WP), & Search Engine Friendly Blogging 101 – Taught with Humor and Sarcasm & WordPress  as a Business CMS / E-commerce platform

Mitch Canter - “How to Make Your WP Blog Do Damn Near Anything” (This guy rocks! You need to see this one)

Steve from EduChalk.com -  The Basics of Installing WordPress and Moving WordPress from One Host to Another

There’s MORE as well! (I just got tired of typing…) (and there’s always room for anyone from Automattic as well if y’all are in the area!)

REMEMBER – You don’t have to stay in one track…go to whichever speaker interests YOU. Connect enjoy. and learn during the longest day of your life – so far

Want more access to the SPEAKERS? We will have an Experts Lounge available for folks to chat and connect as well!

Seats are filling up fast. Get your tickets today!

Ryan Imel of WPCandy

We really do not have “headline” speakers at WordCamp Louisville…but if we did, this would be the guy. Well one of ‘em…we have more on the way! Ryan is starting (errr…continuing to) get noticed in the WordCamp community for his work with WPCandy. Check out this latest post about him and you will see that we are bringing TOP NOTCH WP talent to the game here. Aside from being a great WP afficianado and developer, he is also a great guy.

He will be talking on two subjects “Using WP as a CMS” and “Understanding WP Multisite”.

Get your tickets NOW. This 30 hour day is gonna be fun.

Twitter Hash Tag: Our Twitter Hash Tag is #WordCampLou . (All announcements will be sent there as well as at this site).

Badges: Now is the time to post some of these little beauties on your blog. We need the word to get out to area bloggers and the BEST way to do that is to put some bumper stickers on our bumpers (so to speak).

Word of Mouth: If you are talking with friends that blog or want to, let them know!

We will also need volunteers to help us the morning of the event…if you have something that you want to offer, feel free to contact us!

Thanks!