Tag Archives: WordCamp

Highlights of Day 2 of WCAVL from a Local Front-end Web Developer and Digital Marketing Strategist

June 5, 2016NewsAVL, developers, front end design, WordCamp, WordPresssarahbenoit

by Megan Jonas

We had a great second day at WordCamp Asheville with great speakers and interesting talks. Here is just a selection of the talks from today.

Morning Talks

Freelancing VS Building an Agency with Bill Gadless

Over on the business track, Bill Gadless of emagine started the morning off with the steps of starting an agency once you’ve decided to scale up from being a freelancer. He spoke about the importance of having confidence in your business, creating a sales strategy, and making time to change your mindset from technician to business owner. While much of this talk focused on scaling up an agency and having multiple employees, the information on finances and marketing and having confidence in your agency to push both of these things was extremely valuable.

User Experience with Cliff Seal

Also this morning, the design track had a last minute schedule addition, Cliff Seal talking about Meaningful UX That Scales. Seal discussed how to talk to non-designers about the importance of good design. A well-designed application or website, he said, can make people’s lives a little bit easier, but explaining this to the parts of your company that are not design-focused can be challenging. “Focus on making people awesome instead of making the tools we sell them awesome,” said Seal. You can do this by reverse engineering your product from the expected outcome, rather than building from assumptions of persona and actions.

Social Media and Podcasting Learning at Lightning Speed

Wrapping up this morning with a series of lightning talks on the business track, Sarah Benoit talked about best practices and good plugins for integrating social media with WordPress, Alicia Murray dove deeper into Pinterest with 15 tips in 15 minutes, and Tony Zeoli explained how he uses WordPress to podcast and live stream.

Afternoon Talks

WordPress Admin Tips for Developers with Cliff Seal

After lunch, Cliff Seal was back for a talk on the Developer Track on creating friendlier, safer WordPress Admin areas. He has created a plugin that developers can use to pull code that will allow them to remove unnecessary admin menu links, adjust what user roles have access to features, remove the notices that some plugins automatically generate, and hide certain plugins or plugin metadata. If you do all of these things correctly, you can empower your users to love WordPress.

Email Best Practices, Tips on How to Stop Being Lazy, and How the Internet Works with Emoji’s

In the final session of this year’s WordCamp, a series of lightning talks on the all users track included Lydia Roberts on the best tools and tricks for email marketing, Russell Fair on 10 (actually 13) lazy mistakes we all make and how to stop, and Julien Melissas on the very simple, easy to fit in 15-minutes topic of how the Internet works, explained with emojis. If you didn’t catch the last one, definitely look for it on wordpress.tv soon.

Final Celebration Tonight at The Wedge

Join us right now at The Wedge to continue the conversation and celebrate a successful WordCamp Asheville 2016! Come make new friends, introduce yourself to the organizers, speakers and sponsors and let us know how you plan to spark, create, and collaborate over the next year. See you in 2017!

About the Author

Megan Jonas is currently working as a freelance front-end web developer and digital marketing strategist in Asheville, N.C. Her areas of expertise include WordPress, Social Media strategy and implementation, content strategy and creation, and email marketing. In her free time, Megan enjoys reading, hiking, whitewater rafting, and rock climbing. She lives in Fletcher, N.C. in a barn… no seriously… there are pigs and cows and a donkey and everything. Learn more about her work at www.meganmjonas.com.

Featured Silver Sponsor: GoWP

June 3, 2016NewsAsheville, GoWP, Sponsors, WordCamp, WordPress, WordPress supportsarahbenoit

WordCamp Asheville 2016 is about to begin and we could not have planned such an excellent event without our sponsors. Our sponsors not only believe in supporting WordPress’s open source community, they also believe in sharing ideas, supporting one another, and making WordPress the very best it can be. GoWP is one of these companies and we were lucky enough to get one of their staff to share some information about GoWP‘s story.

Q. What is your name?

A. Brad Morrison

Q. What does GoWP do?

A. GoWP provides complete subscription WordPress support and maintenance, including a white-label plan for agencies. For a low monthly fee, you get automated WP core and plugin updates, regular backups, security monitoring and help from real people. They can keep your site secure, up-to-date and provide WordPress support, assistance, and guidance when you need it most.

Q. Why do you do it? What is your vision and mission?

A. After 10 years of running a traditional web agency, we decided to simplify things in early 2014 and focus solely on support. Our team was a little worn down with managing all of the pieces of project work. Support was always a positive experience — our clients loved it when we helped them solve painful issues and we loved seeing them happy. We retooled our entire business with the mission to “create happiness by delivering exceptional WordPress support.”

Q. Who are your ideal customers?

A. (1) Digital agencies who are looking for a white-label support service and (2) small businesses who need support for their WP site.

Q. Why do you support WordCamp Asheville? What do you hope attendees gain from participating?

A. We’re nearby in Atlanta and want to help grow the WordPress community in Asheville and across the region. I hope attendees see how special the WordPress community is and also take away ideas to improve their site or organization.

Q. How do you use WordPress or how do your clients/customers use it? Why is WordPress important to you?

A. We support WordPress sites across many industries so we see it used in a lot of ways: memberships sites, e-commerce, lead generation, lifestyle blogs and more. WordPress is important to us because it’s community-driven software that is always improving.

Q. How can people learn more about what you do?

A. Visit our website www.GoWP.com.

Meet Our Bronze Sponsors!

May 6, 2016NewsAsheville, AVL, bronze sponsors, Sponsors, sponsorships, WordCampsarahbenoit

WordCamp Asheville could not take place each year without the support of our wonderful sponsors. In addition to supporting our Asheville WordPress community, these Bronze sponsors have WordPress baked into their core values. We are so grateful and proud to introduce the following companies:

MyGeek Technologies provides IT support services to small and medium sized businesses and nonprofits. They also support and host WordPress sites in a PCI/HIPAA compliant datacenter. According to Adam Sewell, “We do what we do to help others. It’s a passion. As part of that idea, we strive to help our clients become productive with the technology they own and find new technologies that fit their businesses and workflows without breaking the bank. Which often includes a lot of open source technologies like WordPress.” MyGeek Technologies was built from the founder doing WordPress freelance development work therefore they have strong ties to the WordPress community still to this day. The reason they support WordCamp Asheville is so they can help others follow their passion and dreams.

Sitelock is currently protecting more than one million WordPress sites, SiteLock delivers a patented 360-degree website security solution to find, fix and prevent malware and other threats from affecting websites and their visitors. Services include malware scanning and vulnerability detection, automatic malware removal, an advanced web application firewall (WAF), PCI compliance and website acceleration powered by a global CDN. SiteLock provides phone support, available 24/7/365.

SiteLock has been protecting websites since 2008, with a varied team that continues to grow every day. Our diverse backgrounds allow us to better understand and meet customer needs with a culture focusing on respect, positivity and fun. And with leadership that is committed to the team, that commitment is passed along to our customers. Above all else, we are dedicated to customer success. Whether it be your online portfolio, business site or blog—fighting malicious activity, protecting your website and helping you through the process when something happens is why we are here.

SiteLock is very excited to be supporting WordCamp Asheville this year! WordPress brings together an exceptional community of people committed to learning from each other and bettering the platform. We want to continue to support that growth and innovation. Our hope is that attendees at WordCamp Asheville walk away with new knowledge, ideas and connections that will improve their WordPress experience.

WPML.org is “The WordPress Multilingual Plugin” and makes it easy to translate WordPress sites into multiple languages. WPML falls under the umbrella of onTheGo Systems, a global company with 79 members coming from 35 different countries.WPML comes in over 40 languages. You can also add your own language variants using the languages editor. WPML offers two versions to fit any size website, from a blog to a complex corporate site. If you’re looking for a simple, powerful plugin to translate every aspect of your WordPress site, check out WPML.org. Created by onTheGoSystems, the team also offers the awesome Toolset plugins and a translation service. Toolset is a suite of plugins to manage custom types in WordPress sites. With Toolset you can build custom WordPress sites, without writing PHP. The ICanLocalize Translation Service provides translation for websites, iPhone apps, Android apps and software. According to Laura de Figueiredo, WPML works hard to develop great plugins because they LOVE WordPress and want to make the lives of the WordPress community easier. “WordPress is an amazing community, in which OnTheGoSystems loves to play an active part by supporting it as it grows,” states Figueiredo. “Attendees at #WCAVL will not only learn, but also share their ideas. You can meet a great developer, an agency owner, or just a WordPress beginner, it doesn’t matter, everyone is there to participate and contribute,” she continues. Visit the onTheGoSystems website to learn more.

Status Forward is a small design and development team focused on helping businesses, organizations, and individuals develop brands that connect with people in a digital world. WordPress plays a fundamental role in all of their web projects. A website is often what makes the first impression on a potential client or customer, and as such, it is a vitally important part of any brand. They specialize in clean and effective design and custom development that makes the most sense for our clients and helps them stand out from the crowd. Founder Laurel Scherer told us, “We do what we do because – well, we like it – and it helps pay the bills too. We enjoy the diversity of the clients we work with. Every business has something unique to say and we like figuring out what that is and how to best communicate it in everything we do when partnering with a client.” “We enjoy being part of the WordPress and Asheville communities, both of which foster collaboration and mutual support,” she continues, “This is key to our success, and we want to contribute to the continued growth and well being of these two great communities. WordCamp is the perfect opportunity to do this as a sponsor, speaker, and of course, at the Happiness Bar.” Visit the Status Forward website to learn more.

Craftpeak, a digital creative studio in the heart of Downtown Asheville, offers web design and development services, as well as classes in coding. Founders Julien Melissas and Corey Bullman are highly involved in the Asheville WordPress community. Their work focuses on collaboration and storytelling to build exceptional web and application experiences. Learn more at craftpeak.com.

DreamHost, a web hosting company that hosts over 750,000 WordPress installations across their shared and dedicated servers. They also offer domain registration, and cloud services for a wide variety of business needs. With 24/7/365 technical support, they are a great option for hosting your WordPress website. Come for the great hosting and support, stay for the quirky newsletters. Learn more DreamHost.com.

Plesk, a WebOps platform to run, automate, and grow applications, website and hosting businesses. Plesk is used by many of the top hosting and cloud providers around the world, and has WordPress specific implementations of its OS-agnostic platform, including the ability to install and manage all of your WordPress installations from one login, and a robust security interface. Visit Plesk.com for more information.