Watch WordCamp Omaha Talks at WordPress.tv

Miss any of the WordCamp Omaha 2015 talks? Good news: You can now stream our October presentations on WordPress.tv!

Thanks to our local videographer volunteers and the WordPress.tv volunteers, most of our awesome sessions are now available online. Check out direct links below.

Business/Content Track

Marianne Worthington: Building Healthy Online Teams

Working on projects with other people can be hard. Working virtually on these projects can make it even harder. However, there is hope! In this session participants will learn how to ensure everyone working on a project is working together to make awesome things happen. Having an understanding of virtual teams and how they work is imperative to building a great project team.  Practical tools will be given on how to utilize technology to open lines of communication, what to do when things aren’t go well on your  project, and what you can do to “get the job done.”

Tyler Golberg: Basic WordPress SEO
This session covers:

  • difference between onpage and offpage SEO
  • general WP settings for SEO
  • helpful plugins
  • picking a keyword
  • headers, alt tags, internal linking, meta tags
  • categories vs. tags

Kevin Moser: Happy Clients, Outstanding Outcomes

As web designers and developers, we often focus on the technical aspects of our jobs. Unfortunately, many of us struggle with an important part of a project – communication with our clients. It is an often overlooked piece of the puzzle, but it is directly correlated with outcomes and how the client feels we did our job. In this talk, we will look at communicating with clients and managing expectations in three broad phases of a project – pitching/planning, development, and launching/troubleshooting. Specifically, we will look at steps that will make the client feel involved and important. This level of involvement and communication will help keep clients happy through the entire process, giving us an outstanding outcome.

Christoph Trappe: How to Use the Jetpack Plugin to Build Audience

The Jetpack plugin has come a long way and can help us grow our audience through:

  • E-newsletters
  • Automatic social sharing
  • Build-in metrics that are easy to review
  • Automated related posts
  • And many other great features.

Designer/Developer Track

Josh Collinsworth: Be Classless – Optimizing Your CSS for WordPress

It’s easy to get caught up adding HTML classes (and IDs) to each and every element we want to style, but the fact is, WordPress helps us out with specific targeting by adding its own classes and IDs to certain elements on every page and post. Cleverly utilizing WordPress’s default page build along with CSS’s pseudo classes and combinators makes it possible to be highly specific with our targeted styles while leaving the original HTML completely alone. In short, if we look for ways, we can often avoid adding more classes and wrapping text in spans to have WordPress and CSS do the work for us.

Trevan Hetzel: Super Fast WordPress Themes

Today’s web users have the need for speed. With internet and cellular connections getting faster and faster, users expect sites to feel snappy and not make them wait. We as developers must make sure we’re doing our very best to serve those pages quickly. This talk will focus on the things you should be doing, both on the front-end and back-end, when building WordPress themes. Presentation Slides

Developer/WordPress-Contributor Track

Frankie Jarrett: WP-CLI – A Practical Guide For The Rest of Us

All too often designers and developers alike wince at the phrase “command line interface.” In this talk, I’m going to prove that you don’t need a neckbeard to use the terminal. If you like the idea of getting more work done in less time, or if you’re just down right curious about what this WP-CLI stuff is all about, then this session is for you!

Anthony Burchell: Helping Core

This talk will highlight the many different ways to give back to Core WordPress. At a high level I will go over the core trac ticketing system and how to talk within tickets. I will even be diving into Vagrant and show how to set up a development environment and create a patch. This talk will take some of the ambiguity out of contributing to Core and focus mainly on teaching how to do the little things that lead to bigger impacts.

Thank You!

A big thanks goes out to all of our speakers, volunteers, sponsors and attendees for making WordCamp Omaha 2015 such a success!

If you joined us Oct. 10-11, please take a moment to answer our follow-up survey, and we look forward to seeing you again next year!

Everything You Need to Know to Have Fun at WordCamp Omaha

WordCamp is finally here! Thank you again to all of our sponsors, speakers and volunteers for making it happen! Here are a few things you need to know.

Check-in and location

Join us at (or after) 8:45 a.m. today at the Institute for Culinary Arts building on Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus (30th and Fort streets; map) for check-in, coffee and networking. The fun will be taking place on the second floor; there are stairs immediately to the left of the main entrance of the building and an elevator available straight from the entrance.

Code of conduct

We aim to make WordCamp a fun experience for all and ask that participants refrain from, basically, jerky behavior. Check our code of conduct if you have any questions about what’s expected, and please report any violations to organizers, who will be wearing red badges. You can also send an email to omaha@wordcamp.org.

Social media

Join the conversation! Share your experiences with other attendees and the world with the hashtag #WCOma and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Recording policy

There will be photographers and sessions will be recorded. If you are uncomfortable with your image being used, please use one of the “no photo” stickers provided at check-in on your badge.

Lunch

Lunch will be provided by MCC’s Institute for Culinary Arts staff, and it’s going to be tasty. The main dish does have chicken, but there will be a vegetarian option provided, and gluten-free & vegan options available upon request.

T-shirts

T-shirts will first be provided to folks who registered on or before Sept. 23. Any leftovers will then become available to others.

Session schedule

The full session schedule (both days) is provided within your badge and online here.

Have fun, get to know folks, and learn about WordPress. Happy WordCamp-ing!

Thanks to Bozell, Silver Sponsor!

Bozell_Logo

Bozell is an advertising agency. Although, we think that term is funny, because we excel at so much more than just “advertising.” We look at brands from the ground up, then use wicked-smart insights and build communication plans that hit the audience at the right place and time. Sometimes, that takes an ad. But other times, it takes a lot more. By researching clients and learning important things about them and their consumers, we are able to help clients with a whole host of services, including the ones below.

  • Strategy & Planning
  • Brand Consulting & Management
  • Data Modeling & Smartargeting
  • Public Relations & Social Media
  • Media Strategy & Buying

Of course, we can’t forget about website/mobile design & development. We make killer websites that not only look awesome, but also function great as well. We can do this in a variety of ways, but when a website calls for an excellent content management system that is easy for our clients to use and update, we often choose WordPress. That is why we are so excited to be a sponsor for WordCamp this year. We look forward to interacting and meeting everyone. And if you would like to find out more about us, check out our website or our social media sites.

Contact: facebook.com/BozellMarketing | @Bozell

Sponsors like this one make WordCamp Omaha 2015 possible. Thanks, Bozell!

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!