If you’ve been thinking about earning a living designing in WordPress, you should attend Javvie Canono’s session Building a Career with WordPress. Jayvie is a full-time self-employed developer and designer who’s used WordPress since it first came out.

This non-technical session is geared towards anyone interested in using WordPress to fuel their career: whether it’s self-employment, or building a great skill portfolio so they can be picked up by great places to work.

Jayvie will share some of his own experiences, but the talk will be focused more on techniques to automate tasks, manage one’s time, and expand one’s market.

Attend this session and get even more WordPress awesomeness at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 on Nov 3-4. Tickets are only $40 and you can register online now!

Kathy Drewien

Kathy Drewien takes you to the foundation of WordPress and helps you understand the basic building blocks for creating a strong website in her session on We Admit It! Getting Started with WordPress Can Be Tough.

A nationally recognized speaker with happy followers, Kathy has a way of explaining the technical mumbo jumbo of WordPress to novices so they feel confident with how to proceed. Her passion for the platform shines through in her speaking, teaching and coaching as she helps her clients through the sometimes difficult process of building their website. She recognizes the challenges or transitions newcomers face and knows how to guide them through content building without being overwhelmed.

The eagerness to share ideas and the generosity within the WordPress community is what Kathy loves most about the organization. She also says it is the best website designing platform “because it is robust enough to grow with you, yet simple enough to launch in 5 minutes”.

Users attending Kathy’s session can expect to come out of it with a stronger confidence in their abilities. “Attendees will know they are powerful, smart individuals who are capable of learning how to manage their website! They will understand the difference between using WordPress to publish and manage their content, and that tweaking themes is a different skill set. Using WordPress is easy. Getting the perfect design is a little more complex.”

Attend this session and get even more WordPress awesomeness at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 on Nov 3-4. Tickets are only $40 and you can register online now!

Thomas Griffin

Thomas Griffin demystifies AJAX, an incredible tool that can be used to enhance user interface and experience in his session AJAX in Your Plugins (The Right Way).

Thomas is a WordPress developer specializing in custom theme and plugin development for clients of all shapes and sizes. He’s built over 100 custom themes and plugins for clients, contributed to WordPress core, created TGM Plugin Activation and sells Soliloquy.

Thomas says that WordPress is the best platform for designing websites because it “puts the focus on the user, not the developer. When the user is empowered to make changes and updates that he/she could not normally make themselves (and you get to watch it in action), there is a powerful sense of accomplishment and appreciation for WordPress as a whole.”

We asked Thomas what he felt was the most important thing people who attend his session at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 will take away with him. He replied, “People are going to learn both “the why” and “the how”. I’m not going to give you lofty theories about how it should be approached or ill-advised examples without proper documentation. I aim to bring together both knowledge and experience so that you can truly learn how to do this stuff for yourself. :-)”

Attend this session and get even more WordPress awesomeness at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 on Nov 3-4. Tickets are only $40 and you can register online now!

Melodie Laylor

If you design websites for churches, professional groups or other types of non-profit organizations, you don’t want to miss Melodie Laylor’s WordCamp Raleigh 2012 session Adventures in Non-Profit Web Design.

Melanie, a classically-trained singer with a bachelor’s degree in music realized she had a knack for computers and has been working with computers and the Internet ever since. A self-proclaimed geek girl, Melanie is married to a geek guy and they have four geektasic kids.

Melanie’s favorite thing about WordPress is the people who use it. “WordPress has the best community of developers, contributors and enthusiasts of any open source project I have ever seen. I have not seen the same level of enthusiasm, support, commitment, or even sheer numbers of people in the communities around any other open source project.”

The Adventures in Non-Profit Web Design session is designed so that someone involved with a nonprofit entity will see that WordPress is the best website platform from which to launch their mission and message to the most people with the most ease and at the most reasonable cost. “Non-profit designers will see there’s no lack of resources and support out there for them.” Melanie says.

Spotlight written by Kelly Phillips

Attend this session and get even more WordPress awesomeness at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 on Nov 3-4. Tickets are only $40 and you can register online now!

Tony Matthews

Tony Matthews may have started his web site design career with Dreamweaver, but once he used WordPress for a website makeover, he recognized a truly powerful tool. “It’s an open source content management system so no software like Dreamweaver is needed. It’s highly extensible with a huge number of plug-ins for everything from contact forms to event registration, and it’s easy to teach someone how to edit the site.”, Tony says.

In Tony’s session, Creating Your Website with WordPress, you’ll learn how WordPress works from the ground up. Topics include:

1- Why WordPress and what is a CMS? /.com and .org differences

2- Installing WP (using Bluehost control panel on my Mac)

3- The admin page: overview of the Dashboard features such as Settings, Themes Pages, etc.

4- Editing photos for the web (if the audience needs that)

5- Creating pages and custom menus

6- Themes and Frameworks

7- Plug-ins: show how to install and configure a couple of common plug-ins like Contact Form 7 and NextGen

8- Resources for learning more such as w3schools, lynda.com

Attend this session and get even more WordPress awesomeness at WordCamp Raleigh 2012 on Nov 3-4. Tickets are only $40 and you can register online now!