WordCamp Raleigh 2015

This is most certainly not to disparage hosting companies who offer shared hosting plans for WordPress (they’re paying some bills around here, and we really do love them), but if you are ready to take your hosting to the next level, often the options are to pay a hefty fee, or to completely surrender control of what plugins or themes you are allowed to use, or both.

Adam Sewell is here to tell you of a third option: becoming your own sysadmin.

Adam is an entrepreneur and developer who founded tinyElk studios where they develop plugins. He’s joining our Power User track this year, and we are excited to have him.

Adam will help to demystify what is going on behind the scenes at the server level, and show you how you can set up your own blazing-fast DigitalOcean VPS to host WordPress for just $5 per month.

While this talk is directed at Power Users, note that a bit of Linux command line knowledge will be useful to get the most out of this session. Don’t be scared of the command line. Read up on it before you come!

Grab your ticket today.

Think WordPress is the right platform to organize and manage your next event or conference? With the right tools and a few pointers, you can be well on your way to organizing top-notch events from the comfort and familiarity of your WordPress dashboard.

Why not swing by WordCamp Raleigh this year and learn from someone who’s done it before, though?

We are excited to invite Jeremy Davis to take the stage in our Power User track to talk through some pointers on setting up WordPress to handle event organization.

Jeremy has used WordPress to manage events with thousands of attendees, so come learn from his expertise!

Grab your ticket today!

Ever clicked on a post on your site and watched the image load seemingly pixel-by-pixel? Slow-loading sites are brutal—not just for readers, but for servers, search engines, and everyone else.

Images are important, everyone agrees. They drive engagement and pageviews, and are cuddly and warm. But given that they can be a significant drain on server resources and bring your web host to its knees when done incorrectly, it is worth getting images right.

We’ve invited Peter Baylies, a WordPress developer at Chapel Hill’s Rivers Agency, to come and untangle the knots that we tend to tie ourselves in dealing with images.

Learn best practices, optimizing images, and how to keep readers, servers, and search engines happy with the images on your site. Grab a ticket today.

So, you’ve read that Uncle Google uses https:// as a ranking factor for SEO, and you’re ready to pull the trigger on getting your WordPress site switched over. Just a quick Google search and…

There are right ways to do these things, and several wrong ways.

We are excited to invite Patrick Stox to WordCamp and our Power User track to walk us through the right way. Patrick is the Marketing Project Supervisor at TheeDesign in Raleigh, an organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup, and a contributing author for Search Engine Land for their All Things SEO column.

Grab your ticket before they sell out, and join us at WordCamp to hear from Patrick.

We are excited to welcome back Ray Mitchell, owner of SixFour Web Design to WordCamp Raleigh 2015. A veteran WordCamp speaker, his expertise is tailor-made for our new business track. Here’s what he has to say about himself:

I know how hard it can be running a small business. There are dozens of things to keep track of, and building your new website is just one of them. It shouldn’t take up all your time and money. SixFour Web Design has one mission: to create websites that help Small Businesses compete effectively with their bigger competition, without spending a fortune.

Are you on the fence about using WordPress for your small business, non-profit, or church website? Come learn from Ray’s experience. His engaging style and helpful talks are a hit every year!

This year his session is “Not Just a Website.”

Grab your ticket today.

We are excited to welcome Jen Riehle McFarland for WordCamp Raleigh 2015 to share more with us about how to use WordPress for education. There’s been a discussion around the WordPress community on the logistics and feasibility of “WordCamp-like” conferences and an on-going community specifically focused on the macro-niche of education.

The week before WordCamp Raleigh, Jen is going to the HighEdWeb conference in Wisconsin. There she’ll participate in (among other things) the ongoing national discussion of how best to support the use of WordPress in education, primarily in Higher Ed, but also for K-12 and continuing education communities. She’ll be bringing that discussion back to Raleigh, and to WordCamp.

Given our proximity to such amazing research and educational resources here in the Triangle, we’re uniquely positioned to take the conversation even further from concept to reality. Get your ticket today to hear from Jen and join in the discussion about using WordPress in education.

I’ve told you before how excited we are to be adding a business track to this year’s WordCamp. The speaker I’m introducing today is a fantastic example of why we’re excited.

If you’ve considered a WordPress site for your business, the staggering number of options and levels of complexity can be paralyzing. It would be so great to have someone walk you through how you can use WordPress to build a community of fans and customers. Let me rephrase that: It will be great when Andrea Olson walks you through that at WordCamp Raleigh 2015.

Andrea has used WordPress to build her (poop-related) community at GoDiaperFree.com and the new tinyundies.com. Without a large marketing budget or a massive complex site, she’s developed raving fans!

Come hear how you can do the same, whether you build your business around poop or not. Get your ticket today!

If you’ve ever worked on or inherited code from a large application or website built with WordPress and then needed to scale the functionality, a session from one of our developer track talks this year at WordCamp Raleigh will likely resonate with you.

This line reeled me right in, to be honest:

When developers use the same techniques for complex sites that they have been using for smaller sites, the unstructured approaches that are so commonly used can quickly turn a large project into a house of cards. The results are bugs that are hard to contain, an overall scope that goes way over budget and a project that has a high risk of failure.

As developers, we know that WordPress core is solid, and powerful. But to take it to the next level and power larger more complex applications and sites typically built for enterprise companies, we need to get beyond the methods we use for small sites and blogs.

We are excited to welcome Mike Schinkel to our developer track to help you (and me!) take our development skills to the next level and get out in front of those exact issues and pitfalls.

Mike’s primary focus is on WPLib—a foundation library for complex WordPress applications—and helping agencies architect and build complex WordPress sites for their clients.

Grab your ticket today, and join me in furiously scribbling notes to learn all that Mike is going to bring us.

Have you ever written a post introducing yourself? I am right now. In addition to speaking this year, I am my own speaker liaison.

Part of my role is to publish blog posts promoting the speakers. This one will be EPIC.

In the famous words of Shawn Carter, allow me to reintroduce myself.

I’m a freelance WordPress developer with 2 plugins in the official .org repository. WordCamp Raleigh 2014 was my first WordCamp, and I was hooked.

Weeks after last year’s conference, I coded and released a plugin on slightly more than a whim that has now garnered more than 5,000 active users, and 17 5-star reviews. That (free) plugin, in conjunction with my other (free) one, has generated around $5,000 in revenue for me so far this year.

That’s right, folks. I am a literal thousandaire just from WordPress.

In all seriousness, I’m thrilled to have developed plugins that are helping people out, and also generating some spare coin for me. If you want to learn how I turned those free plugins with free support tickets from non-paying customers into revenue (and recurring revenue!), come check out my talk in the developer track. It’s centered around what I think is the strongest aspect of WordPress, the community.

Buy your ticket today!

One of the primary shifts which WordPress has helped to facilitate in the tech world over the past 10 years is taking “web design” from being code-heavy and the exclusive realm of coders to being something that creative folks (regardless of their level of code expertise) can build great sites, and the more entrepreneurial can even build businesses helping others with their sites.

One such self-described founder/creator is David Bentley. He transitioned from high risk security (not web security—the type of security with guns and Kevlar) to web design in 2009.

Come hear how he made the transition, and how you can build a web business without all the code, as David shares with our business track at WordCamp Raleigh this year.

Grab a ticket while they’re hot.