Topic: Strategic Approach to Theme Design
As a designer or person building a website you need to be able to know how to approach your website project. I will be focusing on what items you need to consider before beginning your design and website content plan, along with some helpful examples of how we have helped other reach success with their theme design and website.

Cody LandefeldCody Landefeld is the owner and CEO at codyL. He is a creative consultant, speaker, web strategist, and designer for the web. Beginning out of college in 2000, he began working for entertainment entities building interactive design projects and creating websites. In 2005 he launched codyL as a website and design agency focused on helping people build their projects and have success on the web.

Currently focusing on consulting and helping clients engage their target audience on the web, codyL can provide the plan, development, team, and continued support in order to launch your project and see it become successful.

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Sponsor Spotlight: Diverse Solutions

As long time WordCamp supporters, Diverse Solutions is a proud local sponsor of WordCamp Orange County!  Based in Irvine, we specialize in innovative IDX search products that make it easy for real estate professionals to add listings to any website or blog.

For over six years we’ve been the trusted source for search experiences that generate traffic and provide the highest lead conversion rates. Always evolving and improving using the newest advances in technology combined with customer feedback, Diverse Solutions is known for offering cutting-edge products.

From our popular map-based dsSearchAgent interface to our traffic-generating dsIDXpress property search plugin for WordPress, Diverse Solutions continues to be the web technology pioneer for the real estate industry.

Free demos of our products are available on our website, or call us for more info.  All WordCamp attendees get free setup for any of our products, just mention WordCamp OC when you sign up!

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Topic: Measure Twice, Blog Once: Easy ways to get proper metrics on your WordPress site

Adam will cover the basics on the free and low-cost options for tracking activity on and about your WordPress site, and then get into details on how to track and make sense of less “traditional”, but more relevant metrics. For bloggers, businesses, and developers.

adam wareAdam is self-declared “web veteran” with a rich web analytics background and extensive digital marketing experience. He is the CEO at SwellPath, an analytics consulting and digital marketing agency based in Portland. He is a WordPress fanatic, and a hardcore user since 2006. He has extensive experience with an array of analytics applications and platforms, and has hacked and plugged-in most of them into WordPress. A developer in the early years of his career, he now codes just enough to distract himself for hours with analytics and WordPress.

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Topic: Building an Intranet with WordPress
A WordPress-powered intranet or extranet can be a great way to share and collaborate with your team. You can keep everyone on the same page, provide a shared space for important reference documents, and collaborate — across the floor or around the world. This session is geared for businesses interested in leveraging the power of the WordPress for team collaboration. Using real world examples, we will cover hosting and setup options, how to get your team engaged, and measuring the success of your WordPress-powered intranet.

Jeff Hester: Building an Intranet with WordPressJeff Hester is passionate about online communities and creating innovative web-based solutions that deliver value. A web developer since the early 90’s, he has been active in the WordPress community since attending his first WordCamp in 2007. Co-author of three books and engaging speaker, the combination of his engineering background and business acumen gives him a unique ability to bridge the gap between practice and theory in plain English.

Posted in Presentation Topics, Speakers | 2 Comments

Sponsor Spotlight: Page.ly

Pagely WordPress HostingThe guy and gal who run Pagely truly know how to give back. They also know that without WordPress and the community, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the place they are now. They’re proud to be a sponsor of WordCamp Orange County 2011, but instead of telling you about how great they are, how many WordCamps they’ve helped or how many free accounts they’ve given away to deserving businesses, they want to know more about what YOU’VE done.

Specifically, Pagely would like WordCamp Orange County 2011 attendees, and anyone reading this, to nominate someone they’re proud of. Someone that’s donated time, money or expertise in helping others, without expecting anything in return. And they’re willing to reward you for it.

Beginning 12:01am April 18 and ending 11:59pm April 22, please nominate someone you know that’s deserving of a little something extra. This can be a friend, boss, family member or stranger. Tag your nominations, with the nominees’ Twitter handle or full name, with #WCOC and two deserving nominees will each receive a Pagely t-shirt and two even more deserving nominees will each receive a Pagely t-shirt and a free-for-life Pagely Personal Account at this year’s WordCamp Orange County.

Pagely is proud to reward those who help others. Help us find the most deserving!

Posted in General Awesomeness, Sponsors | 6 Comments

Topic: Mobile and Geo Strategies for WordPress
Mobile and geo based brand strategies are in mainstream adoption in 2011 and your brand is lost in the landscape. Use this session to learn about the variety of mobile and geo strategies that you can implement. Leave with a renewed passion for your community and a better understanding of how to articulate your offering across devices and geography.

Luke Pilon: Mobile and Geo StrategiesLuke is a software architect and entrepreneur with just over a decade in the San Diego tech start up scene. He’s the founding and managing partner of the development firm Mobiah, a group dedicated to extending WordPress to meet the demands of media management, mobile engagement and providing geographically centric experiences for users. With Mobiah’s platform in adoption on a few thousand websites, Luke has helped one person operations to public companies identify their tribes and craft strategies to energize them.

Posted in Presentation Topics, Speakers | 1 Comment

Sponsor Spotlight: InMotion Hosting

InMotion HostingInMotion Hosting is happy to support WordCamp Orange County again this year! We’ve been involved in supporting WordCamps since 2009 and OC is one of our favorites!

When we began offering web hosting in 2001 we made it our primary goal to provide the best customer service and support in the industry. Today we’ve grown to host over 160,000 domains by doing just that. By offering a full range of solutions from shared web hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated servers, we can offer a scalable solution for almost any business. As a web hosting provider, WordPress is something that is used by countless numbers of our customers and is also something that most of us use personally for our own websites.

We’re happy to be involved again with WCOC and we’re also offering a special discount for all WCOC attendees – which is available here.

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Topic: Get More Sales with your WordPress Blog/Site
Your homepage is not relevant anymore. Why? Most people arrive on your website not through the homepage but through any of the other pages, a blog increases the odds even more. With Social Media and Search Engines driving traffic to the blogpost, you have to optimize the other pages to get your audience to a sale, or request for more information. This presentation will cover the challenge we have in sales/lead generation for a WordPress blog/site, and will share tips to optimize the path you can lead your audience towards a sale/lead.

Marieke HenselMarieke is the owner of Branding Personality: the online marketing agency for consumer brands. Marieke does Search Engine Optimization since 1998, Online advertising since 2005 and social media since 2004. She lived and worked in Brazil, Romania and the US and is originally from The Netherlands. She moved here in 2007 with her husband and 3 children.

Marieke is an internationally published co-author of BusinessWise, a collaborative book for small companies with large ambitions. She is listed in the VIVA400 for 2009 & 2010 in the Netherlands, a ranking, like the Forbes500 that lists the 400 most successful women in the Netherlands, compiled by Viva magazine.

Marieke created her first WordPress blog in 2005 and has since switched all her clients over to WordPress because of its versatility, community building and search engine optimization benefits.

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Sponsor Spotlight: Event Espresso

Event Espresso - WordPress Event Registration and Manager PluginEvent Espresso is a Stoked Sponsor of WordCamp Orange County and we are happy to have them on board!

We first met the Event Espresso developers at WordCamp Las Vegas.  The Event Espresso plugin was great then.  It’s even better now.  It’s event management with ecommerce, ticketing (including printing), registration, email notifications and more. We’ve since used it successfully on a few projects and clients are always very happy with the results.

From their site:

Event Espresso is the premiere events registration and management plugin for WordPress. WordPress developers use Event Espresso as a event registration framework to create customized event registrations for their clients. This premium plugin for WordPress allows you to turn your existing blog or website into a fully featured event management website.

If your organization offers classes, workshops, events, trainings or conferences for which participants need to register in advance, Event Espresso can make you a hero. Why? Because this online event registration system will save your organization countless hours of administrative time, create a “green” and paperless event registration process, reduce costs and be available to take sign-ups 24/7. Everything from custom confirmation and reminder emails to payment management, and quite a bit more is all included – and automatically handled for you.

Event Espresso events are created from within the WordPress admin. The plugin even creates registration forms so attendees can sign up right on your website.

Where is the registration information stored? Attendee information is stored right in the WordPress database, allowing you to have access at any time.

Posted in General Awesomeness, Sponsors | 1 Comment

Tim McMahan: Podcasting with WordPress

Topic: Podcasting with WordPress
Tim will share the solutions they’ve found to be best for building a strong and reliable audio feed and integrating WordPress with Feedburner, Itunes,  and Zune.

By day Tim McMahan is a freelance graphic designer, or as his clients think of him, a Graphic Design Hero. By night he and his wife transform themselves into the hosts of the popular “Foster Parenting Podcast”.  Since 2007 they’ve been sharing their lives with friends, family and anyone who wants to listen about the ins and outs of foster parenting.  With little time for technical administration they’ve been relying on WordPress from the very start.

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