Thanks for the fantastic write up, Beth.
Maybe we will see a new WordCamp in Memphis next year.
I had a great time at WordCamp Fayetteville— it was a long day, but I learned so much it went by quickly. Here’s a short rundown of the sessions I attended and links to the presentations where available.
via WordCamp Fayetteville: WordPress Rocks and So Does Arkansas.
Eric Huber of Blue Zoo Creative talks Saturday morning at WordCamp Fayetteville.
More will come, but for now we wanted to share all the links to speakers’ Slideshare presentations we have. Please leave your link below in the comments if you’re presentation is not listed.
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/acrofford/wordcamp-fayetteville-guest-blogging-presentation-8756376
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/cottonr/wordpress-profitability-for-agencies-firms-and-freelancers
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/JodyDilday/the-diy-website
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/studionashvegas/ultimate-wordpress-experience-for-wordcampfayetteville-wcfay
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/tsudo/get-things-published
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/erichuberusa/yin-yang-of-your-website-at-wordcamp-fayetteville-73011
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/thapgood/embrace-the-mullet-css-is-the-party-in-the-back-a-css-howto
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/Kopepasah/css3-8741247
Last night was a fantastic kick off to WordCamp Fayetteville.
Got to have a terrific dinner of pizza and craft beer at Hog Haus on Dickson Street for Speakers and Volunteers.
We sat at two tables of ten and everyone got a chance to mingle and meet.
Then we went to Hammontree’s just across the street for the Meetup/Tweetup. We had at least 30 folks there which was twice the amount last year Friday night.
Good times and tasty grilled cheese sandwiches were had.
As plans for this year’s WordCamp Fayetteville started to develop, one of our inaugural sponsors was the Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission.
This commission’s purpose is to promote tourism in the area, including helping to attract conventions. We’re so pleased that they had faith in our grassroots effort by voting to support WordCamp Fayetteville with $1,000. This earned them an Editor sponsorship and gave us a launch for our mission to bring awareness and knowledge about WordPress to the Northwest Arkansas region.
We’re grateful to the A&P Commission for helping place Fayetteville on the technology and tourism map by endorsing WordCamp Fayetteville (the only WordCamp in Arkansas!).
So as our WordCamp attendees enjoy learning about WordPress this weekend, we hope they also enjoy the food, hotels and other parts of Fayetteville’s tourism efforts that make it a great place to live … and hold premier technology conferences.
Check out Ithemes Backup Buddy. They are a sponsor of WordCamp Fayetteville and will save you heartache when your site goes down.
For their homepage:
“Backup your entire WordPress install. Widgets, themes, plugins, and SQL database – the entire package! You should not leave the backup process up to your web host. Just like your laptop or desktop computer, you should be doing regular backups of your blog or website. With BackupBuddy you can schedule backups and have them sent off-site to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, an FTP/FTPS account, or to your email.
Restore your WordPress site fast. The restore function in BackupBuddy is super simple. You upload the importbuddy.php script and your backup file, and it restores WordPress: your themes, widgets, plugins, and everything else. No need to install WordPress first! Other backup solutions only backup; BackupBuddy restores too!
Migrate a WordPress site to another domain or server easily. If you build custom WordPress sites for clients, this plugin is for you! This is a very popular feature for WordPress developers who build a custom site for a client on a temporary domain or locally (like a sandbox or playground site) and then want to migrate the entire site with content, styles, widgets and all on a live client domain.”
We’d like to thank the iThemes team that makes creating a custom WordPress theme easy and fun.
Their Builder product makes creating page layouts a snap, whether they’re for a homepage or an inside page.
Inside Builder a Layout Engine builds the code for you, so you don’t have to. However, if you want to insert HTML and PHP, options are available.
Their Style Manager allows you to change background and theme colors. The Builder also comes with powerful search engine optimization options to promote your page to the top of a search listing.
iThemes’ Justin Kopepasah will speak on CSS3, WordPress & Salsa Dancing Saturday.
Big thanks to WordCamp Fayetteville presenter and sponsor Cotton Rohrscheib for having us on his podcast The Cotton Club last night to talk about this weekend’s conference. Got a chance to talk with presenter Keith Crawford and Steven Trotter also.
Jamie Smith is on our volunteer committee for WordCamp Fayetteville and has been a WordPress user for a couple of years. She recently wrote a blog entry for her freelance communications business about why she attends WordCamp and good reasons for others to use WordPress (and attend WordCamp).
Here’s an excerpt from the Jamie’s Notebook blog:
So why should someone who is not a programmer attend a technology conference like WordCamp? Because WordCamp … and WordPress… isn’t just for techie folk. That’s why I like it and promote its use to many different categories of people.
WordPress is one of those programs that can be comprehended by someone with basic computer skills. If you can figure out how to sign up for Facebook, you can figure out the basics of WordPress. But what’s interesting is, it doesn’t stop there. There’s an ever-increasing number of what I call proficiency layers…the deeper you get into WordPress, the more there is to learn. The more you can manipulate. The more you can develop. WordPress can be used for blogging, it can be used for websites. It can be used for personal, it can be used for business.
Check out the full text of the blog on Jamie’s Notebook.
Some lucky attendee of WordCamp Fayetteville next week will win a white iPad 2 to help bolster their blogging and web development skills.
“Our goal continues to be the democratization of publishing. We want everyone to have their own digital Gutenberg press,” said event founder Christopher Spencer, publisher of Ozarks Unbound.
“While we can’t give everyone an iPad 2, we can give them the skills to communicate online in the most effective way possible, whatever their message or mission.”
WordCamp Fayetteville is a nonprofit event scheduled for Saturday, July 30 at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development. It is dedicated to giving people basic web literacy and an understanding of the open-source and free WordPress software.
An “Unconference day” will be held Sunday, July 31 at The Belford Group, a Fayetteville web design/software development company. On the second day, participants can connect with expert users to learn more one-on-one.
WooThemes’ goal is to make affordable, good-looking sites available to the public.
The company provides new themes every month geared toward a variety of users, including publishers, educators and photographers.
The company’s 98 themes have been downloaded over 1,859,465 times.
And they are firm advocates of the GPL allowing designers to modify their themes without restriction. In fact, they even offer a custom logo button in their themes that allow designers to brand their websites for clients with their own logo.
It’s a pretty nice reminder to the end-client about who customized the site for them.
We’re thrilled to have them supporting WordCamp Fayetteville and we hope you take a moment to check them out.
