Calling All Beginners

I have been talking to a lot of people who have questioned me about whether WordCamp Atlanta will be over their heads. Rest assured beginners, we have not left you out. In fact we really want to go out of our way to make sure you get enough info to get you on the way to using WordPress.

On the morning of the first day of camp we have planned a two hour hands-on workshop for the complete novice, which will also be a great refresher for new users. So get your laptops charged up (or bring your extension cord) and be ready to take a spin through all of the basic functions to a new WordPress site. We have planned our presentations in four separate tracks throughout the two days. One track during each in time slot will feature presentations applicable to new users such as how to choose themes, the difference between pages and posts and basic search engine optimization for your content.

The presentations have been nailed down and speakers are being contacted so it won’t be long before we have the first draft of our schedule up on the site. Go ahead and get your tickets now since they are going fast and when they are gone, we won’t be able to issue more.

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Yay! MailChimp Just Swung Onboard to be an Olympic Sponsor!

What can I say. They are our Atlanta homies and we love the Chimp. I send out my Just a Digital Minute each and every Wednesday morning via MailChimp and sign up all my clients too! I sure hope they bring us some of their awesome t-shirts!

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Wanna get excited? Check Out Video From 2010 WordCampAtl

It is very exciting to be coming into the home stretch planning for WordCampAtl 2012. Tickets went on sale, Sponsors have been signing up, presentations and speakers are being lined up as we speak. But if you wanna really get excited watch this video from our last WordCamp. Almost got snowed out in 2010 but we have ordered better weather this year!

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Party Anyone?

After working and playing hard all day Campers need to have a central place to meetup and unwind. Randy Barnes, Your EZ Video Guy is our EZ party animal charged with finding our after camp watering hole. He has scoped out the Cheyenne Grill which is a Sports Bar down the street from SCAD. Randy put together a little look-see for us. Check it out. This maybe the spot.

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Go Higher with Jetpack

jet-pack logoWe’re excited to have Jetpack as a sponsor this year.  Jetpack is one of Automattic’s latest innovations and is way more than a plugin. Jetpack is a cloud enabled plugin that makes WordPress (.org) sites even more awesome. It uses the killer servers at WordPress.com and makes some of the most popular .com features available to .org users.

In fact, we’re using Jetpack on this site for a number of things, including the nifty sharing buttons located below this post as well as others on the site (go ahead use them). We are also using the cool spelling and grammar checking, WordPress.com stats and a couple other cool features.

Big thanks to Jetpack for helping make WordCamp Atlanta possible!

Find out more about Jetpack here. 

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Big thanks to WP Engine

wp-engine-logoWe’d like to give a huge WordCamp Atlanta thank you (hug) to WP Engine for helping us out with some serious capital. As an Olympic sponsor their contribution to the event will help us be fully prepared and make WCATL a great event.

What’s cool is their sponsorship isn’t even the best part. They will be sending a couple of their staff members to do talks about ways to optimize WordPress, and other exciting topics that will help us fill out our content. Another big WCATL hug for that too. I’ll post more about that once the speaker and presentation topics have been nailed down.

Wait there is more… After the great folks at WP Engine got in touch with us, I asked if I could check them out. I had heard a lot of great stuff about their killer hosting platform, and saw a bunch of exciting tweets about them coming out of the WordCamp Philly twitter stream. They let me get a sneak peek into their hosting platform. I gotta admit as a performance junkie I was pretty impressed. Fast and secure hosting for WordPress that is affordable (and has killer support) is hard to come by.

Thanks WP Engine!

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Tickets are Going On Sale December 2!

Santa on a Scooter with a WordPress logoWe are opening ticket sales for WordCamp 2012 on December 2. The tickets will be priced at the amazingly low price of $40.00 and that includes parking, snacks, lunches and a t-shirt! Can you believe it?

We are planning to have three planned tracks of presentations going all day Friday and Saturday and we have a couple of other rooms to have more of an un-conference approach to scheduling them, depending on the makeup of our attendees. Should be fun no matter what your level of experience with WordPress will be. We have our very beginners, people that use WordPress now but want to know more about it, our designers both experienced and just learning to customize WordPress Themes and of course our developers, both experienced and new to WordPress.

We would suggest whatever your level that you will get more out of the conference if you  have some familiarity with it. So if you are tech savvy, download a copy of WordPress onto a server and if you are not so technical, go ahead and get a free WordPress.com blog to play around with. The more you understand about the features that come with WordPress – right out of the box, the more you will get out of WordCamp.

When you purchase your tickets please understand that we do not give refunds and have a limited number of tickets available. If you buy one and cannot attend you can turn it back in so we can reissue it, or you can flip it to someone else.

When you go to get a ticket please check out the volunteer page and sign up to give us some of your time. There is a form where you can tell us what you’re good at and when you are available. Volunteers still have to purchase a ticket. 🙂

 

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Speaker Applications Submitted Before November 15, 2011 Must Be Resubmitted!

As of November 15, our new WordCampAtl site is now fully functional and ready to accept presentation submissions for WordCamp Atl 2012. Due to a quagmire of circumstances, if you sent a proposal for WordCampATL  2011 or if you submitted one to the new site before November 15, 2011, it is possible that we did not receive it.  We hope you are still interested in speaking.

If so we would like you to resubmit your application so we make sure we have all of the applications and that we are only reviewing proposals from people still interested and able to present at our WordCamp in February.

We are excited to have SCAD again. We will have more space than before, a large auditorium and 5 classrooms. Our plans are to schedule one presentation for all time slots that are either beginner or of general interest to a large number of people in the large auditorium and have three classrooms for the more specific track presentations.  We plan to keep two classrooms free for  “un-conference” possibilities that will be decided upon closer to the date or actually during the conference.

Again, if you want to submit a proposal, even if you have previously submitted a proposal, we’d like you to submit it again here so that it may receive full consideration.

Thanks for your patience and understanding,
Your WordCampAtl 2012 Planning Committee

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My First WordCamp

Snoopy at CampfireI discovered WordPress in 2006 when I was rehabbing historic Warehouses in Atlanta. I began to use it for my own business and a personal blog. When building started slowing down I helped family and friends get their sites started. Then other people started asking me to help them with their websites, and I realized that I probably had a business on my hands. So, in 2009 in the midst of the financial crises and the worst recession on record, I started a new business.

It is one thing to do sites for friends and family and another thing altogether to do sites commercially. I had a big learning curve. I had a medical records software company in the 90’s but I was the CEO and UI designer,  not a programmer.  Staying up many late nights, I was able to Continue reading My First WordCamp

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WordCamp Atlanta 2012 officially ON!

We are very happy to announce that WordCamp Atlanta 2012 finally has a date and location. We are excited to continue our relationship with Savannah College of Art and Design who has generously donated Space for us at their Atlanta campus on Peachtree. We have scheduled WordCamp Atlanta for Friday, February 3rd and Saturday February 4th. Content and speaker selection will begin soon and an official lineup will be announced soon, so stay tuned.

As mentioned announcement that went to all members of the Atlanta WordPress meetup we are looking for people who are passionate about WordPress in ANY way shape or form to get involved. If you would like to volunteer, please attend the Atlanta WordPress Users Meetup and find out how you can get involved. If you’re not able to make a meetup, please reach us by completing the form found on the Volunteer page.

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