Synopsis of WordCamp OKC 2016

August 5, 2016Uncategorizedlynndye

WordCamp OKC #wcokc is in our rearview mirror — let’s take a few minutes for a recap and call to action.

WordCamp OKC 2016

Thank You

We want to thank our sponsors, speakers, volunteers and the organizing team for their efforts to make the WordCamp a reality. We had quite a few people tell us how grateful and happy they were to have a WordCamp in Oklahoma.

There are many interested in WordPress who live outside major cities and coming to a meetup is difficult, but coming to a goodness-packed all-day extravaganza like a WordCamp is very worthwhile to them.

Speaker Slides Available

We have most of the slides available for you to look at or download. Simply go to the Sessions page to check them out.

If you haven’t taken your survey yet, here’s the link to do so. It’s 14 quick questions.

Remember the Bigger Community

Aaron Campbell gave us some homework during his morning session: visit make.wordpress.org to see all the opportunities to get involved. We’d love for everyone that attended this first-ever WordCamp OKC to check that out and find a way to get plugged in.

OKC WordPress Meetup Group

We’d love you to be a regular part of our monthly WordPress group. Head on over to meetup.com and sign up. We meet the last Monday of the month and we’ll most likely have homemade cookies!

We usually have two speakers who present on WordPress topics – it can be about the software itself, plugins, blogging tips, SEO, analytics and more. Look at our past meetups to get a feel. Our speakers are regular people and most don’t consider themselves experts; they have a passion for sharing something they’ve learned. Remember, everyone is an expert in something!

We hope to see you at a meetup soon!

Guest Post – BigWing Interactive Loves WordPress

July 27, 2016Uncategorizedlynndye

When we at BigWing Interactive found out a WordCamp was coming to OKC, to say we were excited would be an understatement.

As a Digital Marketing Agency that offers WordPress development alongside other marketing services, we wholeheartedly support a major WordPress conference coming to our community.

Our Clients Love WordPress

WordPress is the most popular open source Content Management System for good reason. The learning curve is lower than other CMS’s, the back-end, for the most part, is intuitive and easy to use, and the platform is highly extensible with many free and premium plugins available.

For our clients, it means a quicker development turnaround, which results in high-value end-product at a lower cost.

With the extensibility that WordPress provides, clients can have a fully functional calendar, membership site, or e-commerce store with relatively little effort. What once took months or years to develop from scratch is now a matter of a week or two with the help of the myriad of available WordPress plugins.

How BigWing Gives Back to WordPress

BigWing believes highly in Five for the Future. We benefit greatly from WordPress and believe in giving back to help continue the project.

We’ve sent speakers to WordCamps, sponsored a local WordCamp, and have developed or contributed to several WordPress plugins.

We also encourage our developers to attend weekly WordPress meetings during work hours and contribute to WordPress core.

Looking Forward to the Future

BigWing is excited for the future of WordPress, especially in regards to our clients. We’re always looking for the best tools to make our clients’ lives easier and to help them grow their businesses.

With WordPress, we’re confident in the short and long-term that we can continue to provide value and quality for our clients.

Looking forward to lunch

July 26, 2016UncategorizedJessica Estes

You hear it time and again: “the community is what makes WordPress great!” Here in Oklahoma, community and food go together like WordPress and BBQ. With that in mind, we are excited to share our lunch plans with you. Thanks to the generosity of our venue sponsor, we have plenty of space for an on-site, catered lunch.

From the beginning we knew that we wanted to have a BBQ lunch, but we recognize that our great diverse community includes some who prefer a vegetarian meal, so we’ve got that covered too.

For the BBQ crowd, Swadley’s has been hired to provide our catered lunch. The menu includes sausage and chicken as well as beans and potato salad.

Those who requested a vegetarian lunch option will be taken care of with a great offering from Jimmy John’s.

Dessert will be cookies from local favorite Eileen’s Colossal Cookies in Edmond. Yum!

There’s plenty of space to sit and enjoy good conversation with the great crowd attending #WCOKC. So, we hope you’ll plan on staying inside where it’s cool and enjoy lunch with us this Saturday.

Session Spotlight: Doing it Wrong

July 26, 2016announcementscommunity, sessions, speakersMorgan Estes

What happens when you dive into working with WordPress and discover the worldwide community that supports it? You might just learn that “doing it wrong” has a totally different meaning than you originally thought.

Marc Gratch wraps up the day with his personal story of “Doing it Wrong” and how he came to be involved in the WordPress community, and share some ideas about how you can get involved, too.

Session Spotlight: Blogging and Content Creation for WordPress

July 25, 2016announcementsblogging, content, sessions, speakersMorgan Estes

WordPress is used to power apps, e-commerce systems, data stores, and massive news sites, but did you know you can also use it to write a blog? 🙂 It’s true!, and Nile Flores can show you how during her session “Blogging and Content Creation for WordPress.” She’ll provide some easy-to-implement tips on getting past a creative block, sharing your knowledge with the world, and making your content SEO-friendly.

Session Spotlight: The Buyer’s Journey – a Content Strategy for Your Blog or Business Website

July 24, 2016announcementsblogging, content strategy, sessions, speakersMorgan Estes

Everyone tells you to write more; no one tells you what to write, or more importantly, how to be helpful. Chris Lema brings his experience in crafting timely, helpful content to Oklahoma City as he presents “The Buyer’s Journey – a Content Strategy for Your Blog or Business Website.”

Session Spotlight: Beginner WordPress Security

July 20, 2016announcementssecurity, sessions, speakersMorgan Estes

Security of any platform can be difficult, but how do you secure one of the biggest targets on the web? Gerroald Barron knows from experience, and can help you get started securing your WordPress site when you attend his #WCOKC talk “Beginner WordPress Security.”

Guest Post – Francis Tuttle Web Development

July 19, 2016Uncategorizedlynndye

This is a guest post from one of our sponsors, Francis Tuttle…

Francis Tuttle Technology Center is excited to play a part in OKC hosting its first WordCamp! Why? Because Francis Tuttle trains both high school students and adults in WordPress, and we love what WordPress allows our students to do!

WordPress runs on the same coding languages that we teach our students in our web development career training programs: HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and Javascript/JQuery. What better way to familiarize our students with an open-source CMS (Content Management System) than teaching WordPress? Plus, our students are able to start freelancing while they are learning because WordPress offers opportunities for creating websites at many different levels of coding expertise. As students learn more about coding, they are able to leverage WordPress to a much greater degree, learning to create their own themes and plugins that run on the WordPress engine.

Another amazing benefit of using WordPress is the fantastic community of WordPress users from around the world who spur each other on and assist one another! We encourage our students to attend the local WordPress Users Group Meetups whenever they can, and we can’t wait to see what great relationships and happenings will come about because of this WordCamp. We just know that our students and the local community of web developers who attend will leave feeling energized and inspired!

Sponsor Spotlight – Liquid Web

July 18, 2016Uncategorizedlynndye

Liquid Web, a managed web hosting company, offers a wide array of hosting solutions, including VPS, cloud, dedicated, and shared hosting plans. WordPress users will find our fully managed hosting solutions, built on powerful and flexible servers, ideal for hosting WordPress sites of all sizes. In addition, all of our fully-managed solutions come backed by our industry-leading, 24/7/365, on-site Heroic Support®. Our Heroic Promise features a comprehensive SLA with 59 second phone and live chat responses, 30 minute helpdesk responses, 30 minute hardware replacement, and 100% power and network uptime guarantees. With wholly-owned, state-of-the-art data centers in Michigan, Arizona, and Amsterdam, we provide true global reach and geographic redundancy. Whether your hosting needs are big or small, managed or unmanaged, shared, VPS, or cloud … Liquid Web is the perfect match.

You can find out more about Liquid Web here.

WordCamp Oklahoma City

July 30th, 2016