To Boldly Go

One last big thank you to everyone who came out to WordCamp Orange County 2016. Now that the dust has settled we wanted to leave you with one last post.

Below, you’ll find links to many of the speaker slides. We’ll add to this list over the next week or so as they come back in so you might want to check back. In addition, talks in the Nebula and the Dwarf Star have started posting to WordPress.tv and we expect the rest to follow over the next few weeks.

On behalf of the organizers, I want to thank our speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. We hope to see you next year!

Speaker Spotlight: Marketing WordPress & podcasting with Adam Silver

Growing your business is about building trust, and your voice is an important tool to accomplish this. Where writing a blog post may not come easy to everyone, speaking is very natural. Adam Silver of Kitchen Sink WP wants to show you how podcasting is growing (once again) and that it’s not so hard to do. In his WCOC session, he’ll show you a workflow, best practices, and ways to monetize.

If you want relevant and actionable takeaways like checklists to use when launching a podcast, don’t miss Adam’s blogger discussion in the Asteroid Field at 10 AM on July 10!

Adam teaches a WordPress 101 course at his local adult school, presents a monthly WordPress seminar at SBDC, runs the South Bay WordPress Meetup and produces a weekly podcast at kitchensinkwp.com. In his spare time, he hangs out with his wickedly cool 3 kids & wife, and makes some really bad puns, since someone has to.

Speaker Spotlight: Creating and maintaining sites while mobile with Jen Miller

In this talk, Jen Miller of NeedSomeoneTo.com will show you how to integrate design, development and blogging app resources that allow WordPress users the freedom to manage a business, team, multiple websites and other assets while on the go.

Jen will provide laughter, story and insight on favorite and newly released apps that make people, product, website and business management accessible by iPad. The apps she’ll cover combine emergency logo creation, photo and video editing, blog management, code wrangling, email marketing, client and staff management and social media.

Don’t miss her at 11:30 AM in the Dwarf Star on July 9!

Jen Miller believes in the value and power of the written word in sharing truth and story, in life and in business. Combining her journalism background with a passion for customer service and marketing, Jen built NeedSomeoneToBlog.com, a blogging service focused on delivering original, quality website content to business owners. As the business grew, Jen discovered areas that could further develop authority, garner trust, and build engagement for her clients online, resulting in BestBookWriter.com and MyResumeSecret.com. With her newly formed corporation, NeedSomeoneTo.com, Jen seeks to combine services in one-website, making it easier for companies to share engaging messages of community and industry knowledge with their followers.

Speaker Spotlight: A holistic approach to web design with Alicia St. Rose

We’ve all heard something along the lines of this before from a potential client: “We want a simple website, 5 or 6 pages and 3 navigation tabs, a shopping cart, and a contact form.” But are you offering solutions to this client’s challenges online and offline? Probably not. Which, as Alicia St. Rose will teach you in this presentation, means this website is doomed to fail.

Alicia can’t wait to show you how website does not stand isolated from the many aspects integral to good business planning: marketing, company mission/message, target audience, social media, or mailing list. Like a holistic practitioner takes into account all the chakras, Alicia believes you should be addressing all your client’s business aspects to produce an online presence that is solid and effective. Simply building a site does not solve your client’s challenge, which are ultimately to get more exposure, sell more products, save money, reduce wasted man-hours, among many others. If you concentrate on offering solutions for your clients’ challenges, then you are more likely to see a web presence with measurable success and happier, enlightened clients!

Don’t miss Alicia’s session at 2:50 PM in the Dwarf Star on July 10, where she will inspire you to elevate from just a website builder to the higher plane of “Solutionary!”

Alicia St. Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was nearly six years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.

She is owner, principal designer and developer at Intrepid Realist Design, a small agency that employs one. In addition to creating for WordPress, she offers WordPress coaching to WP users who are just starting to flutter their wings to those wanting just a brushup. She is co-organizer of the South Central Coast WordPress Adventure Group, has co-organized WordCamp Ventura County and spoken at several California WordCamps in the last two years.

Alicia currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her two rambunctious cats, Oscar and Milo. She divides her time between that seaside town and Black Rock City, Nevada.

Oh, and her favorite color is red.

Use our Snapchat filter at #WCOC16!

wcoc2016-snapchat-geofilterPost photos of great speakers, cool swag, and short videos of your favorite presentations in style during WordCamp Orange County on July 9 and 10 at The Cove at UC Irvine. We’ll have a special Snapchat geofilter for the weekend that you can select when you’re at The Cove.

Our karaoke afterparty is always legendary, so add as many Snaps to your Story as you like – the WCOC geofilter will work at our party venue too.

Download Snapchat on your smartphone (iOS and Android) before you get to the event! Follow us at wordcampoc by searching within in the app, or use our Snapcode below to find us.

snapcode-WCOC

WordCamp Orange County’s Snapchat geofilter was designed by Nien Studios and sponsored by Zeek Interactive.

Speaker Spotlight: Designing your process (for fun and profit) with Chris Ford

Chris Ford is a world-class designer who recently made a foray into the world of project management. Now that she’s back in the world of design, she wants to show you how combine design and project management – to use design thinking to develop a process that helps you make money without being cumbersome and painful. She’ll have something for everyone, from freelancers and agency folks, to designers and developers.

Don’t miss her talk at 9:50 AM in The Nebula on July 9.

Speaker Spotlight: Building a Sustainable WordPress Agency with Andrew Behla

In 2008, Andrew Behla embarked on a huge adventure and leap of faith. He tore down the house that he and his wife owned to rebuild it, acting as a general contractor with on the job training. Along the way, he learned valuable and often challenging lessons in project management, working with teams, and making the right choices to stay on track and reach the goal of moving back in 6 months to their new home.

By applying the lessons learned to Behla Design, his Woodland Hills, CA based design and development agency, he was able to expand his business and make it more sustainable and successful. In this talk he will share the system, tools and real world lessons that have helped make his business more successful while achieving a better work-life balance.

If you’re a designer, developer, freelancer, or agency employee, don’t miss Andrew’s design discussion at 10:40 AM on July 9th in the Astroid Field.

Andrew Behla is the Creative Director and Founder of Behla Design, a full service design and web development agency located in Los Angeles since 2000. He has been in love with WordPress since 2006 and enjoys giving back to the WordPress community. He is the founder of the Topanga WordPress and Los Angeles WooCommerce Meetup groups and is also a WooExpert. Andrew has a degree in Philosophy and Business from Trinity University, has taught at Santa Monica College and was an award winning teacher at UCLA Extension. He is a lifelong musician and enjoys snowboarding, table tennis, meditation and travel with his wife, Michele.

Speaker Spotlight: Going from Zero to WordPress with Kronda Adair

WordPress is a great platform, but for non-technical users the array of choices, themes, plugins, and steps to get up and running can be overwhelming. Get a step by step guide to getting up and running with your self hosted WordPress site in a way that will set you up to grow with your business in this discussion led by Kronda Adair.

Kronda will teach the framework she’s developed over the last several years to make it easier for small business owners to be empowered to manage their WP sites, and help non-technical business owners navigate the sea of choices to create their own stable, scalable WordPress site. Don’t miss this discussion at 10:40 AM in the Asteroid Field.

Kronda Adair is the founder of Karvel Digital, a WordPress consultancy and development business. In addition to developing websites, Kronda gives business owners the training they need to own and manage their digital presence.

She is a regular speaker at WordPress meetups and Wordcamps and has been invited to speak at Ada Developer Academy, Beyond the Code, Open Source Bridge, Lesbians Who Tech Summit, and others. She has given talks on WordPress deployment processes, successful site planning, starting your own business, and more.

She also writes and speaks about issues of diversity (or lack thereof) in the tech industry. She has been interviewed by sites such as Revision Path and Less Than or Equal. You can read her personal blog at kronda.com or sign up for her weekly newsletter at tinyletter.com/kronda

Her latest project is Websites That Work, an online course to give small business owners the training and tools to create successful websites that help grow their business.

When she’s not working, she can be found enjoying time at home with her wife and two cats, reading dead-tree books, riding one of her five bikes, or enjoying the postcard vistas of the state of Oregon.

WordCamp Orange County 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!