WordCamp Toronto 2012

Marilyn Kay, CCP, is the founder of Triskele Consulting. She is an active user of all major social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and blogging.

She is a a trainer, workshop leader and speaker about social media. An award-winning corporate communicator with over 30 years of experience, she has also launched and managed corporate internets and intranets.

Her company, Triskele Consulting, helps businesses go social, well beyond setting up social media tools and campaigns. Instead, the focus is on how best to integrate the social web into your marketing and business processes.

Presentation: Integrate Social into Your WordPress Site

This presentation will explain why you must go social on your site. We’ll look at the best WordPress plugins for social follows and sharing, (mainly for self-hosted sites), including toolbars/welcome bars and other social media widgets. We’ll also look how best to feature social media on your site. And finally, You will be introduced to some cool free and new premium plugins for Facebook and the fast-growing Pinterest that can help you generate more leads and loyal followers to your site and to your social media platforms.

What do you want folks to learn from your presentation?

You can’t ignore social media. It’s essential for SEO and for reaching potential followers and customers.

Continue reading Featured Speaker: Marilyn Kay →

Bradley Munro is the principal of the RS4 Marketing Group, a Toronto based consulting firm specializing in marketing strategy & product development for small and mid-sized companies. Brad is a marketing professional with over 20 years of experience in the consumer packaged goods and telecommunications/ICT industries.

He has held progressively senior management roles with top Canadian customer focused organizations including Kraft Foods, Molson Breweries, Rogers Communications and Bell Canada/Mobility.  For the past four years he has been teaching marketing and brand management at McMaster University, Seneca College and the Schulich School of Business.

Presentation: Effective Marketing In A Digital World

Local businesses face global competition. Markets are moving faster and faster. Businesses want results not excuses. Everything is going digital.

The session will explore effective marketing practices in a digital world and how the integration of social media within the overall marketing strategy is a key success factor. We’ll look at companies like Mountain Equipment Co-op who have capitalized on the evolving digital landscape to build lasting relationships with their customers.

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Dawn Comber has been writing business and marketing materials for small businesses and non-profits for over 10 years. Recognizing the growing importance of the web, Dawn added web copy writing to her tool kit. Now she spends much of her time creating search engine optimized web content for WordPress sites.  When she isn’t writing, she pretends she’s farming (aka veggie gardening). You can learn more about her at dawncomber.com and follow her on Twitter: @dawncomber

Presentation: How to do better in Google: Optimizing your WordPress Site & Web Content for Search

In these back-to-back sessions, you’ll learn the steps to take to help your site do better in search results. Session One will be an overview of SEO tactics to optimize WordPress for search.  In Session Two, we’ll focus on optimizing your content, including keyword research, web copy and images.

What do you want folks to learn from your session?

That even though on-page SEO is no longer sexy, it still works.

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Richard Martin is an online entrepreneur. He created and manages a site that provides health services to clients and continuing education training for health professionals. Before going online he did product marketing in Silicon Valley with several companies including Apple, Cisco and Broadcom. Richard now lives in Ottawa.

Presentation: Building Your Business on WordPress

I will explain how WordPress should be the foundation of an online business. I will also cover (hard) lessons I have learned while building my online business.

This presentation is designed for companies, professionals (lawyers, physicians, etc), entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs who want a presence online.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want my audience to feel that they have learned at least one thing from my talk that will help them avoid time consuming and costly mistakes when building their online business.

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Jordan Quintal is a seasoned web developer with 15 years of experience. His ever-growing web development company thegenius.ca specializes in WordPress-based websites, plugins, and a variety online/offline services. Jordan handles business management, project management, and some development work when needed.

Workshop: Simple Theme Customization

Our workshop will cover topics regarding Simple Theme Customization. The workshop is broken down into 4 sections. First, we will show you quick and easy ways to install a WordPress theme. Next, we will teach you how to setup Home Page widgets and how to widgetize any area. Moving forward, we will demonstrate how to make basic CSS updates using Google Chrome as a helpful development tool. Lastly, we will explain what Page Templates are, how to use them, and how to customize them.

What do you want folks to learn from your workshop?

I want to be able to provide the audience with easy to learn tips on how to customize very basic WordPress themes. I would like everyone who attends to feel confident about using what I taught them afterwards in personal or professional scenarios.

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Rick Radko is a creative, artistic, and entrepreneurial engineer with a passion for finding solutions to difficult design problems. He is the owner of R-Cubed Design Forge, where he develops custom web applications, social networking and team collaboration solutions for businesses. Rick specializes in custom application development and multilingual WordPress sites. He is co-leader, and a frequent presenter at the Ottawa WordPress Group.

Presentation: You have a backup, don’t you?

Could you recover your WordPress website if it was lost due to a hardware failure, hacked, or corrupted during an update or plugin install? Having good backups can make the difference between a 10 minute recovery and complete site rebuild that may take a week. This presentation will cover the basics of backups, and several techniques of creating and restoring backups including: using cPanel, WordPress plugins, and services like VaultPress.

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“I’m a Design Engineer with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and more. As part of Team Custom, I help create awesome features that let WordPress.com users tailor sites to their personalities with more than just a great theme.”

Presentation: The Power of WordPress’ Roles and Capabilities

WordPress’ roles seem simple enough on the surface, but behind the Administrator, Editor, and the other default roles is a powerful system that can be customized extensively. While some have said that other CMS’ have an advantage when it comes to security and customizing capabilities, I’ll demonstrate in this talk that that isn’t true.

Continue reading Featured Speaker: Erick Hitter →