General

WordPress Q&A
Jasmine Vesque, Ryan Welcher, Rick Radko and other experienced WordPress Guru’s will field questions from the group.  Bring your WordPress questions and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Agenda
6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Open WordPress Q&A

7:00 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions one on one.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:
We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)

Digital Marketing with WordPress

Do you want to communicate a message to your users? Do you want to persuade them to agree with you? Do you want them to take an action? If yes, then you need more than a just a website that acts as a fancy brochure. You need a digital marketing platform.

David Mackey will be presenting on how to transform your vanilla WordPress website into a digital marketing platform using WordPress Plugins. Come see how it’s done and share your favourite marketing plugin with the community.

Presented by David Mackey.  David is a Digital Marketing Consultant based in Kanata. He has 25+ years experience of building and supporting multi-tiered server applications and telecommunication systems. His recent programming experience includes three years of working with WordPress.  He is excited to share what he’s learned about Digital Marketing and how you can leverage your WordPress website for persuasion.

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)

“Ask the Expert & 750 Member Celebration”

Chat with topic experts on WordPress and related topics.  It’s your chance to direct the discussion to what ever YOU want to learn about WordPress.  Bring all your questions, beginner to expert.  There will be 5 to 10 identified “Topic Experts” on hand to answer your questions one on one or in small groups. Of course you can discuss your questions, or WordPress or just shoot the breeze with anyone else there too!

Topic Experts:

Meagan Hanes is an interactive multimedia designer and developer who specializes in using WordPress to create fantastic, effective, maintainable and secure websites for clients of all kinds.  Talk to Meagan about: WordPress.com, WordPress Troubleshooting, Plugins and Themes.

Shawn Hooper has been developing web applications since the late 90’s, and has been actively working with WordPress for the past few years. This year he started speaking at community events, presenting at both WordCamp Ottawa and Toronto. His interests are in making the web DO cool things. As WordPress grows as an application framework, it does exactly that…. cool things! Talk to Shawn about: API Integrations, Security, Managing WordPress from the Command Line, Plugins, or any other developer topics.

Jackson Lo is an expert in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having worked on countless projects with national brands to small businesses, Jackson brings a breathe of knowledge and experience in optimizing WordPress sites for both humans and search engines. If you feel your WordPress site is not stacking up to SEO best practices or you’re stuck, Jackson is the guy you’ll want to speak to. Jackson also runs a digital marketing agency located in Ottawa called SteerUp Marketing. He recently released a free tool called the Schema Creator Tool. Talk to Jackson about: WordPress SEO, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Local Search Marketing, Content Marketing and Google Analytics.

Rick Radko of R-Cubed Design Forge, is a designer and developer specializing in custom web applications and multilingual WordPress sites. He has published WordPress plugins, is a WordCamp Ottawa Co-organizer and a frequent WordCamp speaker. Talk to Rick about: WordPress, custom themes, custom plugins, multilingual sites, backups and site migration.

Christopher Ross is a website designer, developer, speaker, and consultant who enjoys long walks with shortcodes, functional arguments, and playing with other people’s APIs. Talk to Christopher about: issues with larger sites, optimization, and structure issues, as well as advanced developer topics.

Jasmine Vesque is a web evangelist who enjoys helping people share their most important stories and ideas. She is a web specialist, digital marketer, and graphic designer. Her boutique web agency, Forward Slash Media, provides a wide range of digital solutions and technology training. She loves teaching and regularly contributes as both an instructor and mentor to the Ottawa WordPress Group and Ladies Learning Code. Jasmine is also a WordCamp Ottawa organizer and regular WordCamp speaker. Talk to Jasmine about: WordPress, Web Design, Social Media, and Digital Marketing.

Ryan Welcher is a web developer with over 10 year experience who has been working with WordPress since about 2009. He believes there really isn’t much WordPress can’t do, and has been able to successful rely on it for projects ranging from large websites integrated with 3rd party software, to native mobile apps, to single page sites and browser based games.  Talk to Ryan about: plugin development, hooks, custom post types, WordPress as a data source,  and development processes.

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Ask the expert and network!

8:00 – End

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)

Google Analytics and WordPress for Beginners

Google Analytics produces thousands of different numbers, metrics and statistics. There’s so many numbers it can be more confusing than enlightening trying to figure out which ratios should be taken into account, which stats are the most important.

This session is a beginner’s guide to best practice set up of Google Analytics and navigating the user interface so you can look at your traffic more critically. We’ll also talk about how Google Analytics WordPress plugins simplify your set-up and analysis.

Presented by David Bird of Bird’s Eye Marketing. @d8vidbird

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

8:00 – Adjourn

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

We’re working on a new downtown location for the regular monthly meetings of the meetup since we’ve outgrown the libraries.  As we have not settled on a new location yet, this meeting will at the James Street Pub.  We have a private space in the basement to keep the meeting separate from the regular bar patrons. (This will not be our regular location.)

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $450/year)