Laurel Meister is a Laguna Beach artist whose work is featured each summer in the Sawdust Art Festival.

She needed a site to market and sell her artwork that would be easy to maintain and update. She also wanted a sketchbook to be a part of the site where she could share works in progress with her fans. Laurel’s own artwork and sketches were used as the basis for the site design to carry her style through the entire site.

Web design: Natalie MacLees
Web development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress (running on a Windows server!)

Digitwirl is a weekly video that introduces and explains technology to simplify your life, save time and money, and make things more fun.

To solve the problem of archiving, organizing and featuring a weekly video, the WooTube them by WooThemes was customized. Out of the box, WooTube offers some great features for handling video. In this case, its already useful features were extended with a custom taxonomy, separate styles for regular blog posts, custom home page, featured post animated widget, and custom menus.

Web Design: Carley Knobloch
Web Development: Natalie MacLees
Technology: WordPress and jQuery

WordPress Security by Carole Bonds

In all likelihood, you set up your web site and started blogging our building pages without giving a second thought to making sure your web site was secure and without a plan in place for making regular backups so you could restore the site if anything happened. But any seasoned web developer can tell you that the chances of something going wrong and files and work being lost are nearly 100%.

No software is immune to security problems and security can be an even bigger problem when the application is a popular open source one like WordPress. Believe it or not, many people think their chances of a hacker accessing their web site and causing havoc is slim to none. The bad news is, it happens more often than you think. In this presentation, Carole Bonds will show tricks and tips for Beginners to Advanced WordPress users on how to limit access to hackers, how to make regular backups, and how to restore the site from backup in the event that a hacker gets access.

WordPress Security Presentation

Carole Bonds

Carole Bonds is the “WordPress Guru” at AgentEvolution.com with the responsibility of backing up, restoring, migrating and securing all AgentEvolution client sites. Carole developed an interest in WordPress and made the decision to change her career to work exclusively with WordPress 3 years ago after 15 years building websites as a hobby.

Stuff you need to know

Parking is in a lot just off of Hayden Ave, just west of National Blvd. Parking is free after 6pm, so just grab a ticket and park where you’d like.

Lots of grateful thanks to our sponsor, MediaTemple who not only provided us with an awesome meeting space, but will also be providing pizza and drinks! Thanks to their generous support, this meetup is FREE for all to attend.

A lot of small business owners find themselves in this situation – with their time, energy and attention spread thin across all aspects of running their business. It can be exhausting.

But small business budgets are tight and you wonder how you could possibly afford to have it any other way.

But here’s a lesson I’ve learned, and I’ve seen it work over and over again: You don’t have to do everything. Do what you do best, and hire other people to do the rest.

No, really. It works.

Let me explain. If you’re spreading yourself over all these different areas, you’re not giving any one of them the time and attention it deserves. Everybody starts this way, but as your business starts growing, it gets difficult to keep it all going. And chances are, you’re not actually good at all these things you’re doing.

Because it’s what I do best, let’s take creating your website as an example. You can create your own website. There are lots of ways to go about it, but no matter how you do it, it’s going to take up a lot of your time. If you are not, and do not want to be, in the business of building websites, then that’s not where you should be focusing your time. Even if you’re really good at it.

Building websites is what I, on the other hand, do best and it is my business. You might think that you don’t have the budget to hire someone to build your website for you, but here’s where that lesson I was talking about comes in. If you do hire someone else, you’ll free up valuable time, energy and attention that you can then focus on your business – on growing your business, on bringing more customers, or on making more money from the customers you already have.

I get a lot of suspicious looks from people and potential clients when I try to explain this. They think I’m just trying to sell my services and make a quick dollar. And I guess I am trying to sell my services, but for a really good reason: I love helping small businesses flourish and grow. I watch so many small business owners spend 10 or 15 hours every week struggling with their websites, trying to figure out why one feature is broken for some of their site visitors, even though it works fine for them, or trying to learn enough about CSS to make their homepage look the way they want.

And that’s where the lesson is really powerful – it’s 10 or 15 hours for you, but it’s 1 or 2 hours for me, because I already know CSS and I probably already know why that feature is broken, and exactly what has to be done to fix it. So instead of spending 10 or 15 hours feeling frustrated and often getting nowhere, you hire me for an hour or two, and then, just like magic, you have 10-15 hours to spend building your business. Maybe you take on more appointments. Maybe you attend some networking events and meet some new potential clients. Maybe you use the time to create a product that you can sell.

A lot of entrepreneurs are reluctant to give up any of the things they’re doing for their own businesses and trust someone else to take over for them. They worry about their budget and they worry about losing control. But you know what? I’ve seen a lot of businesses grow and blossom after their owners let go, hired help, and really focused on what they do best. I haven’t yet seen anyone who took these steps not grow their business.

So, the lesson is focus on what you do best, and hire other entrepreneurs to do what they do best. Everybody profits and everybody’s business grows.

In this workshop, we’ll cover the basics of themes and child themes – how they work, which files are used when, how to figure out template tags, and how to create your own child theme.

Keep in mind that the building blocks of the web are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll need at least a basic understanding of those building blocks to make minor modifications to themes and a thorough understanding of those building blocks to build your own theme or make extensive modifications.

Your organizer, Natalie MacLees, will be presenting.

Hope to see you there!

Cost is $5.00 per person. RSVP to save your seat.

But let’s focus for a minute on the customers of those banks that were taken over, and more specifically, let’s focus on me. Because I happened to have accounts at two banks that were taken over by other banks. The new banks handled the transitions in each of those cases in radically different ways – one was an excellent user experience for me as the customer, and the other was such a nightmare, I’m going to be closing my account.

There’s a lot to be learned about customer care and user experience from these stories – all businesses go through some sort of internal upheaval at some point. The challenge is, how to deal with that all while taking care of your customers in the best possible way.

The Excellent User Experience or
Washington Mutual becomes Chase

Shortly before the takeover of Washington Mutual by Chase, I’d actually had a pretty rotten experience which involved someone cloning my debit card and using it to withdraw upwards of $1,000 from my checking account without my consent or knowledge. The way Washington Mutual handled that was abominable, and I was on the verge of closing my account there when I learned the bank was being taken over by Chase.

I braced for the worst. I had no idea what was going to happen. Did I need to get a new debit card? Did I need new checks? Would I have to change my direct deposit information? Would I have access to my money? I was a little stressed out about the whole thing.

But you know what? It went off flawlessly. I continued logging into my account at Washington Mutual’s web site until one day I tried to visit and was greeted by a message telling me I now had to log into my account at chase.com. I headed over to chase.com, and lo and behold, the exact same username and password I’d used at Washington Mutual worked at Chase.com, and there was my account, every penny intact.

Shortly afterward, I received a Chase debit card in the mail. My Washington Mutual debit card continued to work until I activated the Chase debit card, making the transition from one to the other seamless.

I never changed my direct deposit information, it just continued to work.

My checks continued to work, and still work to this day, even though they say Washington Mutual on them.

In short, this was an excellent user experience. I was taken care of every step of the way. I did not have to call customer service even once for help figuring out what was going on. I always had access to my account, always had a debit card and checks that worked, and could always access my account online. Chase did it up right. Kudos to them.

The Horrible User Experience or
California National Bank becomes US Bank

A few months after Washington Mutual became Chase, I got word that my other bank, California National Bank was being taken over by US Bank. Lulled into a false sense of security by the beauty and simplicity of my experience with Chase’s bank takeover, I shrugged off the news and went on with my life.

Oh, how naive I was.

Everything that Chase did right for its customers, US Bank did wrong. All those worries I’d had when I first learned about Chase taking over Washington Mutual were realized.

First, let’s talk about online account access. When the California National Bank web site stopped working, I headed over to US Bank to sign in. But the username and password from the CalNational site didn’t work. I tried a few times, then remembered seeing a letter about online account access in the mail from US Bank. I dug it out of my pile of mail and read through it. It gave step by step instructions for setting up online account access. Basically, my account had been moved over to US Bank, but online account access didn’t get moved over.

I tried to follow the instructions in the letter, but they were complicated and I kept running into roadblocks. Frustrated, I called US Bank customer service. The department handling transitioned accounts was closed for the day. I had to call back the next day.

The next morning, I finally talked to someone who could help me out and got online account access set up for my account. Whew. One thing done.

But now, let’s talk about my debit card. One Sunday evening, I headed to the ATM at the bank to deposit my birthday check from my mom. I noticed the ATM had been replaced with a US Bank ATM machine. I walked up, put my CalNational debit card in the slot and…nothing happened. Nothing.

The screen never updated, pushing buttons did nothing, and I couldn’t get my card back. I had to go into the bank the next morning to deposit my check and tell them what had happened to my debit card. The teller checked with the manager to see if my card had been found in the ATM that morning but it had not. They marked the card stolen in their system, and told me that they couldn’t order me a new debit card that day and that I would have to wait for my US Bank debit card to arrive in the mail, which should be within the next two weeks.

Two weeks went by, three weeks. I called customer service to ask how much longer it would be before the US Bank debit card arrived. The customer service rep said he did not know and could not tell me but that it shouldn’t be much longer. A couple weeks later, I called back again and was told the same thing. A couple weeks after that I called again, and was told the same thing.

Finally, I went into the bank to speak with a teller directly. She looked up my account and said I had not been issued a US Bank debit card simply because there had been no active debit card on my account when the account was transitioned. I had to fill out an application for a debit card and wait 10 more days before I finally had the card in my hands, about three months after it was eaten by the ATM.

Do you really even want to get me started on direct deposit? I never received any notices from the bank that my direct deposit information had to be updated. Just suddenly one day, my employer attempted to deposit my check and got a message saying the routing and account number were invalid. This was just two weeks ago, months after the bank takeover. I’m now waiting for my checks to be returned to me for the same reason, even though I’ve received no notices about needing new checks.

I tried to go on US Bank’s web site and order new checks, but the user experience for ordering new checks is absurd and horrible and I couldn’t figure out how to place an order for checks that cost less than $80.

Customers Come First

No matter what is going on internally in your business, customers come first. Without customers, you have no business, and they should be treated like first-class citizens. They should know what to expect, and you should do everything you can to provide an excellent user experience for them, no matter how they choose to interact with your business. That means your web site is easy to use and helpful, whoever answers the phone when they call is helpful and friendly, whoever is there to greet them when they walk through your door is helpful and friendly, and so on.

There are so many ways that your business touches the lives of your customers. Make sure that each and every time it happens, the experience is as great as it can be. Be like Chase, not like US Bank.

And don’t get me wrong – I do love WordPress. It’s incredibly powerful, super flexible, and it allows me to build sites that my clients can then take to the next level on their own without having to learn code.

But what about other technologies and techniques – don’t those deserve a fair shake too?

Of course!

I don’t choose WordPress so often because it’s better than the other solutions out there. I choose it when it’s the best tool for the job at hand.

If the job at hand is putting a nail through a piece of wood, you can use a wrench or a screwdriver, but I think we can all agree that either a hammer or a nail gun is the right tool for the job. Likewise, if the job at hand is a blog or a small business web site that the client can update themselves when necessary, WordPress is very often the right tool for the job.

As WordPress continues to grow and mature, it becomes a suitable tool for more and more types of sites – from photo galleries to shopping carts and other things you might not even imagine WordPress can do.

Best. Feature. Ever.

But probably the best feature of WordPress can’t be found in the downloaded zip file. The best thing WordPress has going for it is the community of talented, generous, and friendly people who share knowledge, contribute themes and plugins, answer questions on the forums, and write tutorials.

I got excited about the community surrounding WordPress a few years ago when I decided to attend WordCamp San Francisco 2007 on a whim. I was blown away by my experience there.

When I learned about Meetup.com, the first thing I searched for was ‘WordPress’. And I was so happy to find a local group! I joined immediately. The group seemed to consist of 5-6 people who met for coffee Sunday afternoons in Long Beach.

Then, unexpectedly, the organizer of the group decided to step down. A new organizer had to step in or the group would cease to exist. I waited past the first, second, and third messages, and then finally bit the bullet and decided to become the organizer.

That was in May 2009. Since then, the little group who met for coffee on Sunday afternoons has grown to be over 350 members strong. At our last meeting, ten WordPress experts in a variety of fields graciously fought rush-hour Los Angeles traffic just to donate their time to answering the questions of the people who gathered that night. It was nothing short of magic.

You can’t ignore the power of such a community when considering WordPress as a solution for your project. You’ll find this community is the ultimate resource for figuring out any problems that pop up or helping you add functionality to your site that WordPress doesn’t support out of the box. It seems like no matter what you’re trying to do and how crazy it seems, there’s always someone who’s done it before. And not only are they willing to show off the results of their work, but they’re usually willing to show you how you can do it too.

Undoubtedly, you’d share information about the products and/or services that your business offers. You’d give your office hours and contact information so that people could do business with you after reading the article. If your business had a physical location, you’d talk about that too – how to find it, what it’s like, where to park, etc.

And then you’d probably include some information about yourself – who you are, why you started the business, what you want to accomplish. You might talk about and introduce any employees you have working for you.

Think about all those things you’d want to make sure to include in a book or magazine article profiling your business. Write it all down, then use that to start your web site.

Start with content

What? Start with that? A boring text document that goes on and on about your business? Yes! That’s how you’ll figure out what kind of content your web site should contain.

Any web site worth its salt is going to start with content. Not with a pretty design, not with a pre-selected content management system, not with a stunning logo. But with content. With a capital C.

What if it really was a book?

Think about it this way – what if you really were writing a book about your business? Would you start by designing the cover and layout of the book, then write to fill in the layout you’d created? Do you suppose a magazine starts by creating a layout each month and then fills in the holes in the layout with content?

No!

Books, magazine articles, newspapers – they all start with CONTENT. The design, the layout, the look and feel, are then based on the content, not the other way around.

Content really is king

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading articles on the web, then you’ve probably come across the saying that ‘content is king’. And you might have surmised that this meant you really needed killer content – that it needed to have keywords for search engines to find, that it needed to be easy to read, that it needed to be interesting and relevant.

And all of that is true, certainly.

But it goes even further than that. Content should be the driving force behind your web site. You should create and edit all of the content first, then build up the design and layout around the content. Once you’ve decided what type of content your site will have and how often that content will have to be updated and by whom, that’s the time to figure out which CMS solution is going to fit best. Content should be driving the entire process the entire time.

Write it out first

So, start your web design project by writing that book (if your business is big enough for a book) or that magazine article. Figure out what you want to say, everything you want to include. Then start working on the look and feel, the design, the layout and selecting a solution for managing the content.

You can hire help for this, but don’t expect that help to necessarily be your web designer. Web designers have many talents, but copy writing or copy editing is not necessarily one of them. If you can’t even think where to start or detest writing, then hire a copy writer to interview you and write all the copy. If you think you can get most of the copy together and know what you want to say, but aren’t confident that your writing skills are up to par, then hire a copy editor to go through and polish and organize it all after you’ve written it all down.

The content should be turned over to your web designer before your web designer ever starts working on the design. And your web site will be custom-designed to perfectly accommodate your content and will capture and reinforce the tone of the copy. And the quality of the site will be top-notch.

People have a lot of different reasons they want to learn to build web sites. Sometimes the first question somebody asks me after they learn that’s what I do for a living is “How did you learn to do that?” It’s such a hard question to answer.

In the beginning, there was HTML

I started building web sites around 1996. If you wanted to build a web site in 1996, the only skill you needed was HTML. That was all there was. And HTML, being a markup language rather than a scripting or programming language, is relatively straightforward and easy to learn and understand. I’d surf around the web and when I found a layout or trick that I liked, I’d just view source in the browser to see how it had been accomplished. That’s pretty much all there is to learning HTML.

Then complexity was introduced

Building and updating sites in HTML was simple and straightforward, but it was also tedious and time-consuming. I heard a story about eBay changing the background color of their site from yellow to white – it took a team of developers days to open every single HTML file and update the background color for each page individually.

Slowly, different technologies were introduced to take away the tedium and to add new features and functionality. On the front-end, CSS made tasks like background color changes simple and quick, and JavaScript allowed for dynamic color changes and other interactivity. On the back-end, scripting and programming languages like Perl and PHP were introduced to help make the process of generating many similar pages simpler and quicker.

As time has gone on, the introduction of new technologies hasn’t stopped. People who build web sites are constantly looking for the next new thing – the thing that will make creating web sites faster and easier, the thing that will make updating content simple and fast, the thing that will make complex interactions like online purchasing easy to implement. To learn to make web sites now, you have to learn a lot.

The business of making web sites grows up

Sometimes it’s easy to take for granted how ingrained into our lives the internet has become. We rely on it for everything from personal messages, to running a business, to checking news and weather, to getting the latest movie showtimes, to buying products and services. It can be hard to remember that the entire industry is a baby by any standards.

Back when HTML was all there was, web sites were often monstrosities of confusing navigation and animated gifs, and garish color combinations. There weren’t any conventions, any set ways of doing anything, so the people building the sites experimented. They tried out new things – a few of them worked well, but many did not.

Over time, the web standards movement started advocating for a better quality of markup – using semantic tags to describe the content and CSS to style how that content appeared. Usability and user experience experts started paying attention to the ways people interacted with web sites and started publishing their findings. Search engines grew more powerful and became a force to be reckoned with – you had to build your web site a certain way for a search engine to recommend it to searchers as useful.

The web industry is still juvenile. Things are constantly shifting and falling into place, only to be shaken up and fall into new places. New roles are created all the time as people recognize needs that aren’t being fulfilled. Old roles are phased out. The lone webmaster who once managed every single aspect of your web site alone has been replaced by a team full of information architects, interaction designers, usability specialists, back-end coders, front-end coders, database administrators, graphic designers, content strategists, internet marketers, copywriters, user experience professionals, business analysts, and more.

So…where do I start?

It seems overwhelming doesn’t it? I had the advantage of being able to learn technologies one at a time as they were introduced. Well, until a few years ago, when the number of technologies being introduced easily outpaced my ability to learn them. I’ve had to pick and choose, finding my way to the things I love and do best, finding my place on each web site building team that I’ve been a part of.

If you’re starting from scratch, you’ve got a lot of potential roles that you can fill. Start playing around – build a few web sites. It’s fine if they’re just 1996-style HTML pages. Pick a topic you love, whether that’s dogs or food or video games, and build a web site about it. Then keep playing – keep adding new features. Learn as you go along.

There’s no one way to learn it all. Everyone has different learning styles and preferences. Some people actually enjoy just diving in head first and seeing how far they  can get on their own. Other people want a more structured approach.

Unfortunately, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a college course worth taking to learn the topic. We’ve discovered over the past 15 years or so that our higher education system just isn’t equipped to deal with a constantly changing and evolving topic – where a technique that’s cutting-edge on the first day of the semester can be positively outdated by the last day. As things change faster and faster, college courses on building web sites fall further and further behind. Learning how people made web sites 10 years ago may be interesting, but it’s not useful, and you’re not likely to end the course with any marketable skills.

The thing you should know is, there isn’t any one course you can take, or any one teacher you can learn from, or any one book you can read, or any one skill you can master that’s going to make you great at building web sites. The key ingredient is passion. Be passionate about learning new things, be passionate about doing the best job you possibly can. Realize that this is not a field where you will ever be able to relax and rest on your years of experience and expertise. There is always something new to learn, some new technology to learn about, some new skill to master. To be successful, you have to really love what you’re doing.

That said, here are my recommendations for where to go to learn:

Best bets if you like to just jump in and figure it out

W3Schools (http://w3schools.com/): Has a huge collection of quick and fast introductory classes to dozens of different topics. Most can be completed in an hour or so and give you a great foundation for jumping into something and figuring it out afterward.

StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/): When you find yourself stuck or unable to figure out the next step, you can jump onto this site and ask a question about absolutely anything to do with building web sites. Just be sure when you ask your question, you include the code you’re asking about or a link to the page that’s giving you trouble so that people can help you out.

Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/): Articles, tutorials, and roundups of useful web site building information in a variety of areas of interest.

Net Tuts (http://net.tutsplus.com/): Simple tutorials on just about anything you might want to learn. Step through these to get the basics of MooTools, jQuery, Python, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and more.

Best bets if you like a structured approach

Google Code University (http://code.google.com/edu/): Tutorials and structured courses on lots of different languages.

Opera Web Standard Curriculum (http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/): A series of articles from various experts in the field acts like your text book. Also includes resources for further reading. Highly recommend this.

WaSP InterACT Curriculum (http://interact.webstandards.org/): This one could be a little harder to follow if you’re a student. It’s excellent, but is aimed at professors and teachers to help them develop courses teaching the latest techniques and standards.

And of course, once you’ve got a foundation down, any of the recommendations in the section above will be helpful to you as well.

Start learning!

My best advice is just to jump in and do it – why not start today? Will your first web site be awful? Probably, but you’ll be proud. A year down the road you’ll look at it and groan at your own bad choices and naivety. And guess what? That should never stop. I still look at things I built a year or two ago and want to hide in shame – because I’m always learning how to make things better. If you ever reach a point where you look at something you built a year or two ago and you can’t see any way to improve it, that’s a bad sign because you’ve stopped learning. Remember what drew you to the field in the first place and keep your passion alive.

If you have a WordPress site or are thinking about building one, no doubt you’ve got piles of questions:

• What’s the best plugin for…?
• How do I…?
• How come my site won’t…?
• What’s the best way to…?
• Where can I find someone to help me…?
• Should I…?
• What if I want to…?
• Do I need to hire someone to…?

Get the answers to all your questions at our WordPress Expert Panel. Bring any and all of your WordPress questions to be answered by a diverse panel of experts in many different areas of WordPress, design, SEO, user experience, plugins, usability, and more. It’s like our own mini-WordCamp!

Meet your panel (in alphabetical order):

Lucy Beer
webtrainingwheels.com
Lucy Beer of Web Training Wheels is an online marketing professional of 8+ years. She has a background in constructing and executing online marketing campaigns for small business, entertainment and art clients. These days she loves to teach small businesses and entrepreneurs how to develop their online marketing strategies. She has been using WordPress since around 2004 and has never looked back. In addition to marketing consulting she provides WordPress training through one-on-one or small group sessions to help businesses build a solid online foundation for their marketing.

Glenn Bennett
happenings.com | anybrowser.com
Glenn Bennett is a computer programmer and magazine publisher. He has his own publication, Happenings Magazine. In the mid-90′s Glenn became involved in creating workable solutions for the Internet and created the “AnyBrowser iii Specification” that allowed website builders to create websites that would render consistently with the browsers of the day. He also created his own web browser that rendered web pages using the “AnyBrowser iii Specification” so site creators could view sites using the spec. This experience has given a unique prospective on the web. In addition to continuing to publish his magazine, Glenn is hard at work on several experimental Internet projects and occasionally works as an adviser to online businesses. He currently uses CodeIgniter, PyroCMS, and WordPress to create his projects. His WordPress work includes Widgetifyr.com, WPMultisite.com and PodcastingPlugin.com. He is the current maintainer of the WordPress Podcasting Plugin, which has more than 100,000 downloads.

Carole Bonds
agentevolution.com
Carole Bonds is a web developer and the WordPress “Guru” for AgentEvolution. A semi-retired chemist, she turned her passion for programming into a second career. She is the lead developer for AgentEvolution since its inception and all the websites she has done for clients are based on WordPress. She is not a designer but loves the “back-end” aspects of WordPress and fully utilizing WordPress as a CMS.

Dan Cameron
sproutventure.com
Prior to Sprout Venture, Dan Cameron was the project manager on multi-million dollar web projects and had a director position with top 100 e-commerce company; he started Sprout Venture in 2008 to escape that start-up scene & out of the management games. Sprout Venture, from day one, has focused on WordPress development and has never looked back. Dan Cameron has been the lead front-end developer on a few high-profile clients, including GigaOm and a network of Radio sites where his theme development is used on hundreds of sites. Late this year he completed a WordPress plugin that allows for groupon.com type functionality with e-commerce integration and membership capabilities. It really has been a crazy two years, with 85% of all client solutions involving WordPress as a solution. Specialties: Theme Frameworks, Advanced WP Themes and Plugin Development, Programming without the future getting in the way, Reuse and not Rework, & Freelancing.

Zeke Franco
@quasarkitten
Zeke is an interaction designer and Front End Developer. He specializes in UX desgin, semantic HTML, CSS, jQuery, and web strategy. Basically – he designs, simplifies, and builds the user interfaces of web sites.

Marieke Hensel
brandingpersonality.com | @hensel | facebook.com/brandingpersonality
Marieke is an online brand strategist since 2002 and is the owner of Branding Personality: the online brand strategy agency for consumer brands. Marieke is an internationally published co-author of BusinessWise, a collaborative book for small companies with large ambitions. Her company, Branding Personality now has 7 employees who help businesses attract customers through online advertising, search engine optimization and social media. Branding Personality generates results for local businesses and national brands such as Fairmont Private Schools, Microsoft Xbox, Chevrolet and Hyundai auto dealers. Marieke started building her first WordPress blog in 2005 and adores WordPress because of the search engine optimization benefits it has and its versatility. Marieke gives workshops to full day trainings in WordPress and leads her clients onto the path of attracting customers through blogging, both by building a community and it benefiting its search engine ranking.

Susan Hildebrand
Marblesoft Technologies, Inc.
Susan Hildebrand has been a programmer since 1980s.  As founder of Marblesoft Technologies, Inc. , she has designed databases and software for Fortune 500 companies.  She is versed in multi-media production on the Windows platform.  She is also a certified NLP coach and a writer/copywriter. Her current focus is in building WordPress sites and mentoring business owners on best use of this exciting technology.

Natalie MacLees
purplepen.com | nataliemac.com
In addition to being the organizer of the WordPress Meetup group, Natalie is also the founder of Purple Pen Productions, a virtual creative agency. She’s been building web sites since AOL was cool (1996). She specializes in user experience, UI design, interaction design, and front end development, and especially loves coding up custom WordPress themes. In addition to client work, she’s working on releasing a set of flexible, extendable WordPress themes.

Vasily Myazin
konspiredesign.com | @vasily_m
Vasily Myazin is a passionate web designer, developer, user experience enthusiast and interface builder based in Los Angeles, CA. His journey with the web started back in 1997 in Russia, when he coded his first website by hand, overnight, with no prior knowledge of HTML. Since then, Vasily has survived though numerous chapters of the online evolution, including the dot-com bubble and bust, as well as the onset of Web 2.0. Vasily is more of a generalist when it comes to web technologies and disciplines: he spends a quarter of his day making the most of Photoshop and Illustrator, a quarter tinkering with jQuery, another quarter dealing with HTML+CSS, and the rest playing with WordPress and stand-alone PHP apps. Accessibility and usability are goals that are always highly sought after. Vasily is an avid user of Apple products: Mac, iPhone and iPad. It’s no wonder he’s got a knack for clean and easy-to-use interface aesthetics. Web tech consulting is a big part of Vasily’s day-to-day occupation; he serves various start-ups and small businesses around the world, as well as gigantic clients like Sony. He has built over a dozen of custom themes for WordPress and uses it as a content management system of choice. Vasily currently runs his own tiny agency called Konspire Design.

Austin Passy
frostywebdesigns.com
Austin Passy is a freelance web designer and WordPress developer. He was the Organizer of WordCampLA 2009 and 2010. He’s also a traveling speaker for WordCamps all over.

Marty Thornley
martythornley.com | @martythornley | identitykitchen.com
Marty is a freelance designer and developer who works 100% in WordPress. In addition to designing and building custom blogs, he has been the goto developer for design and branding company Identity Kitchen for the last year, with a focus on custom websites and pushing the limits of WordPress as CMS. Most recently Marty has co-founded a development company with Identity Kitchen owner Ellen Petty. They are preparing to launch their first project, PhotographyBlogSites.com to enable customizable yet affordable WordPress based portfolio sites for photographers, developed using WordPress 3.0′s MultiSite abilities. Marty has developed several plugins including SEO Image Galleries, and the PhotoBlog Image Fixer – both developed as part of PhotographyBlogSites.com.

Ed Tiongson
Marblesoft Technologies, Inc.
Ed Tiongson has over 25 years working in Information Technology.  His expertise was with Microsoft technology until he came across WordPress, which is now his chosen platform for deploying websites. Ed has researched, customized and debugged many WordPress plugins (i.e. Shopping Cart, Membership, Autoresponders, Analytics, PayPal integration, etc.) .He works at Marblesoft Technologies, Inc.,  a solutions provider focused on building WordPress sites with E-commerce and Membership functionality. Ed is also a graphic designer, a video editor, and an avid musician who enjoys using Mac-based software, synthesizers and electronic music, and loves comedy.

Cost: $5.00/person

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