WordPress Pros; No Cons? :)
This evening, I participated in a quasi panel, discussion about the Pros and Cons and situations in which WordPress or Joomla could or should be used.
I came in on the WordPress side of things.
Keith Schilling covered Joomla, a system that I am somewhat familiar with, but not at a very deep level. I’ve worked in it a few times, but would never claim any expertise.
Below are my slides from the WordPress portion. My original Presentation was provided in MindMap form.
WordCamp Birmingham 2009 – Great Times
It is Tuesday, two days after WordCamp Birmingham and I am finally getting back to myself. Last week was a marathon of hard work, sleep deprivation and good times. Well the good times were all saved up at the end with WordCamp.
This was my second year at WordCamp in Bimingham and my good friend Andre Natta did a bang up job putting on a terrific show. You may recall that Andre and I went to New York City for Affiliate Summit back in August. This was also my second time presenting. This year I taught a great little session teaching people how to make their first wordpress theme and I have to thank everyone for the great feedback I received afterwards. Definitely made my weekend to hear that I had helped a lot of people!
This time, I was the one driving to Birmingham instead of Andre driving to Charlotte. While I was there I saw a lot of my friends from past southeastern social media events such as BarCamp Chattanooga and WordCamp Birmingham 2008. The Memphis contingent was present and stronger than ever.
This year in addition to @dougal the Atlanta contingent came out in force as well. Plus, they had good news to report as they will be putting on a WordCamp in Atlanta this January (I think its slated for January 15 – 16th. That’s right before Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, so I might really have my hands full if I try to make both shows, which I would like to do.)
I met a lot of new friends as well and if I get five minutes to breathe as I recover, I’m going to come back to this post and add a long list of names, but I don’t get much of a breather because I’m leaving for IzeaFest tomorrow, packing up the whole family and driving to Orlando for a 4 day show at SeaWorld where I’ll be moderating a panel on What Advertisers Want. 
So as usually, I’m likely to be a little behind on things for a few more days. But stop back soon, because I have another cool announcement to make about Blogworld.
Here’s some articles from some great people I met this weekend
- WordCamp Birmingham – The First of Several
- Yikes!! Overkill! – WordCamp Birmingham
- WordCamp Birmingham 2009 is a Success
- BuckDaddy who’s running wild through IzeaFest and BlogWorld and even more events than I am this month!
- WordCamp Birmingham Favorite Moment # 5
And then some cool people that I met also (the people with the articles were cool too, just not double listing to avoid redundancy)
- Mike Schinkel
- Kira Fonteneau
- Andrew Jones (I’m not sure if I actually met Andrew, no official introduction, but the second day of WordCamp was at ShiftWorkSpace which I think Andrew runs.
- Todd McCalla who runs Cool Springs, a great site for Cool Springs Tennessee that uses one of my favorite StudioPress themes.
- @The_Jerri_Ann who spoke at wordcamp on migrating a site to WordPress, but I found that she’s also a master at marketing her blog publications to large corporations. She’s doing some pretty amazing things. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that she has become a talent agent or professional publicist promoting bloggers 5 years from now.
- Christopher Spencer
- Emory Rowland
Launching the Peoria Lawn Maintenance Team Site
This week I’m working on several projects including the launch of a new site for the Peoria Lawn Maintenance Team. Its a new site for an old company. In fact the company is well known to me as I used to work for it years back.
My father, Steve Bumeter runs it and I’m helping him build out his web presence a bit more as he works to grow and fill out service in more of the corners and niches of the tri-county area surrounding Peoria, Il.
The site is designed to be very very simple and run with a color scheme that relates to the Cub Cadet equipment that my father prefers to use these days.
Generally, when I work on sites of this nature, the first step is to make sure that the site gets listed well at a local level. In some markets this can be accomplished relatively quickly and in others it can take some more time and effort.
In addition to the initial website, we also have to walk through the basics, new vehicle signs, business cards, flyers, t-shirts for employees and more.
Added Seating in the Dock Office for Labs on the Lake
This week I’m going to start hosting what I’m currently calling a Lab on the Lake, a hands on tutorial/mentored training program for people in the Greater Charlotte area that are interested in learning web design, WordPress and a number of other items (more details to follow).
Well the first thing we had to do, was add seating and tables for more laptops. We made a start of it yesterday but still have more to do.
I’m Speaking at WordCamp RDU 2009 After NIN /Jane’s Concert
So next month I have a crazy couple of days scheduled. On June 12th, my wife and I are going to the Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction concert in Charlotte. After the concert, I’m dropping my wife off at home and driving up to Raleigh for WordCamp RDU, where I will be speaking that afternoon on using WordPress as a CMS. I volunteered to cover Custom WordPress Theme design too. Actually, I offered that one first, I was asked if I could cover CMS instead, so I said sure.
So I will be up pretty much all night long after the concert and hanging with some great WordPress enthusiasts in Raleigh. Trying to figure out how to maybe open up the speech, maybe with a little music from the concert . . . .
Brett Bumeter Speaking at WordCamp RDU 2009
Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media will be speaking at WordCamp RDU (Raleigh Durham) 2009 on June 13th. He will be covering an advanced topic on utilizing WordPress as a CMS for businesses.
Softduit Media has worked for several years to help both bloggers and small companies harness the power of WordPress as a CMS not only in the Charlotte area, but in Atlanta, and around the world.
The SEO powers of WordPress that deliver traffic to a site combined with the super easy administration panel of the WordPress system make it very easy for companies to take control of their own websites handing the keys to the business users of the sites and freeing up expenses and resources from long term web consultants. Brett has led the charge in Softduit to provide affordable websites that almost anyone in an organization can manage regardless of their experience in web design.
Brett will also be speaking at WordCamp Birmingham in September.
For other WordCamp events in the South or SouthEast you might also consider checking out WordCampHSV (Huntsville) & WordCamp Dallas, which looks like it will be an excellent event. WordCamp CLT (Charlotte) will be later next winter in either November or December.
Son of a Witch, Las Vegas Bound, Themes, Themes WP Schmemes
It started out kind of slow compared to wicked, but finally picked up enough to be engrossing about half way through the book, I’m talking about Son of a Witch that is. I got the impression that after the author’s ten year hiatus from Wicked, it just took a while for him to get orientated in the land of Oz again, but once he was there, he was determined to make it work.
So last night I stayed up until 5 in the morning finishing the book after I finished work around 1 am.
This week, I’ve been planning out a trip to Las Vegas next week. I’m making a trek to Vegas and Laughlin actually to catch up with my business partner Joe Klein of New Media Creative. We are locking down some very interesting plans for the year. I’m also hoping to maybe stop in and see everyone in the Las Vegas meetup group again. Haven’t hung out with that crowd since Las Vegas WordCamp. Vegas has a very vibrant and strong WordPress group, and after hanging with the local Charlotte group, I’m interested to see what ideas and practices might cross pollenate.
Today, I was spending a little time catching up with some bloggers at Blogexplosion. I came across a new blogger I hadn’t met before that runs a blog called Snarke.net. Long story short, I noticed a recent tweet from them about how their current WP design wasn’t really doing it for her.
So I thought I’d jump into my favorite design platform for wordpress themes and see just how fast I could whip something together using a couple pictures from her own flickr account.
Here’s the before (or current I should say)
Here’s my 5 minute design after (I’m sure I could do better with a little guidance and feedback, but I just felt like a little random act of design kindness might help me get some focus on my next project for this evening.
The original theme isn’t really that bad, and most of those widgets would import nicely into this them. I just kind of thought the blog needed a slightly more personal feel, but maybe that isn’t Snarkey enough. 
Snarke, whomever you are
Alternatively, if you want to try your hand at the design thing yourself, check out my theme design video at Softduit.
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