Another speaker incoming! We are honored to have one of our favorite local speakers with us this year, talking about design.

Denise Jacobs @denisejacobs

Denise R. Jacobs is a regarded expert in Web Design and is an industry veteran with over 14 years of experience. She is now doing what she likes best: being a Speaker + Writer + Web Design Consultant + Creativity Evangelist who writes, speaks on, teaches, and coaches creativity, productivity, and innovation to both organizations and individuals in the business context. Denise is the author of The CSS Detective Guide, the premier book on troubleshooting CSS code; and co-author to the Smashing Book #3: Redesign the Web and InterAct with Web Standards and has presented and lectured at conferences and organizations such as South By Southwest, the BBC, The Future of Web Design, and Paris-Web.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

While speaker and sponsor information is important – and rightly so – we know people like to know about what’s happening AFTER the event. Yep, we are talking the after party. In past years, WordCamp Miami’s after parties have been revolving around drinks and a good time in the Coral Gables area. Got no complaints, but we wanted to raise the bar a bit. Plus for an event like this, we also wanted to provide a better atmosphere for networking and making personal connection (who has time to network at the conference with so many great sessions going on?).

So our after party of choice this year is Finnegan’s River. We think it’s going to be great for a few reasons:

1. New location. People coming to Miami want to see water and nightlife. In previous locations, we didn’t have that… but this new location does. Win!
2. Dinner is served. Many want to grab a bite to eat after WordCamp, and rightly so. But now you can grab something to eat at our after party location, and then grab some drinks later into the night.
3. Networking. It’s hard to meet new folks over loud music, so our after party location should be able to provide an environment where you can talk to someone without blowing out your voicebox.
4. Drinks. This is Miami, so of course drinks are there as well. We are working on drink specials, but we got water and soda too.

We are also working on a plan to provide special transportation (hey, I didn’t say party bus – where did you get that idea?) to take those without transportation from WordCamp to the venue. More information on this when you arrive at WordCamp.

We certainly hope you enjoy yourselves at WordCamp – make new connections while surrounded by great food and festive environment.

(BTW: Flennegan’s River site runs on WordPress, so we just had to go with them… although someone needs to tell them to turn on their permalinks).

We didn’t announce a speaker over the weekend and you are having withdrawal symptoms? No worries:

Andi Graham @BigSea

Andi owns Big Sea Design & Development in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is a designer and front-end developer who fell in love with WordPress in 2005 for her personal blog. Since then, she’s amassed a team of creatives and nerds who’ve tackled just about every business-logic problem out there with WordPress. She’s led WordPress-based projects of every scope and scale, including a huge multisite networks of small business sites, a complex COPPA-compliant BuddyPress user-generated content hub, a custom hotel reservation system (or two), dozens of directories, eCommerce sites and more.

Andi is scheduled to speak about WordPress multi-site. She’s going to knock it out of the park!

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We would like to introduce to you our next confirmed speaker:

Brad Williams @williamsba

Brad is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the non-Ewok-operated DradCast podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress (1E & 2E) and Professional WordPress Plugin Development.

Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. His scheduled topic involves using WordPress as an Application Platform. Woot! Rest assured we had to sign numerous wavers before Brad could come down. And the insurance policy on his face is HUGE.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We would like to introduce to you our next confirmed speaker:

Jayvie Canono @onefinejay

Jayvie Canono is the lead designer for WebDevStudios’ small business division. Before he took on this role, he was a freelance web designer and developer. Having learned to design for the web in-code, and with a background in print design through the family business, he’s grown a passion for bridging the gap for designers between the print medium and that of code. His WordCamp talks have focused on helping designers with a background in pushing pixels to make their work easier to realize into the languages of the web. In addition to his professional responsibilities he is also an aspiring bodybuilder and dedicates about three hours of each day towards fitness.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We are proud to start sharing with you some of our more local and close-to-home speakers. First up is Mr. Norcross:

Andrew Norcross @norcross

Andrew builds things. Internet things. He’s the founder / lead developer of Reaktiv Studios and the Senior WordPress Developer for Raven Internet Marketing Tools. To quote Andrew: “I live and work in Tampa, Florida with my amazing wife and three hell raising children. When not mainlining coffee or writing code, you can probably find me working on renovating the home I recently purchased. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what I do. I rarely know anymore.”. You see, we are quoting him here so there’s nothing that can come back on us, right?

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February.

We opened up early speaker submissions before we announced our April 6-7, 2013 dates and response was excellent. Enough to run a WordCamp already. Although we desire for speakers to submit sessions focused on their passions and experience, we’ve been asked to “spitball” some possible topics to get the people who are on the fence on what to talk about… well, off the fence.

First off, if you are interested in speaking you should check out this informational page first. There aren’t many rules and guidelines, but there are some. It’s important to note that during this two day WordCamp we are planning on several different formats:

• Standard Sessions – Approx. 30 minutes with some time for questions.
• “Miami Lightning” – You get 5 minutes and a handfull of slides to talk in between other sessions. Unconference style and great for brief-but-fun-and-right-to-the-point topics.
• Workshops – Several speakers give detailed and coordinated talks about a subject in a single block of time, or even a dedicated track.
• Panel – We don’t have a panel session yet, but willing to consider it if several speakers want to get together.

Business And Front-End Development

Based on recent surveys, WordCamp Miami attendees are very interested in business/freelance topics and front-end development (including HTML, CSS, Javascript, UI/UX, design).

Ideas For Sessions

Again, just because we get submission on these doesn’t mean your submission will be approved. We are hungry for unique and interesting presentations from a variety of speakers, but hopefully these will inspire you:

• Responsive Design – Unless you’ve been living under a rock, mobile and tablet devices are defining how people view sites. Many WordPress sites are responsive, but a great deal can be taught and discussed on this topic (I could talk about CSS frameworks for an hour alone). How to code responsive sites, how to test, pitfalls, etc.
• UI/UX, Theme Design – Many designers attend WordCamp Miami – some code, some not so much – looking to learn about latest design trends. What works, what doesn’t. Etc.
• Freelance / Business – There are so many possible topics in here, it’s possible to create a whole track on them. Best to read Chris Lema’s excellent post for inspiration. Each of these could be it’s own session:
  • Staffing
  • Client selection
  • Pricing
  • Contracts
  • Scheduling
  • Communication
  • Project Management
  • Execution
  • Relationships (post-deliverables)
  • Branding
• WordPress Functions And Code – There is so much goodness in WordPress code that many people aren’t aware of. WP-Cron, WP_Query, Hooks (Filters and Actions), and the image manipulation functions of WordPress are just examples of things that experienced developers can share.
• Source Control – Regardless if it’s SVN or Git or whatever, more developers should be doing this right?
• General Blogging Topics – Don’t forget general bloggers come to WordCamps, especially in Miami. Non-coding topics that can cover how to write or legal areas of blogging might be a good area to start thinking about. WordCamp Miami does these every year, so the more unique and interesting the better.
• Beginner’s Topics – This goes hand-in-hand with the general blogging topics, but every year we have workshops or tracks devoted to those just learning about WordPress for the first time. 101 topics, if you will. Finding great themes and plugins, or just even learning some great ways about the latest version of WordPress could be beneficial. Again, the more interesting and unique the presentation the better.
• Using WordPress For [Fill In The Blank] – Using WordPress in an interesting way or a unique industry? Share what you’ve learned. The pros/cons, the decisions you made, mistakes learned, etc. Real Estate, Government, Education…
• WordPress Frameworks – There are a number of these out there and questions come up in our meetups about what they are and what’s the pros/cons of each popular framework?
• WordPress Multi-site – Those who already know this don’t need a reason to talk about it, the possibilites and uses of this are endless.
• BuddyPress – We are VERY interested in those with experience in BuddyPress coding to talk it at WordCamp Miami this year.
• Ecommerce – Always a favorite topic at many WordPress conference and events.
• Scaling and Caching – Another development track topic favorite.

Need More Inspritation?

Check out wordpress.tv to see what others have spoken at previous WordCamps. Who knows? You could be on that site after WordCamp Miami this April!

If you want to make sure you don’t miss an update, make sure you signup on our mailing list. We try to keep updates to a minimum so not to spam you, but we do expect more frequent updates as the event draws closer.

There’s a few nice perks for those on the mailing list. You’ll be the first to know about when tickets go on sale (and the first to know about any early bird discounts, if we offer those again this year), even before we released this information via the website or via Twitter/Facebook. We did pass the 100 people mark in our first week (woot!) so we will be giving away some WordCamp Miami tickets to those who signed up at some point soon.

So what are you waiting for? Signup here, fellow WordCampers.

I’ve run into a few WordPress and back-end developers lately with years of experience. But when asked, they haven’t given much thought to speaking at meetups or WordCamps. Reasons seem to be varied – the thought hasn’t crossed their mind or they were naturally a little shy (at least when it comes to public speaking) were reasons. But universally the “what i know most others already know” seemed to be a recurring theme.

When it comes to speaking at conferences, meetups, and similar events – but ESPECIALLY at WordCamps – you should never hold back if you have something to teach and communicate to others. Even if you think what you have to say is “too basic” for the audience. I stumped upon this quote from Laura Kalbag as I was reading Rebecca Murphey’s javascript post:

The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be fearful of writing about what we know. Even if you write from the most basic point of view, about something which has been ‘around for ages’, you’ll likely be saying something new to someone. They might be new to the industry, you might just be filling in the holes in someone’s knowledge.

When we look at a lineup at a WordCamp or conference, sometimes we can intimidated a bit when we see household names (or at least household names for our industry). That’s wrong. Experienced speakers are fine but (in the case of WordCamps) there are many (and in many cases a majority) of beginners or experienced developers that haven’t heard what you have to say. Or worse have forgotten it.

WordCamp Miami has opened speaker submissions for 2013. While there are guidelines to speaking at these events, the guidelines say nothing about your experience and what you should share. Even if you aren’t selected to speak, it won’t be for these reasons. WordCamp Miami loves speaker virgins. 🙂 In the past, some of the best sessions i’ve attended have been given by first-time conference (or WordCamp) speakers.

Best advice for speaker virgins applying for WordCamps (Miami or otherwise): get over the fear and take your best shot. Start with smaller meetups (even if you have more confidence than some) and go from there. Speaking in smaller groups allows you to be more comfortable with an audience with you learning the best way to talk, gesture, move around, etc. It can also allow you to know when you are losing your audience.

Ever year WordCamp Miami has at least a few speaker virgins, and in 2013 we hope again to be able to bestow the privilege of having WordCamp Miami be the first step toward a rewarding and self-gratifying path toward speaking and sharing your knowledge with others.