Converting the Crowd: Understanding Conversion Optimized Design

Conversion optimization is the art of getting your website visitors to do what YOU want. Whether lead generation, e-commerce sales, application sign up or any other form of ‘action’, designing your website around the concept of conversion optimization is paramount to having it meet your organization’s goals.

“Converting the Crowd” focuses on understanding conversion optimization and the impact it has on the design process. During the presentation we’ll discuss strategies and tools that can be used to help with your conversion optimization efforts. We invite anyone involved in crafting the vision or strategy for an organization’s website: designers, developers and marketing folks.

See you at WordCamp!

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Welcome Platinum Sponsor .TV!

With just under two weeks remaining before WordCamp Boston 2011, I’m very happy to announce .TV has joined us as a platinum sponsor.

Here’s what they had to say:

We’re really excited to be a Platinum sponsor for WordCamp Boston. The WordPress community is so vibrant and active – and at .tv we want to build awareness about creating great video experiences on your blogs and websites. We have a lot of great resources available to learn from and we’re looking forward to sharing these in person!

Why .tv you ask? Well, with millions of websites hosting web video, it’s hard for new ones to get noticed. You need a better way to get your video site to stand out by getting the domain name that best fits your needs. You need .tv, home for video on the web. With a .tv domain it’s easy to let people know that your site is all about video, just by looking at your URL. Plus, you’ll get to choose from a huge inventory of domain names that will promote your brand, keep you memorable and make it easy to find you. If your site has a Play button, it was made for .tv.

See you in Boston!

There will be folks from .tv at the conference – please do drop by, thank them for their sponsorship, and find out how to get a .tv domain.

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Managing The Multi-Voice Blog

Corporate and organizational blogs are at their richest when they encompass a multitude of voices, when it’s not just marketing or communications writing, but engineering, administrative, and front-line staff contributing to the organization’s story. For nonprofits, educational, and cultural organizations, blogs’ voices increase even more to include patrons, clients, and members.

  • With this richness of voices come challenges for blog editors and community managers.
  • How do you maintain consistency of message?
  • Should you impose strict editorial guidelines, or trust the community? How do you enforce standards without stifling creativity?
  • How much support do you offer to bloggers, and how do you offer that support: is it ongoing, training-based, or a combination of the two?
  • Should there be a common tone, or are wide variations in voice the norm and more authentic?
  • When is it good to offer structure?
  • and how do you get good content?

In this interactive session, we’ll look at the different types of multi-voice blog and how to manage them. This talk and breakout session will explore the challenges of both blogs open to a wide public, and those where specific roles within an organization are assigned to blog. Bring your challenges as a blog manager/editor/community manager. There will be a lecture, followed by an interactive Q&A session addressing specific challenges.

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How Blogs are the Core to Any social media strategy

An open discussion on how with all the Social Media Sites being used on a daily basis how having a blog can dramatically increase one’s Social Media influence in a very short time..

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Ten Must-Do steps in converting to WordPress

It happens all the time. You’ve got a site that was brilliant four years ago, and the site developer has retired to a beachfront Internet cafe in the Cayman Islands, and you forgot or just never really knew how to use Dreamweaver. So how do you take that dusty old site and do more than just port it over to a WP platform. Give it new life with the fresh look, content updates and flexibility of a scalable platform that you can enjoy for years to come. This presentation, among other things, will look at:

  1. Why WordPress is a great choice for a comprehensive website platform;
  2. Reviewing your current assets (content, images, graphics, downloads, code);
  3. Prioritizing what you need to move, what can get archived, what may stay in place;
  4. SEO considerations: Assessing your current links, comments and Google ranking;
  5. Back-end versus Front-end considerations;
  6. Annotating change – keeping good notes – of every step;
  7. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP and did I say, BACKUP;
  8. Timeline and cost considerations;
  9. What’s easy; What’s moderately difficult; What’s going to give you heartburn.
  10. Number Ten is perhaps the most important of the Must-Dos. But I’ll save that for those of you who attend this session.

Alan Bergstein has been involved with countless website migration efforts, most recently doing so as a consultant to Internet publishers and marketers large and small. And prior to that as an accomplished media executive at several of the publishing industry’s foremost companies, including IDG, CMP, Crain Communications and Reed Elsevier/Cahners.

Much of his time over the last ten years has been focused on transforming traditional publications from their total reliance on print ad revenue into a more diversified portfolio business model, emphasizing online and other electronic media including Web sites, digital magazines, eNewsletters and Webcasts.

He also helps small businesses and individuals in their efforts to enhance their revenue stream by webifying their operations and expanding their marketing through digital and social media channels.

Alan recently earned a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University. He also has a bachelor of science degree in communications, with majors in advertising and marketing, from Boston University and has studied at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and has been a speaker at a number of industry events.

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Making your WP Site Social

These days we all want our content to be shared, to grow and market itself. As we all know, WordPress is a powerful tool, and it is positioned well for today’s web that requires sites and blogs to have some sort of social integration.

This session will explore some of the different ways to make your WordPress site or blog more “social.” We will look at different ways to spread your content to other social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), improve your users’ experience, as well as bringing other’s content into your site.

We will cover:

  • Social Media/Content Marketing
  • Making a plan
  • Some plug-ins and widgets to get you started

Looking forward to WordCamp…see you there!!

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WordPress as a Higher-Ed Content Management Solution? Heck YES!

Are you in charge of a college or university website?  Has your website outgrown itself, is the creative inconsistent /outdated and static HTML pages a bear to maintain? If so, you will want to come to my session, WordPress as a Higher-Ed Content Management Solution.

In this session, you will learn about how an *Army of One* brought together Marketing, IT and a skeptical community college using WordPress as a CMS (the College’s first), for their first major public redesign in over 6 years. Learn about how WordPress allows a team of three to maintain control of presentation and functionality while empowering individual departments to directly manage their own content.

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Web strategy in higher education: the good, the bad, the better

Effective Web strategy should be good strategy in any profession right?

You start with a strong executive sponsor, clear governance, and business-critical goals. With roles, responsibilities, and processes well established, you nimbly prototype, test, and refine a product for clients. Once in production, feedback informs continuous improvement. Then, as the environment changes, the life-cycle begins again.

Well, obviously the ideal is seldom equal to the real, and the organizational environment affects the success of even the most strategic project or program.

Through my work at Dartmouth, MIT, and Bates, I’ve gotten to know online professionals from around the country and, even though higher education is really a collection of very different kinds of institutions — colleges, universities, and programs in public, private, and for-profit settings — the academic environment does, indeed, provide some consistent challenges and opportunities for online communicators.

In this session, I’ll focus on several of those challenges — including governance, staffing, systems, and silos — and suggest ways that WordPress can be used to surmount those challenges, integrate across the whole college domain, and support the entire constituent life-cycle: from prospective student, to current student, to alum.

I’ll showcase several schools using WordPress to its fullest, and give a shout out to the developers who maintain the plugins that are critical to using WP in higher education. (I’ll also describe a couple of gaps that could be filled with new, or updated, plugins.)

In the meantime, if you haven’t added your school to our growing WordPress in Higher Education list, please do: http://bit.ly/wphighered.  And, if you have pointers or comments use #wpedu on Twitter.

This non-technical session is intended for higher education online professionals expanding their use of WordPress, and for WP developers expanding their support for higher education.

Jay Collier is a communications strategist and producer with over 20 years of experience supporting learning communities, from WGBH, MIT, Dartmouth, and Bates, to his current work prototyping an online professional community for Maine educators. He has been advocating and using WordPress in many forms since 2006. Recent projects include the Maine Department of Education Newsroom, the Chinese-American Friendship Association of Maine, and the WGBH Alumni community. He scouts innovative trends in lifelong and blended learning at JayCollier.net.

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Lightning Talks

One of the most popular elements of WordCamp Boston 2010 (aka #bestwordcampever) was Ignite WordCamp, a series of lightning-talk style presentations we did Saturday evening. We’ll be doing Lightning Talks this year as well – get yours in now!

Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks for WordCamp Boston 2011 will be in the 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide format, which means each talk is 6 minutes and 40 seconds long. (This is the format Pecha Kucha uses).

Please submit lighting talk proposals here by July 11th. Selection from proposed talks will be made by the organizing committee – we’re looking for fun, interesting, and insightful (not necessarily in that order).

For inspiration, you can watch Ignite WordCamp Boston 2010 presentations.

We’re very excited to about WordCamp Boston this year, and look forward to seeing another round of interesting lightning talks!

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jQuery Performance and New Features

jQuery is the de facto standard library for building web applications – and it ships with WordPress! In this talk we’ll look at new improvements that’ve recently arrived in jQuery, changes that are coming, and solutions for optimizing the performance of your web application.

This talk is given by John Resig, who is the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.

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