Videos of the WP theme design presentation in 3 parts

Update – Part 3 is now fixed and working

Getting setup and going with the presentation was a little haphazard so the presentation wasn’t as polished as similar versions I delivered in Birmingham, Las Vegas and Savannah, but the audience had a lot of good questions, and I didn’t mind the change up.  It actually helped me quite a bit get a better feeling for those areas of the presentation that are probably more important for people learning to design WP themes for the first time.

I’m heading to the WordCamp Boston this weekend.  I will be working a shift in the WordPress Genius Bar helping people learn how to design WordPress themes for the first time.  I’m also looking forward to comparing notes with the presenters at Boston WordCamp covering advanced wordpress theme design.  I’m always looking to benchmark best practices to improve functionality, decrease load time and speed up the design process which makes wordpress as a cms theme design more affordable for my clients.

I am also going to see first hand how the Boston WordCamp was organized.  From an online perspective, this show looks tight.  The wordpress community in WordPress is very strong and I’m looking forward to some high level discussions. 

Its also been about 10 years since I visited Boston.  I haven’t been back since my brother in law graduated from MIT.  I lived just outside of Boston in the early 90’s and I do miss seeing one of my favorite cities in the US.

For those of you catching up with me at WordCamp Boston, I design wordpress themes using a combination of the following 3 software programs listed in order of importance based on total usage in the design process:

• Artisteer
• Dreamweaver (Adobe Product)
• Fireworks (Adobe product)
• ThemeDreamer (Dreamweaver addon)
• Firebug (Firefox addon)
• Google Adwords (keyword analysis)

* Note I bought Fireworks and Dreamweaver together a few years ago in a bundle called Studio 8, Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium CS4 is about the equivalent these days.  Its expensive but effective.  If you are a student, but it now while it is still cheap!

In general, I only recommend working on 2 hosting services, Inmotion Hosting and HostGator due to their great support and WordPress friendly atmosphere.  They make installation a breeze.  I do NOT recommend Godaddy, 1&1, nor IPower, which have made my life difficult.

This was an expanded version of the ‘Intro’ level presentation that I provided a few weeks ago at WordCamp Birmingham. 

The big difference is that I demonstrated how to use multiple themes in a single WordPress configuration.  Multiple themes that anyone could design and later iterate modifications themselves.  I also highlighted a few of the techniques that I utilized to build our strategic partner’s site at Grass Shack Events & Media.

Here is the basic code that I utilized to create and call a default header as well as alternate headers based on an if then else selection:

<?php
//
// example of using header file based on pages
// note that you can either use page ID, Page Name or Page Slug
//
// this one uses page title

if (is_page()){
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/header-business.php’);
}
else {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/header-default.php’);
}
?>

 

This month I will also create additional step by step video tutorials to share with people that were unable to attend this session.  Alternately, if you would like me to speak at a conference or event in your area, please contact me to discuss availability.

Photo by Kelly Walker of PegLegPug.com

Brett moderated a panel with awesome panelists including (in order of picture above) George Smith Jr, the social voice of Crocs, Joseph Jaffe of JaffeJuice, Dena Weiste who has worked with major brands through online media for almost 2 decades and John Andrews, who has managed social media programs for Wal-Mart and others.

What would a panel of rock stars like this cover at IzeaFest?

What Advertisers Want! 

They talked in depth for an hour on where the rubber hits the road in social media advertising and what major brands and bloggers need to do to come together effectively, transparently and profitably without reducing the value and quality of content.

For more insights into the event, check out Brett’s personal blog article Back from IzeaFest-Still Absorbing the Insights

BlogWorld 2009

In just a little over a week, Brett will be traveling to Las Vegas for the third annual BlogWorld Expo.  This year BlogWorld has consolidated with the New Media Expo (which would be in its 4th year).  Softduit Media through Brett has been present at every BlogWorld since their inception and all but the very first New Media/Podcast Expo. 

Last year, Brett worked the booths on the exhibit floor demonstrating the use of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 for bloggers from the Blogger and Podcaster Booth.

This year, Brett will be speaking at BlogWorld during the Las Vegas WordCamp event in the exhibit hall area on Saturday.  He will be closing the show covering the topic of How to Design a WordPress Theme in Minutes, once again demonstrating to the audience how to create WP themes effectively and efficiently regardless of whether or not the audience has any design or programming experience.

Here’s the line up for Las Vegas WordCamp and don’t forget to check out the 10 in depth tracks at BlogWorld either.

This is going to be a great BlogWorld with a lot of serious knowledge exchange, and even better networking.  The attendance numbers for this show look like they are going to be through the roof compared to past years.

Both Mac and PC users are eligible to participate.  No purchase is necessary to participate.  All you have to do is download the free trial Artisteer theme design software, install it on your machine and give it a spin.  Send us your finished theme file and you will be entered.  There are multiple ways to enter and multiple ways to win!

Steps

1. Go to Artisteer & follow the instructions to download the free trial via Cnet (Mac users navigate to the News tab, scroll down and download the Mac OSx version of Artisteer)

2.  Install the free trial software (works on PCs or Macs) & generate your theme.

3.  Name Your Theme with a Creative Name and

4.  Save your working Artisteer file as a .artx file

5.  Email me your .artx file attached (typically less than .5 mb) to brettbum@gmail.com

Please make sure you receive a response from me confirming that I successfully received your theme, if you want to use a service like YouSendIt.com that’s cool too!

Email Requirements:

1. Your email should include the title WordPress Theme Contest Entry in the Subject,
2. Entries should include your:
   1.  email address,
   2. twitter ID,
   3. first name and initial of your last name.
   4. Creative Theme Name
3. If you have a blog or website, please include a link to your URL. 
4. I will be posting examples of the themes submitted in the contest in a live preview section of Softduit.  This entry will include your first name and last initial. along with a link to your website & your twitter id

Prizes

We’re giving away 2 Free Standard Edition Licenses (value $129 ea in cost, value in terms of what you can earn with it MUCH Higher!)

The licenses have been provide courtesy of Artisteer!

First, 1 License will be awarded to the participant with the best looking theme

The best looking theme design winners entries will then be removed from the pool and,

then 1 License will be awarded randomly to all remaining participants.

Drawing Date

October 21, 2009 – 4 days after BlogWorld

Contest Judging & Multiple ways to enter Contest

• I will judge the best looking themes (ignoring the watermark) & possibly getting some panel help from upcoming tradeshows. 
• Everyone that submits a theme will get 30 entries per theme for a max of 5 themes or 150 entries.
• After Submitting Your File, You may gain 1 additional entry per day
  • please follow me @brettbum and
  • Retweet the following without the quotes “ Pls RT @brettbum is sponsoring a WordPress theme design contest at http://softduit.com “
• You may shorten the URL if you like
• Before the contest ends, I may add additional ways for people to enter so check back to see how things are progressing, and I withhold the right to change the contest rules as necessary, but do not anticipate substantial changes!

Addition Ways to Enter at WordCamp Birmingham, IzeaFest, & BlogWorld

I will be attending WordCamp Birmingham, IzeaFest and Blogworld in the next 30 days.  If you see me at one of these shows, ask me how you can enter this contest on the spot, by designing a theme right then and there for an extra 10 entries!

Note, we started this contest once before in early August.  Technical difficulties(twitter) delayed that contest and entrants from the earlier contest will have their entries rolled into this contest according to the rules of this contest.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please leave me a comment below. 

If you need any help finding the free trials, I can help point you in the right direction.

Themes will be judged on their design, not on advanced wordpress configuration capabilities from plugins.  Stay posted, we will be looking at intermediate and advanced contests in the future!

The main goal of this presentation is to help everyone give this a try, and if possible design their own theme, while I guide the audience through the process.

If you want to follow along during the presentation, I recommend downloading the free trial software from Artisteer or Cnet

1. Go to Artisteer & follow the instructions to download the free trial via Cnet (Mac users navigate to the News tab, scroll down and download the Mac OSx version of Artisteer)

*If you are using a Mac with Snow Leopard 10.6, there is a early beta (download trial beta) that is workable for most users so far, that early release by Apple has the team at Artisteer working over time like so many other companies I suspect.

2.  Install the free trial software (works on PCs or Macs) & generate your theme.

For more information on the Theme Design Contest . . . see ->

Enter the WordPress ‘License to Design’ Theme Contest 2.0

John of TransformativeLifeCoaches.com asks

I am wanting to install an Aweber autoresponder Sign Up Box (for a Giveaway report and a series of autoresponder emails) on our site. 

I believe the best way to do that is to put the Sign Up box in Sidebar 2 which doesn’t appear to be activated on our TLCoaches site. 

I went  to Widgets on the WP control panel to drag the "text/HTML" widget onto Sidebar 2 but it wouldn’t drag nor do any other widgets. 
Can you tell me the best way to get the autoresponder box on every page of our site?

In reality, WordPress and the sidebars on the site were not broken.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the site as of the date of the question.

This particular site only has 1 sidebar programmed into the theme.  With Artisteer (as of Sept 2009) at most you can design themes with 2 sidebars.  You can add more than 2 sidebars to the themes after export but that is another topic for a different day.

In this case, with only 1 sidebar designed in the theme, when a user logs into WordPress, they can only activate/use/drag and drop widgets to the sidebar that actually is turned on an enabled within functions.php of the theme they have created.

Two sidebars do show up sometimes, but only 1 will work when your theme has just a single sidebar activated.

The Solution

In this case if John wants to utilize a second (new) sidebar, all he has to do, is open up his theme in Artisteer and make a 5 second change to his layout, adding a sidebar where he likes, and then export and upload the updated theme to his website.

Piece of cake!

UPDATE

If you read the comments below, you will learn that the original solution and trouble shooting didn’t quite fix this problem.  the solution was a little easier, but also more hidden.

To fix this, John learned that he needed to click on the screen options button at the top right hand corner of every wordpress admin screen.

Then

On WP widgets page, I went to screen options and hit “enable accessibility mode”-simple solution, just didn’t know it was there.

This was a live demo of Artisteer for both PCs & Macs and neither video nor slides were available from the actual event, but people can view are in depth video from a WordPress meetup in Charlotte covering WordPress Theme design for people of any skill level from novice to advanced.

Barcamp Chattanooga was a lively and busy event with close to 100 people registering for the event.  Chattanooga is rather unique as a city that has an extremely high percentage of citizen twitter users as well, so this strong turnout for a first year event was probably not a surprise for local visitors. 

People travelled from Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham and of course Softduit Media’s Brett Bumeter travelled in from Charlotte NC about 5 and a half hours away by car.

Chattanooga will also be the location of a future Palm Pre development meetup and Birmingham will host the next WordCamp in the SouthEast at the end of September with attendance currently projected between 150-250 people.

Pictures from Barcamp Chattanooga

I have these on Facebook as well, if you want to tag someone or yourself, connect with me at facebook.com/brettbum

PRE-EVENT GATHERING

Please come out and meet your fellow presenters, our WordCamp sponsors and selected guests.  Tyler’s location (American Tobacco Historic District) is really cool and you can even catch the game while you enjoy a few drinks and some good food.

Tyler’s Tap Room

324 Blackwell St

Durham, NC 27701

(919) 433-0345

7pm-9pm

WORDCAMP SESSION SCHEDULE

Please remember that you may be in a session time slot based on whether or not your topic is considered Advanced or Beginners.  I tried to place at least one of each in every time slot, with the topics that cross over added in between.

9am-9:45am – Registration/Breakfast

9:45am-10:15am – WCRDU Welcome/Opening Statements/Host Statements

10:15am-11am – Phillip Barron / Andy Beal / Glenn Ansley

11am-11:45am – Angela Connor / Shayne Sanderson

11:45am-12pm – Sponsor Announcements (Full Throttle)

12pm-12:45pm – Hal Goodtree / Brett Bumeter / Chris Gatewood

12:45pm-1:00pm – Sponsor Announcements (ConnectNC)

1:00pm-1:45pm  – (really until 2pm but right before 2pm I am going to call people together)

Lunch / Announcements (Goodtree, Andy Beal as event sponsors)/ Giveaways

2pm-2:45pm – Wayne Sutton (Tweetshop)

2:45pm-3pm – Announcements/Giveaways

3pm-3:45pm – Lew Ayotte / Beth Morgan / Jason Keath

3:45pm-4pm – Announcements/Giveaways/Keynote Intro

4pm-5pm – Matt Mullenweg Keynote

5pm-5:45pm – Alan Knox / Michael Torbert

5:45pm-6pm – Final Announcements / Final Giveaways

Plus here is a partial list of sponsors twitter id’s (will update more as I get consolidated list)

@KitsUnlimited @ConnectNC @Digsby @AndyBeal @Hal990 @CommunityGirl @mwalters @brettbum @waynesutton

WordCamp RDU Location

School of Education, NCCU
712 Cecil Street
Durham, NC 27707