Amanda Blum- Howling Zoe - U.S

We’re all a bit obsessed with what our sites should look like, because that’s the easy sauce.

“Figuring out what the site should say, how it should say it and where it should say it is two steps short of brain surgery.” says Amanda

Pop a few “easy pills” as I lead you on a sure-fire-how-to of how to get it done without the soul crushing doubt.

Clear concise exercises and a few laughs when you look out the right side of the plane.

Amanda is  a past organizer of WordCamp Boston and WordCamp Phoenix and CMSExpo (WordPress track), a speaker at WordCamps Boston, Phoenix, NYC, Savannah, Portland, Las Vegas and Chicago, and have spoken at WordPress meetups in Boston, Providence, Cape Cod, Portland, Phoenix and San Francisco.

I talk a lot, sometimes when people have specifically asked me to:)

I’m a longtime champion of WordPress for use in microbusiness and non profits and talk mostly about information architecture, UX, the administration of WordPress and how to keep clients from f’ing up the sites you make them.

When not Pressing, I make pickles and knit scarves. My parents still have no idea what I do for a living. For more clues see her Howling Zoe website – tip:hover over the bottom left corner.

P.S  If you are Amanda’s parents – we are delighted she is coming down here (She has photos)

Other sessions will cover off Themes & Design with Stacey Roche, Advanced Plugins with Dan Milward and Paul Gibbs. Ryan Hellyer will be showing us “Easier WordPress”.

Update: As a special treat Mike Dickerson, Sam Cooke and Liz Quilty did an impromtu Uke song called the Curly Bracket Blues about CSS. (Our impromptu ukulele band, the Shortcode Thesis Hooks or whatever, survived closing Wordcamp 2011) The #wordcampnz ukulele song about CSS can be downloaded from http://www.kiwiukulele.co.nz/songs as a pdf

Keep and eye on the main 2011 schedule to view times and more details

Know - IT

Co-Organiser - Jason

Co-Organiser - Dan

Design- Stacey

WP - Orientation - Jo

Easier WordPress

Ryan Hellyer is a WordPress plugin and theme developer with specific interest in making WordPress easier for noob users. Owner of http://pixopoint.com/.

Noobs to WordPress, or web development in general, have to contend with many annoying facets of development including FTP, MySQL, cPanel, PHP and all sorts of other mumbo-jumbo they don’t really care about but need to know.

With that in mind, I’ll present a way to create your own WordPress powered site without having to dive into the nitty gritty technical stuff.

We are really pleased to announce them as speakers on the Saturday afternoon for a short talk.

We all know there is a lot of comedy in technology (not all of it is intentional)  Morgan and Ben manage to walk that tightrope in their weekly podcast show.

“The Discourse Weekly Show is New Zealand’s best podcast. It’s also New Zealand’s favourite podcast.”

“Ben Gracewood, you’ve heard the name, and you’ve probably heard the voice too, but have you heard him constantly interrupted and talked over?

If not, and if you like that sort of thing, then The Weekly Show is definitely the place for you.

Morgan Nichol, a face that launched a thousand ships (and a thousand websites, and a thousand bad ideas), a singing voice that makes angels cry (and dogs whimper).

He brings it, and he brings it hard, every single time. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

So expect the un-expected and don’t miss these guys. Depending on timetable we should be able to fit in 2 or more lightening sessions before adjourning across the square to Macs Brew Bar.

We reckon it will be a brilliant end to the afternoon.

That means he has 12 minutes including questions to show why “Tweeting this Book” has moved 13,500 copies in about 8 weeks.

“I’m a consultant creative director in Auckland, New Zealand, currently having no end of fun with social media.

When not doing this I raise goats and sons, and daydream about the brief and now distant period in my youth when I filled my days flying the C130 Hercules wherever in the world the Royal New Zealand Air Force needed it flown.

“Tweet this book!” is my first book.”

Vaughns website is The Goat Farm and on twitter @vaughndavis Vaughn posted this morning on What he is talking about at WordCampNZ and on the  Why He is coming to WordCampNZ & Why You Should Too

* Unfortunately Melissa Clark-Reynolds has a surprise family event that means she has had to cancel. We are still hoping that another Minimonos staff member can talk about that project and we will keep you posted.

Breaking news update: Feb 10 – Due to a surprise family event Melissa can’t make it on Saturday as planned – she/ & we apologise. In her place we have Gwen Walton-Wegener of Minimonos project giving her insights.

Special bonus is that we have @Vaughn Davis from tweet this book the Goat Farm (and previously Y &R) giving a lightening talk how he got 13,500 downloads of his book in less than 2 months.

Melsissa thinks, blogs and speaks about how to grow technology businesses.

Melissa has been CEO of two IT companies, and now leads the largest On-line Games company in NZ – MiniMonos.com. It has almost 100,000 registered users and is a virtual world for good green kids. Their kids blog has almost 3000 daily readers. MiniMonos has over 50 fan sites involving 100+ kid bloggers.

Melissa will be presenting Kidsplay – Monkey Blogs. Blogging with, for, by kids. Who is doing it? What’s it good for? Why do it? How do you make it work? Melissa will present the latest in research around kids & blogging, plus give her top tips for blogging with kids, helping them to blog, and creating kid friendly blogging material.