Our Introduction to WordPress class is honored tonight with five fascinating business people, each one using WordPress in different ways. This is the time to get all your WordPress questions asked and answered by WordPress users, designers, and developers, especially questions associated with your final class projects. The group represents all levels of WordPress expertise.
Kim Greenhouse is the producer of It’s Rainmaking Time!™ — Amazing Breakthroughs, Conversations, and Discoveries for Everyone, a multimedia publishing company focused on new and ancient knowledge, solutions, and discoveries – uncovering the “truth behind the news.” Recent podcast episodes include Finding Light in the Thick, Dark Fog about social inequality and cultural oppression for a small group of Native Americans, Is Something Fishy About Fish Oil? on the true impact of the fish oil supplement, A Real Life Da Vinci Code about the Chinese arriving in the Americas before Columbus, Healthy & Safe Dentistry, and New Hope for the World on Internet privacy, freedom of speech, and economics in Iceland.
Dan Portis-Cathers of Deep Sea Music is an award-winning composer for film and television and a specialist in music production and sound design, and developer of computer music applications. His original music is exceptionally diverse ranging from country-western to jazz, from children songs to alternative rock and roll and funky sports themes. He’s released more than 30 albums in traditional and digital formats. Intimate Guitar Suites is his music catalog store featuring his own work and fellow artists from around the country. Dan is in the digital design, development, and marketing program at Portland State University and converting his sites over to WordPress, integrating custom JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX scripts.
Scott Kritzer is a classical guitar artist and performer, touring world-wide, and a popular teacher in Portland with a large social community and fan club. He created the Kritzer Method, a master program for integrating physiology and guitar technique to promote long-term playing and hand and body health. Scott is the founder of the successful Classical Guitar Immersion Conference (CGI) bringing 20-40 guitar students and professionals from around the world together for an intensive week-long conference annually. He also developed the unique Performance Anxiety Rehab (PAR) workshop to help guitarists overcome stage fright and performance anxiety. Scott converted his static site and active forum to an integrated WordPress site (maintaining the forum) a year ago, making it easy to promote his concerts, classes, and social events as well as share his innovative teaching techniques.
Randy Sandberg is the Software Test Engineer of beAutomated, a web development company specializing in building custom WordPress Plugins for the enterprise market. Their customers are small to large ecommerce and online businesses eager to automate the business process online, especially within the WordPress environment. Examples include custom email and subscription handling, database integration, ecommerce/store integration, migration, and conversion, directory development and management, and other website automation. They’ve created several popular free WordPress Plugins including Benchmark Email Lite emailing management program and beCounted, a unique Plugin that counts up (or down) annual statistics for anything you wish to count such as animal kill statistics, CMS downloads, mobile phone shipments, and the number of mythological created created since arriving on the web page.
Jeff Brock of Jeff Brock Studio is a long-time web designer specializing in designing on WordPress for small businesses, celebrities, and innovative enterprises around the country. He is also a professional photographer, integrating photography with digital arts. He works with beAutomated as a partner, focusing on custom wireframes and frameworks with WordPress. His company offers WordPress installation and upgrades, WordPress Theme and template design and development, WordPress Pluguin creation and modification, content customization, third-party integration, optimization, and graphic design.
For the final project, the WordPress Introduction class at Clark College was divided into teams to create a small business site on WordPress.com. This gave the students a chance to put into practice what they learned and find creativity within the limitations of WordPress.com. The small business sites are hypothetical, giving them a chance to use their skills in web design, content strategies, and WordPress to serve a variety of business “clients.” The business types were chosen from lists of the top 500 most popular small businesses in the United States representing potential future clients.
