Meryl McCay
We have another speaker announcement for WordCamp Brisbane. This is another great talk for the WordPress users. Selina will be giving you the run down on WordPress plugins and our next speaker Meryl McCay will be giving you the low down on WordPress themes so you’ll have all aspects of WordPress covered.
There are so many themes out there; how do you choose? Especially if you’re not a coder, so building one from the ground up is not an option. Or your CSS skills are more like “What on earth is CSS?” Where can you find quality themes? Meryl will introduce you to several sources of WordPress themes and some of the pitfalls for the unwary beginner, such as “I’ve installed the theme but it doesn’t look anything like the demo!” Plus, Meryl’s got a couple of favourite themes she’d like to share with you.
Meryl’s talk will cover the following topics:
- Introduction
- Sources of themes (e.g. ThemeForest, WooThemes, StudioPress, Elegant Themes, etc)
- Why doesn’t it look like the demo; There’s more to implementing a theme than just installing it!
- Pitfalls for the unwary (e.g. image sizes, theme option panels, support, etc)
- Tweaking CSS for the novice – where do you start? (including a look at Firebug and the CSS Hero plugin)
- A few of my favourite themes (Canvas by WooThemes, Divi by Elegant Themes, KingSize from ThemeForest)
- Questions
Meryl has been using WordPress since 2011, but still considers herself to be a novice. Having seen the list of august speakers coming to the WordCamp, people with serious dev skills, entrepreneurs and the like, she has some trepidation about volunteering to present; however, we all had to start somewhere and if she can inspire another newbie to think “Hey, I can do that too”, then the anxiety will have been worth it!
As a non-coder she finds the WordPress platform perfectly suited to the skills she can bring to the table. With over 20 years’ experience as an Information Professional (aka a Librarian), helping small businesses and not-for-profit organisations to create well-structured websites, with quality content, that they are able to manage themselves (to a large degree) is something she finds very satisfying.
Being programmatically challenged, Meryl uses quality commercial themes to do the heavy lifting and has begun to delve into the mysteries of CSS in order to tweak the design to suit the client. Still unsure about whether this fascination with WordPress can actually generate an income, she has nonetheless taken the plunge and finally got a business card. ☺
You can follow Meryl on Twitter.