Jump start your knowledge with Vancouver interactive workshops designed to help you leverage your web skills or attend the 2-day Interlink conference for more hands-on workshops.

Interlink Workshops offer a series of six hour hands-on workshops on the first Wednesday of each month. These interactive workshops are taught by industry leaders and are designed to teach participants digital-based skills — web design, WordPress, etc. The workshops are at the W2 Media Cafe on E. Hastings and run from April to June. Tickets go on sale beginning in February and cost $395 (early bird) or $495 (regular). Register early in order to reserve your spot. Lunch is included, a laptop is strongly encouraged for all workshops.

1. How to build and customize WordPress themes

When: Wednesday April 4, 2012 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Tickets available starting: Feb. 8, 2012

The first workshop, by web developer Jeff Starr, teaches participants how to create a WordPress theme from the ground up including building & customizing your own theme, integrating e-commerce, support systems and chat forums. Additionally, he will explore social-media functionality through the use of widgets, advanced loops and more. Participants will be left with a flexible and scalable WordPress theme that is functional and SEO ready.

2. Adaptive web design 

When: Wednesday May 9, 2012 (9:00a.m. – 5:00p.m.)

Tickets available starting March 7, 2012

With the explosion of new devices–phones, tablets, media players and video game systems, web developer Aaron Gustafson will teach participants how to deal with an increasingly fragmented browser landscape through modern web design. Get a better understanding of Progressive Enhancement, CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.

3. Responsive enhancement

When: Wednesday June 5, 2012 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Tickets available starting April 4, 2012

In the third workshop, technical director Jeremy Keith teaches how to construct websites that are intuitive on a wide range of devices. Learn how to prioritize content, size images for different environments, apply fluid layouts based on percentages and more. This workshop is aimed at designers and developers.

4. 2012 Interlink web design conference

When: Wednesday June 6-7, 2012

Tickets available Feb. 1 at 8 a.m.

The Interlink conference is a 2-day event of  curated talks and hands-on workshops created for web professionals led by a mix of designers, developers, creative directors and more. Lots of extra free events are offered for connecting and lunch is included for attendees.

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We originally helped build the Cancer Talk website which first set the cancer talks in motion. After several weeks of the site being live, the FCancer team received feedback from  users and wanted to act on that feedback, make some revisions, and improve the experience on the site for the online community. With that, they really wanted to showcase the awesome celebrity videos they made for this campaign in a big (large) way. Who doesn’t want to see celebs talking about their awkward sex talk?

We enjoyed working closely with the FCancer team to identify and revise areas of the site. We used custom development to ensure designs were properly translated into editable modules in WordPress, for easy updates. The results are in and the page speaks for itself. The Cancer Talk site now features:

• Celebrity videos large, front and centre. Nearly full screen, the videos act has a great hook to get people onto the site and they keep users engaged, increasing the time on site.
• The videos are played on a new video player, DailyMotion.
• The site now allows for FCancer to continually make videos and update the site regularly. Check out the latest one by Ke$ha.

And as always, with FCancer, the site is not only entertaining, it’s educational too. Key messages being: 90 per cent of all cancers are curable if caught in stage one. That is why you should have the cancer talk.

Ready to have the cancer talk? Let the fine folks at FCancer help you get started. They provide the ice breaker, the info package, and even the questions to ask. Such as:
Has anyone in our family had cancer?
How old were they where they got it?
What kinds of cancer do we have in our family history?

Go on, check it out. Tell us what you think!

In need of a site re-design? We’re here to help. Email us at info@invokemedia.com

We asked Julia Stowell, open source community and marketing manager for Microsoft, to tell us a bit more about Open Source Week. Stowell has ten years of IT industry experience, specifically at Microsoft. She has experience in marketing and community management and business and market analysis.

How did the idea for Open Source Week come about?

… This is our (Microsoft’s) third time hosting Make Web Not War.  Last year we held the event in Montreal and as part of the lead up to our event we helped to organize an Open Source Week in Montreal.  When we were  visiting Vancouver last October for the Drupal Summit we asked the tech community if they’d be interested in having an Open Source Week. They were enthusiastic and supportive and so we continued the conversation.  And here we are.  The community in Vancouver is awesome and we’re thrilled to have been part of the creation of  the first Open Source Week in Vancouver.

Why are you passionate about Open Source Week?

I’m passionate about it because it helped me to get involved and get to know the local tech community.

What do you think specific events happening during Open Source Week will achieve?

This is a great opportunity to have people come together that don’t normally talk to each other.  There are many brilliant people that need to meet each other.

What impact do you think Open Source Week is going to have in the long and short term?

Both long and short term, I think it will trigger more mingling, learning, and networking between the various open source communities.

Which event and which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing from?

Well, I’m partial, but Make Web Not War — specifically my session (LOL),  which is a panel on Microsoft and Open Source.

Questions with CT Moore

CT Moore is  a senior strategist at NVI, where he handles client SEO, PPC, and social media. He is also a blogger, journalist, podcaster, and speaker and has more than five years of experience in SEO. He consulted on web strategy for brands, such asAmerican Apparel, Yellow Pages, and Microsoft, as well as a number of media start-ups.  He also sits as a staff editor at Revenews.com. Moore will be talking about technical SEO for enterprise level & dynamic websites at Make Web Not War, with Mohamed Hamad.

What do you love about WordPress?

Well, there are probably two things about WordPress that I love. The first is that it’s free. I first encountered WordPress back in 2006. I wanted a blog, but was too cheap and broke to higher someone to build it for me. So after some Googling around, I found Wordpress. At the time, I didn’t even know what an FTP client was, and it took me two weeks to figure out how to properly install and configure it. But I would’ve never started my web dev education it wasn’t for WordPress being free. Just goes to show that freedom is power

The other thing I love about WordPress is how versatile it is. I mean, you can use it to build a blog or static website, or you can use it build a small ecommerce store.

The open  source community behind WordPress has resulted in so many different plugins, add-ons and themes that you do just about anything with it. Come to think of it, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the WordPress community so I guess it’s the community I love.

What impact is do you think WordPress is going to have on open source platforms moving forward?

I think, if anything, WordPress has demonstrated the power of communities. Like I said, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the community behind it, so I think that open source developers will really be forced to invest in their community when developing platforms. It’s that kind of crowdsourcing that streamlines new releases and bug fixes, and it’s that kind of crowdsourcing that can take a platform to a level where it’s a viable and dependable business options.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

I guess pretty much anything mobile. Obviously, Android is huge, and is going to continue to influence what developers choose to develop.

I also think it’ll be interesting to watch the development of Window Phone 7 (disclosure: through NVI, I currently work with Microsoft Canada and worked on the Great Canadian Apportunity mobile dev contest with them). The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has a lot of potential. Nokia makes great hardware but needed a really strong OS, and Windows Phone 7 needs quick marketing penetration. If consumers buy into the Windows Phone 7 platform via Nokia, it’ll definitely have a significant impact on mobile developers.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

The freedom, versatility, and possibility they afford us. Open source technologies afford people the tools and experience that they couldn’t get if they had to pay for licenses. As I mentioned already, I learned about web dev because of WordPress.

But being free from licensing constraints and having access to the source code also allows people to take something that is only partially what they’re looking for, and customize it to their needs. That can save you countless hours in product development and make the impossible otherwise possible.

But “the possibilities” go so far beyond that. The idea of having a strong community of sharp minds collectively working on a platform means that the technology can evolve very quickly and in so many ways.

Just imagine where WordPress would be today if Matt Mullenweg had been trying to make money off of it as a licensed solutions. He’d only have a small team of developers working inside the box, and WordPress would’ve never evolved the way it had. Instead, you have thousands of developers finding bug fixes, developing plugins, and making themes so that WordPress can be used in so many different ways. And the result is that a lot of business get started or save a lot of money on what they otherwise might not have been able to do.

I honestly believed that open source is one of those paradoxes where everyone gets richer because something is free. It opens the door to so many possibilities and minds to so much inspiration.

Questions with Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is creative director for Pink & Yellow Media. He is a web designer, developer and educator and specializes in remarkably customized and unusual WordPress themes. He is also an author for Pearson publishing and Lynda.com and has published three books and two video series on web design and WordPress. He enjoys writing about anything and everything web related on the his blog Design is Philosophy. He loves web standards, information design and making the web make sense for everyone. He recently launched  PhotoPivot.com with Chris Arnold. PhotoPivotcreate a digital lightboard for professional photographers by using the Microsoft Pivot application. His topic for the Make Web Not War conference is: open source in the cloud – PHP on Azure.

What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about SEO?

SEO as a service is a bit of a scam (cue flame war). In the past you could game the search engines to get a better ranking. That just doesn’t work any more. Today search engines are simply too smart. If you want good search engine ranking (SER?) what matters is well written and well formatted content. In my opinion you’re better off buying the services of a great copywriter than getting an “SEO expert” to look over your content.

If you could suggest one thing to improve someone’s SEO, what would it be?

Focus on proper markup (page title, description, headers etc.) and put some effort in attaching accurate and descriptive alt tags to your images. Images are largely overlooked and search engines – being text driven – don’t understand them. Simply tagging your images with a proper description will make a huge difference in your findability.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

Cloud, pure and simple. As solutions become more advanced and people need more space, faster transfers and larger pipes the old world of static servers and shared hosting will quickly be supplanted for the new and more agile cloud system. Yes, it’s more complicated, but the payoff is immense both in lower cost-to-performance, better stability and the benefits of a properly distributed network.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

In Norwegian we have a word “dugnad”. Translated to English it would mean something like “work done voluntarily by the community for the common good.” Open source is that – dugnad on a massive scale. To me open source is what the internet is and should be about: people working together for a common good. Open source is crowd sourced innovation on a scale not possible when run by an organization or a corporation. The ability for everyone to pitch in and add the little details they think matter produces an organic evolutionary process that often ends up with things no one ever thought of before. Sure, open source also produces a lot of garbage, but it’s easily balanced out.

What impact do you think open source is going to have on the web in the long term?

If we jump back in time we see open source as this fringe element written off as a joke by the people in power. Now we see open source leading the way and taking over for proprietary solutions. This organic collaborative environment can easily be the way forward for both the web and society as a whole as long as we, the people who work in it, keep our bearings and focus on innovation and betterment.