Check it out!

This year’s Reno-Tahoe WordCamp will be held on Saturday, June 4th at the University of Nevada, Reno Joe Crowley Student Union. A series of workshops and WordPress developer sessions will be held on Sunday, June 5th at the DeLaMare Library.

Reno-Tahoe WordCamp is a two-day community conference for WordPress users, developers, designers, and marketing and advertising professionals from all around Reno, Lake Tahoe, and the surrounding area to meet, mingle, and learn about WordPress.

Tahoe-Reno Wordcamp website

If anyone wants a ride from the Bay Area let me know! It would be great to go as a group!

Lance Loveday spoke at Web Design World in Seattle recently. I am interested in presenting hard numbers concerning the the role of web design. Last December, I created an HTML email which linked to a branded microsite containing success stories and a quiet request for donations. The return that year was 40% above the previous year. I went back to study the campaign from the previous year and compared it to what we did in December of 2007. I had a good amount of data but did not know how to interpret it until I read this book. I learned from Lance how important it is to have branded landing pages, simple targeted navigation and limit choices for the website visitor (in our case, the donor). Now that I have the words and strategies to explain the success to the executive team, I can also see the areas of the campaign I can improve even more, such as redesigning our form on our donation page and targeting the metrics that truly matter. This book also provides information for understanding web analytics and how they tie into business objectives. The book is well organized with color screenshots for those of us who are visual learners. The best part is now I have business language to sell the importance of what I do that adds value to online campaigns, whereas before all I had was intuition and luck.