What is the name of your company and can you tell us something about yourself?
I’m a Senior Front-End Developer at New Signature. In 2005 I was a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
(Yes, seriously, I asked and he sent me video! See below! – Jenifer)
Ben Byrne on Millionaire Pt. 1
Ben Byrne on Millionaire Pt. 2
Can you tell us why you love WordPress?
WordPress strikes a superb balance between simplicity and flexibility. It’s easy to get started with and use, but has enough power under the hood to handle sophisticated website needs.
What is your topic for WordCamp?
I’m presenting on widgets — specifically, ten cool things you can use them for. While WordPress comes “out of the box” with a number of widgets — some mundane, some quite useful — the sky is the limit with what you can accomplish using third-party and even custom widgets. In my session I’ll highlight some of the more important and creative uses for widgets out there I’ve seen. Hopefully you’ll learn something, whether you’re running a simple blog or looking to deploy an enterprise site that doesn’t even look or feel like WordPress!
What do you hope attendees learn from your session?
I hope attendees will learn two main things: first, I want people to leave the session having learned of at least one use of widgets they hadn’t thought to make use of before. Second, I want people to learn that — whether or not a particular example I cited is relevant to them — widgets are an extremely powerful and flexible, but often overlooked, tool in the WordPress user’s toolbox, and can be leveraged to help reach a wide variety of goals.
How do you use WP in your business?
WordPress is one of several CMS solutions my firm deploys for clients. Not only do we love building out sites on WordPress (it’s generally a quicker development cycle than on the other platforms we use), but we also try to give back to the community with plugins like Easy Post Types.
