We’re so excited to be bringing Foundation Friday – a full day of workshops – to you as part of WordCamp LAX. We’ll have three, count ’em THREE,  all-day workshops running on Friday to give you a great place to get some intensive learning done!

We’ll be announcing the schedules and speakers for the other two workshops soon, so keep your eyes peeled for those announcements! Today, though, we’re all about the Beginner Workshop!

If you’re just getting started with WordPress and need some help getting it all figured out, then this is the workshop for you. You’ll learn how to set up a site, and how to add, edit, organize, and remove content. You’ll learn all about themes and child themes and how to change the look of your site. You’ll learn about plugins and how to add extra bits of functionality to your site and customize it to make it all yours. And you’ll also learn how to run backups and keep your site secure. You wouldn’t want to lose all of your hard work!

Here are the smart and helpful speakers who will be guiding you through the Beginner Workshop:

Gregg Franklin will kick off the day with a 4-hour introduction to WordPress. Gregg is a WordPress Developer and team member over at ServerPress LLC, the creators of Desktop Server – and all-around awesome and great guy. We suspect he walks around with a superhero costume under his clothes. He’ll cover setting up a local copy of WordPress, then will walk you through posts, pages, categories, tags, menus, and widgets.

Adam Silver will explain themes, theme frameworks, and child themes so that you can get your WordPress site looking just the way you want and decipher many of the conversations happening in the WordPress community. He’s also a podcaster and a talented dancer, as Facebook videos have attested. Adam owns and operates Silver Lining Productions and spends his days working as a social media manager, website developer, and photographer.

Lucy Beer will tell you everything you need to know about plugins – how to find them, evaluate them, install them, and configure them. She’ll also share some of her plugin recommendations so you’ll have some great plugins to get started with. You’ll also get a chance to check out Lucy’s stylish haircut – the result of having shaved her head for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation to raise money to conquer childhood cancer. Lucy has been using WordPress since 2004 and teaches people how to use WordPress for a living.

Suzette Franck will cover making and storing backups of your site, and also some basic security measures you can take to keep your site safe. Suzette’s a WordPress Evangelist at Media Temple, an LA-based hosting company and all-around terrific WordCamp speaker. If you’ve attended any of our local meetups or pretty much any WordCamp ever, chances are that you’ve run into Suzette! She jet-sets all around the country spreading the WordPress love!

Philip Artinyan is going to explain hosting and domains. Philip is a part of the SiteGround Customer Service team and he’ll be stepping workshop attendees through choosing a reliable host – what to look for in a hosting company, what your hosting options are, and when to use them. He’ll also go over how to choose and register a great domain name.

With these helpful, dedicated folks on board to teach, our Beginner Workshop will get you up and running with a new WordPress site in no time flat.

And, if you’re local to Los Angeles, you might want check out our local WordPress 101 Meetup Group. Geared just for beginners, you can get answers to your questions and help getting up and running. That group is run by WordPress coach Karen McCamy. Their next meetup is coming up on Tuesday, August 5th.

But wait…there’s more!

We have one new speaker to announce for our Saturday Sessions! What the what? The fun never stops here at WordCamp LAX Planning HQ.

Shaimoom Newaz an artist, musician and coder and has a particular fondness for CSS. He’ll be speaking on a starter theme workflow that involves such fancy things as Roots, GitHub, Grunt, and Bootstrap. And if all that sounds scary to you, well, let me just assure you that Shaimoom will show you how he accomplishes all that without getting too deep into code. Create custom themes with less bloat and easy deployment.

Like I said, folks, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the announcements on the speakers and schedules for the Design Workshop and the Business Workshop because we’ll be announcing those in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! Foundation Friday is worth taking a vacation day for! Or, well, you know, maybe calling in sick. *cough*