Rhyne Armstrong is leading the preconference workshop, WordPress for Technical Communicators: Under the Hood,” a hands-on session in which participants will learn just how powerful this tool can be and how to use it to your advantage.
You’re doing several sessions for us this year, and I want to ask first about the preconference workshop, WordPress for Technical Communicators: Under the Hood. What prompted you to come up with this session idea?
For the last few years, my company has used WordPress. People ask why, and my answer has been, “because it’s free.” There’s nothing magical or difficult about it, but it’s important for people to get under the hood and understand how it works. You should be able to find the plug-ins that are right for you, install them, configure and customize them, customize the templates, work with loops, and so on. If you’re going to use WordPress, you should make sure it meets your needs.
Complete the sentence: “You should absolutely attend this workshop if you …”
Want to get more out of WordPress or want to start using in your organization. Many people use it for personal websites, but it’s different for a company. You need to consider security, tracking, plug-ins, getting content in and out, storing and managing content. Attendees will get experience installing, configuring, and working with WordPress—this is a workshop, not a lecture.
But I definitely believe it’s going to benefit people who want to build their own sites, too. And once you’ve installed and configured a basic site, you may be interested in conference sessions that address design and development.
You’re also doing Watch Out: Monitoring Social Media for Documentation as a Spotlight session. How do you feel about this new format of presentation?
I’m pretty excited, actually. I’ve always liked the idea of shorter, speaker-driven presentations that allow speakers to be themselves. It will be, hmmm, interesting to let speakers be themselves.
Yes, interesting. And finally, the tables are turned and you get to do a ninja talk. Tell me about that.
Yeah, yes, I am. I don’t know why they’re making me do that, but at least I get to make somebody else’s slides. I like to sit down with my slides and come up with a plan, so we’ll see how this goes.
Speaking of slides, you always have great slides. You do great presentations. What has had the biggest influence on you in helping develop your skills in this area?
Going to tech comm conferences, you see good, and you see bad. And being the person I am, I tend to emulate the good. Several years ago, I went to a conference called BlogWorld, and I saw a lot of presentations that were really fluid, and the presenters’ styles were just on. They were marketers, not technical communicators, and they were like their presentations—they were fluid. I knew then I wanted to be present like them. It’s okay to find someone you like and emulate them as you develop those skills. Especially with presentations. You have to do presentations to feel good about doing them.
What are you looking forward to most in Phoenix?
Catching up with all my friends—always number one.
More About Rhyne
Rhyne is the director of documentation and training at RouteMatch Software in Atlanta, GA. He has organized popular networking events, such as tweetups and karaoke outings, and he has served on the STC Community Affairs Committee (CAC), working with geographic communities who have experienced various problems and concerns. He currently is the team lead for the CAC Resource Team.