Our sponsor: Zeekee Interactive – Where marketing meets the web

Zeekee Interactive was founded in 2003 with the vision of creating an internet consulting firm dedicated to helping its customers understand the marketing power of the internet.

Ten years later, Zeekee boasts some of the region’s most popular brands, with expertise in a full variety of internet marketing services. Whether your business is looking for Website Design and Development, Website Maintenance, Internet Marketing Campaigns, Hosting, Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, E-commerce Solutions, Graphic Design, or Social Media Services — Zeekee has you covered.

Whether you need a complete internet marketing solution or a quick and easy website, Zeekee Interactive has the resources and talent to create the right solution for you.

We are thankful that Zeekee has invested back into the local WordPress community to sponsor WordCamp Birmingham as our Gold level sponsor. Check them out today.

Our sponsor: Backup Buddy – backups are just the beginning

Backup Buddy is a flagship product of iThemes. It’s been the go-to commercial backup solution for WordPress for years, and it keeps getting better.

With Backup Buddy, automating and simplifying your website backups is just the beginning. You can restore your website completely and automatically from a backup.

You can also restore specific files if you make a bunch of changes and then decide they weren’t right, so you don’t have to restore the entire website or manually revert all of your changes.

And their migration services in Backup Buddy are really good. You can move an entire website to a new domain or hosting provider, no problem.

Don’t lose all of your hard work because you didn’t have good backups in place. With Backup Buddy, it handles the hard work for you, and always “remembers”, even if you don’t.

We’re very thankful for Backup Buddy‘s Gold level sponsorship for WordCamp Birmingham.

Our sponsor: Exchange – simple eCommerce for WordPress

Making something simple is often times harder than making it really complex. WordPress eCommerce is one of those things that can get really complex, really quickly. And Exchange by iThemes is looking to change that.

Exchange is an eCommerce platform that keeps things simple and modular, to make eCommerce with WordPress easier for users and developers alike.

I’ve beta tested Exchange, and it’s a promising platform that’s not near as intimating as other eCommerce options.

Exchange is trying to simplify things that other aspects of eCommerce try to force into being hard, like payment gateways. They’ve recently created a chart to help store owners figure out their options, and easy to implement gateways like Paypal and Stripe are available right out of the box.

Exchange launched with the ability to handle digital downloads and decided to let customers help guide future development. They’ve now got physical products and memberships under development and on the way.

We’re very thankful for Exchange’s support of WordCamp Birmingham as a Gold level sponsor.

Our sponsor: WooThemes – Themes and plugins for your niche

WooThemes is a leader in the WordPress community. They have been around just about as long as anyone, and boast one of the largest customer bases out there. But they haven’t stopped iterating and building products geared for site owners, designers, and developers.

WooThemes aims to be a platform to build and transform standard WordPress-powered websites into slick, functional business tools. They do so with WordPress themes for general use and a variety of niches, designed and developed by some of the top folks in the industry. They also build extremely robust plugins like WooCommerce to help people serve business needs effectively, from standard stores to subscriptions and coursework.

We are thankful to WooThemes for their support of WordCamp Birmingham, and be on the lookout for some great giveaways from them during camp!

Our sponsor: Yoast – WordPress SEO made easy for everyone

Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is the go-to SEO plugin for site owners and pros. Their free plugin is a great start to technically sound tools ready to help you deliver semantic markup for search engines to have a better understanding of your site content.

Yoast offers a number of products in addition to the base WordPress SEO plugin as well. They’ve got add-on offerings for WooCommerce, Local SEO, Video SEO and Google News. And you can purchases video tutorials either for your own use or to help teach your clients, straight from the dashboard.

In short, Yoast makes websites work better for both website owners and website visitors. And people like me (and perhaps you) can rely on Yoast to stay on top of the SEO industry so we don’t have to.

We thank Yoast for supporting WordCamp Birmingham as a Gold level sponsor.