Sessions

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

Come get your WordPress questions answered!

There are a lot of things that go into running a service business beyond finding clients and building things for them. You’ve got to manage contracts, invoices, estimates, proposals, and more. You need to keep clients informed on progress, collect payments, and follow up on those payments invariably missed. On top of all of that, you need to have some sort of repeatable process to make projects run smoothly and keep getting in new work.

We’re going to look at a few ways that you can use WordPress to manage your WordPress business. This includes managing all of that paperwork from the backend of your site, allowing clients to make payments, and setting up a progress and ticketing system. We’ll also take a look at some ways to use your site to gain and manage leads.

From there you’ll be able to manage your business with ease and focus on the most important part: keeping your clients happy and successful!

Do you know that if you have a picture of a duck having it face left or right can increase your conversions by 40%?

Think this sounds silly? It is but backed by research. Spend some time to learn about what a/b testing is, what things to test, testing methodology and the best tools to use for your site.

Everyone will get a handout of the very same checklist I use when A/B testing our client’s sites. One of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.

When you launch a website, you are guessing. Sure the guesses are educated based on experience and data, but you can maximize your ROI with good A/B testing.

There are many people that are curious about making a career with WordPress, but don’t know where to begin. It can be difficult and overwhelming to try and make sense of all the information that is out there.

Sam went from from being a Firefighter/Paramedic to being a self-taught website developer and digital marketer. He is working part-time at a web design agency, and on his way to a career with WordPress. He is going to tell his story and provide a guide for those interested in using WordPress to make a living.

In this session, all-level attendees will learn basic design principles that they can use to build a better WordPress site. I will cover the importance of layout and whitespace, basic color theory for branding, and choosing better typography for the best user experience practices. I will also provide examples of three user case studies and offer tips that every WordPress user can begin implementing for better design.

Angelica Yarde is the co-founder of Sevenality, a brand strategy agency, located in Orlando, Florida. She is also the owner of Studio 404 Paper and co-host of the Heart + Hustle Podcast, a weekly podcast focused on giving creative entrepreneurs the tools they need to achieve with life-work balance. She has been a designer and developer for over a decade and is passionate about helping brands achieve their goals using design and user-experience based solutions.

Accessibility is a term you keep hearing, but may not fully understand. This is in part because the word itself can be a bit confusing. The root word, access, makes the concept seem tied to things like passwords. If users can “access” your site, accessibility is checked off. If only it were that simple. In this talk, Adam Soucie will take you through the basics of making your site more accessible.

Do you really know how your users are using your site? Do you know where they are coming from? Do you have any idea on what marketing paths are working best that you are currently using?

In this talk we will go over real world examples and tools we use on a daily basis to improve our client’s user experiences by removing roadblocks and increasing conversions.

Buzzwords: Heat Maps, Screen Recording, Analytics, Link Tracking and Effort

Come join us for coffee and pastries at our networking brunch! Before Sunday sessions start take some time to meet your fellow attendees as well as learn about their work.

I will like to share our journey of how we grew by investing in quality and had to spend only a fraction of our revenue in marketing. The talk is more about how to retain clients as we do.

Good clients are worth their weight in gold. Bad clients are never worth the hassle. But how can you tell the difference? In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years of experience working with clients and offers a clear strategy to ensure both the client and the project are right for you.

Has a client ever wasted your time in a consulting session? Ever had a one-hour consultation turn into 3? Have you experienced the sinking feeling that comes when you leave the consultation and realize you failed to ask a key question? This talk provides answers to these issues and more. Attendees will leave with a clear, memorable outline to manage the client consultation. Using this strategy (that anyone can implement), I close over 90% of the proposals I create.

My recent experience with leaving the company I started has shown me quite a few things I wasn’t aware of when I started.

If you’re building WordPress themes or plugins, WP_Query is certainly something you’ve needed to use whether you realize it or not. WP_Query is the backbone of WordPress. It is front and center of everything that happens on any typical WordPress site. In fact, WP_Query is a deceptively simple tool that packs a very powerful punch.

In addition to providing a very clean and simple means for generating complex MySQL queries, WP_Query also does a number of different things behind the scenes that help us access our data effortlessly and efficiently. However, these same features that make WP_Query easy and powerful can also cause us much grief without us ever realizing it.

Whether you’re just getting started with WordPress development or you’ve been writing queries pretty steadily for several years now, there’s bound to be a nugget (or several) of information in this presentation that will surprise and even help you.

In this presentation we’ll look at all of the following:

• Common uses (or misuses) for WP_Query, get_posts(), and query_posts()
• The many, many query parameters that are available to us
• Some of the more advanced ways we can query based on date, meta, or taxonomy data
• What actually happens each time WP_Query is called
• An abbreviated look at the many steps WP takes in serving a given page request
• The many ways a query can be modified and refined via several different hooks
• Finally, we’ll discuss the risky pitfalls and practical performance wins WP_Query provides If time allows, we might even talk briefly about the pros and cons of using $wpdb instead of WP_Query.

How you show up in other people’s lives is very powerful and empowering. Are you showing your stress and your annoyance and abruptness in business relationships and transactions? Or are you the person everyone wants to do business with because you know what you want and you are a win win person?

You want to run a business and need to learn where to start. You run your own business and want to learn more. Come ask questions of successful WordPress business owners!

APIs are a fundamental part of getting web services to communicate with each other. Integrating with web services is becoming almost a must as we progress into the future. Pulling dynamic data in from REST APIs is a great way to build dynamic functionality into WordPress. When you combine WordPress’s remote request functionality with some custom controller and the WP REST API, you can make your website much more powerful and dynamic.

Another part of REST APIs is authentication, so we will be discussing oAuth for authentication and how to include authenticated REST calls into WordPress. There are also some commonly used tools we will be introduced to that make API development easier.

So if you want to be able to build services into your WordPress website that automatically absorb data from any web service (Facebook, Slack, Twitter, Yelp, you name it), and there isn’t a good plugin already out there to do it, then this talk is for you.

This isn’t a 30-minute seminar on how to get rich fast! It still takes hard work and TIME! However, I have seen time and time again where eCommerce websites are missing what I consider essential functionality. I will go over a few topics such as payments gateways, newsletters, and security that have increased revenue for my clients.

You’ve heard a lot this weekend, but are you still missing some important information? Get all of your WordPress questions answered here!

WordPress is an awesome platform with a vibrant community of developers and a huge market share. Even though WordPress developers are a dime a dozen, it can still be difficult to find developers who really know their craft.

Don’t be “”just another WordPress developer””. Learn how to create a roadmap for growth, hone your craft, gain confidence and stand out from the crowd.

In this presentation, you will learn:

1. How to identify where you are in the learning process.
2. How to know what you should be focusing on right now to optimize your learning.
3. Mistakes you should avoid when learning new things.

Ultimately, the concepts learned here can be applied to learning any number of things, but we’ll be specifically focused on learning WordPress development.

This session is meant for anyone who works directly with clients!

Christina will be giving tips and sharing stories on how to keep clients happy by being open (when possible), honest (without hurting feelings :p), and constantly resetting expectations.

Do you feel like you could use a “softer touch” when having to push back to clients? Then attend this talk! Do you get nervous when having to answer pointed questions? Then this talk is for you! Do you wish you had a better process that would set you and your client up for success? See you there! Do you want to work at keeping your clients happy- be there or be square!

Technical Debt is a factor for any development team that continuously delivers features and products to customers and users. In this session we will learn to understand technical debt, when that debt is bad and when it is not. We will dive into tools that help us understand where the debt is piling up in our code base so we can focus efforts to reduce it. If you are on a team or leading a team that has slowed its development velocity due to debt and you want to understand why, how, and what to do about it this is a session you’ll want to invest in.

We have all been there: a project gets defined and scope set when suddenly a new requirement becomes a ‘must have’ from a key stakeholder. Surely this one off addition can’t hurt. But soon comes another one. And another. Until finally our original design has become ‘design by committee’ and no one is happy.
Understanding how to ask the right questions up front can mean the difference between happy clients who are eager to give you more business and nightmare clients who can never be satisfied.
This session will focus on delivering a better discovery process with all team members that not only uncover their individual goals, but uncover the big picture. We will discuss how to ask the right kind of questions. The ones that give you all the backup you need later to stand firm and calm the stakeholder down when the ‘one off’ requests come in.

Lots of people blog these days, but not everyone does so successfully. In this session we’ll cover 3 key elements that will separate your blog from the rest. This session is designed to help you take your WordPress blog to the next level!

Based on past year’s experiences transferring my main WordPress site from one server company to another as well as from one theme to another. Learning from mistakes of others and mine own, I’d provide some antidote type stories as well as best practices bullets. Would apply to users, DIY business owners, and others.

Cloud Computing has made an everlasting impact to the tech ecosystem for the better including one of the most cohesive and widely adopted software tools on the planet, WordPress.

Joshua “TechDev” Walker will walk you through a basic overview of Amazon Web Services and then show you how you can take advantage of RDS a scalable Relational Database that can be configured with SQL along with other magnificent database options. With a decoupled database, high-availability website and the ability to the connect the same database from multiple environments you just might have found the performance enhancing tool set you were looking for.

The talk will discuss important items to check off your list after launching a new wp site, including, but not limited to, submitting a site map to search engines webmaster tools, checking every link, ensuring that the robot.txt is readable, google analytics, permalinks, update all relevant plugins and disable those not being used, manually backup site, SEO plugin installed e.g Yoast, disabling comments and using captcha on all forms. The talk will make available a handy checklist that attendees will be able to use for all their WordPress projects.

Nobody likes a slow site. Every year the weight of an average site keeps increasing, mainly because of image sizes. Optimizing images is the biggest win when it comes to your website speed.
In this presentation we will focus on different image formats and steps to follow before uploading them to a website. We’ll discuss PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG and when to use each one.
We’ll set up a process to prepare images for the web, and go over tools to measure loading time. We’ll also look at some examples of before and after image optimization.

There’s always something to learn and new things to explore. Divi Theme, makes drag & drop, responsive websites fast and easy for the designer who doesn’t want to code. Divi has many new tools and resources you can use to streamline project productivity. Carol will share tips, Divi resources with a Divi CSS repository she is creating. Includes is how to create and use the Divi Child theme with a few custom options.

There are hundreds of platforms to use when it comes to building your website. So does it matter which platform you use? The answer is yes- it does matter. So in this presentation I would like to go over key benefits and differences that make WordPress stand apart from other platforms and how does it work when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and setting you site up for success.

As a developer I’ve never been a big fan of page builders. “If you want something done, do it yourself” was my mindset. Now, I can’t build as quickly as clients need, I am now using page builders and I kind of like some of them. I’ll be comparing at least three of the best ones out there to date.

Learn why it’s never too late, or early, to start coding or to dive in to the tech world. Miles Lifton is an 11 year old tech whiz who defies all the rules when it comes to barriers to entry. Find inspiration in his story and unique perspective on age, why he believes tech is such a powerful tool, and how you can start seeing that right here, right now, is the right place to be, at the right time.

People are scared of 404 pages, but at times they overlook how important it is to optimize the 404 error page.

Pages get renamed, content changes, links break and the inevitable happens, your visitor lands on a 404 error page.

But, what if we could leverage it to start a conversation instead?

In this talk learn why it is important to create custom 404 pages and how to monitor and analyze your 404 pages.

What good is your website if you have no conversions? Let’s discuss how to design your site to be a conversion machine. We will look at common design trends that convert well and even talk about ways to determine what is the best design for your audience. We will cover homepage design, subpages, landing pages and conversion funnels/paths.

There’s a lot of talk about website security, keeping sites updated and making sure passwords are strong, etc. These techniques might be great for your site itself but aren’t helping your privacy or your users and, in the right circumstances, can leave your fancy new passwords and other data open to anyone who might be listening. We’ll look beyond passwords and updates at ways to protect your privacy, your users’ privacy and the data that is sent to and from our own sites as well as those we use every day.

With seemingly endless new ways to browse the web, we know that responsive design is here to stay. But how do we adapt the traditional design process to flexible screen sizes, device-based restrictions, and multiple use-cases without feeling like we’re giving up all control to the great unknown? We’ll learn how to use our Problem Solving Superpowers to move away from creating endless mockups, and into crafting Design Systems. You’ll learn actionable methods to transform how you design for the web, and workable ways to present these designs to your team or your client.