Sessions

Hosting providers are as numerous as the stars, and what they offer can be just as varied. Learn some lingo and evaluate what your unique needs are to choose the solution that not only gives you the POWER to run your website, but the peace of mind to sleep at night. I will not be “naming names” but supplying information for what you should be looking for!

Getting more traffic to your website is always a good feeling. But what are you supposed to do once you’re getting enough traffic but aren’t yet winning new customers? I’ll go over some best practices of what to do (and what not to do) in order to slowly turn new visitors into paying customers.

This session will explore various SEO and content marketing tactics for marketers of all levels. We will dive into measurement, planning and execution.  Having a short and long term plan is key for the marathon that is SEO and content marketing. Slides will be available immediately following the presentation.

How data science is playing a role in web development and why its game changing for business. We all know that data is important in business but yet most don’t know their numbers. Today we are seeing more and more trends to collecting data to make better decisions. I’ll address some projects we’re working on with clients that help collect data and help them analyze the data.

Being a freelancer, contractor or digital nomad is all the rage nowadays, but you don’t want to just survive doing what you love, you want to thrive! Learn strategies for building reoccurring income, business systems, sales automations and other tools to better manage your freelance business. I have been a freelance digital media expert of almost 10 years, and want to share my experience of what it takes to succeed outside of a 9-5 job for the long term.

We all need help in identifying the needs for our business. In this talk, I’ll share a few ways to help organize your business from choosing CRMs to managing projects. There are so many tools online to choose from and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. I’ll cover a variety of ways to create the system that works best for you without wasting time through countless hours of trial and error.

The next generation of devices is here, and they’re all voice enabled. With the rise of technologies like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, businesses need to think about how to structure their offerings to be compatible with these interfaces. This talk will explore how voice search is influencing SEO and customer acquisition as well as how to adapt to give customers a viable voice-interface option to interact with your services.

We’ll interact with Alexa and Google Assistant live to see how they can take your WordPress site to the next level and provide a unique interface to your content.

We’ll discuss necessary steps to ensure success of your WooCommerce installation; which includes product importing, sales reporting, cross-selling, shipping and payment options.

Note: this topic will focus on physical products, not digital downloads.

Many developers, including myself, deal with mental health issues, yet mental health in the developer community is often overlooked, hidden, or swept under the rug. Too many of us suffer in silence and end up hurting our professional and personal relationships, or even worse, ourselves.

What can be done to help de-stigmatize mental health issues? How can we, as a community, band together to help those of us with mental health issues feel more welcome in tech?

Together, we can work to Erase the Stigma associated with mental illness.

Podcasting is a growing medium and a worthwhile marketing tool for freelancers and businesses. They are a perfect way to grow your following, earn trust, and tell your story. In this session, you’ll learn why podcasting matters and receive numerous strategies on how to use one to promote and sell your own work.

After several months or years developing WordPress themes and plugins, you feel like there must be more than this. Now what? In this session, we will discuss different options on how to improve your skills and focus your training plans in the right direction. Based on actual client data gathered from hundreds of real WordPress jobs, we will review the hottest trends and propose concrete courses of action to gain new abilities and propel your development status to the next level.

Are you crazy? WordCamps and WordPress are huge, everyone wants to use it, everyone is talking about it? Our community is not dead! Find out the real truth.

This talk is geared towards freelancers who are ready to turn their small business into a full agency. We will go over some of the basics and necessary steps to incorporate a business, and give some tips and advice for freelancers with the entrepreneur bug. A quick rundown of what will be in the speech:

* How to stop thinking like a freelancer.
* Defining your staff.
* The 7 essential steps to running a business: Planning, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Production, Staff Development/Training, and Personal Growth.
* Learning to delegate (and give up control!)
* LLC vs S-Corp vs Corp: What you need to know, where to file, and how to find legal resources.
* Securing funding and making a financial plan.
* Increasing prices to pay for your bottom line.
* Find the right team members. An overview of how to hire, who to hire, and how to keep your employees happy.
* Brand recognition: creating a brand and growing a loyal following.
* Goal setting: think toward the future.

This session is for users, designers, and developers who already know the basics of SEO. In this session, you will learn beyond-basic strategies for taking your SEO to the next level. This session received highly positive responses at WordCamp Philly, WordCamp NYC 2017, and WordCamp Lancaster 2018. Some of the testimonials from that can be viewed here: http://pamannmarketing.com/internet-marketing-speaker/ And the slides can be viewed here: https://www.slideshare.net/pam4187/wordcamp-2018-intermediate-seo-strategies

As someone who builds WordPress websites for clients, you’ve probably learned that offering (or requiring) monthly maintenance contracts is smart business. It’s likely you’re including core software, plugin and theme updates as part of your maintenance plan, which ensures a steady income stream you can rely on and helps with your financial forecasting. But are you including website security as part of your project proposal and scope?

The security of your clients’ websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project (or sale?) as an optional add-on for the client to consider after going live. The value of a strong website security posture can be difficult to explain to clients, but when put in the context of their business and possible loss of revenue, it can become an integral part of your offering that separates you from the rest.

In this session, Adam will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, he’ll also offer advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients. Not only does this ensure your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, but also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

You’ve built a website, you love your business, but now what? We’ll cover a wide range of tactics and marketing blends and introduce you to different mediums to begin your marketing efforts.

In this talk, Jeff discusses ways that you can expand your WordPress plugin, theme, or maintenance business to simultaneously help your customers while increasing your sales.

Jeff’s experience handling the marketing efforts for Gravity Forms has led to an immense amount of knowledge. Just as he’s done with Gravity Forms, a few quick changes can sometimes make the biggest impact.

Whether it is for re-using the same code or deploying a bug fix or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system, or VCS. Since Git is the standard VCS over 80% of developers, lets roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.

This talk will briefly explore the need for git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.

Five years ago while walking through the break room at WordCamp Los Angeles, Organizer Alex Vasquez handed him a microphone and asked him to talk about himself and his connection to WordPress. Afterward, Alex stated, “You should do a WordCamp speech someday.” That someday is today as Joe Simpson presents “90 Days to Live: Finding Your Place in the WordPress Community.”

We’ll go over some basic debugging tips for beginning to power user levels, mainly focusing on using wp-debug and some common things to look out for.

After spending five years as a developer and then the last ten years in operations and project management, I have often found myself in a position where I have to estimate what it will take to build a WordPress site without expertise as a front-end or PHP engineer. I will explain how to decompose a project into it’s component parts and scope feature build time as a function of risk to accomplish the three part goal of client acceptance, developer buy-in, and realistic delivery date attainability.

It is great that WordPress allows us to easily create websites and blogs, but most website owners want to make money with their websites by selling more products, getting more potential clients, and promoting their businesses more effectively.

The problem is that most websites are not designed to engage their visitors or make money for their owners and miss great opportunities to convert visitors into customers or paid members.

This session shows simple design changes to our WordPress themes and blogs to help convert visitors and engage them to become customers, subscribers, and repeat visitors. It can be applied to any WordPress theme and covers over 20 actions that website visitors do when they visit your site. I explain how to design our themes to make visitors take action from any demographic, geographic or social media.

We also discuss tapping the power of the Google Analytics bounce rate to measure how our visitors are taking action as well as how to improve our theme’s designs to lower the bounce rate.

Learn everything you didn’t know that you wanted to know about WordPress, from running a profitable business to building core features for tens of millions of sites. Maybe a rant or two. Let’s be friends!

At the simplest, using a child theme is as simple a matter and copying and pasting a few lines of comment text to a style.css file and giving it a home in your themes folder.

But there is so much more you can do to make your child theme really shine. In this talk, we’ll cover some essential tricks and techniques to wrangle your child theme and use it as a powertool for controlling your site.

We will be talking about WHY plugins are not usually as simple as “plug in and go.” We will help users identify reputable plugins, and talk a bit about the difference between free and premium (paid) plugins. We will also talk about some of the common issues that arise when installing third party plugins – theme conflicts, jQuery conflicts, and CSS disasters.

Incorporate UX strategies to jump start your next website project using WordPress as your UX toolset.
You can use WordPress for prototyping, user testing, information architecture and content strategy before any visual design is done.
After business goal sessions, research, problem/solution discovery, customer journey mapping, sticky notes and paper and pen wire framing are done, enter information into a minimally designed WordPress theme.
This WP-UX design process move from sticky notes to interactive iterative prototyping rapidly for user testing and client feedback.
Custom post type and plugins are used for organizing all the projects information – ideation, business goals, note taking, client information, and content development. Menus and widgets are used for a working information architecture.
You will now be prepared for the design and development stage with a working prototype. This workflow works well for small businesses, web consulting clients and freelancers.

It is being said that the economy is morphing into a gig economy. Developers/designers living gig to gig as bigger companies outsource the work.

As this becomes more true, how can a freelancer adapt? I will discuss my personal journey as a freelancer working gig to gig and how saying ‘yes’ to even small projects can lead to greater success.

On the internet, content is king. Whether you are writing content for your business or a large corporation, you must know and respect your target audience. Targeted content is one of the best ways to grow your brand and the old tricks of the trade will no longer cut it. Content for the Modern World takes a deep dive into the new and emerging content marketing trends. Since content patterns are ever-changing, we’ll discover new ways to keep up-to-date with channels to follow and helpful and efficient tools. Have you been struggling to create viral and click-worthy blog titles and email subject lines? We’ll talk about what trends to look out for in 2018, how to create content that resonates and converts, and current SEO tips and tricks to be found on the web.

Want to enhance the look of your content on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest? Do you want to get new search features and featured snippets in Google?

Configuring the right meta tags and including the appropriate structured data can help boost your content chances of outperforming its competition.

This session will review implementing Schema.org schemas for structured data and current best practice meta tags in WordPress using plugins, themes, and widgets.

Attendees will come away from the session knowing how to implement and test Schema.org schemas, Google search features, and current meta tag best practices in WordPress.

The day to day tools used to solve issues can be one of the most important business decisions made… now think about scaling that as your team doubles, quadruple, or even further. Should you build or should you license a tool? Does cost outweigh the features needed? How do your tools grow with the growth of the team?

This talk is designed to chat about making early and ongoing decisions to help your team grow so they can do their best work. With a focus around support, it will revolve around how a team of 3 grew to a team of 40 and the growing pains that have came with it.

Step by step directions on how to increase traffic and conversions from your blog.

Retailers and web designers alike can get caught up in the look and functionality of a store’s website, forgetting that every decision made needs to be made with your business and your user in mind. In this session, we will learn how to identify your website’s primary call to action and create online experiences that encourage conversion. Discover the design principles that have a huge impact on how people interact with and understand your website—and how that can affect your company’s bottom line.

This talk will give a brief overview of the Gutenberg Project and then dive in to converting an existing shortcode into a Gutenberg block.

1 in 5 people in the United States have a disability. That’s a huge market! Now, if you’re a global business, think about how big that number might be on a global basis. Wouldn’t it be nice to increase your user base by 20%?

You’ve probably heard of accessibility and the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), if nothing else, due to some recent lawsuits related to accessibility and usability. But, do you really know what being accessible means? Who should consider accessibility for their site? How do you get started? How will having an accessible website help your business (hint: accessibility even helps with SEO)?

In this session, you’ll get insights from accessibility evangelists at Americaneagle.com, who helps clients expand their audience and grow their businesses by providing extremely user-friendly, high-converting, accessible websites.

In this session, you’ll:

-Get a better understanding of guidelines to help people with accessibility needs
-Learn about common pitfalls and how to avoid them
-Learn how to sell accessibility within your own company – why accessibility is important from business perspective
-See how accessibility applies in the WordPress space

In this world of big data and data driven decisions, having a tool to gather all your data in one place is just as important as the data itself. Enter Google Data Studio and Community Connectors. In this talk, I’ll show you how to use Google Data studio to generate a report from many different data sources: CSV, Google Analytics, BigQuery, and more. You will also learn how to connect Data Studio to almost any data source with a REST API by building a community connector.

As a preface, I attended WordCamp Chicago last year and there were few, if any, presentations for advanced developers so I wanted to present this year with some more advanced topics.

In this presentation, I will show how to create modular custom fields using Advanced Custom Fields Pro to eliminate the need for clients to enter HTML to maintain their sites. Using ACF Pro means a little more development work in the beginning but makes your sites much easier to maintain by your clients and they will be happy. We like happy clients!

Requirements: at least intermediate level PHP and custom theme experience; knowledge of Advanced Custom Fields/ACF Pro plugin.

Topics covered:
– which ACF field to choose for specific setups/situations
– calling ACF content the right way in your theme templates
– when to use Flexible Content/Clone/Group fields
– organizing your Field Groups
– adding instructions to your Fields
– working with Image fields and WordPress built-in srcset retina images
– using ACF Theme Code Pro
– Custom Post Types and ACF
– Case study/walkthrough: Staff CPT and ACF

Q&A to follow presentation.

So, you want to create a website, and make money, but don’t know where to begin? Or maybe you’ve got a site and dabbled a little, but still need more ideas on how to generate cash flow? Well, this is the presentation to be at.

We’ll be talking about:
1. Ways you can make money using WordPress
2. Tips to set you on the right path
3. WordPress plugins to assist you along the way

And by the way, I’m giving you a couple links to a large list of links to some of those money making opportunities too! Hopefully by the time you walk away from this WordCamp, you’ll be able to start creating your own plan, implement some of the tips mentions in this talk, and begin making some money with your WordPress website.

I’m literally giving you the kitchen sink, because you’ll have references to some articles that have lots of opportunities for you to make money with your blog and social media handles.

For far too long we’ve been forced to reuse layout patterns that have worked in the past, creating a web full of sites that all look the same. Lack of browser support, no true layout system, and designers who are forced to make safe decisions for budget or timeline reasons have led us to create work that is rarely creative nor inspiring.

I’ve spent years exploring how we can make the web a more unique space. Many CSS properties have been overlooked, but support has grown and many of these features are available now. One of these new features is CSS Grid Layout, which will play a major role in layout design. Having a true, 2 dimensional grid will give our layouts much more flexibility and it is on us to explore the possibilities.

Gutenberg is coming, and it’s bringing a lot of changes to how WordPress themes and plugins will be developed. What does that mean for a a grumpy, old developer like me? Well if you want to keep working in WordPress, it means it’s time to buckle down and lean something new. In this session we’ll cover some of the changes Gutenberg means for developers, and all the new tools, languages and libraries you need to to learn to start to develop with Gutenberg.

The May 25, 2018 GDPR compliance deadline is looming, and if you own a WordPress website, you’ll need to be prepared, or potentially face heavy fines. We’ll go through the basics of the GDPR and what you need to do to comply and then will open things up for a discussion and questions.

UX (User Experience) is a big buzz word in technology today. But UX is nothing new, and it’s DEFINITELY not going anywhere! Considering the user’s experience is more important than ever these days, and it can really cost you if you ignore it… literally! Last year alone there were over 800 lawsuits against businesses who’s websites or apps didn’t meet accessibility standards, which is required under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title III. Even without facing an actual lawsuit, it is so easy for negative user experiences to snowball into a business’ worst nightmare.

We all know that a positive user experience is important, but sometimes struggle with where to start with our own websites, products, apps or client work. But have no fear! Come learn some tools, skills and processes to start–or level up–your “UX-ing!”