Sessions

There are a host of reasons why you should care about web performance, but some of them have become more important in the last few years. Besides the potential cost savings of squeezing more performance from the same hardware and the bragging rights of being able to build a fast site, speed has become a compelling part of the user experience, an important factor in search engine treatment of sites, and a must for maintaining or improving conversion rates. Optimizing web performance is challenging because it’s hard to quantify a good user experience, it’s hard to systematize or automate speed optimization, and technology changes–yesterday’s good advice becomes today’s bad advice. Each of these challenges is big enough for its own talk, but this talk will focus on some good advice that has definitely turned…

Vertical. Horizontal. Mobile. Bread crumbs. Fly-outs. Drop-downs. Current page. Current parent. Current ancestor. Hamburger. Footer. In-page. Toolbar. Search. Icons. Home. Links. Logo. Focus. Too often a site’s navigation is an afterthought. Treated as a unitasker. A default design element. Don’t underestimate your navigation. The purpose of this talk is to shed light on the different components and considerations that there are for a site’s navigation, and the role that navigation can play for your website.

Every developer must learn “The WordPress Loop”. It can be simple, yet also very nuanced. We will learn what functions and classes WordPress provides and what the best practices are, what to avoid, how to optimize performance, and much more.

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Is your website accessible for people with disabilities (for instance, people who are blind)? Maybe you have heard about businesses like Domino’s and entertainers like Beyoncé being sued over inaccessible websites? Did you know that in 2018 more than 2200 businesses and organizations were sued because their websites were not accessible?  Sometimes websites are not made accessible because of the perceived large increase of costs — and it can cost more to make a site accessible.  But accessible websites have good ROI (return on investment) for both developers and businesses who make their sites accessible. It’s not just good karma, it’s good business!  This talk will not deal with technical aspects of making sites accessible, but will focus on why building in accessibility on websites is good for business. Business owners will find this information helpful, and anyone who develops sites for businesses (and nonprofits!) will also find tips for “selling” accessibility to clients who may be unfamiliar with the concept, and how to get them to fully embrace it.

You have the presence. You have content. Now the questions start. Is this the right content for our audience? Does it speak to them? Is there too much? Not enough? Wait, who is our audience? Knowing the answer to this last question makes all the difference. In this session, we’ll walk through ways of creating and utilizing an audience-focused digital strategy to help transform everything from your website to your social media presence.

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Finally. You’ve done it. You’ve launched your website. It’s such a sense of accomplishment and pride.

And then you find out your job isn’t over. Updates, spam, backups, brute force, attacks… It’s enough to make your head spin.

We’ll talk through what you should be doing for your site, why it needs to be done and how often you need to do it. Take control of your site’s maintenance with confidence.

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As was the case in the golden era of sailing the high seas, today’s publishing oceans are fraught with chaos (information dealers) and rival powers (information brokers) attempting to stake claim to the storytelling commerce and richness of content (our personal narratives) sailing the vastness of these publishing oceans (information distribution network). These info. dealers have coopted our stories (our personal information is our story), commodified them, and weaponized them in their successful efforts to stir up fear and hatred for the purpose of profit. At its simplest core, Pirate Authors: 1) are beholden to none other than the reader. 2) The more immediate access between story and reader the better. 3) Pirate Authors build assets for their own author brand. 4) Pirate Authors sail as part of a Pirate Crew. 5) Pirate Authors support the broader Pirate Community.

Disaster planning is not where any freelancer or agency wants to start when beginning a working relationship with a new client. Yet, having a solid Plan A can help to ensure you never crack into a disastrous scenario with any client. In this lightening talk, learn the 6 key strategies you need to deploy when building a WordPress based business. Discover ways to create win-win projects and build solid life-long client relationships. To start, what is Plan A, and how do you think through every possible scenario before you meet a potential client? How to ask better questions and build solid expectations from discovery. Learn the ABC technique for building trust, aimed at a prosperous, long-term client. Present your clients with a winning way to take the guesswork out of where you are on their project. Throughout the dynamic presentation, learn about over a dozen proven plugins you can utilize to save time and build a win-win business foundation to support your goals and create a more streamlined approach for better outcomes for you and your clients.

Everyone loves a good story. We connect with them. And, more importantly, we remember them. As digital content marketers and producers, we can harness the emotional power of storytelling to amplify our mission and form strong relationships with our audience. In this session, we’ll examine how, as digital storytellers, we can utilize the different technologies, channels and tools to share your message across multiple digital platforms.

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You installed a security plugin, and you don’t get much traffic anyway since your business is small…so you don’t need to worry about getting hacked, right? Think again! Security incidents are on the rise, and small businesses, and individuals, are easy targets.

While there are several good security plugins that are a useful part of a security plan, securing a WordPress site requires more than a plugin. Plugins are handy tools, but they can give a false sense of security if you don’t consider the entire security landscape.

In this session, you’ll learn a framework you can use to develop a security strategy tailored to your needs. You’ll also learn some actions you can take to help you get a better grasp on security for your website – and your business.

Most find out the hard way that great software architecture is best if built before your one-click-install begins, and we are all architects in one form or another. In a new or established business, automation throughout requires a fundamental shift in thinking along with technology development and specific actions to get you from where you are to where you want to be. During this fast-paced interactive session, you will learn how to identify systemic opportunities to integrate WordPress automation technology. Learn how to map out a customer loop, and trace operations needs through multiple areas of the business including marketing, sales, accounting, human resources, customer support, and production. Find out how to match technology to your operations needs, and tie the implementation into sprints. Sketch out how to deploy agile development into any business. Finally, learn the tips professional utilize to keep research, automation, testing, and deployment on task. Don’t waste another day: rally the troops and deploy cool tools throughout your business using WordPress.

Growing from personally writing each blog post to a network of successful sites with 50 employees producing blog posts and Youtube videos, Jim and Ricky have learned a repeatable process for creating income sites. You’ll learn their “Post Recipe” that has cut the time it takes to write blog posts in HALF, the dead-simple SEO techniques they use to outrank much larger sites, and their “Search Analysis” process that helps them identify low-competition keywords without using keyword tools. You’ll get all the juicy details like their RPMs on each ad network, their top monetization sources, how long it takes their blog posts to rank, and why they don’t do any link building (like, ever). Basically, attending this session is your opportunity to rip off a successful internet marketing company’s secret processes.

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Are you struggling to get your site found in organic search results? Or, maybe you just want your site to appear higher in the rankings? An SEO site audit might be exactly what you need to achieve whatever your SEO goals might be. SEO site audits don’t need to be complex or highly technical to give you quality insights that will positively impact your site’s ability to rank. Instead, they just need to provide you with a processe you can follow and actions you can take that will allow you to create real change. This talk will cover each of the four pillars of SEO – technical, content, on-site, off-site – and give you a way to understand if your site is living up to best practices in each category. And, it will give you actions you can take if you find that your site isn’t meeting the mark.

Allowing flexibility while maintaining visual design consistency can be a time consuming and irritating task with your website, especially one with multiple editors. However, there are approaches to design implementation that can help reduce this burden.

Using color as a catalyst, this session will help you set and use CSS variables, adjust background and text color settings within WordPress blocks (Gutenberg), and place inline SVGs that inherit color styles to more easily maintain your site’s visual identity.

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The key to producing regular quality content is strategizing with your team or your using to make sure what you produce supports your marketing goals. 

To create valuable content, you need to establish a process working with those who know the industry and subject matter best, whether you’re a freelancer, solopreneur, marketing manager, content writer, or developer. By following the process you establish for your team, you will provide value to both your site visitors and your SEO strategy. 

In this talk, we will cover the following topics: 

• The Importance of Regular New Content
• Establishing Goals and Strategy 
• How to Build a Team or Work with a Client
• Defining a Process 
• Connecting and Automating Your Workflow
• Measuring and Monitoring Your Success
  

Attend this talk to learn the value of good content, how to create a culture that includes content creation as a team, and setting up a process for content creation that fits your team, agency, or freelancing workflow.

Do you get frustrated when writing CSS? Do you wish it could do things it can’t yet? Well, with Sass, sometimes it can. We’ll be talking about what CSS preprocessors are, what advantages they have, and how to get set up to use them yourself. And looking at a bunch of CSS of course!

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Only keep things that spark joy in your life, says Mari Kondo, the author of the bestselling book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.” And just like your home, you can also benefit from tidying up your virtual space — your website. The KonMari Method can be applied to your WordPress site plugins, theme files, pages and posts, text and photos, and more. This session presents a KonMari twist to conducting a content audit of a website.

How do you tell if a change you made to your website has unintended side effects? Security updates should rarely result in anything changing visually, but how can you be sure?
Visual regression testing automates the comparison process by taking screenshots of two URLs and comparing them. You can view a report that highlights the differences and use the pass/fail result to make decisions.

In this workshop, we will use the BackstopJS visual regression tool locally, via Node JS, to automate visual QA. We will also learn how to scale and automate these tests across multiple sites and URLs.

Key takeaway: “Writing tests can be easy. Tests will dramatically improve the quality of my work and build confidence that I’m not introducing bugs.”

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Imagine getting to do something you are passionate about every day—to not dread the alarm going off each morning and instead to wake up energized and excited. There is nothing better than starting each day knowing that you love what you do for a living.

Combining your hobbies or your areas of expertise with your skill as a website designer or developer can ignite a successful career—and maybe even one that can generate an income that will help you live the life of your dreams.

We will talk about:

How to find your niche
How to establish yourself as an authority
How to pursue and land clients
How to build a respectable income
How to live your “perfect day” every day

If you are struggling as a generalist or just want to explore other options that will help you get excited about your career, this is the talk for you!

Google Search Console is the most powerful free SEO tool available to you and your website. But, it can be intimidating and stressful if you don’t already know how to use it. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be. This talk will walk you through the nuts and bolts of Google Search Console so you can go home with the confidence you need to use it and start acting upon the insights you gather. The actions you take with your newfound knowledge will lead to better search results and more of the right kind of visitors to your website. Not only are you going to get a tour of the Google Search Console and learn how everything works, but you will also learn strategies that you can easily use to improve the way your pages are ranking in search results.

“I’d like some data about my website users, please.” “Can you tell me how many hits I got last month?” “Why do we we keep getting calls asking the same question? The info is on our website.” Whether you have clients asking analytics questions or these are questions you’d ask yourself — this session will show you how to approach looking at data from Google Analytics without feeling overwhelmed or getting misguided. This in turn can help you make informed, meaningful improvements to your website.

Pinterest is the unsung hero in digital marketing with its incredible reach and high potential to make content go viral. In this presentation, you will learn the power of pinning as we pull back the curtain on why it is the greatest marketing asset that you’re not using. This presentation will explain how you can leverage Pinterest and WordPress to get more attention, trample your competition, and create a behemoth of a marketing machine. No matter what business or niche you are in, spreading your WordPress content on Pinterest is marvelous at helping you:

– Spread your ideas to a targeted audience
– Build up a colossal following with professional visuals
– Create a consistent snowball effect to grow your web traffic for years

Be prepared to take notes as we cover the exact steps to pin your way to page one of search engine results using the robust infrastructure of WordPress, coupled with the aggressive distribution of Pinterest.

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This session was moved from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon!

Multisite is often treated as a dark corner of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite to give context to some of the early decisions. We’ll walk through the structure and load process to show how straightforward it really is. And to help you work with multisite, we’ll cover some common situations and solutions.

Have you ever run your site through one of the many online speed testing tools and received low marks for cryptically-named speed violations you’d never even heard of? Have you ever visited a site yourself and left before it loaded? Worse yet, have you ever taken a look at your analytics and realized your site is losing valuable users due to speed issues? WordPress sometimes gets a bad rap for being slow, but with strategic early planning, a knowledgeable speed testing approach, and practical performance adjustments, WordPress can be quite fast.