July 26, 2019 — From the brains of @themattyg comes a panel discussion on the use of page builders now that Gutenberg is in core. Joining us will be @MichelleAmes and guests yet to be announced!

Questions that could be touched on:

What does Gutenberg solve that Page Builders don’t? Vice Versa?Should page builders continue to be their own interface or adapt and integrate into Gutenberg as a collection of blocks?Why would a user want to use both a page builder and Gutenberg on the same site? Would they want to?Should developers focus on developing for page builders, Gutenberg or neither?How are you using Gutenberg today? How are you using page builders today?How do we change our approach to building sites for clients, when they have this new level of control?When starting a new WordPress site, what considerations would you take when choosing between a page builder, Gutenberg or the classic editor? Which one would you choose?If you already use a page builder on your site, would you consider switching to Gutenberg?

July 26, 2019 — This session will teach participants the essentials of any website, (Home, About, and Contact pages) Using WordPress.com and Gutenberg in one session. This includes some of the blocks that you might need to build each of these pages that make a more complete experience and save you time.

July 26, 2019 — Have you ever had a client insist on having admin access to their website? They own it, so they have that right…but how long did it take before they called you to fix what they broke once they logged in?

While clients who break their own sites are guaranteed revenue, those calls never come at a convenient time and are ALWAYS urgent.

So what can we do to both empower our clients and make sure their sites continue to run well?

This talk will present several ideas for ways that we can do just that, including:

Helpful pluginsHow to train a client in WordPressHow to set user permissionsHow to set pricing for fixing mistakesCreating a user manualOther tips for managing the client relationship

Attendees will leave with some good ideas and action items to better help clients help themselves…or not.

July 26, 2019 — Starting a blog changed my life not once, but twice. That was never my initial intention. It was meant to be a passion project that helped me rekindle that long lost love of writing.
I share the ups and downs of my blogging journey, the many mistakes I’ve made, what I’ve learned and where I am now (running a consulting business, an instructor at Sheridan College).
I’m a huge believer in sharing your story because you never know who is reading, who is watching and who is listening.

July 26, 2019 — How do you eat an elephant? Answer: one bite at a time. Like anything overwhelming, breaking it down into bite-size, easy to achieve components is the way to become efficient and efficiency is the path to profitability.

All too common in the free and open source software market are developers who are financially frustrated, to put it lightly. Would you like to level up your profitability?

What’s stopping you as a freelancer from financial freedom? Let’s work on some of the practical things that, with just a bit of tweaking, can help you earn $100,000 in one year.

In this talk by Mike Demopoulos (his friends call him “Demo”) will talk about ways to streamline your process, have client outreach like the big brands, and become profitable.

July 26, 2019 — WordPress is a great place for visual artists to share their work, but getting things set up can be challenging. In this talk, I’ll cover everything from preparing imagery of artwork for the web, useful built-in WordPress functions, recommended plugins, and improving the user’s viewing experience. I will also demonstrate my free WordPress theme, optimized for artists.

July 26, 2019 — This technical session is for developers as well as users with at least a little coding experience. After a brief introduction to what Gutenberg is and what it can do, the presentation will show simple bits of code and demonstrate how these bits of code translate into a Gutenberg block.

Building a Gutenberg block is very simpleGutenberg blocks make the editing experience a lot richer

July 26, 2019 — Does it feel like keeping up with SEO has been a wild ride the past year?

The one constant in SEO is change, but the past 12 months have been especially turbulent. And the rapid pace of change promises to continue. Hard to know which changes to pay attention to and what to do about them

Voice Search? Mobile-First Index? E-A-T and algorithm updates? Site speed? Structured Data and Schema? Major changes to SEO Tools (Hello, Yoast SEO and Google Search Console!)

Whew.

You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed. We’ll get right into the nitty-gritty of understanding how we need to adjust our thinking and adapt our WordPress sites, content and processes to succeed in this new reality, while maintaining our sanity. And slay a few sacred cows in the process.

We’ll particularly focus on the needs of small business sites, bloggers and small to medium, e-commerce sites while keeping the jargon under control.

July 26, 2019 — Dealing with multiple themes, layout editors, and plugins is hard. The key is having a semi-standard workflow for getting sites from concept to production efficiently. You’ll see how using a few standard tools (Plesk, Elementor, Gravity Form, ACS) you can efficiently build complex sites for yourself or your clients.

July 26, 2019 — In this talk, I will introduce several tools and best practices for developing WordPress sites in a local environment. I will compare the most popular options and show a quick 5 minute tutorial on how to use each of the top 3 (Local by Flywheel, Desktop Server and MAMP)