January 24, 2024 — Your customer experience probably sucks right now. But you can fix it.

Today, more than ever, customers want to find themselves in your brand story, in your content, and throughout your website. They expect their needs and desires to be met instantly and consistently, anywhere, anytime. Companies who can innately understand the world of their customer, adapt to their needs, and design specifically for their benefit can gain a competitive advantage that wins hearts and business.

During this session, Chris Belli, VP of Studio Science, a leading brand experience agency, will walk you through key customer experience pillars to discover more profitable opportunities, design more desirable products, and convert more loyal customers.

January 24, 2024 — SEO has important nuances when you are working with a local business and need to focus on their specific geographic area.

Your Local SEO efforts are more effective when you have an optimized website and Google Business Profile (GBP) for your business. They work together and when done right can amplify your results. We’ll go over what this means for Local Search.

This workshop is for businesses and agencies that want to get more out of their Local SEO efforts.

January 24, 2024 — Consent management platforms (CMP) are used by companies to legally document and manage a user’s consent choices prior to collecting, sharing, or selling user data from online sources such as websites and apps that use cookies, embedded videos, and other tracking technologies.

This of course applies to WordPress websites. Privacy laws are becoming more and more dominant in our digital laws, and thus, we must know what information is being stored by both our theme and of course, plugins that we install. But how do weknow which CMP to choose? How does it handle the deletion of cookies? Any free choices? How much can they cover when it comes to my own plugins? Or third party plugins/themes?

In this talk we will go over the basics, as to what our options are, how can we categorize cookies and local storage data, and all the technical details we need to know in order to choose a CMP wisely with our WordPress website.

January 24, 2024 — In this talk Steve Jones, CTO of Equalize Digital will cover how to implement an accessibility-first approach to WordPress development projects. This ensures a truly accessible digital experience for all users, specifically those with disabilities. WordPress developers have a unique responsibility to take a proactive approach to develop blocks, plugins, and themes that are fully accessible at launch. These products are generally content producing or duplicated on multiple websites throughout the web. With WordPress’ large market share of websites, remedying accessibility issues retroactively can be a daunting and expensive task. Prioritizing the accessibility-first methodology takes accessibility from being a baseline standard to a core project requirement. Moreover, accessibility-first equals people first.

January 24, 2024 — I watched a few YouTube videos on security in WordPress and if you think all you need to do is install a WordPress plugin (as these videos suggested) I highly recommend coming to this talk.

There is a lot more than just installing a plugin to secure a site, there are tools like using CloudFlare, using an actual firewall, etc.

I’ll walk you through a lot of things I do for the couple hundred sites that I host.

January 24, 2024 — Congratulations, you created a WordPress blog! You have taken the first step in contributing to the online world. But in today’s internet environment, just writing a post and clicking publish is not enough.

This presentation will show you great ways to promote and increase traffic to your WordPress blog. From podcasts, social media, and more, you have the power to become popular on the internet.

January 24, 2024 — There’s no doubt that we are in a global economy. Now, more than ever before, people from around the world can connect with you real-time, to read your blog, buy your goods or use your services.

But ….how does one begin to actually connect with the world?

In this talk, we will explore diverse ways you can bring your blog, talents, and products to an international audience…. Starting with WordPress, of course!

January 24, 2024 — Oftentimes, website providers think they are “adding value” by giving away some of their work or time. Typically this means 1) not getting paid for discovery activities and/or 2) not getting paid for scope changes.

Regardless, giving away work ALWAYS sets the incorrect expectation with the client, and ends up eating away at the project profit margin. The answer?

Use a paid discovery process that delays finalizing the estimate until AFTER a deep dive discovery is complete.

Establish and implement a “set-in-stone” change procedure that uses a change budget.

January 24, 2024 — What is “agile”? What is scrum? Are they the same thing? How do I know if I’m being “agile”?

These questions and more will be answered in this discussion on what it means to bring agility to your business. This talk is not just a technical discussion and in some ways will touch all aspects of your business.

Learn why embracing change is important, why more frequent customer interaction “counterintuitively” saves you time and money, and learn some traits of the most successful teams in the software industry.In this session we will cover:

How to use a 2-step proposal process to ensure you get paid for ALL discovery activities without fear of the client going elsewhere.
How to establish and implement a solid change control process that helps set proper client expectations, minimizes frivolous change requests, and allows you to always (yes, ALWAYS) come in on time and under budget. (It works like magic!)

January 24, 2024 — When it comes to marketing, there are a million things you can do, and a million more things everyone tells you “you MUST” do. When it comes to REAL LIFE and what actually works with clients today, there is a much simpler approach. This talk with explore a scaled back version of marketing that actually works. If your client can survive in business for 10+ years and you have a hand in that, you have a built a relationship that will last through good times and bad, no matter what the economy is doing.

In this talk, Elizabeth will share how she approaches Branding, Websites, Social Media, Blogging/Podcasting, Email Marketing etc, in an “minimalist” way so you can grow your client base in a way that will make your company (and your client’s companies) stand the test of time.