August 31, 2017 — Google is always changing up it’s algorithms. It’s not because Google wants to keep you on your toes, but Google wants you to put your best foot forward.

In order to do that, they’ve put together Quality Guidelines and have started to enforce them. So… what does that mean for the website owner?

I’m going to go over a checklist of things you should be doing with your WordPress blog. Some of it is about site speed, security, and content. Hopefully this checklist will help you understand what you should be doing for your website.

August 31, 2017 — As WordPress professionals, we are lucky to be surrounded by a plethora of opportunity. But where is your place in the WordPress ecosystem? We’ll share experiences and advice that will help you navigate your career in WordPress.

August 31, 2017 — One can have many reasons to form a WordPress agency. At required+ we didn’t think about becoming an agency in the first place. Initially we teamed up to build an online platform that scratched an itch in all of us, we simply wanted to try and prove a point with the idea we had. All of a sudden we were running a thriving job board for the Swiss web industry and had a beautiful side project to work on. In order to keep our creative freedom and sovereignty, we didn’t want to take money from venture capitalists or investors. Therefore we came up with a concept to keep us going while allowing space for our individual lifestyles. We started to take on interesting client projects, this way we continued to build interesting sites & apps. I would like to talk about our journey with Freshjobs.ch – a job board for Swiss web professionals. The talk is intended to be a business talk. I’m going to share our experience in designing & building an online platform on top of WordPress. I’ll share some secrets and learning from running & maintaining it for about 5 years now.

Presentation Slides »

August 31, 2017 — My talk will focus on the genesis of creativity, whether it occurs out of necessity (oh god I have no job), boredom (this job is lame), or good ol’ fashioned ambition (I think I’ll write 3000 words about elves today). I’ll talk about the unmitigated disaster that was my first Wordcamp talk back in Edmonton in 2013, plus how people can use their own personal story as a backdrop to creative outlet. My talk should be about 20 minutes long. My basic outline: Intro: Wordcamp 2013 when my computer died and I was forced to be creative. Part 1. Unacceptable boredom: backing up to life in a tiny cubicle Part 2.

August 31, 2017 — All prospects and clients have a budget in mind. As much as we wish their budgets could allow them to have a website with highly custom designed and built features, sometimes, that is not the case. As website designers and developers, we often have to get creative with the solutions we offer to fit client budget expectations. At Orbit, we leverage a site builder theme with easy-to-use modular content types alongside a process that allows us to quickly and efficiently produce a website that the client is proud of, achieves their goals, and fits their budget. Come listen and learn from our experiences to help you do the same for your clients!

August 31, 2017 — Rachel Martin is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and resides in Scotland. Several years ago Rachel started blogging after a natural disaster in New Zealand as a form of therapy. You can see her blog at https://rachel.blog.

We talk about her presentation at WordCamp Edinburgh, which was the closing keynote presentation titled “Blogging as therapy: a personal journey.”

Her work at Automatic includes providing support for Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress and Simplenote.

As is the case in most of the interviews I do, it never ceases to amaze me at the information and life lessons people provide. It was truly a pleasure to interview Rachel.

August 31, 2017 — BuddyPress is a community website plugin for WordPress and can be used to build things from social networks to intranets to education sites and anything in-between that is build around a community. We will dissect the features of BuddyPress and some use cases for them as well as look at examples of BuddyPress sites in the wild. Come see what the heck BuddyPress actually is and how you can use it to build powerful community-based websites for you or your clients.

August 31, 2017 — Topics will cover:
• Defining a story (The Story Spine)
• Translating dreams into goals and actionable steps
• Using the larger story as your roadmap
• Driving your process with ‘why’

August 31, 2017 — Did you know that data entered into a website form is often passed across the Internet in plain text? Sensitive information such as addresses, credit card numbers, or other personal data is vulnerable to being intercepted by clever yet malicious trolls. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a security technology that encrypts data passed between a web server and a browser, rendering sensitive data into a garbled hodgepodge of meaningless character strings. Using SSL to serve up your content can give you (and your users) peace of mind. It can also greatly impact how Google ranks your site. This presentation will go over the fundamentals of SSL and demonstrate real-world methods for its implementation on WordPress installations.

August 31, 2017 — How we handle bad decisions examples include: violations of regulations, bad industry practice, and how to get the client to take your side or at least protect yourself at worst.