June 5, 2017 — In this session, we’ll take a dive into WordPress and all of it’s settings and features. We’ll discuss:

– Posts vs. Pages
– WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
– Adding Content
– Installing Plugins and Themes

June 5, 2017 — After investing so much time, effort, and resources in developing your WordPress website and marketing your brand, you should expect a flood of conversions on your site. After all, if you offer something of true value, it’s in your audience’s best interest to contact you and buy from you.

This presentation will walk you through 31 effective techniques to get more of your site visitors converting. Some of the techniques will focus on behavior-based data gleaned from heat maps, scroll maps, and A/B testing, while others will focus on messaging, neuromarketing, and human psychology, while yet others will focus on color, design, and UX elements.

Whether you are looking to sell more on your website, increase leads, promote an upcoming event, build your email list, or drive site visitors to some other conversion event, you’ll walk away from this session with highly specific methods for doubling your website’s conversion rate.

June 5, 2017 — Creating high quality content before designing and developing a custom WordPress site can be the difference between a successful project and one that goes over budget, wastes time and leaves everyone feeling frustrated. Unfortunately, the reality is that clients underestimate the enormous task of writing and editing and aggregating the right content.

After some trial and error, our team at Big Room Studios has worked to incorporate content gathering, writing and editing into every part of the web development process.

I’ll go over how we incorporate content creation into:
1. The sales process
2. Client intake and education
3. Wireframing and Information Architecture
4. Development sprints
5. Final writing and editing before launch

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2017 — WordPress is known to be a powerful and versatile tool for rapid proof-of-concept web app development. During this presentation, we will investigate why WordPress may be the best tool to help create your next web app.

* In this presentation, we will look at different examples of business cases where WordPress is the best option, and also where it falls short.
* I will illustrate how I have solved the most common UI patterns required by web apps using plugins, web resources and occasionally code.
* We will walk through one of the apps I’ve built from idea to development to production to see the patterns in action.
* Finally, I share other considerations from my experience like deployment, syncing dev environments, AJAX, the REST API and iterating on feedback.

After the presentation, the audience will have a better understanding of WordPress for web app development. They will be ready to build a minimum viable product (MVP) web app on top of WordPress even if they have limited coding experience.

June 5, 2017 — Content is a huge bottleneck for freelancers and agencies. (How many sites have you seen get delayed because of content loading?) I’ve felt the pinch on projects big and small, both in-house and with client work. But I’ve also learned a few tricks for getting around it.

In this session we’re going to look at four approaches for dealing with the content problem: Making it an up-front dependency; treating content development as an early project phase; working on content in tandem with a website build; and making content development a standalone value-added service. We’ll also review a handful of different tools and resources that make content less of a pain to work with.

June 5, 2017 — O que é preciso para montar se uma loja on-line de sucesso?

Para além do WooCommerce, quais são os elementos essenciais, plugins recomendados e configurações mínimas para que se consiga tornar o WordPress numa das maiores plataformas de comércio eletrónico do mundo.

Nesta apresentação irei abordar todos os pontos que considero os mais importantes para que valha a pena o investimento e se tire o maior proveito: desde temas, plugins, sistemas de faturação, de envio, inventário, passando pelos sistemas de pagamentos e plataformas de suporte e marketing.

June 5, 2017 — The WordPress community and how much we are all changing our and the lives of others, every day.

Our community helped me a lot to get through some pretty rough period in my life last year, and this is going to be my first talk about it and probably the only one.

I am going touch base a little bit about #WPDrama, and probably about the future of the whole community.

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2017 — When I first contacted Marco Andre about doing an interview, he stated that he would like to have some of the other organizers sit in and take part in the interview.

I did not realize how lucky I would get to interview the group while they were preparing for their Meetup.

Marco Andrei, Rodrigo, Gustavo and Eduardo were part of the ograinzing team for WordCamp Porto Alegre, which was held on May 6thof this year. WordCamp Porto Alegre has been held twice in the past few years and this group hopes to make this an annual event.

We talk about their involvement in the WordPress Community, as well as being involved in other tech related groups in their area.

In preparation for their evening Meetup, Marco Andrei, Rodrigo, Gustavo and Eduardo had prepared a cake and cupcakes to celebrate the 14th anniversary of WordPress.

June 4, 2017 — You wrote a really awesome bit of code and submitted it to the directory, only to find out your code MAYBE wasn’t so great. And worse, even after it was approved, people can be pretty terrible about things. Judgmental. Mean. And now you have complaints, conflicts, bad reviews, broken code, security patches, and more. AUGH!

It’s OKAY!

Everyone’s first plugin sucks. Everyone runs into unexpected conflicts. Learning how to handle them is what will take you from a good developer to a great one.

In this talk, I’ll discuss :

* That first review (what really happens)
* Preventing name conflicts (classes, functions and when to use if-exists)
* Replying to reviews (and when not to)
* Replying to support tickets (and when to say ‘no’)
* Handling security reports (what we really mean by ‘responsible disclosure’)

June 4, 2017 — Prior to the development of the current Campus News site, there wasn’t really a public facing news site as much as a static archive of press releases without rich content, pictures, seo, or any kind sorting mechanism. Since we migrated in to the new site, we’ve seen a huge improvement in the quality and volume of news content and a dramatic increase in engagement with UTHSC news.

This talk will focus on how we were able to leverage custom post types, taxonomies, fields, and templates and other built-in features to develop a highly customized, powerful site with lots of cool features including our campus-announcements system and an archive of press coverage from outside media. I’ll also emphasize some of the steps we took to ensure a quality user experience for the Communications and Marketing department who maintains the site’s content.

Presentation Slides »