April 15, 2017 — There are a lot of things that go into running a service business beyond finding clients and building things for them. You’ve got to manage contracts, invoices, estimates, proposals, and more. You need to keep clients informed on progress, collect payments, and follow up on those payments invariably missed. On top of all of that, you need to have some sort of repeatable process to make projects run smoothly and keep getting in new work.

We’re going to look at a few ways that you can use WordPress to manage your WordPress business. This includes managing all of that paperwork from the backend of your site, allowing clients to make payments, and setting up a progress and ticketing system. We’ll also take a look at some ways to use your site to gain and manage leads.

From there you’ll be able to manage your business with ease and focus on the most important part: keeping your clients happy and successful!

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April 15, 2017 — Choosing typefaces and applying them to your WordPress website can be frustrating, even designers go around and around about this. There are so many options and decisions to make—it’s hard to know where to begin. What gives?

You will learn the importance of typography in website design, how to choose font families, and tips for implementation. Armed with the basic understanding of typography and how it relates to the success of your website, you will be confident the choices you make will be based on more than a whim.

April 15, 2017 — Single page apps are all the rage these days, but did you know you can use WordPress to help you build one!? This presentation will go over the basics of single page app frameworks (React/Angular) and how to use them with WordPress.

April 15, 2017 — When making websites over the years, I often centered content vertically and created responsive columns. In order to achieve the aforementioned effect, I would use a css hacks. Every hack came with unique set of customized code for every major browser. Flexbox and grid were established (2009-12) to replace bloated use of ‘float’ and layout hacks. With Google partial to fast mobile friendly pages, flexbox serves content quickly and robustly, using less code. Current WordPress themes generally seem to be using non-flexbox methods to create a similar result; it’s likely this will change over the coming years. I am an advocate of flexbox. My presentation will answer the following questions. 1) Where did flexbox come from and where is it used now? 2) When should one use flexbox? 3) How does one use flexbox? 4) What is the future of flexbox? 5) Why is flexbox relevant for WordPress designers and developers?

April 15, 2017 — The WordPress industry is dominated by freelancers, remote workers and a distributed workforce. Though the Community as a whole is strong, the day to day reality for many is isolation.

Sure, there’s Twitter, Slack, and the lot. But seeing people’s faces and hearing their voices is the way humans connect. This is why Face to Face Communication is such an important part of human connection. And you can’t have a community without connection.

It’s easy to take meetups for granted or to believe that their only value is in the exchange of information. However, the value of in-person meetups cannot be understated. Meetups are a great defence against isolation. They inspire, create relationships, and are a great place to learn. Yet, not everyone lives close enough to attend a WordPress meetup.

In Orange County, for example, we have several meetups to choose from which have become mini communities in and of themselves. By building relationships, there is a cohesive bond is formed. We generally call this friendship.

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” CS Lewis

Knowing that you’re not alone is the first step in friendship. The exchange of ideas — theme suggestions, the best form plugins, and CSS tricks — all help the meetup attendee with her work, but even more, the discussion is a platform upon which friendships are built. And friendships are the undergirding, supportive structure of any thriving community — like a coral reef.

April 15, 2017 — Adam left college with a degree in Advertising Design and went straight to work on the factory floor making office furniture. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined but having been raised in a blue-collar family, he was taught that a strong work ethic would make you invaluable to “the company” and “they” would provide the financial security and stability needed to raise a family and enjoy life. In other words, this meant working in the same stark metal building for thirty years with twenty-minute lunch breaks and 2 weeks vacation in the summer.

In this session Adam will detail how he discovered WordPress and the open source community, the many businesses he’s experimented with, and how he’s utilized those experiences to continually fuel his entrepreneurial spirit and create his own path to a work/life balance and how you can too.

No matter what your passion, WordPress can be an integral tool to helping you achieve your dreams and success in your own business.
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
― Babe Ruth

April 15, 2017 — WordPress’s content management system is only one piece of a very large puzzle. Acronyms abound as a site prepares for launch—from DNS to SSL to CDN, you’re up against a series of technical tasks that need to go well to go live.

Once you get to launch, there’s a whole litany of concepts a site owner ought to understand: optimizing and maintaining SEO, keeping the site secure, monitoring performance, tracking analytics, and keeping everything up to date. Plus, what do you do when performance slows down, or your site gets hacked, or users aren’t converting like you expect?

In this session, I’ll give an introduction to everything from domain hosting to site launching to cleaning a hacked site—sharing proven tools I’ve used to help hundreds of clients. You’ll get a better idea of what you can manage on your own and better understand the things you can’t (or don’t want to).

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April 15, 2017 — Sub-title: Stand Out in a Highly Competitive Market is the Future of Sales and Marketing

This is a straight shooting (no holding back) talk to help WordPress companies grow in the hugely competitive market segments they are in.

There is a mega trend impacting WordPress companies. It is the fight for ATTENTION. We all crave attention. Attention is the new business currency. Millions of messages come at us faster than ever before, and it confuses the average prospect.

If you are in a highly competitive service-based business like WordPress Developers and Designers, you want your message to be heard. No, wait…you NEED your message to be heard. It is what makes the difference between sustainable success and stagnation.

In this signature talk, Gene shows WordPress shops how to:
– Stand out from the white noise of the competition
– Build deep trust by establishing yourself as a credible expert
– Develop the mindset and skill set needed to move beyond your comfort zone and accelerate your personal and professional growth
– Dominate your market as the go-to authority in your field
– Create new action steps to increase your sales and bottom line profits

April 15, 2017 — Imagine a website that is getting 1000 users a day. Now imagine that about 50 of them are spending money on the site. You probably want to get more of the users that are spending money on the site but how do you know where these users are coming from? Maybe you know that all of them are coming from Twitter or Facebook but do you know which post or tweet refers the most people who actually convert to customers? Or, how do you know how many signed up to receive your lead magnet?

This is where analytics comes in. Analytics allows us to track where visitors come from and how they behave on your website. You can see which tweet, post, ad, video, etc. brought the most users to your site. Then, you can also see which link brought the most users who converted into customers. Analytics allows you to see which pages the visitors go to, how long they are on each page, where they come from, and much more so you know how to get more converting visitors to your site.

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April 15, 2017 — Global marketing takes more than just enabling traffic to your website from other countries. Encouraging multilingualism and cultural diversity will help determine how involved your business can be with the online world. In this presentation I will discuss WHY it is important to cater to foreign audiences in their native languages and why translation is the next step to grow a global business.

I’ll cover the importance of translation being done correctly and some of the best tools and practices that are widely available for WordPress website translation. This will include:

How Translation (or lack of) can Affect your Business Reputation
Common Mistakes or Mistranslations
Ways to Connect with your International Audience

I will have a special section on optimizing eCommerce websites for different languages. This will include how to create a pleasant experience that encourages your consumers to convert, return, and advocate for your business.

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