October 5, 2015 — A tenth of a second can make a huge difference with how many people stay on your site. What about a whole second? Or two? Or *five*?

Find out what HHVM is, how and why it’s being used by the biggest sites on the Internet and how you can use it right now to improve not only the speed of your site and how that can improve your conversions.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2015 — The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2015 — I’ll give an introduction to the WordPress REST API and Angular.js in the form of a high level overview (why they exist, what problems they solve, the future of the REST API), and proceed to walk through building theme components with the REST API and Angular.js. I’ll discuss the concerns leading a theme author to chose to build asynchronous components, such as caching issues. Live examples of REST API/Angular.js components will be discussed, with examples of how I built them. Time permitting I’ll conclude by building a REST API/Angular.js theme component live, though will likely do it Emeril Lagasse style (here’s a directive I baked earlier!) due to time constraints.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2015 — Benchmarking is an important practice for high-traffic sites, or even low traffic sites that may have high-traffic spikes.

What will happen to your site if it hits the Reddit front page? Without benchmarking and stress testing, there’s no good way to know how your site will perform under true load.

In this session, you’ll learn some of the basics of benchmarking, some good tools to get started, and when stress tests are the right tool for your site’s performance concerns. Finally, you’ll learn some common performance problems found through stress tests, and their solutions.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2015 — WordPress offers a lot of power as a CMS, but all too often we can lose sight of the most essential of those three letters—the Content. Whether you’re a web designer, web developer, or end user of WordPress, potential pitfalls abound when planning for the structure and delivery of content is left until the eleventh hour. Using examples from real projects, I will demonstrate how taking a content-first approach to our WordPress work allows us to better harness the awesome power underneath its hood, and save ourselves and our clients from massive (and expensive!) content headaches down the road.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2015 — How to identify the most lucrative prospects.
How to pitch large projects (value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections.
How to execute (IA, Project Management, Resources, post-launch support.)

Presentation Slides »

October 4, 2015 — WordPress has plenty of options, both built-in and third-party, to be used as a content framework to create delightful administrative experiences that will improve your workflow and impress your clients; both those who use the site and manage content. Using WordPress’ built in Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies, and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin; learn how to use these to your advantage to create a great WordPress Dashboard UI and to better organize content for the admin-user and the end-user, and to streamline the entire editorial workflow with little development work necessary to make it happen.

If the structure of WordPress leaves you wanting more, coming into WordPress from another platform, or new to theme development in general; this will help demystify WordPress and help you make WordPress work for you rather than working around WordPress.

October 3, 2015 — Jetpack is a powerful, but sometimes daunting plugin for new users, so I’d like to unpack some of its most popular and useful features and give attendees some concrete things they can then go and try themselves on their own sites. I’d like to cover the basic areas that Jetpack’s modules can be grouped into, and then go in depth with some of the most powerful ones.

Presentation Slides »

October 3, 2015 — Writing for the web is not like writing for any other media. An art and a science, it involves placing keywords correctly and in the proper density; it involves writing engaging copy that can be easily scanned; and it involves promoting the writing for maximum visibility. Learn how to attract an audience for either personal or professional content from a professional writer, using WordPress and selected plugins.

Takeaways

Learn how to correctly use keywords so they work
Learn the tricks of writing online content
Learn how to promote your writing online, for free

Presentation Slides »

October 3, 2015 — WordPress upgrades, they bring us new features, faster sites, and better security. But pushing that upgrade button can be a scary moment, unless you’ve ensured your site is ready and compatible. I’ll show you the best practices for ensuring your site is ready including a simple strategy that works whether you manage one site or hundreds.