June 27, 2019 — WordPress has some great internal APIs to work with WordPress things. Sometimes we need to move beyond $wpdb. We will take a high-level walk through the benefits of things like custom tables, ElasticSearch, Redis, and other external services. Some specific implementation examples will be provided along with learning curve, risks, and potential real world use cases.

June 27, 2019 — Performance is something at the forefront of every site owner’s mind. A slow site will always scare off impatient users and customers. But how can you make your site faster without adding hardware? The answer: caching.

Let’s roll up our sleeves and dig into the different types of caching and how they relate to your WordPress site. If you are wondering how to improve your plugin or site’s performance, then this is the talk for you. Leave with an understanding of the different types of caching and when each type is appropriate so you can improve your site’s performance and conversion rate and start cashing larger checks.

June 27, 2019 — What is a featured snippet and why should you care? If you woke up today thinking you can succeed in SEO doing the same thing you did yesterday, you would be wrong. In 2019, the answer to ranking at the top of Google and driving more traffic is this: optimize for featured snippets (aka “Position 0.”). Come to this session and find out what featured snippets are and how to optimize for them, how to start showing up for voice search, and how to drive more traffic without creating new content or getting more backlinks.

June 27, 2019 — The term “incremental website design” was first introduced to capture the reality of constant new content creation and adjustments inherent in the inbound marketing methodology. Gone are the days of building the website and leaving it alone for months on end. This workshop will focus on packaging and selling monthly retainers for incremental website design and maintenance specifically for small business owners. We will discuss contracts, monthly strategy meetings, goal setting, and the array of service options, and pricing.

Suggested questions:

How do you manage expectations and control scope creep each month?
What are the downside risks of incremental design?
When is it best not to suggest incremental design?

June 27, 2019 — Building your freelance business starts with a purpose and a focused plan for getting there. This workshop is designed to help you set your business goals, and develop the concrete steps you need to take to hit them. By focusing on a few strategic goals, you’ll be able to prioritize your time on the areas that will bring the greatest impact to your business.

June 27, 2019 — If you’ve ever wanted to build your own plugin for WordPress, this is the session for you. We’re going to start from scratch and work our way up.

First, we’ll take a look at the basic requirements of a plugin. Next we’ll take our example plugin idea and break it into the various components and steps that we’ll need. We’ll code up the plugin together and install it on our sites, debugging any problems that arise. Finally, we’ll look at ways that we could further extend our plugin.

This tutorial assumes some HTML and CSS knowledge, but you don’t already need to be familiar with writing PHP or JavaScript.

June 27, 2019 — Internationalization (I18n) is important for plugins and themes as it helps your published plugin or theme reach international audiences. How do you internationalize your themes and plugins? Why is it important? Why should you care? Come find out these answers and how to get started internationalizing your themes and plugins. We will look at practical steps and real code to see how everything fits together.

June 26, 2019 — Through this session, Prasad is going to share his experience on how empathy & ownership towards the project helps in successful delivery. Keeping in mind the client success as an end goal, Prasad will explain some important points one should focus on, along with the examples of how it helped him.

Presentation Slides »

June 26, 2019 — 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.

In this talk, we will discuss:

How to see where your users are coming from
What pages/posts your users most spend time on
What actions your users do on your website
What UTM codes are and how to use them
How to see exactly which links in your marketing drives the most traffic and conversions
And much more!

June 26, 2019 — This talk will provide an overview of the planning and execution of taking over an existing website. Sometimes we don’t get to start a project at the beginning. This talk will show users what to expect, and how to be prepared for it. Topics will include: Executing a safe handoff, initial housekeeping, planning for improvements, staging and deployment of changes, stakeholder management, and ongoing maintenance.