April 3, 2019 — My topic will delve into the depths of psychological principals, such as the Von Restorff effect, Occam’s Razor, the Serial Position effect, and how they relate to UI design and user experience.

This won’t be a hands-on talk, but more of a philosophical look into why we make some of the decisions we do on the web, and how these psychological principals backup a lot of the common sense design techniques we typically already know as designers.

Come ready to think, learn, and apply these cognitive psychology principles and how they relate to your UI/UX work.

Presentation Slides »

April 3, 2019 — You can’t just install a couple of security plugins and call it a day when it comes to safeguarding your WordPress website. Plugins are a great start. The door to your website now has a lock on it. But how about adding a dead bolt? A door chain? A peep hole? Titanium reinforcement? A pet dragon hiding inside? Plugins help with the 5th layer of security. Did you know there are 4 more layers that you are most likely not protecting? Huh? Did he say 4 more? Come learn how to safeguard the other 4 layers so that even with the best of plugins, you drastically reduce your (and your client’s) chances of getting hacked. Just as you would add layers of security to protect your home and family, your WordPress security needs a multi layered approach. Come learn how to build a wall, a moat, and some additional lookout towers to keep the bad guys away from your castle. Oh, and dragons? We’ll talk about them too, if we have time.

April 3, 2019 — Put WordPress to work for you!

In this talk, I will share powerful methods that will help boost your business and improve your productivity by taking full advantage of your WordPress website.

WordPress is already known to be a powerful tool for growing and promoting your services and business.

But what you may not know is that WordPress can also be used to track time, manage your contacts, collect payments, brainstorm ideas, track your health, share files and much more, directly from within your own WordPress website.

We will explore many of the features that will help you take full advantage of your WordPress website to help empower you or your business to its fullest potential.

April 1, 2019 — When a website is inaccessible, it is not just an issue of compliance, it is just bad practice on display. People with disabilities ranging from blindness, deafness, dyslexia and others may navigate and consume content in different ways with assistive technology (like screen readers, captioning or joy sticks). Therefore it is not that difficult to understand why lack of accessibility negatively impacts SEO. Web accessibility is not just for developers, it is just as important for marketers to make it part of their digital marketing to ensure that opportunities for success aren’t missed.

Presentation Slides »

March 31, 2019 — There are 28 Million small businesses that drive the American economy, 46% of small businesses have no websites. Cities are collections of neighborhoods – and neighborhoods are powered by small business. From coffee shop owners to fitness instructors the people we see in storefronts are building and reinforcing the unique character of our cities. Come listen to how WordPress.com and local independent developers are telling the stories of local small businesses in 2-hour increments. Come and join the revolution.

March 31, 2019 — Help make the world a better place with WordPress.

Assisting organizations that make this world a better place is highly inspiring and satisfying. But that can’t be the only reward when you give your professional best. In a nutshell: Birgit shares how to work with nonprofits and how to bring them into the best light online.

She discusses how you can build a donor/member-oriented website and how to incorporate the organization’s “bucket list” within the realities of budgets and capabilities.

You will learn about the wide range of online needs for various types of nonprofits, share info about plugins, and learn about tools to build useful solutions. You’ll walk away with the resources to connect with other nonprofit technologists and services.

Just because the organization is a nonprofit doesn’t mean you can’t make a living building effective websites with a notable online presence.

March 29, 2019 — When you think of business structure, you may think of a business or financial plan. Although both of these documents are great, they still don’t necessarily give you a clear visual to generate sales and attract potential customers to purchase your products and/or services.

In this session, I will discuss how to transform and market your business on the web creating a name for yourself online. This strategy has been proven to generate sales and you’ll be guaranteed a successful online presence.

March 29, 2019 — This talk is about 5 changes that we made as an agency from the time I arrived to today that have helped us grow our revenues and maintain a healthy income stream. They’re simple changes that help you work with the right clients for your agency. The ultimate goal is to stop chasing bad leads, getting bad clients, and keep consistent revenue coming so you’re not working project to project.

March 29, 2019 — Problem: You have a team of developers and you all work locally pushing up to one central development environment. Your client has been adding content to your live environment while your team is working away on other features. Your client decides they want to add calendar functionality to the site, which you can easily do with a plugin. However, configuring this plugin requires database changes. If you make any changes to your database, or even the development environment database, you are going to have to go make those changes again on the live site since they already have content in the site and you can’t copy over that entire database.

UGH! There has got to be a better way! We have all been in this situation more than once. So how do we get out of this situation?!

Solution: Configuration Management! We will talk about what configuration management is and how you can start to use it in your current workflow. We will also talk about WordPress plugins that make our lives easier by using similar methodologies.

March 29, 2019 — Web browsers limit the number of active connections for each domain, but browsers distinguish domains by name rather than by IP address. Domain sharding, in which content is split across multiple subdomains, may drastically improve the user experience of slow page load times for image-heavy pages, but only if your server has sufficient bandwidth. Uploading content to Amazon S3 and using CloudFront to serve images from multiple subdomains has been shown to be an effective way to use domain sharding. In addition, when images are uploaded to S3, a Node.js script is triggered which creates thumbnails and the larger web versions of the full sized, high resolution images. The final step happens during the creation of a WordPress custom post type, where the domain sharding is actually applied.