March 11, 2019 — Are you creating a beautiful website that, in the end, does not perform to your customers’ expectations?

Before you start any actual design work at all are you clear on what the desired business outcomes and objectives for the website are? What do you want users (prospects) to do on this new website? – and how will you (and your customer) define the success or otherwise of these actions?

Over 70% of new websites fail to live up to the customers’ expectation. So we have found that the first goal should be to map user flow – the actions that typically take prospects from their entry point into the site through conversion funnels including follow-up sequences and towards the final action (signup, purchase and so forth) and to share this process with our clients.

In this talk we will take a look at how we do customer journey maps and the role of the map in website design, creation and integration into a successful marketing funnel.

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March 9, 2019 — Malicious activity is an unfortunate reality when maintaining a web presence today. Most people involved in the web industry know someone who encountered the aftermath of a disruptive attack–if they haven’t themselves. Because of this, awareness of security best practices is at an all-time high. To many, though, it may not be clear exactly why these measures are important.

To remedy that, we’ll be taking a practical look at what’s actually happening when a website gets attacked, as well as discussing the hows and whys along the way. From understanding why small sites still get hacked, to why password reuse is really as bad as everyone says, we’ll explore the rationale behind the security principles you’re always being told to follow.

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March 8, 2019 — Lets get to basics of riding this new Blue Whale and help your self with containerization and orchestration.

What is Docker, and why can it be really good thing? How to setup docker as my local environment? Is it safe to use it in production? Docker compose?

Get to know about Docker, different integrations and implementations, how to run it, scale it, control it.

March 8, 2019 — How many times have you been in a situation where the client is never happy with the results, no matter what you do? How many ’emergency’ messages have you responded to because the site isn’t quite right in some new way? How many clients have you lost or fired because they honestly had no idea what they really wanted? If you answered yes to any of those questions, this session is for you!

Gathered from years of ‘learning it the hard way’ I am excited to share my knowledge with Freelancers, Agency Owners, Project Managers, Business Development professionals as well as anyone else who wants to better manage conversations.

Walk away from this talk with a better understanding of:
– Project And Sales Pipeline Strategy
– Uncovering Client Business Goals
– KPIs vs KPIs
– Managing Scope

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March 8, 2019 — When’s the last time you’ve met a developer that wasn’t busy? We as developers are constantly pressed for time and are always looking for tools to make our jobs easier.

WP-CLI can be one of the most powerful tools in a developers tool belt if used correctly. This tool can be used to automate the simplest or most complex tasks with ease. All from the comfort of your command line.

In this session, I’ll show you a few specific examples where WP-CLI can save you tons of time by performing tedious, or repetitive tasks, and getting you back to the things you want to be doing.

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March 8, 2019 — For those of us that rely greatly on Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for customizing our themes, the release of Gutenberg was and still is scary at times.

Have no fear! acf_register_block() allows you to create your own Gutenberg blocks using just Advanced Custom Fields.

You will learn:
– ACF & it’s awesome capabilities
– How to create Gutenberg blocks with ACF
– A few other handy ACF tips & tricks

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March 8, 2019 — In this talk, we’ll walk through setting up an Alexa Skill using the VoiceWP plugin. Participants will learn how to test a skill locally, develop it using the WordPress REST API, and publish the skill to the Alexa marketplace.

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March 8, 2019 — While large swaths of the WordPress community were protesting the arrival of Gutenberg with mixed feelings, I chose to embrace it early and often, but even late into its development, I felt unable to produce the same level of work my clients expected–so it was always back to the old ways: page builders and custom fields. In fall 2018, I finished a project that relied way heavily on custom fields; it was slow and its admin UI was confusing and it made like 150 custom fields per post, but it worked and looked great. After, though, I paused and I asked myself “am I sure I can’t do this with just Gutenberg?” So I set out to try. Spoiler alert: its possible, and I did it.

In this presentation, I’ll show you the old way vs the new way, and explain how I needed to change the way I do and think about things to deliver an identical site while shucking the crutches of page builders and custom fields and custom templates that has propped up my work for so long.

March 8, 2019 — It’s no secret that WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world.

Gatsby is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools to build static sites, using Node and React.

In this talk, we will explore using WordPress as a CMS for static sites generated by Gatsby.

We’ll cover the benefits of static sites, such as:
– performance
– free hosting
– much lower security risk

Then we’ll cover how to build a basic Gatsby site that gets it’s content from WordPress via WPGraphQL.

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March 8, 2019 — WordPress’ minimum-supported version is still PHP 5.2 (gasp!) but that doesn’t mean you should let that hold you back from leveraging modern PHP features in your plugins and themes!

In this talk, we’ll take a deep dive into ways you can start leveraging modern PHP features today to bring new life to that old plugin or theme. We’ll cover how to code partial plugin activation for old versions of PHP, use autoloaders and namespaces, setup group aliasing, use return type declarations, leverage traits, and much more.

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