February 1, 2019 — Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. After all, the structure of your website shows Google what articles and pages are most important. You can influence which articles will rank highest in the search engines, with your site’s structure. So, it’s important to get it right! It also is a very actionable part of your SEO strategy. You can all start improving your site structure today! In this talk, I’ll explain the importance of site structure for your site’s SEO and I’ll give three quick tips on how to start improving your site’s structure.

February 1, 2019 — What makes a database query fast or slow? Are WP_Query’s taxonomy queries fast? What about meta queries? In this talk, we’ll dig into the WordPress database schema, talk about what factors influence query performance, and learn how to sniff out potential performance problems before they ever give you a headache. Next, we’ll discuss strategies for refactoring queries to be as performant as possible, caching strategies, and more.

February 1, 2019 — Traditionally, marketing and product design have been thought of as separate roles within many organizations. Often times, a gap is formed between the two, leaving an inconsistent experience from the time a customer is made aware of a product up through the time they’re an actual customer. Whether you’re a freelancer or part of a large company — join me as I dig into the growth funnel (AAARR model—Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) and explore ways in which you can rapidly iterate in your marketing and product to provide a more cohesive experience for your target demographic.

February 1, 2019 — An intro to React JS Framework and how it relates to Gutenberg. We will discuss React Core Concepts such as JSX, compontents and props, state and lifecycle, handling events, and lifting state.

February 1, 2019 — This topic will be an overview to the leg work to do before you jump into the design and development stage. I will give an introductory talk on site maps, user personas, content guides, and other things to consider about how your website will function before you start designing or developing your site.

February 1, 2019 — Personalization, hyper targeting, and segmenting are far from subtle these days. In this session you’ll learn effective marketing techniques to help you actually connect with your users and customers. You’ll see real examples of how I learn about users and do it by providing them with value. We’ll also get hands-on with businesses from the audience discovering real world fair trade marketing opportunities. We’ll identify ways to raise your revenue and make customers happy doing it. And we’ll learn how to create up-sells that actually help users rather than just helping your bottom line.

Let’s stop duplicating the techniques and strategies we see across the Internet. Learn how to listen to your users, they’re already telling you what they need and how to connect with them.

February 1, 2019 — The security of your WordPress site goes far beyond it’s code and settings. In 2018 and beyond, your online habits and practices make you far more susceptible to being hacked than bad code.

Let’s talk about how to safeguard your entire online identity, and how doing so will help your WordPress site stay safe from hackers and malware. We’ll also talk about some realistic strategies for securing your WordPress install.

January 30, 2019 — Branding is not an option if you are a startup, a freelancer or a sole proprietor of a professional service business: it’s a necessity, and one that can yield rewards or create harm if not well tended. Building a brand goes far beyond having a logo – in fact, a logo is NOT a brand by any means – and it’s a practice rooted in data and science. In this workshop, we will understand the theory behind, follow the necessary procedures and emerge with a branding strategy that attendees will be able to implement in creating/revamping/establish their brand(s).

January 28, 2019 — There are many tools that help us understand and improve the state of web performance on our WordPress sites. But it’s not always obvious which tool is right for the job and how to use it. When would I use “field” data from real users? What is my “lab” testing tool trying to tell me? In this workshop, we will examine the landscape of tools at our disposal: WebPageTest, HTTP Archive, Google Analytics, and the Chrome User Experience Report. We will use these tools and real world examples to better understand how slow a website is, what is causing it, and how to fix it.

January 27, 2019 — (Hiss in Audio)

Since the introduction of the WordPress REST API, the potential for using it to power React applications has generated much excitement among developers. But what is an actual use-case for these technologies, and how can it improve the user experience? In this presentation we’ll show how WordPress was used as a foundation for building an in-gallery video kiosk for the Clyfford Still Museum.

We’ll begin by looking at the design process for a museum experience: How digital design can reflect the physical space in which it is installed, and how graphic and movement choices affect visitors’ sense of intimacy. We’ll show how the video kiosk platform was built to scale with the museum’s growing video library, how we made the videos accessible to people with hearing impairments, and how we designed the system to be content-managed from afar.

From there, we’ll demonstrate how content-management via WordPress combined with the REST API and a React front-end provide an intuitive experience for administrators and users, save development time, and provide a smooth native-app-like experience. We’ll finish by detailing the hardware used to present the system in-gallery.