January 10, 2019 — As someone who builds WordPress websites for clients, you’ve probably learned that offering (or requiring) monthly maintenance contracts is smart business. It’s likely you’re including core software, plugin and theme updates as part of your maintenance plan, which ensures a steady income stream you can rely on and helps with your financial forecasting. But are you including website security as part of your project proposal and scope?

The security of your clients’ websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project (or sale?) as an optional add-on for the client to consider after going live. The value of a strong website security posture can be difficult to explain to clients, but when put in the context of their business and possible loss of revenue, it can become an integral part of your offering that separates you from the rest.

In this session, Adam will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, he’ll also offer advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients. Not only does this ensure your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, but also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

January 10, 2019 — 5 tips for increasing engagement via social media

January 10, 2019 — Code review: You know you should be doing it. Or maybe you don’t. The benefits of code review are enormous, and if you’re contributing to WordPress or another open source project, it’s required. What should contributors expect during code review? How do we balance the code review workflow without slowing good ideas down, and manage these reviews around deadlines and launch dates? What can we as contributors do during review to ensure new contributors are comfortable and given the right resources to learn and onboard to our codebase?

In this talk we’ll show you how we answered these questions at Boston University and went from years of committing directly to master to all designers and developers opening pull requests in a matter of months. Whether you lead, contribute, or both, you’ll leave with inspiration to guide your own process and goals for code review and tools to give helpful and empathetic feedback to the people around you.

January 10, 2019 — In the summer of 2010, I made the mistake of reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, while sipping tropical drinks on a beach vacation, and it ruined my life. Or rather, it encouraged me to rearrange my life to make more time for my passion for music and achieve location-independence. My husband and I founded Rabell Creative, a WordPress web design and digital marketing agency in 2012. After six years of experience building WordPress websites for clients full time, I will share with you our top tips and tricks for building beautiful websites efficiently, making your clients happy, and having time leftover to pursue your passions. I will outline the exact procedures and plugins that help simplify this process and discuss some of our most frequent pitfalls in dealing with clients, and how we avoid them.

Since we can work from anywhere with just our laptops and the Internet, we moved to Nashville in 2016, so I could pursue my dream of becoming a musician and songwriter. Running a fully remote WordPress web design agency is allowing me to travel, play music, and live out my dreams, and I am so grateful for the awesome and supportive WordPress community that helps make it all possible.

January 10, 2019 — Images typically account for the greatest number of bytes downloaded when viewing a web page. Because of this, images are an area in which there’s huge opportunity to lower the size of a page, decrease load time, and increase performance. In this session, we’ll touch briefly on the basics of how to use the appropriate file types for images on a site. From there, we’ll dig a bit deeper and discuss methods to implement responsive images, browser-specific image formats like WebP, and how to optimizing responsive images further via lazy loading. Finally, we’ll go over building out a workflow for automating image optimization via WordPress’ built-in add_image_size function and task-automation tools like Gulp and Grunt.

January 10, 2019 — This session will provide actionable steps for implementing some proven (and easy) project management techniques to stop the dreaded “scope creep” that so many WordPress practitioners struggle with when providing services for others.

Takeaways:

The 6 Principles of Productivity Management You Knew and Then Forgot
What to Put in the Contract so You Get Paid for Change
How to Effectively Manage Change

Presentation Slides »

January 9, 2019 — Slow sites frustrate consumers. Frustration costs money. To delight consumers, beat competitors, and to please Google, your site will need to load in under a second. Web performance is no longer an art, but a science. You have 600 milliseconds; how will you spend them?

Come and explore the theory, and take home practical tips, tricks and tools.

Presentation Slides »

January 9, 2019 — Do you constantly feel like you are hacking code together? Do you find it difficult to maintain, adapt or even read code you’ve written previously? Chances are, you are not taking into consideration some of the basic principles of software architecture. Come learn how some simple habits and changes in perspective can transform you from a 1x developer to a 10x developer!

Takeaways:

How to keep your code simple and straightforward
How to reduce bugs in your code
How to become a more productive developer

Presentation Slides »

January 9, 2019 — Discover how one Mom’s tips, tricks & curriculum led to her daughters and their friends engaging in tech beyond Pokémon and Minecraft. Learn how they earned the ability to land job opportunities at agencies while attending university, due to their skills in writing and WordPress development. If you’re new to WordPress and wondering how to get started or trying to build a team at your company, you won’t want to miss this session! Gain resources to learn/teach WordPress. Learn how to convert teens into agency assets. Discover the value of mentorship and building a legacy business.

January 9, 2019 — In this talk, we’ll dip our toes into the relatively new javascript framework called Vue.js. We’ll go over how to integrate Vue.js into a custom theme and use WordPress as the backend that powers a simple directory with an ajax search feature and Google Maps. We’ll cover a few basic concepts of Vue and why it can be a nice alternative to using jQuery.

Takeaways:

You’ll know what Vue.js is!
You’ll have a basic understanding of how to get started with Vue.
You’ll see how to use the WordPress API in order to use that data with Vue.js