January 10, 2019 — While the benefits of image optimization are well known, in practice, it is one of the most misunderstood topics in all of WordPress. With the addition of responsive images and an influx of new solutions in the marketplace, the topic of image optimization deserves an updated take on best practices for the modern responsive landscape.

This talk begins with a step-by-step analysis of how WordPress processes images by default. With this baseline understanding established, we will review common misconceptions about image optimization techniques that sometimes do more harm than good. One such example is the practice of optimizing images *before* upload, which actually has no effect on the generated image sizes.

By exploring a combination of best practices and common snafus, the audience will take away the key concepts necessary to optimize responsive images in a manner that works with WordPress, not against it.

January 10, 2019 — Building a website is just the first step. The next thing you will need to do is turn your visitors into your most loyal fans with the use of an email mailing list.

Your mailing list is one of the most important ways you can engage with your customers, followers, or users, making it one of the most valuable assets of your business. We’ll go over what makes it so powerful, how to capture emails on your website and ways to make your subscription forms irresistible.

During this talk, you will learn how to setup your mailing list, discover three ways to capture leads, understand the power of drip campaigns, and know the best practices for effective and memorable email campaigns.

By the end of this presentation, you will hold actionable steps to keep your audience engaged and help you achieve amazing results.

January 10, 2019 — With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) now in effect, what does this mean for your site? Is the GDPR law geographically limited? Sam brings his 20 years of cybersecurity experience to discuss how you can protect your client data, what to do in the event of a data breach, and how you can prevent one. We’ll answer your questions and more including how your plugin choices can affect GDPR compliance.

Takeaways:

What is the General Data Protection Regulation?
Does it affect us in the US?
Learn how to become compliant.

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 »