December 14, 2018 — In the WordPress Community, we talk about value — quite a lot. And that’s awesome. We should charge for our value. The problem comes when we don’t understand our cost — both in financial, physical, and branding terms.

Having spent over ten years in construction accounting, “job costing” is in my vocabulary and the front of my mind. But as a marketer, I also understand that WordPress has a branding problem. In order to elevate our personal brands and the brand of WordPress, it’s important that we go beyond value and take a look at cost.

In this talk, I’ll discuss job costing, sample time tracking, and just how to reverse engineer your pricing to not only meet your expenses, but live the life you want.

December 14, 2018 — How to Make WordPress Your Favorite Marketing Tool

December 14, 2018 — If you’re building WordPress websites, blogging, or marketing as a sideline hustle, you may not realize how easily you could next level your work to create a sustainable business model. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about turning your freelance projects into a full-time career. If so, you need to recognize that starting a business is not only a matter of devoting more hours to your craft. In this talk, you’ll learn an eleven step process that will help you find the right clients, create a client-focused website plan, set realistic expectations, and develop a system that will help your WordPress business succeed.

Get ready to be inspired as you learn how you can team with others in the WordPress community, as well as your clients, to create lasting relationships and recurring revenue. You’ll learn how to break free from your comfort zone, modify current habits, develop a business model that works for you, and set up an organized workflow so you can roll up your sleeves and implement your strategies.

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December 14, 2018 — PHPUnit is the standard PHP testing framework, but getting it working with a WordPress plugin is challenging. If you ever wanted to start adding automated tests to your code, but did not know how and where to start, this talk is for you.
This presentation covers:
– brief introduction to unit and integration testing
– scaffolding a test suite for an existing WordPress plugin using WP-CLI
– refactoring the existing code to make it testable
– writing and running the first tests

December 14, 2018 — Dipping into Child Themes is an introduction to theme modification & development for anyone curious about how WordPress themes are built and safely modified.

This talk will provide several simple and practical Child Theme examples and explain the modular nature of the Template Hierarchy. We’ll also touch on how Template Tags and Conditional Tags and how they can be used to enhance a website.

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December 14, 2018 — There are WordPress Features You May Not Know. If you are like many, there always seem to be things you wish you could do with WordPress, but maybe can’t figure out. This session will provide you with some great tips and tricks for you to make working with WordPress even easier. From changing the number of posts on the dashboard page, to adding a target to link to on the menu dashboard, there are many things that are easy to accomplish — if only you know where to look. Not only are there screen options on almost every dashboard page, but there are help pulldowns, too, helping to answer questions before you might even need to turn to help in a forum. We will also cover shortcuts for use in the editor window, and a quick and easy way to save your favorite plugins to find at a click to upload to your site.

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December 14, 2018 — CSS Secrets for Beginners

Discover ten handy tips in ten minutes for customizing your WordPress site with CSS. From quick techniques to hide elements you’d rather not see – to sneaky ways to add in extra bits of text, this talk for CSS newcomers will show you just how useful CSS can be. It’ll whet your appetite for more and suggest where to continue your CSS journey after the ten minutes whiz by.

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December 14, 2018 — In the technology world, often soft skills and outreach are forgotten. But they can be an important asset to whatever role you may have (developer, designer, marketer, blogger). I will discuss my own journey from just being a developer, to being a leader in my local WordPress community – and my journey to speaking at WordCamps across North America.

December 14, 2018 — Managing a multilingual website or promoting your business on social media in more than one language can be challenging. How can you create bilingual content without doubling your workload? What targeting options are available to reach specific linguistic subgroups? What cultural considerations exist when selecting platforms, content and messaging? Which plugin options are available for multilingual sites? This talk will look at best practices in bilingual social media management and content strategy, drawing concrete examples from government, multinational corporations and local startups.

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December 13, 2018 — The alphabet soup of relevant data privacy and security acronyms out there can be overwhelming: GDPR, PII, ISO, SOC, FERPA, and more. We’ll discuss the frameworks and laws most relevant to WordPress site owners, best practices, open-source resources, what to look for from your hosts and plugin/theme providers, and share a checklist to summarize it all to help ensure that you are on the right track.