December 21, 2018 — While you can use BuddyPress to create a feature packed community site in mere minutes, it is often overwhelming for both administrators and users alike. I’ll share some tools and techniques that you can use to build your BuddyPress community while maintaining your sanity.

December 21, 2018 — The struggle is real. Managing WordPress core settings as well as other settings, like Advanced Custom Fields setup, and carrying those things over to other environments without completely wiping and replacing the entire database is a major pain point.

Maybe your production environment is holding your content where your client is entering data but your development or local environments are still being developed and settings and configurations are still changing. You do not want to push up your entire development database to your production environment and lose all the content your client is creating. That’s where configuration management comes into play!

We will cover what configuration management is, how you can start to use it and the concepts to take it even further!

December 21, 2018 — While security is often associated as a non-revenue function, it’s one of the top critical pieces to the success of any website. The challenge website owners face with security however is that it can be perceived as technically complex, and the idea of effectively deploying security can be overwhelming. How do we employ a security framework that we can understand, maintain and deploy?

This session will present the idea of a basic Security Framework that any website owner can adapt and deploy. Whether a one man team, or an organization with a dedicated security operation center, this talk is designed to introduce and refresh the basic principles as they apply to Information Security, specifically websites.

December 21, 2018 — This talk will go into detail about when, why and how to use WordPress as a decoupled CMS backend with a React / Node frontend. This talk is equal parts tutorial, existential dive into when it is appropriate to use modern web application architecture, and lessons learned from my journey building a React SPA with a WordPress backend.

December 20, 2018 — Ready to learn the basics of Gutenberg?

Learn the ins and outs as well as useful tips and tricks for publishing content using WordPress’ new editing experience.

December 20, 2018 — You have something to say – find your unique voice for your words and then develop creative and powerful ways to put your words to work

Simple ideas for finding your voice
Quick Tips for getting the words down
Turn scripts/blogs into ebooks.
Turn ebooks into print books.
Turn blogs into to memes.
Turn podcasts into blog posts.

Be creative in adjusting your words to work within a niche and you will find that your words work for you instead of you having to work so hard for your words.

December 17, 2018 — As freelancers, we all know how difficult it can be to keep clients on track. From shifting visions to missed deadlines to massive scope creep – it can feel like an uphill battle to keep things on deadline and within the original contract you signed. Fortunately, with strong client communication you can avoid many of this issues. As a long-time project manager and freelance developer, I’ll dive into the foundations of good client communication including: setting expectations, using deadlines and timelines effectively, buffering for client schedules, measuring out next steps, and handling conflict.

December 17, 2018 — The new WordPress editor (Gutenberg) is how all new content is to be created on WordPress. However with the way the data is stored, is that really the best way to power an application? I will walk through the drawbacks for how Gutenberg stores data, and how to easily change that to more easily power custom headless (and not) web applications.

Presentation Slides »

December 17, 2018 — An update to last year’s WCLAX 2017 SEO talk, this presentation will cover everything that has changed in the last 12 months and will go into what Google’s algorithm is liking this year.

This rapid-fire talk will cover and provide step by step instructions on the following SEO processes:

– Topical organization of content, bread crumbs, and schema.
– Implicit and explicit entities, what they are and why they are important.
– Voice search optimization for publishers, name-brands and service providers.

We will also dive into Google’s new Search Console, its new reporting features and what it all means for bloggers, marketers, and webmasters.

The primary objective for this talk is to help attendees become more educated about the ever-changing world of SEO and to keep these new practices in mind as they work on their websites.

Presentation Slides »

December 17, 2018 — Join the team of SEO experts from TopHatRank SEO as they provide attendees with actionable SEO recommendations and solutions. They’ll audit your site on stage in real-time proving you with actionable SEO solutions to your existing website. No theoretical solutions or hypothetical scenarios in this session. You’ll walk away knowing what you need to do to your website.

3-6 attendees will have the opportunity to get their site audited and everyone else can watch and learn from these real world examples!