December 30, 2018 — You’ve no doubt heard a fast loading website is critical to success. With Google’s recent algorithm updates, this is more true now than ever. Many plugins and services claim to speed up WordPress, but which are most effective? Should you spend money on a service or find something free? How can site owners improve performance without writing code? This beginner-friendly talk covers the basics of site performance and recommends simple strategies and tools to boost performance. Sprinkled throughout will be pro tips for power users who want to take these concepts to the next level.

Presentation Slides »

December 30, 2018 — Sometimes the best way to know what you’re doing right, and what you can do better, is to look at things from a fresh perspective. Being a Drupal developer for almost 9 years, and a recent convert to WordPress 2 years ago, I’ve seen the best and worst of both systems. Rather than pitting the two against each other, it’s best to look at the strengths, and yes the weaknesses of both. By doing so we can learn from each unique community and together make the projects stronger.

This talk will center around my experiences of building a plugin coming from Drupal, what I found in the WordPress community that I’m trying to take to the Drupal community, and visa-versa what I learned in Drupal that I hope to share with WordPress. This will be a fun look at the two communities and from it we’ll come away with a greater sense of how we can better ourselves, our sites, and the open source community as a whole.

December 30, 2018 — The idea of marketing is shrouded in mystery. While there are endless agencies and consultants that bill themselves as the best at understanding particular demographics and tools, I believe anyone can be a great marketer if they apply four core principles. We’ll talk about product, place, promotion, and price – the keys to a strong marketing plan. We’ll dive into understand the art and science behind great campaigns and 10 key concepts I have observed.

December 30, 2018 — What if we saw WordPress as a force of change on the web and in society? We talk about our aspiration to reach 50%, but we rarely talk about how we could and should use the power that comes with that market share. Starting from the WordPress philosophy of “democratizing publishing through free open source software,” this talk explores how — through code, community, and political engagement — WordPress can be used to move the web, the internet, and our society forward.

December 30, 2018 — Stories are powerful and a part of our genetic DNA. Stories in products can be used as fuel to power creation. The experience itself is a story and it’s important to craft the narrative. By understanding the stories of those interacting with the product, you can guide, support and even change their narrative from a tragedy to a happily ever after. In this talk I will show how to use stories in your day to day work. Start seeing the stories, learn ways to tell the stories to others. By putting stories at the heart of everything you do, you experience will improve and everyone will have a better time.

December 30, 2018 — Over the past 10 years, CSS has transformed from a descriptive language for presentation into a Turing-complete, domain-specific, declarative programming language for layout on the web.

Okay…but how does one go from describing presentation to programming in CSS? And what on earth is a “CSS Algorithm”?

This entertaining and personable talk will answer these questions and more, before delving into practical steps for creating CSS algorithms of your own to bridge the gap between design and development.

December 30, 2018 — In the day and age where “posting something” has become an everyday affair to many, with so many different choices in software, tools and platforms — what does it mean to choose WordPress as a publishing tool teaching material in Higher Education? How easy or difficult do students find? What can contributors learn from it?
I have been working at a university for over seven years as a staff (in-house webmaster/developer), but never thought of teaching the students. This summer, I had an opportunity to co-teach undergraduate art students about online self-publishing using WordPress.
I have been contributing to WordPress over a decade, and I would like to share my experiences and thoughts in teaching, from a contributor’s point-of-view.

December 30, 2018 — “You Don’t Have any Business Cards?” is a question that you hear a lot at formal networking events, but it happens even more frequently at WordCamps. Do you feel intimidated when it’s time to give your “30 second commercial”? Do you run out of things to talk about once you’ve exchanged names?

Effective networking is an important part of building your WordPress business. This presentation will help you get past the “grip and grin” stigma that people associate with networking and cover some ways that you can get the most out of mixing it up at networking groups, “business after hours” meetups, and of course the Hallway Track at conferences like WordCamp.

Learning how to network effectively can lead to your next client or your next trusted business partner. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you’re sure to pick up a thing or two in this presentation.

December 30, 2018 — The WordPress community builds amazingly powerful software to extend the platform with plugins. The developers who contribute plugins to the project should be proud of what they’ve created! The challenge is that often, they’re so close to the code that when they market their plugin, they position it as software for developers, rather than marketing it to the end user. In this session, I’ll give developers a framework for ensuring they market their plugin to their actual user, not to other developers.

December 29, 2018 — How to build teams around your business as a freelancer and avoid breaking down or losing customers.