August 1, 2018 — Our success as freelancers is built upon the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years of freelancing experience to share important lessons he had to learn the hard way and common mistakes we all can avoid. Each one is summarized in a succinct memorable statement and then unpacked with examples.

August 1, 2018 — Question and answer session about WordPress Security

July 31, 2018 — Content — it’s everywhere. So, why does it seem to come so easy for others while you stare at a blinking cursor? Creating and marketing content shouldn’t take the joy out of your business. We’ll talk about how you can make your content go farther and work harder. No more guilt about not posting to your blog and social media. You’ll leave this session excited and ready to take on the content world!

Presentation Slides »

July 31, 2018 — Your clients (prospective and active) are not telling you the truth. Maybe it’s about a project that’s gone off track or a website ideal they envision. Or maybe they’re not sharing their thoughts on ways their business could grow its sales or improve operations.

By demonstrating your ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, you can aim toward creating projects that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.

Presentation Slides »

July 31, 2018 — Whether you have just started, or if you have been around a while, pricing, contracts and proposals can be a pain in your … brain? Thing is, they are WAY less complicated than in the past. Elizabeth will take you into her pricing evolution over the past decade and share some of her stories of staying self employed through the most recent economic down self-employed. She shares her contract and proposal and the tools she uses to get it to the client within 30 min of a consult.

Presentation Slides »

July 31, 2018 — In this talk, we will dive into what you need to know to start tracking your website with Google Analytics. We will cover the basic installation on a WordPress website and then dive into the features of Google Analytics. In this talk, we will cover audience reports, acquisition reports, behavior reports, filters & segments, event tracking, setting up goals, UTMs and save some time for your questions.

Presentation Slides »

July 30, 2018 — WordPress is better!
Drupal is better!
Joomla! is better!

Sound familiar? The open source community has the habit only to look inside ourselves and never look what else might be going on in the other communities or projects. As someone who currently serves on leadership for Joomla and also the evangelist of BoldGrid has seen the best of multiple open source communities. I have seen patterns emerge across our communities.

This talk will explore my experience being married to open source. I will also explore the ways the communities support each other through initiatives such as CMS Garden (An initiative to promote all major open source CMS projects). I will also share the top things I learned about myself and the combined future of an open source web.

Presentation Slides »

July 30, 2018 — This presentation blends the running a business topic with the themes / plug-in topic, to present some of my experiences as both a WordPress end user and a WordPress developer, as they relate to achieving small business goals with WordPress driving your business content and customer online experience. As an e-commerce entrepreneur, switching to WordPress and Woo Commerce (from Pinnacle cart) opened up a massive amount of opportunities for my business. As an end user, while the learning curve was a bit long, the result was well worth it in terms of the growth that was achieved over prior systems. However, achieving the best results came from understanding how plug-ins and structure can be a tremendous help in taking advantage of opportunities.

Now on the WordPress developer side, helping small businesses and non-profits incorporate WordPress into their digital marketing and customer experience efforts, organizing the “building blocks” of WordPress, via content, site structure and utilization of plug-ins, can make a huge difference when running a small business successfully. In other words, understanding your own business opportunities and challenges when using WordPress, and understanding your client’s business opportunities and challenges if you are developer, is key to utilizing WordPress to the fullest as a valuable digital marketing tool towards achieving business marketing and revenue goals.

Presentation Slides »

July 30, 2018 — How can you provide real-time analytics and other data to clients directly from their admin dashboard? We will show you how to customize the default WordPress dashboard appearance and use Google API for simplified statistics on client website performance. We will also discuss Facebook Graph API to include social media statistics. Stats can be sticky, we’ll teach you to simplify them for clients!

July 30, 2018 — A comparison of WordPress.com hosting versus self-hosting with WordPress.org. What’s the difference? And how does your choice affect costs, security, content restrictions, maintenance work, promotion, available features, available themes, plug-ins, using your own domain name, advertising and selling on your site, and so on? What about multi-sites? And if I use WordPress.org, why should I care about WordPress.com?

The goal of the talk is to help new users, creating individual or small organization sites or blogs, decide which service best meets their requirements.

Presentation Slides »