June 25, 2018 — New website launch and redesign projects are often built on goals of improving user experience and driving business goals of increased exposure, sales, or leads. The process often focuses on the new design and functionality of the site. Unfortunately, SEO often is a second thought or takes the back seat. At a minimum we need to know and understand the ways to avoid disaster and take advantage of the redesign or launch process to maximize optimization. This session will focus on the pitfalls to avoid as well as the best practices and strategic ways to use the redesign to fully realize the goals and reasons why you’re crafting a new website in the first place. This session will hit on a range of topics from introductory minimums for relaunch to some specific advanced tactics and aspects of optimization to consider and add to your process and project.

Presentation Slides »

June 20, 2018 — Chitra Raj Bhandari is the co-founder of Pulse Digit – a digital marketing agency exclusively dedicated to digital marketing services.

Semantic SEO: Optimizing Web for Crawlers that understand SEO is a wide topic and has many facets to cover. But in this topic, He focuseed on making the site and its content ‘understandable’ to search engine crawlers.

June 20, 2018 — We will step through a clean WordPress installation and configuration. We will then step through each section of the WordPress Admin Dashboard to illustrate the following: (1) theme selection & installation, (2) media uploading, (3) plugin selection & installation. (4) install several popular WordPress plugins, (5) create a custom menu, (6) set up a few widgets, (7) create a blog post/page, (8) walk through the elements of a post (9) discuss categories, tags and urls (10) discuss different user types and (11) making backups.

June 20, 2018 — In this talk we will continue to build up our React knowledge by discussing more advanced concepts which most real world applications will require. Concepts such as:

More advanced state management with Redux.
Creating more complete apps using React-router.
Building more advanced components by creating Higher Order Components and using render props.
The basics of server side rendering.

June 20, 2018 — This happens a lot at formal networking events, but it happens even more frequently at WordCamp. 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. Whether your an introvert or an extrovert, you’re sure to pick up a thing or two.

June 20, 2018 — Let’s face it. There’s a gap between what developers care about and what users care about. In this session, we’ll explore what happens when we ignore this simple fact. We’ll discuss what UX is and why the user’s experience matters, how to think like your users, and some new rules we can all get behind. After all, UX is more than just about visual design, but also about making sure systems are set up in a way that makes them easy for people to actually use.

June 20, 2018 — Whether you’re designing a new website or updating an old one, user-friendliness is key. Large fonts, big buttons, and strategic color motifs make calls to action obvious.

Help users take the actions you want them to. Help website users be happy.

Happy website users convert to happy customers. Happy customers help your business thrive.

June 20, 2018 — In this session, we examine the NC State Accessibility Helper, a homegrown plugin that makes accessibility testing a part of WordPress. We will discuss common issues reported by users of assistive technology and how those issues are introduced when creating content. We will then discuss how our plugin addresses these issues using an open source accessibility testing engine called aXe.

June 20, 2018 — In this talk, we will cover how the central IT web team at NC State reworked development processes and tools to fit within a GutenWorld. We will discuss changing coding practices, new vocabulary, and cross-departmental collaboration all coming together in a campus-wide Blocks plugin.

Attendees of this talk will come away with strategies for adapting to change and working collaboratively, as well as a framework for developing a set of blocks for your campus.

June 18, 2018 — Here at Zeek Interactive, I’ve put together a system that allows us to deploy code worry-free. The system automatically brings in PHP dependencies, WordPress plugins, builds assets, runs security scans, deploys the files quickly and performs automated visual regression tests, all while keeping the team informed via Slack on the status of the deploy.

This talk is recommended for anyone who has ever had to get code from their local machine and push it to a server. If you have ever been frustrated or annoyed at deploying code and wondered if there was a better way, don’t miss this talk.