February 20, 2018 — It’s estimated that 1 in 6 people in the UK suffers from ongoing anxiety problems. However, there’s still so much stigma surrounding the issue, that it rarely gets discussed openly. This has resulted in people with anxiety feeling like they have to suffer in silence, and employers not fully understanding the condition.

In Laura’s talk, she’ll share her personal experience of dealing with an anxiety disorder and how it impacted her working life. By openly discussing this issue, she hopes to diffuse some common misunderstandings of the condition, share some tips on how anxiety sufferers can help themselves and what workplaces can do to be supportive of them, and give people the confidence to communicate mental health issues.

February 20, 2018 — For one of our customers, we required variable length arguments to be passed into plugin configuration options. WordPress core only supports scaler (single variable) assignment. So, we modified the plugin itself to support this. This talk will be a line-by-line code review on the work we did. The talk will be split between PHP and jQuery. Proficiency at both is assumed. If we need to do this for another (paying) customer, we’ll likely take that opportunity to make these modifications to core. Until then, the actual code we display will be publicly available under a GPL license. The rest of the plugin code will not be displayed, and has an indeterminate license.

February 19, 2018 — Two are smarter than one!

We know the benefits of a good business partner, but is a partnership right for you? Learn what it takes to partner up and grow your business. We’ll walk you through best practices and tips to help you understand what it takes to forge a rich, rewarding professional partnership.

Whether you’re toying with the idea or can’t wait to get started, attend this session to get insights into how a professional partnership works and what it takes to establish one without regrets. A merger, or going into business with a partner, is exactly like walking down the aisle and getting married. You have to make sure you’re a good fit because this is a long term commitment. Are you ready to say “I do?”

Join our session as we lift the hood and show you what it really takes. Walk away with key lessons learned and advice from a local business duo that merged two years ago and hasn’t looked back!

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February 19, 2018 — Digital is constantly changing and that means that developers have to change as well. With so many different possibilities, how do you build a rewarding career for yourself? Where do you even start?

This talk will explore how to find out the things you’re really interested in when it comes to your job, create a personal learning plan, and market those skills in a way that demonstrates value to employers. Focusing on aspects like carving your own niche and being able to communicate your expertise in a way that people can understand!

February 19, 2018 — There has never been a time in the history of humanity when it was easier to build cool stuff. But whilst we usually think “building” is a developer trait, everyone in the greater WordPress community is building something. We don’t just build websites or apps: we build relationships, audiences, teams, careers, you name it.

Being a “product person” is a mentality, a mindset. It’s not necessarily something related to “a” product. In this talk, Franz will explain how he applies his identity as a product person to everything he does: identify a problem, sketch, prototype, test, focus on what works, fix or discard what doesn’t, launch, grow, reach the maturity stage. No matter what the product is.

This talk is for everyone in the WordPress community who wants to streamline their processes or become a better product person.

February 19, 2018 — This talk is aimed at anyone who is considering developing a digital product or SaaS, but will also be relevant to anyone wanting to learn more about marketing.

There is much information available on the internet about how to market a digital product, but a lot of it is terrifying to the average developer, involving techniques that can make your skin crawl just thinking about them. “Reaching out” and “going viral” may sound good in theory, but are near impossible to put into practice for anyone other than the most outgoing extroverts.

This talk will give you some “polite marketing methods” that are easy to put into practice and achieve results without having to undergo a full personality change.

February 19, 2018 — Chris Lema interviews Sakin Shrestha. Sakin has started various technology companies incluing Catch Internet, Catch Themes and DevotePress.

February 19, 2018 — “I never want my site to change.” – Said No Client Ever

Healthy websites change over time just like healthy businesses do. As developers, it is our job to empower website admins, and make our sites more maintainable.

This talk shares design patterns and best practices you will find invaluable when creating custom themes for clients, and demonstrates how to implement them using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF).

ACF is a powerful development tool used to easily manage custom fields and data.

Since the possibilities are endless, we will explore a handful of specific examples. These will include…

Providing simple options for clients:
* Editable content fields for specific sections, such as changing the image and copy overlay for hero images
* Single, repeatable call-to-action blocks
* Choose between several kinds of content blocks
* Choose a custom post type “product” to be the featured product

Providing options for advanced users:
* Add a field for custom CSS classes
* Automatically apply ids so admins can apply custom CSS
* Expose specific styling elements, such as tweaking the position of background images
* Apply icons to menu items
* Optionally add a sidebar to single content blocks
* Force a content block to be full width

And many more!

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February 19, 2018 — Everything you need to know about recruiting, hiring and onboarding processes in WP oriented companies, how to select, test and onboard new employee and how to get advantage over other candidates if you are looking for a job.

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February 19, 2018 — Are you charging enough for your services? Chances are you’re not. The goal is not to get as much money as you can get but to get paid for the value you provide.

When I first started out with web and graphic design, I was charging pennies because I felt I was not good enough. For my first website, I charged $500 and the second website I charged $0 and was later paid $1,000. After comparing my work to others on the internet, I soon found others were charging $5,000 to $10,000 for a website and were not giving as much value as I was.

In this session, I share my pricing journey as well as tips on how freelancers can double what they are earning by creating a process and upgrading their professionalism to earn higher value clients.

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