February 26, 2018 — This talk will cover quick and easy methods to get feedback from your customers and increase the usefulness and usability of your website without needing a dedicated research team.

Presentation Slides »

February 25, 2018 — WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform on the most popular CMS, WordPress. It is great for selling discrete products, be them digital, physical, or subscription-based. But what if your “product” is a time-and-materials type service, where clients pay for the time it takes to do something. We love WC, but didn’t find an out-of-the-box solution that fit our need. So over 9-months of testing and refinement we built our own. This talk covers our process, the results, and lessons learned along the way.

February 25, 2018 — This track consists of five short sessions focused on Blogging and Social Media.

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Use These 5 Basic Blogging Skills to Rock Instagram

Jessica Rhae

Don’t be intimidated by Instagram. Many of the core tools used grow a successful blog also apply to this social channel. You’ll walk away from this session with 5 strategies you can use to skyrocket your success

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordCamp-Pres-J_Williams-Instagram-10_22_17.pdf
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How I Repeatedly Broke my WordPress Site – and How I Cleaned-up The Mess

Steve Case

What happens when you start building your site without considering what you want it to do? What happens when your web hosting company is part of the problem?

We’ll look at a real-life example of how to make wise choices while planning your site, what can happen when you don’t make the best choices – and how to clean up the mess, regardless of who or what caused the problems.

As our example, we’ll look at what happened when a simple site evolved into a WordPress site, and what happened while trying to get them to play well together.

This journey will be both fun and educational. No experience required!

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordCamp-Seattle-2017-Steve-Case.pdf
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WordPress Redirect Links: Your New Best Friend for Influencer Marketing

Lyndal Cairns

WordPress redirects are a much underused tactic in marketing campaigns. At NTEN, we gave unique addresses to partners in a marketing campaign, which allowed us to track the web traffic that came from them. That info not only helps us make better decisions about marketing partners but is also really useful to share with the partner as a win, so we can keep them engaged and more likely to keep sharing. This small piece of WordPress tech can have a huge impact.

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordPress-Redirect-Links-Your-New-Best-Friend-for-Influencer-Marketing.pdf

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Proper Care and Feeding of Trolls
Kimberly Gauthier
Many bloggers don’t worry about trolls. “I’m not big enough to attract a troll,” I’ve been told. If you’re thinking of that combative person who hides behind a fake name or anonymous profile, spewing insults and political rants, that’s only one of many kinds of trolls. In reality, a troll can be a family member, a friend, or a passionate person who believes they are saving the world from your lies.

Whatever troll you’ve attracted to your blog, it can be stressful and be distracting for both you and your readers. In this session, I’m going to share the steps I take to protect myself from a trouble maker.

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/Proper-Care-and-Feeding-of-Trolls.pdf
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Counting down: What not to forget when you launch your website

Joshua Lynch

You’ve completed the famous five-minute installation of WordPress, customized a theme and published some content, but now what? We’ll cover the essentials of launching a professional site with WordPress, and some helpful tools for quality control, SEO, security, webmaster tools, analytics, monitoring, and maintenance.

SLIDES: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sRqvwS-j8Vc3UrIjPDS8z91OWHclX1dLOI68cCmRlSM/

February 25, 2018 — A frank and honest discussion with women who have been involved for different amounts of time in WordPress – ranging from development to designer to marketer.

February 25, 2018 — In this session, Adam details his story of creating a sustainable plugin business. He shares actionable advice that audience members can put into practice immediately to grow not only a user-base, but also a customer-base. Adam also explains the techniques he uses to guide free-users to premium product.

Attendees will learn everything they need to know to market a plugin that people will love, and recommend to others.

February 22, 2018 — He is the past President of Rhode Island School of Design and formerly eBay‘s Chair of their Design Advisory Board. He is also the recipient of many awards, including the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award.

February 22, 2018 — This talk will be helpful for any WordPress developers or consultants who are thinking of building products of their own. I’ll use our own story as one example of how to do this, with advice that should helpful for businesses and freelancers looking to increase the value of their consulting services, add revenue streams from products, or transition 100% into products like we did.”

Presentation Slides »

February 22, 2018 — When more people from underrepresented groups start speaking at WordPress events, everybody benefits. At WordCamp Vancouver, we started by focusing on women. In 2013, not many had applied. The following year, three times as many women applied and fully half of selected speakers were women. This dramatic shift was no accident. My talk will share how we accomplished it, some of the lessons we learned along the way, and the positive changes that resulted in our community.

February 22, 2018 — An extremely engaging moderated discussion of the challenges that face large WordPress sites with 100s or 1000s of users.

Come learn lessons and hear advice on managing user needs and providing tools that make site management easier for everyone.

February 22, 2018 — Are you a small, ambitious nonprofit with lots of programs but a little marketing budget? Is it hard to show what you do on your WordPress website because your org just does so many different things? Do you need help maximizing your WordPress site’s potential to market your mission? In this session, we’ll share 3 cost-effective ways of promoting your nonprofit’s work:

1. Build an online annual report
This is a highly effective and super shareable way of showing your nonprofit’s impact. And you won’t have to print and mail those reports again.
2. Build microsites for your special programs/events
Highlight your special fundraising events or conferences with a microsite, which has its own mini navigation bar.
3. Create an issue specific resource
You can create a crowd-sourced Google sheet that will drive new traffic to your site. It’s an easy to maintain document too. (Ex: Women in Tech).