November 16, 2017 — Do you have data and lists you keep having to massage to make it useful for your project? Have you heard of regular expressions but been frightened by the Klingon-looking examples? Fear no longer!

I’ll demystify regular expressions and show you how best to do them in PHP. We’ll cover the syntax and functions that make PHP a great text-parsing language, and give you the foundation to learn more.

As a bonus, I’ll give you two cases people often use as examples for regexes that PHP gives you better native ways to accomplish.

November 16, 2017 — Hosting providers are as numerous as the stars, and what they offer can be just as varied. Learn some lingo and evaluate what your unique needs are to choose the solution that not only gives you the POWER to run your website, but the peace of mind to sleep at night. I will not be “naming names” but supplying information for what you should be looking for!

Presentation Slides »

November 16, 2017 — This talk will cover best practices that you can use to get effective support from theme and plugin shops as a freelancer, blogger, agency, enterprise, or government client.

From the other side as a customer support provider, this talk will also discuss best practices that you can use to provide effective support to your customers for your theme, plugin, or service.

November 16, 2017 — As developers, we constantly strive to do better. Whether it’s writing better code, making a more performant site or just doing it faster; with automation you can have your cake and have robots feed you it too. You’ll work faster and get feedback on how to make it better.

This presentation is for front end developers who want to push themselves to be better, whether using a WordPress backend or not. After this presentation I hope that you feel empowered to find new ways to make your life as a front end developer better and your code even more awesome than it already is.

– Get feedback on coding standards and issues
– Minimize site assets automatically
– Generate and update image sprites and have your css updated for you
– Run several performance scans and aggregate them into a report
– And more!

November 15, 2017 — As one of your primary marketing tools, your website represents you and your brand to prospective clients and well, the universe. Does it make a great first impression? Is it useful and easy to navigate? Does it reflect your brand value?

With a nod to Marie Kondo, this fun and creative talk will provide strategies to tidy up, declutter, and freshen up your website. WordPress website designer and strategic communications expert Lisa Petrovich Smith will give you simple, strategic, and sustainable actions to create a powerful website that is both beautiful and useful and that works for your brand.

Lisa will share how-to tips that help the audience:
1. Apply key design principles to make a powerful first impression
2. Clarify your website’s messaging
3. Identify immediate practical steps to improve your website’s usefulness.

November 15, 2017 — Understandings of (1) the legal environment, (2) the pov of people with impairments, and (3) how to make their websites more accessible.

November 15, 2017 — Pre-Selling and getting confirmation for your membership site idea works, but what happens when it is time to deliver? In this talk, Phylecia Jones will break down how she successfully pre-sold her online Budget School program, but then had to deal with the challenges of creating the product to deliver in 60 days.
If you want to know the behind-the-scenes of creating an online program using WordPress, Wishlist, Divi Theme and a host of other plug-ins, then this presentation is for you. Walk away with some laughs on going crazy building a membership site, but also some lessons learned and things you must remember such as:
– The details that will make or break your site from a user stand point and from a maintenance stand point
– Deciding to create your own membership site vs using a third party provider
– Crafting your program and designing your site with the user in mind
– Putting in place customer service check points when things go oftenly wrong
– Having access to people or resources when plug-ins don’t behave the way they should
– Giving yourself patience to design a program that will blow the socks off of your members

November 15, 2017 — Don’t let office politics keep you from creating the fresh, user-friendly site your organization deserves. This presentation covers how to use data to illuminate your current site’s issues and sell stakeholders on content overhauls and design improvements. The presentation includes the following takeaways:

– The three types of “back seat drivers” who can derail your website redesign project – and their top concerns.
– How to use data to respond to common redesign questions and concerns
– Get tips for presenting this technical, data-heavy information to an executive audience

November 15, 2017 — Often the main bottleneck in a seamless redesign project is content planning, gathering, and migration. Even seasoned agencies get it wrong. Clients send initial content in a series of emails and then send changes in another series of emails. Large folders of image files are Dropboxed over with no naming convention and direction. Having the right communication plan, collaboration tools, and approval workflow in place can make all the difference in a happy client and on-time delivery of the project.

The attendees will learn how to:
* Ask the right questions in the discovery process and content roadmapping session to determine project content initiatives
* Identify the different content gathering activities that need to happen throughout the project
* Gain clarity on who’s doing what and when… and how long it will actually take
* Break content delivery into prioritized batches
* Document which stakeholders need to be involved in content reviews and approvals.
* Pick the workflow and tools that will keep things moving most efficiently

We will also briefly cover some other tips such as inventories, architecture, how to identify obsolete content, redirections, and potential hiccups along the way.

November 15, 2017 — SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) are vector-based graphics in XML format and they are incredibly powerful way of displaying graphics on the web. This intro level talk will provide benefits of using SVGs on websites, tooling and workflow for SVGs and some neat things you can do with SVGs such as animations and styling.