October 17, 2017 — Every time a visitor comes to your website or views your social media content, they’re telling you what they think about your business, products you’re selling and content you’re sharing. This information doesn’t show up in the comment section! Valuable insights are waiting for you in your website and social media analytics.

Key Takeaways:

– Data reveals what products and messaging attracts customer attention.
– Learn how to discern your visitors unique path to purchase, including any stumbling blocks that may be slowing your sales.
– Learn how to identify data duplication and other common system configuration errors that compromise the validity of analytic data.

Intended Audience Type: Marketers, Content Managers
Intended Audience Experience: Beginner to Intermediate
Attendees should know the basics of Google analytics and metrics.

October 17, 2017 — HTML: for those of us who aren’t comfortable with code, we may have shied away from it in the past. Maybe you’ve seen it when you click the text/HTML tab in the WordPress editor, but quickly clicked back to the visual mode. Whatever your familiarity with HTML, we’ll use this talk to break down some of your fears. You’ll learn what HTML is, how it’s used, and why it’s worth learning. Together, we’ll see that HTML isn’t too bad at all—that it’s actually a powerful tool to help us better our websites. By the end, you’ll be familiar with HTML and know where to go to learn more.

Presentation Slides »

October 16, 2017 — A WordPress install that’s ultra-secure, lightning-fast, and near-infinitely scalable?.. What?! Turns out there’s a service to give us just that: Shifter. We will explore what it’s all about, its pros and cons, as well as possible use cases for it.

P.S.: I’m not affiliated with Shifter in any way.

October 16, 2017 — Finding the right plugins, and navigating through the large library can be hard. Come and hear about some personal tips and tricks I’ve found to make the selection easier. I’ll recommend some plugins based on what you need – and discuss the advantages of a paid plugin rather than just free.

October 16, 2017 — Sandro Gilando attended his WordCamp this past June at WordCamp Kent. Although well versed in SEO practices, Sandro was new to WordPress.He attended the 2 day WordCamp and sat through the WP 101 sessions which were presented by Melinda Helt of the Training Team.

Although I did not meet Sandro at the WordCamp, I happened to see a mention of a podcast talking about WordCamp Kent and that is how I contacted Sandro. You can listen to his podcast here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/60-second-marketing/e/50612855.

October 15, 2017 — I have often come across this notion that WordPress isn’t ready for big projects by default and that a lot of customization is needed for it to work at a truly large scale. However, my personal experience with setting up and helping maintain several really big projects has made me heartfully disagree with this statement. In this talk I will show you how a truly scalable and redundant system can be created without the need to change anything in WordPress. Here are few of the topics I will cover:

— Multiple Web Nodes
How to properly use load balancers and how to set WordPress on multiple web nodes without making any application modifications.
— Multiple Database Nodes
How to have a redundant master-slave DB replication without WordPress even knowing about it.
— Shared Storage
How to organize your files on multiple nodes, replicate them and keep them in sync in the most efficient way.
— Handling Sessions
How to handle sessions properly and how to overcome other potential issues with huge sites hosted on high-availability, multi-node WordPress setups.

October 15, 2017 — Get a quick intro into the online advertising world. Then, get a crash course in putting advertisements on your website. Learn what free plugins are available, and how you can best work with them.

Presentation Slides »

October 14, 2017 — • Discover how giving back to the community that helps you pay your bills can also help you travel the world and build connections you never dreamed of;
• Get to know at least 3 ways how voluntourism helps you let go of insecurity and build a healthy sense of self-confidence;
• Take home 4 best practices to make the best of voluntourism.

October 14, 2017 — Many starting WordPress business owners underestimate how long it takes to build a strong foundation for their business. Often, out of desperation, they will take on any job, at any price, no questions asked. Ending up financially and emotionally drained. This is probably a reason why so many businesses close down in their first two years.
Having experienced this myself the hard way, I discovered the power of the tiny word “No!”, the most powerful key we hold to end this rat race.

Saying “No!” is counterintuitive. And it is certainly is not an easy thing to do. But practicing to say “No!” can keep you from disliking your business and the people you do business with. The moment you stop saying ‘Yes” to every opportunity that arises, your WordPress business can grow bigger than you could have imagined.

The “No!” strategy is all about doing the work you are passionate about and are good at, and with the right clients. It really boils down to doing less of the work you dislike, isn’t profitable or does not fit your beliefs.

Learn to say “No!”
I feel the time is right to share some insights about why and how I learned to say no to certain work and clients. I will share my six-step process that helped me grow my WordPress business over the years …

And remember:
“If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no.”

October 14, 2017 — Building WordPress plugins in an object-oriented way presents some particular challenges, due to the fact that the WordPress APIs you’re coding against are mostly procedural in nature.

In this session, we’ll go over a real-world plugin to see how the code should be structured, and how best to hook into the WordPress lifecycle when you want to take full advantage of the benefits of OOP PHP.