October 17, 2017 — Whether you’re a budding developer, a pixel-perfect designer, or just like helping out, the WordPress community is always looking for people to help make WordPress even better. Hear how you can contribute to the WordPress community, even if you aren’t highly skilled.

October 17, 2017 — Many of us here aren’t developers. We might have a fuzzy notion of what they do, or why they’re important. When we run into an issue while using WordPress, we might know that it’s a developer who can fix the problem, but do we know how to explain the issue to them? Do we understand the answer they’re giving?

There’s a lot of technical jargon that many developers assume as common knowledge to anyone using WordPress. How is your backend configured? What theme are you running, and is it based on a framework? Is it a Genesis-based theme? Are you working with HTML5, CSS3, or SASS? What version of PHP is your server running? Are you on a shared host, a dedicated VPS, or a managed solution? Are you seeing a server error or a PHP error?

The avalanche of questions and terminology can be completely overwhelming.

In this talk, I’ll break down some basic terminology, explain the foundational concepts of how a WordPress site works, and try to help you bridge the language gap between you and your developer.

October 17, 2017 — Are you ready to take your next step? Do you want to have a competitive edge? Do you want to do more work that you love and have more success while doing it?

Learn how uncovering your personal brand can have a direct impact on getting more of what you want; it’s a combination of art and science.

In this interactive, hands-on workshop with Laura Willis you’ll learn:

What a personal brand is and why it’s important
Why passion is critical and contagious
Who your “target audience” is and the value you bring to them
Identify how you “show up” and the perception you create
Understand the science and power of connection and how it works
Where it fits into all of your communications
When you uncover your authentic personal brand, you get clearer about the vision you have for your life, how you want to live it and achieve it.

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.

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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.

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