October 8, 2017 — The web plays a lot of roles in modern life. It’s a world wide network designed to be available and accessible to everyone. The types of people, their range of abilities, and their types of devices are quite diverse. How can we, as developers, impact this diverse user base? How can we make the web a better place? The approach we use to develop our code can have a significant impact. That approach is the combination of accessible design and progressive enhancement.

October 8, 2017 — Just as an occasional Tweet is not a social media campaign, having a blog doesn’t mean that you’re doing content marketing. While blogging is a key component, a weekly blog post probably isn’t enough by itself to give your business the boost you want. Let’s talk about strategy, branding, and developing a killer content marketing plan with your WordPress blog at the core of it all.

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October 8, 2017 — The ongoing optimization of your WooCommerce store can lead to increased conversions, higher sales and more income. The purpose of this talk is to help you achieve these three goals and to optimize your store into an efficient selling machine. We will cover all aspects of improving your WooCommerce store – from choosing a theme, to optimizing your pages, to integrating plugins, to adding in features that will increase your conversions and sales. You will learn the most effective tools and techniques for optimizing your WooCommerce store and reap the rewards of your positive actions.

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October 8, 2017 — My first year in business, I made a whopping $12,000. Before taxes. You can bet I “celebrated” with a whole bottle of (cheap) wine and a lot of tears. I’d worked SO hard, only to feel like a failure. Five years later, and my rates have shot from $500/website, to over $10k/website. It’s possible, but it’s not an easy process. In my talk I break down how I improved my skills, created a better customer experience, and was able to raise my rates–and how others can too! It’s not all about code or design skills, the most overlooked soft-skills of customer service and communication played the biggest role in commanding higher prices. I want to help others utilize these skills so they can boost their prices too.

October 8, 2017 — Branding your business lies in large part on how well you’re able to convey why you do what you do, and to put it into a narrative that your perfect customer understands. This is a simple framework based on the Hollywood blockbuster model.

October 8, 2017 — In this presentation, I walk you through why WordPress is the perfect solution for non-profits, and share stories about three non-profits I had the pleasure of working with to help transform the way their organizations function. In particular, I will discuss how I helped improve their online fundraising experience, implemented an automated membership system to connect Rotarians around the world, and created a video sharing community all through WordPress features and WordPress Plugins. If more organizations are able to learn and understand how to harness the offerings of WordPress, there is no limit to what they can do.

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October 8, 2017 — It’s 2017, cell phones are old news. Everywhere you look, people are looking at their phone. And everywhere we go, we depend on our phones to give us just in time information. However, in the web publishing world, websites that allow you to discover content based on your location seem far and few between. We read food blogs for fun but rely on Yelp for restaurant recommendations. We browse news sites for information but rely on Twitter to know what’s happening in town. We visit museum websites to find the details, but we Google for interpretation. Websites everywhere are being developed without location aware content discovery features. As a result, they are giving up their audiences to goliaths. What can you do to include these features into a CMS based website? How do you add this into our website planning strategy? What are the technical and publishing workflow challenges inherent to location aware content discovery? This talk will tackle those questions by breaking down the fundamentals behind location aware content discovery. We will also look at a few real-world implementations to explore some common ‘gotchas’ that implementers should be aware of.

October 8, 2017 — WordPress.COM (as opposed to WordPress.ORG) is for those who want to concentrate on their blog or website and not worry about maintenance and security updates. This workshop is led by Lydia Rogers to get started on your website or blog.

October 8, 2017 — I’d like to discuss security as the foundation of a site rather than an add-on and approach this idea from the outside looking in. We’ll cover a high-level process on how to enhance security with version control, hosting and access management, 3rd party integrations and more. My goal is to highlight flaws in common practices and present alternative ones to create more secure WordPress sites.

As a developer working with businesses and Universities with thousands of hacking attempts per day I’ve learned what works.

October 7, 2017 — We’ve all been there. Your site looks beautiful on mobile, tablet, and desktop but 768 pixels to 900 pixels is a disaster. Creating a truly responsive website experience goes beyond using bootstrap. Frontend Developers consistently find themselves creating elaborate sets of Media Queries that are time consuming to create and difficult to maintain.

This talk will explore browser-compatible innovations in CSS that you should start employing in place of Media Queries. The end result will save time and create more adaptive web experiences.

We will explore practical use cases for the calc() function, Flexbox, and Mozilla’s CSS Grid.