August 12, 2017 — As a freelance web designer I heard them all. The horror stories of domains lost (and later resold at auction), the (not so) ‘great hosting deals’, and myriad tales of web designers who had run off with their money.

If you’re a business owner with a website or getting geared up to build one, you’ll want to listen to Linda’s talk on how to side-step some of these common, and not as common, mistakes. Learn what you need to know to protect your online presence and accounts, and how to work with a web professional to create the product you want (and can afford).

August 12, 2017 — No matter the size of the site, getting hacked is a painful process to deal with. As a developer, it is important to know what you can do to prevent possible attack vectors. In this talk, Jim will show what you can do to harden your code and ensure your project will be secure.

August 12, 2017 — Hooray! You’ve got your WordPress Website up and running. Now that it looks great, see how you can use it to get more sign ups, contact inquiries and more for your nonprofit or business.

We’ll show you how to connect your WordPress Website with some of the leading customer relationship management (CRM) tools and marketing automation systems, so that you can develop long-term relationships with customers, donors, fans and brand advocates.

August 12, 2017 — Developers have spent countless hours working on a plugin that seems to be built just for you, just for this moment. If only it wouldn’t… This is a problem nearly every developer faces at some point during a project. Knowing how to safely customize functionality is key to building products that will stand the test of time (or major updates.)

This talk will cover the following topics:

Tips for diving into a large codebase (like WooCommerce or Gravity Forms)
Hooks
Filters
Overwriting functions
Modifying returned content
Requesting a change to a plugin

August 11, 2017 — Metrics are important for the digital publishing industry. One key metric that Boston.com, a major regional news media outlet, uses is ‘Time to Publish’. In a world of breaking news, time is of the essence. This talk will take a look at the past year and a half since launching on WordPress and how this metric came to the surface. Further, it will cover performance in the WordPress admin, tools for debugging, and investigating general slowness in the admin. Finally, we will review some of the ways in which we addressed these issues for the editorial staff. Join to learn why you want to reduce your Time to Publish and how to get it done.

August 11, 2017 — Take your WordPress development to the next level by learning some (not so difficult) techniques specific to WordPress. We’ll discuss and review (at a high level) techniques you can learn and features you can employ to build better and smarter themes or plugins which also provide a richer experience for your users. To get the full benefit from this session you should be familiar with PHP and already writing code in WordPress.

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August 11, 2017 — New to WordPress or want a refresher? Let’s take a stroll through the dashboard together to learn all the ins and outs, including the difference between pages and posts, adding images and image galleries, the difference between categories and tags, and more. We’ll also cover the not-so-obvious tools you won’t know how you lived without, like hidden options, extra toolbar buttons, and other tricks of the WordPress trade.

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August 11, 2017 — Are you a developer, graphic designer, or content creator who makes websites? How’d they turn out? Whether your design skills are good, bad, ugly (or worse), don’t worry, there’s some simple steps and tools that can help you design less like a developer.

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August 10, 2017 — This talk walks through the highly performance-focused (and WordPress-based!) approach we took to Bocoup.com—from tinkering with the built-in responsive images functionality, to asynchronous font application, to fully automated CriticalCSS setup.

August 10, 2017 — pend time talking with a group of freelancers and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most freelancers have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any freelancer can take to contain the impact of a bad client. In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.

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