August 31, 2017 — All prospects and clients have a budget in mind. As much as we wish their budgets could allow them to have a website with highly custom designed and built features, sometimes, that is not the case. As website designers and developers, we often have to get creative with the solutions we offer to fit client budget expectations. At Orbit, we leverage a site builder theme with easy-to-use modular content types alongside a process that allows us to quickly and efficiently produce a website that the client is proud of, achieves their goals, and fits their budget. Come listen and learn from our experiences to help you do the same for your clients!

August 31, 2017 — Rachel Martin is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and resides in Scotland. Several years ago Rachel started blogging after a natural disaster in New Zealand as a form of therapy. You can see her blog at https://rachel.blog.

We talk about her presentation at WordCamp Edinburgh, which was the closing keynote presentation titled “Blogging as therapy: a personal journey.”

Her work at Automatic includes providing support for Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress and Simplenote.

As is the case in most of the interviews I do, it never ceases to amaze me at the information and life lessons people provide. It was truly a pleasure to interview Rachel.

August 31, 2017 — BuddyPress is a community website plugin for WordPress and can be used to build things from social networks to intranets to education sites and anything in-between that is build around a community. We will dissect the features of BuddyPress and some use cases for them as well as look at examples of BuddyPress sites in the wild. Come see what the heck BuddyPress actually is and how you can use it to build powerful community-based websites for you or your clients.

August 31, 2017 — Topics will cover:
• Defining a story (The Story Spine)
• Translating dreams into goals and actionable steps
• Using the larger story as your roadmap
• Driving your process with ‘why’

August 31, 2017 — Did you know that data entered into a website form is often passed across the Internet in plain text? Sensitive information such as addresses, credit card numbers, or other personal data is vulnerable to being intercepted by clever yet malicious trolls. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a security technology that encrypts data passed between a web server and a browser, rendering sensitive data into a garbled hodgepodge of meaningless character strings. Using SSL to serve up your content can give you (and your users) peace of mind. It can also greatly impact how Google ranks your site. This presentation will go over the fundamentals of SSL and demonstrate real-world methods for its implementation on WordPress installations.

August 31, 2017 — How we handle bad decisions examples include: violations of regulations, bad industry practice, and how to get the client to take your side or at least protect yourself at worst.

August 31, 2017 — In this session I will be covering the importance of good customer service and the powerful impact your support team has on your business. I will discuss practices to use and practices to avoid. I’ll take poor customer service examples and show how they could be handled differently and turned into excellent customer outcomes.

I’ll also cover the steps to develop and implement an all star customer service program.
This will include the secrets to providing super service, general support standards, and how to get things right for your customers. I’ll discuss why it’s important to go the extra mile to make and keep your customers happy so that they turn into returning customers and brand ambassadors.

August 31, 2017 — The websites you create aren’t for you nor are they for your clients. They’re for your users. Take your WordPress website to the next level by integrating user empathy into all stages of your UX process and learn techniques and tools that will help your next WordPress project even more successful. We’ll discuss every stage from stakeholder questions and technical requirements gathering to content models and wireframes through the development and how to tailor your deliverables to a WordPress site.

August 31, 2017 — Ever think of using WordPress to manage a project, be a private communication board, or even have a forum? This presentation looks at novel and unique ways to use WordPress beyond a simple blog or website by using BuddyPress, bbPress, and P2. We’ll cover these and more uses that truly push WordPress to its limits.

August 30, 2017 — In this talk I will discuss:
– How to plan internal “hours as dollars” against code-based (Plugin dev) assets and COG expenses
– How to use Cash Flow projections, rolling three months, to plan for product development cycle budgets
– How to conservatively project hires of the employee, # 4-6 as well as future hires #7-12.
– How to budgeting marketing on a quarterly basis using sales and renewal benchmarks
– How to adjust projections (free v premium) as your business matures