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.

Presentation Slides »

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.

October 7, 2017 — Check out all newest things that CSS can bring to WordPress theme development: CSS Filters, Feature Queries, Native Mixins, Grid Layout, Native Variables, and more. Learn how they work and when to use them. For theme designers.

Presentation Slides »

October 7, 2017 — For many WordPress users, even seasoned PHP developers, creating new plugins for WordPress seems like a daunting task. This presentation aims to show attendees how simple creating plugins for WordPress from the ground up can be by looking at the architecture of a WordPress plugin, from the basic concepts of registering actions and filters to more advanced concepts such as the creation of admin pages and registering shortcodes.

Presentation Slides »

October 7, 2017 — You have a plugin, but you want users to be able to use it in their native language. Learn how to get it ready for translation, things to watch out for, and tips for maintaining it as you change the plugin over time.