June 6, 2017 — Podcasting is an easy way to engage with your audience, have your voice heard, and stand out from the crowd—and WordPress makes it even easier. With a few free plugins, WordPress becomes a natural platform for publishing your serial audio content. From recording hardware and editing software to WordPress plugins and configuration, we’ll review how to get started with podcasting.

June 6, 2017 — Many of us know and understand the importance of SEO, yet it surprisingly doesn’t stop at just hitting publish on your latest blog post. Even if you think that you are a true SEO rock star and following the SEO basics to a T, chances may be that you are still missing some core onsite optimization basics (as even I have done in the past). We’ll go over some of these easily made SEO mistakes and ill offer some basic solutions.

June 5, 2017 — WooCommerce now powers over 30% of all online stores, both big and small. While the basic WooCommerce package covers a lot of needs, business use cases often require special attention.

This talk will look at the best practices for building and customizing themes and plugins for WooCommerce. We’ll talk about:

* Building a streamline customer service experience for your business;
* Keeping template files up to date;
* Useful actions and filters;
* Custom solutions for unique eCommerce situations

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 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.

June 5, 2017 — Have you ever wanted to change how your WordPress site looks or works, but aren’t sure if you can make the changes on your own? Do you wonder what kind of help you even need: a designer or a programmer? Both? And what do those folks even do? If you do hire someone, how much should you spend?

This talk will go over examples of some things you can DIY and when you might consider calling a professional. It will also review the different skill sets that go into working on a WordPress site to help you understand what kind of help you need. Finally, it will cover what costs to expect and give you some tips on getting professional help.

June 5, 2017 — In this session, we’ll take a dive into WordPress and all of it’s settings and features. We’ll discuss:

– Posts vs. Pages
– WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
– Adding Content
– Installing Plugins and Themes

June 5, 2017 — After investing so much time, effort, and resources in developing your WordPress website and marketing your brand, you should expect a flood of conversions on your site. After all, if you offer something of true value, it’s in your audience’s best interest to contact you and buy from you.

This presentation will walk you through 31 effective techniques to get more of your site visitors converting. Some of the techniques will focus on behavior-based data gleaned from heat maps, scroll maps, and A/B testing, while others will focus on messaging, neuromarketing, and human psychology, while yet others will focus on color, design, and UX elements.

Whether you are looking to sell more on your website, increase leads, promote an upcoming event, build your email list, or drive site visitors to some other conversion event, you’ll walk away from this session with highly specific methods for doubling your website’s conversion rate.

June 5, 2017 — Creating high quality content before designing and developing a custom WordPress site can be the difference between a successful project and one that goes over budget, wastes time and leaves everyone feeling frustrated. Unfortunately, the reality is that clients underestimate the enormous task of writing and editing and aggregating the right content.

After some trial and error, our team at Big Room Studios has worked to incorporate content gathering, writing and editing into every part of the web development process.

I’ll go over how we incorporate content creation into:
1. The sales process
2. Client intake and education
3. Wireframing and Information Architecture
4. Development sprints
5. Final writing and editing before launch

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2017 — WordPress is known to be a powerful and versatile tool for rapid proof-of-concept web app development. During this presentation, we will investigate why WordPress may be the best tool to help create your next web app.

* In this presentation, we will look at different examples of business cases where WordPress is the best option, and also where it falls short.
* I will illustrate how I have solved the most common UI patterns required by web apps using plugins, web resources and occasionally code.
* We will walk through one of the apps I’ve built from idea to development to production to see the patterns in action.
* Finally, I share other considerations from my experience like deployment, syncing dev environments, AJAX, the REST API and iterating on feedback.

After the presentation, the audience will have a better understanding of WordPress for web app development. They will be ready to build a minimum viable product (MVP) web app on top of WordPress even if they have limited coding experience.

June 5, 2017 — Content is a huge bottleneck for freelancers and agencies. (How many sites have you seen get delayed because of content loading?) I’ve felt the pinch on projects big and small, both in-house and with client work. But I’ve also learned a few tricks for getting around it.

In this session we’re going to look at four approaches for dealing with the content problem: Making it an up-front dependency; treating content development as an early project phase; working on content in tandem with a website build; and making content development a standalone value-added service. We’ll also review a handful of different tools and resources that make content less of a pain to work with.