May 13, 2017 — Keynote for WordCamp San Diego 2017

May 13, 2017 — Ready to learn the ins and out of how to accelerate the performance of your site? Site back and relax, you’re in for a treat! We’ll cover just what a Content Delivery Network is, what it can do for your site and how your sites can be better, faster and stronger.

May 9, 2017 — What exactly is SEO, what does it have to do with content, and how does all that connect with WordPress?

Learn the essentials of SEO, how to plan a content marketing strategy, and the plugins that will make it practical.

Presentation Slides »

May 9, 2017 — I have been the support manager for a sucessful WordPress theme shop for the last two years and I would love to share some of what I have learned in the process. Here are some of the points that will be shared in this presentation. >>This talk will cover the technology available and how you can use it to streamline the support process. >>How important it is to begin with adequate documentation and ways to accomplish this. >>Tools you can use to meet the needs of a variety of customers. (video, tutorials etc) >> The necessity of using saved replies >> How to set boundaries for support >> Other ways to offer help when it is beyond the offered level of support >> Diplomacy – Kindness is always appropriate and can turn the worst support customers into the best clients for continued sales >> Specific strategy I use for my workflow >> Using support as a springboard for other sales >>Ways to gauge how you should improve upon your support.

May 9, 2017 — Designing in the open is about sharing your work and progress publicly through the course of a design project. I’ll explain how this works, where to start, and why it’s good practice for all designers. We’ll also discuss how you can give back to the WordPress community through design contributions to Core and WordPress.org.

May 8, 2017 — Wow! Just wow!

When I first started to consider asking Cate DeRosia if she would be interested in being interviewed, I thought she might have something interesting to say to the WordPress world. This interview far exceeded any expectations I had.

This interview was done at WordCamp Jackson, where we were able to find a quite place in between sessions.

Cate talks about being the spouse of a remote WordPress developer. She discusses attending WordCamps and getting to know people in the Community she had only heard about and building her own relationships.

We discuss raising children in the digital age, the steps taken to protect them and letting children find their own way. Cate talks about taking their children to WordCamps and how they forged their own relationships in the WordPress Community.

May 7, 2017 — On December 3rd, 2015 a service called Let’s Encrypt entered its public beta. Backed by several major sponsors, the service caught on quickly. As of summer 2016, more than 5 million SSL certificates had been issued by Let’s Encrypt, nearly four million of which were active and unexpired.

If you are not familiar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority that allows users to encrypt the data flowing to and from their websites easily and for free. The goal of Let’s Encrypt is to make data transfer over the internet secure by default. Towards that end, they have invested a considerable amount of time and energy in making it easy for users of all stripes to secure the data flowing in and out of their websites.

You may have already considered encrypting your website before — perhaps to perform better in search engines, or to gain the ability to accept payments on your website. Regardless of whether you’ve considered enabling SSL on your website or not, the goal of this talk is to demonstrate why encryption on your website matters. We will look at some practical examples and live demos of what data can be stolen from your website, even if you are using an encrypted wifi connection. Likewise, we’ll talk about how encryption of all websites — whether they’re dealing with sensitive information or not — makes the web a safer place for all of us.

Last, of course, we will look at how you can get started with Let’s Encrypt on your website. We’ll review the options available to you on common hosting providers, as well as walk through the steps for how you can set this up for yourself, if you have administrative access to your server.

If you already have Let’s Encrypt enabled on your site, this talk may be basic for you (although we’ll do a few cool demos that make for great party tricks, so feel free to stop by).

If you’ve never accessed your hosting provider’s website admin area (CPanel, Plesk, etc), this talk might be a bit hard for you to follow (although you should totally come and ask questions both during the presentation and after).

If you have a website and you’ve thought about enabling SSL on it but you just haven’t gotten around to it yet, this talk will be perfect for you. By the end of this presentation, you should not only know how to enable encryption on your website, but you will understand why it’s so important that you do.

It sounds like an intimidating topic, but we can do this. Come on and let’s encrypt!

May 7, 2017 — In this business track session, James will share insights from his Ninja Forms history. His core message? No matter how talented you are, you shouldn’t do this thing called entrepreneurship alone. You need a co-founder.

May 7, 2017

May 7, 2017 — Google Analytics provides a wealth of demographic information about your site’s users if you know how to find it. This session will discuss enabling the collection of demographic information, creating analytics dashboards for easy access to demographic information, and content curation to reach specific audiences.

Presentation Slides »