March 15, 2017 — Online, everything’s a competition. If your website isn’t healthy enough to compete, you lose, which can be detrimental to the profitability and viability of your business. If you want your business to win the online marketing race — or at least place in the top 10 — you have to train for it, just as you would if you were preparing for an actual, physical race.

In this session, I will provide you with a five-point training regimen that will help you whip your WordPress website into shape and make it a true contender in online marketing.

1. Learn what website architecture issues to look for and what tools will help you detect them.

2. Discover the role of keyword research in today’s online marketing landscape and how to properly optimize content.

3. Understand content’s role in online competition.

4. Learn social media’s threefold role in your website’s health and how it impacts search rankings.

5. Know what usability issues you should be testing to make using your site effortless for visitors.

Presentation Slides »

March 15, 2017 — Are you afraid to keep your WordPress site up to date? Start treating maintenance work seriously. A little time now can save you a lot of time later. Learn some tips and tricks for keeping WordPress up to date and running smoothly.

March 14, 2017 — WordPress has many moving parts that can be updated at the click of a button through its native tools. Keep your repository up to date by learning how to optimally configure your local .gitignore file. Benefits include: less merge conflicts, greater collaboration between developers and environments and of course, ease for clients and end user experience.

In a nutshell: What should you be versioning? Answer: YOUR themes or plugins you develop.
Optimizing your gitignore to version only the relevant code per your project, or directories can assist with allowing customers to update other features, such as WordPress Core and plugins that are not designed by your team. Your repository is then more streamlined and focused on code. This also excludes any configuration files that would cause issues between development environments. In the long run, you have less code to review/version and customers have the ease of use to know that only code is being updated for the theme and no potential issue with pushing anything unnecessarily.

March 14, 2017 — In this talk I’ll show how to integrate your WooCommerce store with other systems that power your business. Perhaps customer data needs to be available to a CRM system, or the order data needs to be updated by the warehouse’s inventory system. All of this functionality an more can be harnessed by using WooCommerce’s built in REST API!

March 14, 2017 — In the past I’ve worked with a lot of different email form solutions, most of them have been cowboy-coded by developers but each has varied in ease of management. Our agency has been using Gravity Forms on all WordPress websites since 2013 and I’d love to share our insights on an incredible email form solution. A few topics I’d love to discuss are:

Initial Plugin Integration
The Proper Form Setup (with a few pro tips)
Email Form Creation
Confirmations
Notifications
Mind-Blowing Add-Ons
I may choose to scale the topics down depending on timeframe. I’m not a traveling speaker, I run an agency here in San Antonio so I’m always busy working in and on our business. I’m looking to help anyone I can from beginners to experts and love seeing tech grow in SA.

March 14, 2017 — Security is a crucial element of any WordPress site and too often site owners don’t put it on their forefront of development till it’s too late. A few steps provided in the WordPress documentation along with some tested practices can help.

March 14, 2017 — Going over the basics of design in WP theme building. How to help organize your classes, bootstrap (if someone intends on using it) and overall design output through desktop and devices.

March 13, 2017 — Francesca Marano is a WordPress professional, community junkie, author, educator.She enjoys speaking / attending WordCamps and Meetups.

She is the founder of the website C+B, a blog for Italian female creative entrepreneurs, with an editorial staff of more than 50 professionals offering advice to women who work on their own. The website has 40,000 readers.

March 12, 2017 — Episode 15

I throw out the idea of a new interview series that would feature chats with the various leaders of the Make WordPress Teams.

We take a look at the Community Team and news about the various stages that WordCamps are in.

From the Accessibility Team, we take a quick look at the Handbook.

March 11, 2017 — The WordPress Community is one of the most supportive tech community in the world. We help each other through code issues, site problems, ideas for improving the design of the site, and so much more. New WordPress users often struggle to understand how to get help, and confront similar challenges when they start building their site and hosting it.

Where should they host their site?
What type of design should they use?
How do they manage all of their plugins, and which plugins should they use?
Then what happens when their site goes down?
How do they ask for help?
Who do they ask?
This talk covers these type of topics and covers the life cycle of different types of users. WordPress is one of the most flexible platforms in the world that provides a ton of options. For a new user, or a seasoned user, it can be hard to navigate the WordPress Community. Users Need Our Help.