December 16, 2016 — Independent bloggers have become multi-platform influencers with success being much more broadly defined. Getting people to pay attention, being influential on social media networks, obtaining financial rewards and non-monetary incentives, and acquiring self-branding skills are being tied to the creation of valuable content. All of these are associated with a more recent, evolved view of blogging and success. In this session, attendees will learn what it means to be a successful blogger, discover some of the latest trends in blogging, gain insight into becoming an influencer, get advice on how to view success, get tips for finding success-generating topics to write about (e.g., products, services, people, events,…), learn about maintaining a balanced work-life lifestyle as an independent blogger, and find out about emerging trends in generating revenue from their blog and social network.

December 16, 2016 — Are you trying to get users to DO something on your site? Whether it’s sign-up, buy, download, donate: if you have a goal you NEED landing pages! This talk covers important basics like what landing pages are and why/when to use them, attention ratio, message match and key persuasive elements. Includes a walk-through of examples of our premium interactive landing page templates and case studies to see what converts best and why. Run better, more efficient, and just plain cooler campaigns, plus get the most out of your marketing time and dollars!

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December 16, 2016 — By mimicking user flow and interactions, acceptance testing plays a key role in catching any kind regressions in someone’s plugin or theme. In this presentation, I will show how to write acceptance tests using a very simple little framework called Codeception and how someone can automate those tests using a continuous integration server such as Travis CI.

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December 16, 2016 — You’ll love being a WordPress theme developer even more than you already do by learning to apply time- and sanity-saving practices to your WordPress development workflow. If you’ve heard about web developers using technologies like CSS preprocessors (e.g. Sass), task runners (e.g. Grunt, Gulp), and version control (e.g. Git) and wondered how to apply them to developing WordPress themes, I’ll show you how!

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December 15, 2016 — The WordPress REST API is one of the most fundamentally important new aspects of WordPress, yet it’s rarely explained to people who aren’t developers. In this talk we’ll explain what this thing is, and why you should be excited about what it can do for you, even though you’re not a developer.

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December 15, 2016 — Expand your role and grow your business within the world of Word Press. In this session, you’ll learn to:

– Triple your average sale

– Sell services that you’re not currently offering – while focusing on what you do best

– Have a higher level of perceived authority with your clients

– Garner “guru” status

– Become a full-service agency (if you want to)

… All by making one simple change to the conversation!

Want to be bigger?

Want to see more for your role?

Want to learn to control and evolve the conversation with your clients?

Steve Bennett and Kevin Skarritt will walk you through the process of how leading with brand strategy can take your business to dizzying new heights.

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December 15, 2016 — Let’s walk through a few common AJAX patterns and compare how they look and work using the WP REST API instead of custom admin-ajax hooks and functions.

Specifically, we’ll look at code samples for infinite scolling/load more buttons, look-ahead search, and interacting with a totally custom data set (custom post type and custom post meta).

Throughout the process we’ll talk about what you get for free from the REST API, what you have to build yourself, and review real, working code so that you can build smarter and faster solutions.

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December 15, 2016 — In this session we look at SEO best practices and how to apply these to your WordPress website and blog. We’ll discuss what search engines want and need, so you can apply this to driving traffic via organic search.

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December 15, 2016 — Learn the tricks designers use to make websites attractive and effective. We’ll teach you the Most Important Question designers ask their clients, and how you can use it to your advantage when doing it yourself. Then, learn practical ways to apply it to create attractive sites (using good design principles and simple rules for success) and effective sites (through basic exercises that help you develop and showcase your primary call to action).

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December 15, 2016 — The Internet is a battleground. It’s true. Every minute of every day, a war is being fought. This is a war between the owners of every website in existence and the nefarious hackers seeking to circumvent any and all protective layers in order to gain control of the digital property of others to use for their own malicious intent. There is no end in sight to this struggle. It is one in which we must all engage no matter how serious or trivial our purposes may be.

This session will take you into the depths of this conflict where you will witness firsthand the tactics and strategies employed by both sides to gain the upper hand. You will learn the methods used by hackers to bypass security and compromise websites. You will also see how experienced webmasters protect and defend their sites from invisible enemies.