November 2, 2016 — The topic will cover an introduction to working with the WordPress Customizer in Theme Development. It will cover a range of topics to get people going, including:

Setting up your theme for the Customizer
Add To / Remove default Customizer Sections
Add custom Panels, Sections, Settings, and Controls
Basic and Advanced Control Types
Output settings on the front end
4.6 Validate Callbacks
Tips for workflow and dry coding
The future of the Customizer
We’ll also examine the Customizer method properties, including:

Type: ThemeMod vs Option and why
Transport: Refresh vs postMessage
Sanitization: Built in and custom
Callbacks: WordPress basic and Custom callbacks

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November 2, 2016 — Growing your business is about building trust and whats more trusting then your voice? Where writing a blog post may not come easy to people, speaking is very natural, and intimate. Podcasting is growing (once again) and it’s not that hard to do! In this session I’ll show the workflow, best practices and ways to monetize.

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November 2, 2016 — Podcasting was created 12 years ago, and is considered one of the fastest growing medias available. You do not have to be a seasoned audio pro to take advantage of what podcasting can add to your media mix. Find out what Podcasting is all about, and if you should consider using it to grow your business.

Podcasting Hall of Famer, Gary Leland, gives you a behind the scenes look at the benefits and gives you information about using podcasting in your content strategy.

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November 2, 2016 — More often than not the average WordPress user doesn’t understand the core principles behind the idea of open source software like WordPress. This often leads to misdirected frustration by users at what is seen as a lack of product support. The talk will look at the realities of an open source project and how you can get involved and help make a difference.

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November 2, 2016 — SCRUM is an agile framework especially used to manage product development, especially software development. In this presentation we will cover all the basics of SCRUM from planning a project to managing the team doing also a short overview about some project management tools.

November 2, 2016 — In this talk, seasoned creative director Sara Cannon will dive into the intersection of strategy and creativity through discussing how knowledge can inform design decisions. She will be looking at how different methods of research, data-collection, and strategical thinking can play into the creativity behind designs. And how at the end of the design process, you can measure success.

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November 2, 2016 — Most freelancers sell WordPress as a service: installing WordPress, customizing WordPress, and extending WordPress. These freelancers, and the services that they offer, share one thing in common: income is directly related to time spent. If you want to make more money, you have to find more clients and put in more hours. It just doesn’t scale.

What if I told you that the opportunity for a product business goes beyond plugins and themes. You can productize your services and scale your work so that your hours don’t increase at the same rate as your profits. Using personal examples and identifying use cases scattered throughout the WordPress ecosystem, I will show how to separate your time from your income with a product approach to selling WordPress.

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November 2, 2016 — There is one thing that many people have difficulty when it comes to writing; coming up with content ideas which people are looking for.
The other difficulty is that not everyone can afford to pay hundreds of pounds for different tools which can help you to come up with content ideas.

So what do you do? Well just use Google, search and that’s it. It’s that simple, except there are various tactics and hacks which are unknown to many people which can help to extract more keyword data from Google. And it is these data which can help you to find out what people are searching for and how they can inspire you to create content.

This topic will be a live demo of how you can find endless content ideas using just the Google search page. I will not be using PowerPoints, whiteboard, blackboard or flip-chart. Just Google.

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November 2, 2016 — The Voice within Your Interface: An Easy Way to Grow User Retention

Beyond the functionality they are meant to serve, products that require interaction speak to users. Some have a friendly, reassuring voice, others send confusing messages or don’t speak at all.

This presentation focuses on the various types of messages that can be used inside the interface of a product to improve the user journey. From success and error messages to guiding tooltips or new feature announcements, we will talk about when to use and how to design the voice inside our products.

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November 2, 2016 — Knowing your words’ worth: Content creation for websites

This talk will focus on the importance of quality written content for websites and how to create it. The talk would highlight the following topics:

How writing for the web differs from print content creation
Writing SEO content – what it is and why it matters
How to create quality, SEO content for websites: i.e. incorporating keywords and long-tail keywords/phrases; using action words; keeping sentences short and eliminating filler words
Why the quality and usefulness of your content matters to Google (and site visitors)
Why editing is key for good content creation
Brief overview on writing business blogs (if there’s time)

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