April 7, 2016 — We all want to keep our clients having the best possible experience, that starts with project management basics. In this session, whether you’re a freelancer, a small agency, or an established enterprise grade agency, we will cover the 10 best practices I have seen and learned through 20 years of mistakes while learning from Some of the best professional service companies in the world. We will cover tactical examples and best-of-breed tools available today.

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April 6, 2016 — This talk will focus on the purpose and significance of the three environments all professional developers should use when serving their clients.

This includes:

1. Development Environment
2. Staging Environment
3. Production Environment

The presentation will not stick to a particular set of tools, though. Instead, it will acknowledge the fact that developers choose to use a variety of different editors, debuggers, and so on.

Sure, various tools will be mentioned and recommended but none will be pushed on any of the audience – the ultimate goal is to inform those who are there what their options are.

Further, we _will_ discuss the general workflow of going from development to staging and from staging to production and ways to easily and professionally move your code from one environment to the other.

Finally, the talk will cover why this matters and how it benefits both you (or the business) and the customer.

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April 6, 2016 — Accessibility is so much more than just catering to screen readers. What goes into making a website accessible? Many government contracts require websites to be accessible. A variety of companies and brands want them. It can affect the “magic” of SEO (ranking, search-ability, search engine karma, etc). How can you determine whether or not your website is?

Ultimately, it’s really not that hard, doing even one thing is better than nothing at all, and it’s never too late to start thinking about it. This talk will discuss both tools and techniques that can help you build accessible websites.

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April 6, 2016 — The visual design of a website is only half the job. The other half is the writing, which can engage and convert visitors if it’s done right — or push them away if it’s done wrong. Come find out why good marketing copy is just as much about the customer as it is about the company. Check out a slew of home page makeovers, to see how a creative treatment of a strategic message makes a business stand out. And uncover insights for making a genuine connection with those nice people who visit your (or your client’s) site.

Not a writer? Get helpful tips for working with copywriters.

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April 5, 2016 — In this presentation I’ll be sharing all of the tools that we use at GreenMellen to help us keep moving forward. We’ll dig into the products we use, but also into some of their competition so you can decide what works best for you. This will cover areas including organization (such as Asana), communication (such as Slack), files and notes (such as Dropbox), education and reading (such as Feedly), social media (such as Buffer), development (such as ManageWP), SEO (such as Moz) and business (such as Freshbooks).

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April 5, 2016 — Did you know that running multiple instances of WordPress on a single server doesn’t actually require multiple instances of the codebase? In fact, as of WordPress 3.9, you don’t even need multiple instances of a plugin or a theme! Multitenancy can eliminate massive maintenance overhead in the right situations, think server-wide, near-instant updates that let you stay secure without keeping up with multiple sites. And that’s just the beginning of how it can help. In this session, I’ll show you how multitenancy can save time and energy while empowering your users. It’s simple, but powerful.

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April 5, 2016 — In this talk, users of all levels can expect to learn different ways to create content strategies for their WordPress sites and blogs. I will cover several ways to create an editorial calendar. how to generate content ideas, and resources for implementing good content creation practices using tools in WordPress.

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April 5, 2016 — Through a series of increasingly complex requests from an imaginary, albeit very demanding client, we will review the most effective methods of rendering truly responsive images, and learn how to embed them — right from the start — in your WordPress workflow. You will walk away safe in the knowledge you own all the right tools to achieve bulletproof responsive art-directed seo-friendly lazy-loading images. (phew!)

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April 5, 2016 — Too often the idea of WordPress as an old and bloated framework and its PHP 5.2 back-compatibility minimum requirement will hide implementation mistakes and a “spaghetti” code approach.
Let’s take responsibility for our code and stop writing it the “old way.”
I will talk about test-driven development, dependency-injection, template engines and other techniques and tools that will allow for modern and efficient code while maintaining PHP 5.2 compatibility.

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April 4, 2016 — In 2014 Matt Mullenweg coined the phrase “Five for the Future” when asking those who make their living on the WordPress platform to give back to the WordPress community in some way by donating 5% of their time to the project. It’s an awesome goal, but can be intimidating and seem out of reach for a majority of WordPress users (especially non-developers). Here we will discuss many ways to leave a positive mark on the future of WordPress without writing a single line of code. From beginner to pro, ANYONE can contribute to WordPress with minimal effort if they know where to look.

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