February 18, 2016 — As a Small Business owner, you have taken the first step and decided that WordPress is the engine for your online business. But customizing your business website can be difficult – especially if you don’t know which are the right plugins to use to maximum effect. This presentation will help you find what types of plugins to use for which type of business, and how to customize them.

February 18, 2016 — I briefly cover what makes WordPress tick to establish a base understanding of best practices, then immediately dive into a huge range of solutions – all of them publicly accessible as demo sites with instructions to replicate. From simple portfolios to complex, membership-based eCommerce storefronts (and even fully-operational Role Playing Games!), anything is possible in WordPress with the right approach and mentality…

February 18, 2016 — A walk- through of building a grandchild theme for a Genesis child theme. But surprise, it’s a trick! We’ll really be writing a plugin to add the functionality and design to a child theme that keeps child theme changes safe. And if you hate the changes, simply deactivate. This talk might be a gateway to plugin writing.

February 18, 2016 — An American turns 50 every 7 seconds. Those aged 50 and older represent 45% of the U.S. population. One-third of the internet users in the U.S., are adults aged 50+ representing the Web’s largest constituency. WordPress sites must be designed with this in mind. You will learn how to meet senior’s needs from one of their own.

February 17, 2016 — Have you noticed that there are a LOT of blogs out there? All of them want the same basic thing – readers. Paid traffic can be great, and SEO is vital, but there’s nothing quite as effective as a direct referral from somebody who doesn’t even know you. It’s fairly simple to start making connections with other bloggers, and with a little bit of knowhow, those connections will translate into free advertising and endorsements for your blog that will make your traffic skyrocket. Once we cover the basics of how to network effectively, we’ll get into some tips and tricks to get the most mileage out of promotions, including posts on your blog and promos that other bloggers are doing for you. Learn how a little bit of effort can yield huge results.

February 17, 2016 — If you build a website, will they come? Or should you probably optimize it for search engines to start getting traffic? WordPress comes with a ton of great built-ins for handling the basics to search indexing, but we’ll go through some additional tips and tricks to make sure you’re doing it just right.

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February 17, 2016 — It’s not enough to just create great content on WordPress. You want people to find your posts in search engines. But how exactly do you control the metadata that Google consumes before sending readers your way? You need to use WP SEO by Yoast. Widely seen as the top plugin for optimizing WordPress web sites, WP SEO by Yoast goes deep and broad with features that include a page edit tool. Mari Kane will show you how to used that page tool, as well as other features of Yoast that help optimize your site for search engines.

February 16, 2016 — Pratik has been working on WordPress since 2013, and is a huge fan of the platform. He led the workshop on how to conduct theme reviews on WordPress. Sweta Shrestha and Suwash Kunwar provided their assistance in the workshop.

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February 15, 2016 — Workshop:
Starting a website is easy with WordPress, but having a clear goal in mind is vital for determining design, structure and content. In this workshop we’ll first focus on setting clear goals, before we in the next step will translate that into a better website. We’ll look at different types of goals like personal blogging, sharing portfolio, revenue gain, community building, and so on. Together we’ll discuss what would be the best approach for each of those specific goals.

This workshop is ideal for WordPress beginners who’ve never built a website or those who want to take their website to the next level.

February 15, 2016 — WordPress in Africa

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